Long-time readers of this diary may recall that back in 2004 – around the same time of year, in fact – I had a rather silly phone call after midnight one night, in which a caller had tried for a curry house, got the wrong number, and when I told him I wasn't a curry house he persisted in trying to order a curry from me anyway.

Last night, well past midnight, I had a wrong-number phone call from a curry house, informing me that a meal I hadn't ordered was ready for delivery. When I said they'd got the wrong number, they insisted that it was definitely the right number because it was on their computer as the number the orderer had called from. I said I hadn't ordered anything, and they said that in that case they were going to have to charge me £20 for a prank phone call. I said I hadn't made a phone call, and they insisted that yes I had.

I tried to get them to tell me what address the delivery was meant for, in the expectation that it would turn out not to be my address, but the guy on the phone said he didn't have access to that information as he was ‘only a call operator’. (Seemed odd; a curry house wouldn't have struck me as the kind of organisation which obviously required a separate department for phone calls with limited access to databases.) Meanwhile, some other guy was clearly audible in the background and sounding quite panicked, saying ‘But I've got this curry! The curry's ready! What do I do with this curry?’

I eventually hung up on them, after getting bored with the endless repetition of ‘we're going to charge you £20’, ‘but I didn't make a call’, ‘yes you did, your number is in our computer’. I told them to send the bill for their £20 to the address the delivery was meant for, and put the phone down.

I presume that it really was a wrong number, and that nobody had actually managed to make a prank call which caller-IDed as me. (Not least because if you'd gone to the effort of being able to do that sort of thing, prank calls to curry houses would be low on your list of applications for it!) So I presume that whatever address they had was not mine; certainly there was no subsequent ring on the doorbell with an unwanted curry (although I did dream a ring of the doorbell at 5am, and actually did go down to check it really was a dream and not a confusing curry-related caller). I imagine no bill will turn up in the next few days either, but if one does then I suppose I'll have to tell them to take me to court and prove I phoned them.

But their persistence amuses me, or at least it amuses me now after it finished irritating me. My last confusing curry-related caller persisted in trying to order a curry from me even after finding out I was a private individual and not a restaurant; this one persisted in trying to tell me about my curry delivery even after I told them I didn't order one. Perhaps the proximity of curry is deleterious to people's ability to comprehend that they've got the wrong number :-)

These days, whenever I see (or worse still, find myself using) a noun phrase consisting of an acronym followed by a word beginning with the acronym's last letter, part of my brain twitches uncomfortably in a ‘PIN number’ sort of way – even if the last word represented by the acronym isn't the same as the following word.

I'm also beginning to feel a reflexive flash of irritation on seeing the word ‘it's’, even in many circumstances where it's being used correctly.

Subconsciouses are irritating things.

Sprinting to catch a bus, successfully, but then realising when you get on the bus that you haven't enough cash on you for a ticket and have to walk after all. For added points, do this when the air is cold enough to make running particularly unpleasant.

Still, I got there in the end, and a cup of hot coffee and one of Caffe Nero's extremely gooey and delicious gluten-free chocolate brownies made an excellent restorative.

At post-pizza last night Ian set me an algorithms problem, because he thought it would be right up my street. The solution I came up with turned out to be overkill for his actual needs, but it was a rather cute use of annotated trees which I hadn't thought about before, so I want to write it down somewhere.

( algorithms geekery )

Last night was the first change of the clocks since I got my latest radio-synchronised alarm clock.

This clock, unlike its predecessor, is unable to walk and think at the same time. Or rather, it's unable to both display the time and synchronise itself with radio signals; so once every 24 hours it shuts its time display down while it listens carefully to the radio for up to 15 minutes before being satisfied it's got it right. And it has to do this only once a day, because shutting the time down is annoying and has to be minimised.

It turns out, in a staggering display of careful, attentive-to-detail design, that the time of day at which it chooses to do that is just before the radio signal adjusts when the clocks go forward or back. So my alarm clock is still wrong today, though it will presumably be right tomorrow. Or at least it had better be.

Good grief, who can have thought that up? It's not even as if you need to fully comprehend the MSF signal to know the clocks have changed: there's a one-bit DST flag broadcast every minute.

While I'm ranting, I'm also not fond of the way the clock change is officially mandated to happen. Instead of having certain times of day sometimes happen twice or not at all, it'd have been much better if they'd arranged that the hour between (say) 1am and 2am either went at double speed or at half speed, but remained monotonic. The only possible excuse is that the people who devised the current scheme had never heard of cron(1).

