A couple of weeks ago I randomly, and rather unexpectedly, picked up Nethack again and had another go at it.

After managing to win it once in 2006 playing the traditional and relatively easy Valkyrie, I tried to beat it again playing a Wizard, and had two near-successes but no joy. I got disheartened by this and stopped playing; but it still niggled at me a little that I'd got so close to ascending a Wizard and not managed it.

It turned out that my feeling of demoralisation wore off faster than that niggling feeling of unfinished business, so somewhat to my surprise I had another go this year. And successfully, this time: after only a few weeks of trying, yesterday a Wizard joined 2006's Valkyrie in the short list of my personal ascensions.

I don't think I have any expectation of playing again, this time. There's no feeling of unfinished business: I haven't seriously tried playing any other role, and none of them gives me a strong urge to do so. And my recent winning game was such a total faff that by the end it was feeling more like a chore than a pleasure. I may of course change my mind in another couple of years, but right now I feel as if I could comfortably stop for ever.

But it's a good feeling to know that I've now managed everything I seriously tried in the game. Even if I don't manage to achieve anything lastingly worthwhile this year, I won't be able to look back at the end of 2008 and feel that I didn't at least achieve something.

I recently replaced the seven 50W GU10 halogen spotlights in my kitchen light fitting with 7W energy-saving bulbs, after managing to google up some which weren't 2cm longer than the originals and hence actually fitted into the space.

The new bulbs take a few minutes to come on fully. I wondered how long, because that way I know how long to go away and wait after flicking the switch. Unfortunately, finding that out by sitting and watching is a bit tricky, because one's attention wanders and in any case one's eyes adjust constantly so it's hard to say whether the lights are still getting gradually brighter or have stabilised.

Solution: the digital camera to which I treated myself at Christmas, in video recording mode. Set it up on a tripod pointing at the kitchen door, with a bit of uniformly lit dining room wall in shot as well to compare against; start it recording; turn kitchen lights on; go away and leave it until it runs out of disk space. Extract the resulting video file, convert into a gigabyte of PNGs, and analyse them in software.

( I don't imagine everyone will actually care about the results )

An excessive effort, perhaps, but it was fun. Also it vaguely justified the new camera, since the old one's video recording capabilities wouldn't have been nearly up to this job. (That is, even before I broke it beyond repair.)

Sometimes, one band writes a song, or publishes an album, which has the same name as a different band. For example, last night lark_ascending played me some music by ‘Van Canto’, including a song called ‘The Mission’. And Leonard Cohen had a song called ‘Sisters of Mercy’.

It occurred to me last night to wonder how common this is. In particular, my most immediate thought was this: if one were to define a directed graph on bands with an edge from one band to another iff the former had a song or album named the same as the latter, would the graph be cyclic? That is, does there exist a band called A with a song/album called B, and a band B in turn with a song or album called C, and … eventually some band X with a song or album called A? My own knowledge of music is less than encyclopedic, but I wonder if any music-trivia buffs among my readers might enjoy having a try.

(Standard conventions for directed graphs apply: it's cheating for a band to link directly to itself, but two bands linking to one another are a valid cycle. Also, I'm prepared to be a little forgiving on the matter of whether or not band, song or album names have a leading ‘The’. Finally, I don't demand that the name matches be coincidental: if the song name directly inspired the band name or vice versa, as in the second example above, that doesn't disqualify the link.)

I was phoned at work by a headhunter today, who said he'd heard I was a good software developer and who tried (unsuccessfully) to interest me in jobs in financial services IT.

I would have considered this a one-off oddity and ignored it, if it hadn't been for the fact that I had a very similar call from a different headhunter ten days ago (and at the time I did consider it a one-off oddity and ignored it).

So I wonder who's just got hold of my details, and why they think joining the financial services sector is a natural career move for someone whose day job is facilitating embedded software development and whose extracurricular interests revolve around giving things away to people for free.

