I just found a USB key in the pocket of my jeans. The jeans came out of the drawer yesterday, and I haven't seen the key in months. Ergo, it's gone through the laundry at least once. Oops.

It still seems to work, though, and it hadn't even lost the last lot of data I remember putting on it!

Attempting a task, and then realising simultaneously that (a) it was a bad idea and would have had a bad consequence, but also (b) I mucked it up in such a way that the bad consequence did not in fact occur.

I can never work out what I should be calling myself an idiot for, in that situation!

I've been noticing this week that I appear not to be the sole occupier of my property any more.

Last weekend I heard loud meowling noises around the time I was going to bed, close enough to make me wonder if they were coming from my own garden rather than a neighbour's. And, sure enough, every time I've gone out of the back door this week to put something in the wheely-bin, a black cat with white feet has been in my back garden. This morning I saw it out of the back window, walking along the fence right next to me and looking at me coolly.

It hasn't let me come near it; every time I get within the same half of the garden, it looks startled and hops it over the fence.

I'm getting the impression that it (no idea whether it's a he or a she) has claimed my garden as part of its territory, there being no resident quadruped to challenge the claim. (The previous owners of this house had a big dog, but that was in 2007; now I think about it, it faintly surprises me that the local feline community has taken this long to notice the dog's absence and reallocate the space. Perhaps it just takes a long time for the City Kitty Committee to organise a meeting.)

I don't think I actually object to it; there's nothing in my garden I particularly value except the sheds, which I reckon are safe enough. If it wants to damage any of the plants, it's most welcome to: 90% of them are weeds, even after I've weeded.

But if it's going to be there, I feel as if I'd like to know its name, and at least be able to say hi to it in passing without it going ‘warrgh, scary biped’ and levitating out of range.

A thing that has struck me from time to time is the surprising number of things that come in varieties labelled as ‘1’ and ‘3’, or ‘1st’ and ‘3rd’, missing out 2.

I tend to think of this as ‘Trinity Boat Club Syndrome’, since my standard example case is the 1st and 3rd Trinity Boat Club. (I've always faintly wondered what happened to the 2nd, and had rather hoped it would have been disbanded in mysterious circumstances after the inadequately explained sinking of a John's boat, or possibly an Oxford one; I was recently disappointed to find out that their website actually answers the question and it's nothing so exciting.)

There are several other common ones. You hear a lot about the Third World and the First World, but ‘Second World’ is not a widely used phrase by comparison. Fiction tends to appear in single novels or trilogies, with relatively few two-volume works in between. And both books and computer games are often described as first-person or third-person, but very few of either are second-person.

More domain-specific examples include the fact that in technical drawing, orthographic projections come in first angle and third angle, but never second, and that in violin-playing it's common to use first position and third position, but second position (while a perfectly meaningful concept) comes up rather less often.

So: what other examples of this haven't I thought of, and what can we do to rehabilitate the poor left-out number 2?

I cannot choose the wine in front of me.
And yet I can't discount a bluffing play:
The wine in front of you it cannot be.

You think I'm stalling, but you must agree
That while I hope your choice you might betray,
I cannot choose the wine in front of me.

You beat my Turk, a fighting prodigy,
So you might trust your strength to save the day.
The wine in front of you it cannot be.

You beat my Spaniard very skilfully.
So you would put the poison far away:
I cannot choose the wine in front of me.

I know the poison comes from oversea.
Its origin enables me to say
The wine in front of you it cannot be.

I switched the glasses when you couldn't see!
Yet, unresolved, the paradox must stay –
I cannot choose the wine in front of me;
The wine in front of you it cannot be.

(With apologies to William Goldman. It randomly occurred to me in the bath that this particular poetic form and piece of dialogue were a strikingly good fit for each other.)

Last night I walked over to cartesiandaemon's place at around 9pm, for a small gathering of people.

On the way there I approached a group of five rowdy-looking lads heading the other way along the pavement, who were roaring ‘wooorrr’ at each other. As I passed them, they suddenly went quiet, and as I walked away I heard one of them mutter behind me ‘Thought that was a PCSO for a moment’.