On Saturday I went to the Depot (formerly the Vaults), in a small group gathered by cartesiandaemon who had recently tipped me off that it had a gluten-free submenu. This was an excellent experience, not least because it was the first meal I've eaten in a restaurant since 20061; usually the sheer hassle of finding coeliac-friendly eateries puts me off. And the Depot is also an excellent place to have your first restaurant meal in two years, because its unusual menu structure (lots of starter-size dishes, you order a lot of them and have a bit of each) meant I didn't have to dither over which of the many appetising things on the menu to select. ‘I'll have nearly all of them, please!’

Anyway. It turned out that one of the group who I didn't already know is also coeliac, and not only that but is on the committee of the local branch of the Coeliac Society. Apparently this is entirely coincidental: her other half (also present) was at university in Jack's year. Small world.

During a discussion over what wine to order, I excused myself from making detailed wine-buying decisions on the grounds that my absent sense of smell rather rules out a career as a wine expert. The abovementioned other half promptly startled me further by asking

Tim	‘Did I just hear you say you've got no sense of smell?’
simont	‘Yes, that's right.’
Tim	‘Are you therefore Simon Tatham?’
simont	<blinks several times> ‘Yes!’

thus proving that the world is even smaller, or possibly merely that I am still the Internet's most famous anosmic. (He'd encountered my FAQ on Reddit.)

1. well, unless you count having lunch in Tatties once last year, on a technicality. I don't.

So the other day Stephen Fry wrote a long blog post about pop versus classical music, and his specific reason for preferring the latter. I've seen a couple of posts discussing whether he was right, but reading the post has reminded me that when I was a child I also preferred classical music for a specific reason, but the reason was completely different.

The thing I disliked about pop music when I was young was that there wasn't enough music in it. Specifically, the same verse and chorus section tended to be repeated several times throughout a song, pretty much exactly unchanged except for the lyrics sung over the top of it. But, at the time, I just wasn't very interested in lyrics compared to music; so I tended to feel shortchanged by four minutes of pop song compared to the same length of classical music, because the latter tended to have more different music packed into its four minutes whereas the pop would only have one minute's worth of tune repeated over and over.

(The observant will notice that this isn't really about classical music; it's about instrumental music. And, indeed, I eventually worked that out for myself: the first modern musician to really hold my interest was Jean Michel Jarre, largely because his music was instrumental.)

I got over it in the end. I now like lyrics as much as the next person, and I have no fundamental problem with repetitive tunes any more as long as the lyrics make them worth my while.

But musical and lyrical variety don't have to be mutually exclusive; even in verse-and-chorus structured songs, it's possible to have melodic or harmonic evolution between successive instances of the verse and/or chorus, and the occasional song which manages that still makes me particularly happy. There needn't even be very much of it, as long as it's done well: for example, there's a two-note change between two choruses in the Sisters' ‘First and Last and Always’ which has always struck me as just right. And the subtle tweaks to the tune between successive verses of Steve Vai's ‘The Silent Within’ make me rather fond of the song in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it at all otherwise.

(I've had this lurking around in my file of half-written rants for some time. It came up in conversation today and someone expressed interest in reading it, so I thought perhaps it was time to polish it up and post it. I'm probably mostly preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to get it down in writing anyway.)

I was physically assaulted in the street on the way home from the pub just now…

… by an extremely tiny puppy, who ran up behind me and collided with the backs of my legs, provoking a loud yell of surprise before I realised I hadn't been harmed in any way.

How sweet. But also rather unexpected and startling; it must surely have noticed that there was something in its way?

On Saturday night, I saw a long limousine parked by the roadside, with a bunch of teenagers milling around outside it. I assume it had either just taken them to a party or was just about to.

Parked behind that was a second long vehicle, of a type I hadn't encountered before. It was to a limousine as an SUV is to a normal car: taller, rugged-looking design, big wheels, intimidating front grille, but still a long vehicle. A Sports Utility Limo.

I suppose, thinking about it, there are one or two practical advantages to the design over a normal limo; for instance, it might be easier to move about inside it with a bit more headroom.

However, I was a little disturbed nonetheless by the concept of an SUV limo, and in particular I can't help thinking that what the world really needs is for Jeremy Clarkson to take one off-road and laugh at its performance :-)