Don't suppose anyone else has been getting similar calls recently? If it were widespread, I think I'd be less disturbed than if I were being targeted specifically.

When I was at school, a friend of mine wrote a program to delete lots of files at a time (since the school computer system neglected to provide a ready-made tool for this). He wasn't content with having it just delete files, though; he thought it would be cool to have it delete files while scrolling up the screen some thoroughly bloodthirsty-sounding lyrics which he said were from an Iron Maiden song.

Several of those lyrics have stuck in my head since then, and just occasionally bubble to the top of my brain when I'm doing bulk file deletion of my own. But last night – and I'm really not sure why it hasn't occurred to me to do this at any point in the intervening seventeen years – I actually got round to googling the bits of lyrics I could remember, tracking down the original song, and arranging to listen to it in full.

It turns out that the song in question is ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, which surprised me a little because my vague memory was that he'd said it was called something like ‘Killer’. Several details of the lyrics weren't how I remembered them either, and worst of all the tune was noticeably different from my memory of it. It's unclear to me which of these various discrepancies were due to transcription errors originally made by Will, which were due to me not paying attention at the time, and which are due to distortion of my memory over the intervening decade and a half (although I suspect that the errors in the tune are largely attributable to the latter by way of my music theory training, which I've noticed before tends to obscure the fact that I can't remember how a certain bit of a tune goes by seamlessly making up a believable but uninspired substitute and pretending I can remember it going like that).

But the combined effect of all those errors is that although I recognised most of the song as being unquestionably the source material for Will's lyrics, I have a lingering feeling of not having listened to the same song I've really been thinking of all these years. Strange, and slightly annoying.

I was referred to as an ‘Englishman’ yesterday on a newsgroup. That startled me. Initially I wasn't sure why it startled me, since it wouldn't particularly surprise me to be referred to as English, and it's been some years since I had that reflexive am-I-sure-I'm-grown-up-yet hesitance to think of myself as ‘man’ rather than ‘boy’; after a bit of thought I decided that the reason is analogous to the way ‘girlfriend’ has a specific meaning distinct from ‘girl’ + ‘friend’. It wouldn't cause me cognitive dissonance to think of myself as an ‘English man’, but an Englishman is a stock character in Englishman-Irishman-Scotsman jokes!

I was listening to some Mesh the other day. A thing I keep meaning to mention in here is that for some years I've been unable to hear their song ‘Safe With Me’ without giggling, because the very first line, sung with almost no instrumental backing, is ‘This is my space, no-one can ever get in here’. I think I managed to take that vaguely seriously the first couple of times I heard it, but now I'm unable to parse it as anything other than ‘This is MySpace’.

Like last year, Sainsburys stopped stocking grape juice over the Christmas period, so I had to resort to temporarily buying it from Asda. To my increased annoyance, Sainsburys have now come back out of Christmas mode, and still aren't stocking white grape juice; it isn't in the online catalogue any more either, so as far as I can tell it's been permanently discontinued. (They still do red grape juice, but it's not the same.) So now I'm probably going to be making a special trip to Asda every month or two just for that. Gah.

I've had an interest in fonts1 since I was a teenager. I've never represented myself as an expert in typography or font design, but I can pick out a few more specific fonts than most people and I occasionally have strong opinions about which ones people should (or more often shouldn't) have used in a given piece of text.

( possibly the single most boring thing I've ever written in here )

1. yes, yes, ‘typefaces’ is more accurate, but the difference isn't critical to anything I do, and ‘font’ is faster to type and say.

I went to bed last night, and lay there having insomnia. No obvious cause: no persistent thought or worry running around my head, no physical discomfort. I just lay there, fully awake, failing to naturally descend into sleep.

I lay there all night, in fact, watching the clock gradually advance from 1:30 to 7:30. Then, rather to my surprise, at 7:30 I woke up from what felt like a deep sleep.

