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.

( bigger, geekier, and lj-cut )

Electricians came back this afternoon, took up most of the upstairs floorboards, and traced the problem to a screw in a junction box which hadn't been tightened. So they tightened it, and now everything works again.

While they were there, though, they also noticed that my ring main fails to be a ring; so they downgraded me from a 32A to a 20A fuse on that circuit on general principles of safety, and they recommend I have it all redone properly at a later date.

Now I have to go out shopping: rapid power-cycling appears to have comprehensively nadgered my radio-synchronised alarm clock, with the result that it (a) can't radio-synchronise any more, and (b) won't make alarm noises. It does still work as a clock, if you manually set it, but that really isn't enough to be useful.

Well, the emergency electrician has been and gone; the problem isn't fixed, but now we at least know what it is. Apparently the neutral wire in the ring main is no longer connected to the fuse box. Probably tomorrow someone will come back and run a new piece of wire to solve this.

‘Exciting,’ said Mum on the phone just now. Exciting is hardly the word I would choose.

Well, I expected to have to deal with some sort of homeowner's crisis at some point during my ownership of this house, but I hadn't really expected it to be quite this prompt.

It appears that all the electrical sockets downstairs stopped working yesterday evening, while I was out at a party. It further appears that this has nothing to do with the fusebox – none of the switches had tripped, and taking out the fuse for the defunct circuit and experimentally using it to power a working circuit proves that the fuse itself is fine.

Helpfully, the power came back on around the time I got home, and then went off again shortly afterwards, which caused a number of strange beeping noises as things started up again. I assumed this was the aftermath of a brief power cut and that everything would sort itself out by morning, and went to bed. But this morning it appears I was overoptimistic.

By means of long chains of my absurd surplus of mains splitters, I've managed to emergency-reactivate the fridge, freezer and network infrastructure using an upstairs power socket, but this is clearly untenable in even the medium term. So it looks as if I need an electrician, and ideally an emergency one who can come out today. Any readers of this got a recommendation?

Phew; I now have working home phone and network again. Much better.

But NTL are certainly no better now they're Virgin, and may in fact have managed to become worse. Their installer chap showed up mid-morning (having promised an afternoon visit, and in fact he was lucky to catch me in and not having dashed out to the tip), futzed about with various sockets, and instead of having everything working by the time he left he instead promised me that it would all start working soon – the network within an hour, the full range of TV channels within 24. This may or may not be a genuine consequence of otherwise sensible network architecture, and it may or may not be a deliberate attempt to arrange that the installation engineers are out of range by the time you find out things don't work, but it certainly has the latter effect even if it wasn't intentional.

So an hour later I still didn't have working network: Virgin's DHCP server was issuing me a temporary IP address from which I could ping anything I liked, and connect to their auto-registration web server, but do nothing else at all. Multiple reboots and various faffing didn't help; I tried going through their auto-registration procedure, which didn't help either. Eventually I resorted to ringing their network support, which is now on a premium rate line. It rang and rang and nobody answered. I phoned the main Virgin support line, who explained to me that ringing for ages is that line's equivalent of being on hold and I should have left it for ten minutes. (That actually makes some sense since it's a premium line – it probably means you're not charged for the time you spend on hold – but that only makes me more irritated about it being a premium line in the first place.)

Anyway. Got through to someone in the end. We patronised and counter-patronised each other for a while (I understand more about actual computer networks, he understands more about Virgin's horrendous hackware, both of us felt a need to explain things loudly and slowly to the other).

Eventually he made me shut down both the cable modem and the computer and then start them up again in that order. Infuriatingly, this turned out to fix the problem. It certainly hadn't fixed it the previous time I'd tried it. (I realise lots of people will say that and be wrong, but I hope at least some of my readers will respect my general competence level enough to entertain the possibility that I might be right this time.) Dad (who happened to be visiting today) suspects he did actually change something at his end even though he didn't admit it to me.

(It does, on the other hand, make me realise that there probably is quite a good reason for making their broadband support line a premium rate number: probably a hell of a lot of computer-illiterate users will call up with problems that do turn out to be their own fault, so it's not completely unreasonable to make them pay for the privilege…)

So the result of that phone call was that on the one hand I had (and have) a working network connection, but on the other hand I felt about as frustrated and furious and upset as I would have felt if we hadn't managed to get it working. This seems to be a particular talent of NTL/Virgin: as well as having things fail infuriatingly, they can even manage to infuriate you when things work.

Still. With any luck, by tomorrow the annoyance will be gone and the network will still be working. <touches wood>

I am successfully moved. Woohoo!

I got the packing actually done by the time the removal vans arrived, which was a big improvement on my last move. This was partly because I started it quite a lot earlier, partly because I discovered packing my computers is a good way to remove a source of packing procrastination, and mostly because feanelwa selflessly donated three hours of help packing my kitchen on Saturday, for which my gratitude cannot adequately be expressed in words and would be better expressed by large roast dinners.