I certainly wasn't deliberately imitating a PCSO, or any other kind of official person. I was just walking along the street, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. Though I suppose, in retrospect, I did have straps visible on my torso, a complicated device hanging off my belt, was walking with a long and confident stride and jingling faintly as I went, so some or all of those might have contributed to such an impression. (The straps were attached to a rucksack containing a jumper and a bottle of wine, the device on my belt is a digital watch, the jingle was keys and spare change, and the gait signified a desire to get there quickly rather than a sense of authority and power, but I suppose they weren't to know any of that.)

So on the one hand it amused me at the time that I singlehandedly put the wind up five rowdies by accident. On the other hand, I did actually just go and look up the wording of the law on the web, to make sure it wasn't possible to accidentally commit illegal police impersonation!

(I don't think so, though. As I read the Police Act 1996 section 90, you have to either be deliberately trying to deceive, or have something that's distinctively police uniform or a badge or document.)

The sentiment ‘it's not much to ask’, presented as the sole justification of why people should do something you want. When everybody has a ‘not much to ask’ request and they're all different (or, occasionally, when the same person thinks of a different one every week for a year), they add up until collectively they are a lot to ask – so some of them have to go unfulfilled, despite each of them individually being so small that the asker couldn't imagine how anyone might have a good reason not to do it.

Don't just point out that the cost is low and leave it at that. Show why the benefit (whether to you, to whoever you're asking for it, or to somebody else) outweighs it!

Sometimes, in previous years, I've googled around to try to find interesting things about the third of May. For instance, the other year I discovered that I shared a birthday with Machiavelli. (Previously the only person I'd known of who shared my birthday was Jeff Sinclair, who is two hundred and forty-one years younger than me :-)

This year, I didn't need to go looking, because one came to me. Randomly skimming my LJ friends-friends page some months ago, I came across a snippet in Neil Gaiman's blog, who had in turn found it in a book of legends from the Inner Hebrides:

…the third of May, when the Devil and his angels were cast out of heaven (and therefore 3rd May is a day on which no important undertaking should be begun and on which it is unpardonable to commit a crime)…

That is, I would have to say, considerably more awesome than Machiavelli. Sorry, Nick, but there it is.

Working on a compiler tool chain has some odd side effects. On my work computer:

$ cd ~/src/misc
$ ls hello* | wc -l
60

It's only just occurred to me to think of it this way, but I appear to be a power user of hello-world programs.

I popped into town just now to talk to my bank. Outside the bank was one of those ‘living statue’ performers – painted silver and with a pedestal to stand on.

I've seen plenty of those around before, of course, and they normally do nothing for me. But this one did – because he was off his pedestal, taking a break, and chatting to a passer-by while one silver-painted hand rootled enthusiastically in a bag of crisps.

The idea that statues need to take a snack break now and then really made me smile. Probably even Nelson comes down off his column every week or so, late at night, and goes looking for a kebab van.

‘My car should have passed that test!’ he said, seeking the mot juste.

My local printer at work, when you press the button on its control panel to cancel a queued print job, puts up a message box saying "This job will be cancelled. Continue?", with buttons marked "Continue" and "Exit".

Dear My Bank,

When you send me a letter, please either sign it with an actual person's signature, or do not bother at all. Printing somebody's name at the bottom of the letter in Brush Script where a signature ought to be is much, much worse than either.

No love,

Simon.

wildeabandon posted the other day about having gone through the ‘geek rite of passage’ of assembling a PC from parts from the first time.

I've never actually done that myself (I'm too lazy – I generally let the shop do it for me!), but I had a rite of passage of my own this week, namely my first ever full restore of a machine from backups. The firewall that died last Sunday is now running cheerfully again from its new flash card, with nothing lost beyond a week or so of logs I wasn't going to read anyway.