So I can only guess that some of that insomnia was actually a dream of insomnia; but I have no way of judging how much. In other words, I have no idea how much sleep I got last night. A sort of Schrödinger's Snooze, I suppose.

(I can't even gauge it by how tired I feel now, because what usually happens when I don't get enough sleep is that I feel perfectly fine and awake for part of the day and then suddenly become sleepy later on. So if that happens, I suppose, I'll be able to make a decent guess.)

A silly thought that came up at post-pizza last night was that it'd occasionally be nice to have a sheet of sticky labels to hand for guerrilla fallacy-highlighting. The idea is that you'd have two sticker designs, looking roughly like this:

and you'd peel off the appropriate one and stick it on any publicly posted text which you felt deserved it :-)

I dreamed that my house had somehow acquired an extra bedroom.

Then I woke up, realised that was silly, got out of bed – and found my house had acquired an extra bedroom, but in a different place.

Then I woke up. Extra points for a dream-within-a-dream! I think I've had one of those before, but never that vividly.

(On the minus side, second time this week I've overslept. I need to get better at using this alarm clock…)

ETA: Whoops. Yes, I have shamefully made the unwarranted assumption that people wishing each other ‘Happy New Year’ are doing so in response to the turning of the Gregorian calendar. If you're not, either don't answer the poll, or do something sensible and appropriate such as translating the year so that 1 January is your own new year day. Sorry about that. And yes, I also shamefully missed out the option for people who never wish each other ‘Happy New Year’ at all. Sorry about that too.

People believing themselves to have an accurate and undisputed overview of a subject, which is in fact a thoroughly unrepresentative cross section that they have mistakenly elevated to the status of Revealed Truth. I used to think that the world was divided into details people and big-picture people, that I was firmly in the former camp, and that I therefore ought to listen respectfully to people in the latter camp because I needed their input to get certain sorts of thing done. I am now coming round to the view that in fact rather too many of the people in the latter camp are woolly-thinking, conclusion-jumping guesswork merchants to make this a dependable life strategy.

When I have a thought that feels like a big-picture insight, I have a healthy doubt of its universal applicability, and am therefore hesitant – perhaps overly hesitant – to noise it about until I'm really sure. And even then, I tend to start by saying ‘hmm, I wonder if’. Some other people seem to lack that doubt, which can make them sound interesting and incisive and highly synthetic … until one day they make a sweeping statement with their usual confidence and flair and you happen to know from personal experience that it is absolute drivel. And then you wonder about all the other things they've ever said in that tone of voice, and worry that you might have let a quantity of comparable drivel influence your thought processes without realising.

Stamp-collecting overviews of a topic. If there's one way to explain a subject area to me which is guaranteed to leave me with the feeling that I've been told everything except what I really wanted to know, it's to list a lot of bits and pieces and not give an idea of how they all relate to each other.

Don't just tell me there are three schools of thought on a topic, for instance. Tell me whether they occurred at different points in history and superseded each other in a clear order; tell me whether any of them produced clear demonstrations that one of the others was untenable; tell me whether people's adherence to them correlates to any other relevant factor in their opinions or attitudes; tell me which, if any, is generally believed today and whether the reasons why look like changeable fashions or like genuine advances of understanding. And don't tell me there are five different ways to make a widget and then just list them with a brief description; tell me why I need to know that, such as what each one's advantages are compared to the others and why everyone hasn't just settled on a single one. Otherwise I will feel you haven't explained anything at all, you've just read out the sales catalogue.

The style of argument which involves waiting for the other person to make a definite statement, and then contradicting it without providing any counter-statement. If you've got all the answers, be so good as to share one or two of them with us; or, failing that, it's only fair for you to at least make some kind of a statement so we can have a turn at putting you down. Even Kosh didn't get away with this in the long run, and neither will you.

(Disclaimer: Each of the above annoyances is derived from accumulating a large number of specific experiences and noting what they had in common. It's possible that some people reading this might have done some of these things on occasion; but if anyone thinks one of the above rants is directed mainly at them, it isn't.)

