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 Tell me whether they occurred at different points in history and superseded each other in a clear order; tell me whether any of them produced clear demonstrations that one of the others was untenable; tell me whether people's adherence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.)

In my study, I have a pair of large desks against one wall, and lots of cables running back and forth between things on those desks. Most of the cables, both here and in my previous flat, trailed along the floor behind the desks. This was fine to begin with, but as I accumulated more and more computer equipment, I reached the point where if I stretched my feet out they would encounter an enormous pile of cables, mains adapters and power strips. This was (a) uncomfortable, (b) unaesthetic, (c) risked me accidentally unplugging something if I fidgeted the wrong way, and (d) made it impossible to hoover that area.

So this month I decided to do something about it. I obtained some string netting by the standard method of obtaining weird things in the modern world (i.e. Google and a credit card), and I've just spent most of this afternoon crouching behind my desks, hanging the netting in a half-tube from hooks I screwed into the underside of the desks, threading all the cables through the resulting space, and cramping my back. Now I can stretch my feet out and all they encounter is nice warm carpet. The plan was entirely successful.

Somewhat too successful, in fact: I bought more netting than I needed, on the assumption that I would probably end up having to throw the first lot away and do it all again with slightly different-sized pieces, and/or have to double the netting up for strength, and/or something else I hadn't thought of. Then I added a standard fudge factor to that as well, and ended up ordering a 4m×10m sheet of netting, which I thought ought to be more than enough even in the worst case.

But in fact the plan worked perfectly the first time, and I ended up using a piece of netting that was more like 4m×50cm. Leaving me with a rather silly 95% of the original sheet left, which is currently cluttering up my spare room and will shortly instead be cluttering up my loft.

So, um. I don't suppose anyone has any use for a large piece of netting?

I was having long thoughts again this morning on the way to work. It occurred to me that pretty much all the things I'm most afraid might go wrong with my life are internal to my own mind.

Falling inconveniently in love is perhaps the prime example: this has been a major source of woe to me in the history of my life. When I was a teenager and an undergrad I had a pretty much solid pattern of falling for someone I couldn't have, angsting about it for too long, eventually getting over it (usually by making a fool of myself in front of her), and then repeating the cycle with someone else. I don't seem to have been making quite such a career of it in recent years, but it still happens to me occasionally. And as if to make up for the relative infrequency, the last time it happened (a couple of years ago) it was worse than ever: it turned my brain completely inside out, disrupted my life utterly, and prevented me concentrating on absolutely anything at all – and it was only by great good luck that the worst of it only lasted a week and not months. So I still think of it as a clear and present danger to my mental equilibrium.

My other big worry is about losing my ability to do useful things with computers. Not so much my actual programming skills and knowledge – I've proved to myself any number of times that those are deep-rooted enough to survive practically anything I can do to my brain, up to and including balance-impairing quantities of alcohol – but the powers of concentration and focus that are necessary in order to apply those skills and knowledge to achieving any worthwhile goal. At work I don't feel as if I'm concentrating as well as I used to (although this may simply be because my job has been changing a lot in the past few months and I'm not used to it); in my free-software activities I seem to have been flitting about doing small and silly stuff, and it's difficult to imagine myself ever again having the time or energy to achieve anything of the magnitude (or the usefulness to society) of PuTTY.

Added to those there's a list of more minor mental worries: fear that the anxiety attacks I suffered a few years ago in the wake of a stressful life event might recur, fear that my ongoing difficulty convincing myself that I really locked the front door when I went out1 might be a symptom of the onset of some sort of OCD-like inconvenience. And, of course, fear that all this unnecessary worrying isn't good for me!

What strikes me as odd about this is that it's not as if there aren't plenty of things that could go wrong with my life in a purely material sense. I now own a house which might fail in difficult and expensive ways; I have a slightly rickety body which might at any point choose to develop some new and exciting ailment to help make a mockery of the idea of Intelligent Design; and there's always the background risk of things like car accidents, people close to me dying, and so on. For some of these things the actual risk (probabilistic expectation of the total damage to my life) is probably higher than the purely mental phenomena I've listed above.

But none of them scares me nearly so much as the mental risks. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I perceive (with dubious accuracy) my mind to be under my own control, so that if it does something wrong or unhelpful then it's in some sense my fault, so I feel as if I should be taking extra care in pre-emptive avoidance. Whereas many of the material and physical risks to my life are things which it's easy to see as basically unpredictable, so while they could strike me at any time there would be less of a feeling of having ‘done it to myself’, and more a feeling of ‘them's the breaks, these things happen’.

1. Which seems to be worse in the new house, incidentally, as a result of the way the front door lock works. I plan to get a new front door, since the behaviour is annoying for other reasons too, but haven't got round to it yet.

I'm getting increasingly sick of never being able to buy the same product a few years after I last bought one.

( shopping rant )

I think, after some weeks of thought and intermittent attendance, that I'm probably not going to go to the Calling any more.

For the past few years, my aim in going to the Calling has been to see a selection of lovely people who I don't have the opportunity to see often enough, or at all, in any other context. But I don't end up achieving this to any great extent any more: several of the people in question don't often go to the Calling themselves any more (or, in extreme cases, don't even live in Cambridge any more), and I seem to have failed to retain the interest of several of the others. And even the remaining people often don't really want to stand around talking to me at the Calling, because talking to people is not what the Calling's designed for. (And fair enough, I have to say; it certainly isn't the venue I'd pick for normal social interaction if I had an entirely free choice. I only used it for that myself because I didn't.)