Of course, I couldn't do it the easy way. Oh no. Not for me the simple narrative of ‘flash card dies, haul spare out of drawer, format it, restore backup on to it, insert in firewall, boot up, away we go’. I didn't have the foresight to have laid in a spare card, so instead I restored the backup on to a spare corner of another computer's disk, then reconfigured the firewall (via some yak-shaving involving its kernel) to network-boot and NFS-mount its file system from there. It's been running happily in that configuration all week; the replacement card (and spare) arrived yesterday, so I've just transferred the file system back over, and it's now once again self-sufficient. While the machine was running diskless, I took the opportunity to upgrade its Debian installation (taking advantage of the unusual ease of making multiple copies of the filesystem to try things out), which I'd been meaning to get round to doing for far too long. As an added bonus, it now boots using GRUB (which was incompatible with its hardware last time I tried, but turns out to work fine in the latest version), so I no longer maintain any machine that runs the thoroughly irritating LILO. Hooray!

It's nice to have the lid back on the machine, and it's even nicer to know that the backups I've been religiously taking every week for a few years now really do work. (And with any luck they'll work even better next time: as a result of this exercise I've tweaked them a bit.)

The other day I mail-ordered two Compact Flash cards (one to replace the recently deceased one my firewall had been using as its hard disk, and one as a spare for when that one dies).

They arrived today. In separate jiffy bags.

It turns out my iPod wasn't defunct after all. It just needed turning back on!

Apparently, for the last three and a half years, every single time I thought I was turning it off or on, I was in fact putting it in and out of a state more akin to a laptop's ‘suspend’ function. On Monday it took it into its head, for reasons unexplained, to power itself off properly, which meant that pressing what I thought was the On button but was actually the Unsuspend button did nothing. To actually turn it on, one has to apply a Vulcan nerve pinch to two particular buttons and hold it for eight seconds, whereupon it spends a minute or so booting up before being willing to do anything.

I thought Apple were supposed to be masters of creating computing devices that a non-expert could use. If you can't even find the on switch without looking on the Internet, something is wrong!

(Unless, I suppose, any non-expert would have known to do that immediately, and I only failed to because my mind was too highly trained?)

I got home last night to discover that my firewall had gone on the fritz. It was too late in the evening to try fixing it, so I went to bed.

Up this morning and out to work, through what turned out to be 45 minutes of traffic jam for no discernible reason. Spent all day beating my head on an intractable problem, and didn't solve it. Went home via Sainsbury's, which was in utter chaos because its car park was full of bulldozers; also discovered on the way home that my iPod had quietly stopped working (it now refuses even to turn on).

I've now managed to emergency-reactivate my firewall (hence being able to post this), which is something, at least. But good grief. Can I have 24 hours of everything going right next, please?

That pedal a drummer presses to turn the closed hi-hat into an open hi-hat?

It occurred to me last week that it really ought to be labelled ‘Cymbal Shift’.

Rather late in the day compared to many people, I've recently been taking steps toward joining the DVCS generation.

For a year or two I've been an occasional light user of bzr, either to hold temporary branches off my main SVN repository (e.g. pre-commit polishing of a big patch somebody contributed to one of my public projects) or to hold projects too small, too experimental, too embarrassingly silly, or occasionally too private or legally encumbered to want to put into my public main SVN. A few weeks ago I managed to lose my long-standing fear of git, by dint of playing with test repositories and examining the output of git fast-export until I actually understood how its data structure fitted together and could work out everything else by reasoning about that. Having done so, I immediately migrated all my bzr repositories to git, because that kind of understanding is very valuable to me and bzr's documentation seems to place almost no emphasis on imparting it.

At the weekend, though, I actually did find the document which explains bzr's data structure – and, despite a superficially completely different user experience, it's actually very similar to that of git. As, I discovered after a brief browse on another website, is the data structure of Mercurial. The user interfaces can vary, but all three of these DVCSes have an essentially similar underlying data model.

And, curiously, a thing that struck me about this model is that it's surprisingly similar to something I already know about: Usenet.

( may not be entirely serious )