Curious sight on Coldhams Lane this morning, as I was going to work.

An upturned blue recycling box sitting on the pavement was quite suddenly caught by a freak gust of wind and propelled out into the road. The wind kept pushing it, at approximately a normal pedestrian's walking pace, until it reached the other side of the road, whereupon it managed to mount the kerb (I assume due to a dropped section, but I wasn't watching that carefully) and then stopped.

It managed to do this just when there was a neat gap in the traffic in both directions. The effect was eerily reminiscent of a small blue plastic Dalek, trundling forward under mechanical propulsion but with conscious direction. Other recycling boxes very near it were unaffected, reinforcing the impression that it was just that one box that happened to decide it wanted to get to the other side.

(At least, I assume the motive force was a freak gust of wind. I suppose it's just possible that the box was on a fine string or had a motorised unit under it, but either of those would seem like a lot of effort for a prankster to go to just to momentarily confuse a few passing motorists.)

At one point while I was at my dad's for Christmas, I made the mistake of trying to get an intelligent response out of my sister before she'd had tea in the morning. She refused to reply to my question until she got her tea – but as soon as a steaming cup was handed to her, she replied immediately and usefully before having taken so much as a sip. I concluded that it wasn't the caffeine she was after so much as the moral support.

I giggled gently at this at the time, but the same thing just happened to me: faced with a strange problem to investigate at work, I decided I couldn't face doing it without a cup of coffee to hand – and yet I have no particular intention of drinking enough of the coffee for the caffeine to begin to take effect before I start on the job. It's just vital, for some reason, to know it's there.

If someone lives near me, and I decide I'd like to spend some time with them, my usual approach is to invite them over for dinner. It's fairly clear that this is the polite thing to do whereas attempting to invite myself to theirs would be rude, and it's fairly clear that this is because the host is the one who does all the work: extra cooking, making the place respectable beforehand, washing up afterwards etc. So volunteering to make all that effort myself is polite, whereas trying to manoeuvre the other person into doing it is rude.

All of that is well known and uncontroversial. But how, if at all, does the picture change when the person in question lives sufficiently far away that travelling there and back is liable to be at least as much effort and hassle as the duties of the host?

I find I can't quite make a case either way which convinces me. I would feel a bit rude inviting someone to dinner if accepting the invitation necessarily involved them sitting on trains or in traffic jams for longer than I expected to spend cooking, and yet I would also feel just as rude inviting myself to have dinner with them so that they had all the hosting responsibilities. Neither seems to me to be the obviously more polite option.

Currently, my best solution is to issue an either-way invitation. ‘I'd like to have dinner with you, how about it? If so, your city or mine?’ But that doesn't really seem ideal to me either: it's long, unwieldy, and has a nervous, talking-too-much, downright Hugh Grant vibe to it which is rarely if ever what I want. What do other people do?

Perhaps such dinners should always be held in complementary pairs: home and away.

Well, another arbitrary division of the calendar has arrived, so it's probably time for the semitraditional annual review.

This time two years ago I wrote that 2005 had been the slowest year in my love life since it originally managed to get going. Well, now it isn't any more; 2007 has beaten its record. Nothing whatsoever happened in my love life, for the entire year.

Work was unusually stressful, for several reasons, foremost among which was that I unexpectedly had to take over responsibility for a colleague's code mid-way through the product cycle, and then try to meet the deadlines he'd committed to without his detailed knowledge of how it all worked. (While not missing a beat on my existing responsibilities, naturally; although fortunately those haven't been particularly demanding this year – which was one reason the new stuff chose me to land on.) Not only that, but I had to do all of this while going through the stress of a first-time house purchase, and also I didn't get a holiday for several months longer than I usually go between breaks (because given my housing situation it simply wouldn't have been restful anyway). Add that lot up, and you're looking at someone who seriously needed a rest when I finished work for the year.