I've been going to the Calling, on and off, for nearly ten years: my diary archives tell me that I first went there on 1998-01-29. It's generally been good to me: it's the only nightclub I've ever really felt at home in, it's often been fun, it's always been a useful change from any other environment I regularly spend time in, and the best relationship of my life so far was with someone I met there.

But the value of me continuing to go to it has been dwindling for months, and has now sunk below my activation threshold. So enough is enough; unless someone persuades me very convincingly, I'm calling it a day, and leaving it to younger and more energetic folk.

Out of curiosity I ran two Google searches this morning, whose results were surprisingly close:

Results 1 – 10 of about 801,000 for "free reign"
Results 1 – 10 of about 841,000 for "free rein"

The right one won, but only just. This gave me an idea for a couple of silly Google challenges, if anyone reading this is bored enough:

Firstly, see if you can find a well known word or phrase, together with a common misspelling, in which the wrong spelling actually gets more hits on Google. (Cross-channel variation, or other reasonably justifiable differences of opinion, don't count as misspellings. One of them has to be clearly wrong, such that anyone sufficiently educated who isn't an incurable descriptive linguist has to agree on which one it is.)

Secondly, see if you can find a wrong-and-right pair in which the scores are (proportionately) closer together than the above two.

I haven't tried either, but I'd guess the second challenge would be harder than the first: I'm sure there must be some wrong spelling more popular than the right one, but those two are really pretty close by the normal Google standards (there's usually more like an order of magnitude difference).

One of the after-effects of moving house is that I keep noticing ways in which I'm not fully settled in yet. Every so often I'll seize on one of those ways which is particularly irritating me, and tell myself that when that one has gone I'll ‘really’ be settled.

Just after the move, for example, I told myself I'd have ‘properly’ moved in once I'd managed to do some laundry in the new place. Or when I'd cooked for myself, instead of just eating a ready meal as I did for the first few days while I unpacked and sorted out the kitchen.

When I'd reactivated my computer infrastructure enough to run my first proper backup in the new house, that was a milestone. And it took me a couple of weeks to hit the milestone of getting to work on time: I kept being delayed in the morning by either doing a quick chore before leaving the house, enjoying the new shower for a bit too long, or not quite having worked out the optimal route to work yet.

This week's one is that I hope to feel as if I've properly settled in (translation: at least until I come up with the next of these milestones) once I'm no longer generating more rubbish than the normal collection can easily cope with. Even now I'm not making regular trips to the tip any more, my black wheely bin is constantly about half a load fuller than I normally expect it to be, and to some extent I'm still queueing up rubbish inside the house to be transferred to the bin once it's been emptied. It's terribly annoying, and the most annoying thing about it is that it's not nearly over yet: I still have lots of things on my to-buy list which will come in packaging more bulky and annoying than the stuff itself, and which will overflow my bin for yet another fortnight.

Today I cleaned up the spilt toner, or as much as I could manage of it, from the inside of my laser printer. This spill occurred during the house move (the manual probably contains some instructions on how to stow the printer for safe transport, which it didn't even occur to me to look for let alone read) and since then the rogue toner has been generating exciting yellowy-green smears on all the pages I've printed. Quite a lot of the change-of-address letters I sent off to various governmental and utility bureaucracies contained postscripts along the lines of ‘Sorry about the smears, my printer didn't travel well’.

So today I got round to the cleaning job: I pulled out as much of the innards of the printer as I could sensibly extract, wiped up some toner from underneath them, and now I've managed to put several sheets of paper through the thing and get them out again containing only the marks I actually asked for. This is good, and is one more item crossed off my list of things to do.

Unfortunately, it also means several of the fingertips of my right hand are going to be a bit yellow-stained in the nooks and crannies until all the toner grows out. If anyone notices this, they should hereby be reassured that I haven't taken up smoking!

My sofa was delivered this morning. Therefore, I can now reasonably declare my new house Open For Business; people can visit me and I won't have to apologise for making them sit on anything substandard.

(People who need crash space in order to visit me, however, will either have to sleep on the sofa, or wait until I've turned the spare room from a messy pile of toolboxes into a guest bedroom…)

Yesterday was the official end date of my tenancy at my previous flat. Therefore, today is the first day in just over ten years during which I am not renting any kind of living space.

For the last year or two I've been feeling almost oppressed by the knowledge that a sizable chunk of my monthly income was being effectively poured down the drain, or at least contributing to someone else's capital assets rather than my own. It's been a constant feeling of guilt and discomfort, pressing down on the back of my neck. In response to that feeling (and a number of other factors too, of course, but that feeling of oppression was a major one) I have spent nearly a year working towards this day. So I had expected to feel at least slightly triumphant, or relieved, or at the very least marginally less oppressed.

But, unfortunately, I still just feel as if I've got a pages-long list of things to do in the new house. In twenty-five years I will have a capital asset which I otherwise wouldn't have had, but right now I've just exchanged one lot of oppressive guilt for another. Ah well.

I had the electricians in again yesterday; that's three times in a week. This time it was because the people who fixed everything on Monday had left some wires in my fusebox unconnected ‘because they couldn't work out what they were for’. A couple of days later I found out: they were the power to my outhouse. So someone had to come back in a hurry yesterday and reconnect it.

It all makes work for the working man to do, but it isn't traditionally the same working man every time. Ho hum.

Fortunately this didn't require me to take yet more time off work, because I was off work anyway for furniture delivery. My study is now full of enormous desks, so I can use my computers without hunching painfully over tiny picnic tables. Parts of the house are now beginning to look vaguely like I originally intended it to.