But without question, the biggest thing that happened to me all year was the abovementioned house purchase: I have now successfully joined the ranks of the filthy landowning bourgeoisie, and only missed by a few months doing so before turning thirty. This process actually took me nearly all year – in fact, a little of last year too if you count my preliminary investigation of mortgage options in very late 2006. I didn't talk about it much while it was going on, not least because I didn't want to jinx it, but the rough timeline went something like this:

February: began seriously looking. Found an entirely workable house, and after some dithering made an offer. Owner promptly took the house off the market.
May: three months of on-and-off hunting having got me nowhere, I took two weeks off work and applied myself more vigorously. Found an even better house and made another offer, which was accepted.
August: exchange and completion, the latter nearly at the end of the month.
October: actually moved in, having stayed in the old rented flat for over a month while I had the place pre-emptively redecorated and recarpeted. Almost immediately wished I'd had it pre-emptively rewired as well, since the electrics went out within a week.
December: got the place to the point where I was able to laze around in it without constantly coming up against things that desperately needed doing. Some things do still need doing, naturally, but they're not terribly urgent (yet).

Now I'll have to find something different to stress me out in 2008!

Hmm. I probably should have drunk slightly less at the party last night, or alternatively stayed in bed for another couple of hours. However, I didn't want to do the latter due to my grand plan to readjust my personal time zone to the point where I can usefully go to work tomorrow, and by the time I thought of the former it was too late.

Oh well. Happy New Year, everyone!

Christmas seemed to go off reasonably well. Went down to Dad's for a few days, and Sophie (sister) and Tim (her boyfriend) were there too, at least until they got up at good grief o'clock yesterday morning to go and catch a plane to a ski resort. So, plentiful alcohol, plentiful nice food, a couple of walks (one in the general vicinity of Watership Down, which surprised me a little since it had never occurred to me to even wonder if it might be a real place), and a few days away from home.

Unfortunately my before-leaving-the-house checklist included ‘lock the door’ but failed to include ‘do that little mental dance to make sure I can remember having locked the door’; so the holiday was slightly marred by me occasionally worrying that I might have left it open. Though, of course, when I got home I found it was perfectly all right and I'd been worrying for nothing.

Highlight of the entire trip, I think, would have to have been one of Tim's Christmas presents from his family (he brought quite a few of those and we all watched him open them :-). He got a Picoo Z indoor RC helicopter, which is a beautifully simple and robust little device. Curiously, the single most difficult thing to get it to do appears to be to make it fly forwards: it has a control for main rotor speed and one for the tail rotor, so it's easy to get it to go up and down and change its heading, but there's no control to tilt it forwards, so getting it to actually follow that heading takes skill, patience and deviousness. Still, it afforded us quite a lot of fun on Christmas Day trying to get it to fly; by the end of the day Tim seemed to be basically able to coax it gradually in a specified direction, in spite of Sophie's best efforts to shoot it down with a party popper :-)

It's an odd thing about this time of year: there are certain classes of item which, if you buy them for yourself for completely non-Christmas-related reasons, they still feel like Christmas presents if bought in late December.

Last week my old low-end digital camera finally gave up the ghost, after a prolonged battle with internal injuries sustained some years ago due to my own incompetence. <f/x: moment of silence> So today I wandered into town and treated myself to a new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10, which cost about the same and is approximately an order of magnitude more functional in every possible way.

At least, if you believe the manual. I haven't been able to actually test it yet, because its battery has to be charged for two hours before first use. This is possibly contributing further to the feeling of it being Christmas swag: I've now got that feeling of small-child Christmas-morning impatience, when you dive out of bed at about six in the morning desperate to go and start opening the presents, but your parents for some reason keep telling you to wait while they finish doing all sorts of pathetically unimportant stuff like getting dressed. But-it's-not-fair-why-can't-I-play-with-it-NOW!

(Inspired by a random comment I happened to see go past just now, which was drawing one of these inferences and it wasn't entirely clear to me that it was justified in so doing.)