The removal people were efficient and sensible, which didn't surprise me because I've used them twice before. They protected all the relevant bits of my stuff from the relentless dribbly rain, uncomplainingly dismantled and remantled things which were too big to move in one piece, put portable rolls of rug down before doing anything so they didn't track mud all over my nice new carpet, and generally did good.

(I was caught out, however, by the fact that they dismantled and remantled my bed. I had expected them to ask me to do that one for them, on the grounds that they did the last two times, and had deliberately arranged to keep a screwdriver unpacked for the job. But this time they did it, so if I'd known that in advance I could have packed the screwdriver…)

I haven't managed to unpack everything already, as I did last time I moved. But I've done over half of it, and enough of the house is in a functional state for me to survive for a few days.

I'm without phone and home network connection until Saturday, because NTL Virgin weren't able to book me an earlier appointment for reconnection. A bit feeble – last time I moved they managed to show up on the same day, so that I was able to spod from the old flat and the new one within twelve hours of each other – but I'm back at work for the rest of the week so I can at least spod from there in a pinch.

My biggest problem right now is that the desks from my old study didn't fit through the rather narrow door to my new study. The removal people could have dismantled and remantled them, but I decided against it, because I plan to replace them anyway (I can fit bigger ones in the new space) so I'd only have to do it again within weeks. Downside of that, of course, is that I'm actually going to have to get a move on with ordering the new desks.

Finally, the shower in my new house is so much better than the one in my old flat that it's worth lingering under. This made me late for work this morning, and will probably do so on a regular basis if I don't watch out :-)

There are many tasks which it's possible to learn how to do much more quickly and efficiently after you've done them a few times.

So doing such a thing once isn't too bad: it may be frustrating and fiddly because you don't really know how to do it properly, but you only have to do it once so it's at least over quickly. And doing it lots of times isn't too bad either: after a few floundering attempts, you get into the proper swing of it, and it becomes easy and satisfying from then on.

But somewhere in between, there is an absolutely pessimal number of times to have to do the task: just at the point where you have the insight which tells you how to do it really efficiently and how you could have saved 85% of the time you'd spent up until now, you've suddenly finished and have no opportunity to use that knowledge.

Well, it's nearly here at last. My new house had some carpets fitted on Monday to replace the dodgy laminate flooring downstairs and one completely destroyed carpet upstairs; so it's now a genuinely habitable building and all I have left to do is move into it, which is booked for Tuesday. (And then take care of an endless to-do list of big and little things after that, of course, but at least the waiting will be over.)

Which means it's time to pack. Also on Monday I drove over to the removal company's depot and picked up a carload of sturdy cardboard boxes, and last night I began packing my belongings into them.

I … hate … this bit. I really, really hate it. Words have a hard time expressing just how much I loathe packing to move house, but I'll give it a try anyway.

For a start, it's fundamentally demotivating. Everything I take off a shelf and put in a box is making my home look less like a home and more like a mess, and I like my home. I've been working hard all year to move out of this particular home, admittedly, but that's irrelevant, because what I'm talking about here is the abstract concept of ‘my home’ which isn't about the building but about having a layer of all my stuff arranged around me in a comforting and cosy manner. That aspect of ‘my home’ has evolved gradually over the years, but there's been a continuity to it which has made it perceptibly the same thing for far longer than any particular house or flat has contained it. So tearing it down piece by piece, even though I know in a week or so it'll all be back around me again, is heartbreaking and difficult. Every time I finish packing a box I just want to sit down and mope about it, and the very last thing I want to do is to start packing another one.

By contrast, I find unpacking at the other end of the job to be a breeze. People often seem to find this unusual, but it's true: when everything that comes out of a box on to a shelf makes the place look more like a home, it's constantly making me happier as I do it, which encourages me to keep on doing it. So the process is self-motivating, and things just seem to fly out of boxes as if there's no tomorrow. In fact, last time I did it, there wasn't: I spent days halfheartedly packing and still hadn't really finished when the removal men arrived, but unpacking zipped by in a matter of hours and by the time I went to bed on moving day I'd completely finished it.

Secondly, a lot of packing is difficult. It's not so bad when it's things like books, which are collected together already and arranged in orderly lines; I just hoist them off the shelf in the largest armload I can carry without them going everywhere, and I stick them in the bottom of a box. But going round the edges of the room picking up endless large and small things that I've been treating as unnoticed parts of the scenery for years and now have to readjust to treating as foreground and work out how to fit into a box … that's hard, not (just) emotionally but intellectually, because I have to try to make my brain point in a direction it isn't used to pointing.

And because I've been treating half my stuff as background and scenery, there's always more of it than I think. I'll fill a box, and I'll look around, and I'll realise that behind all that lot there was another lot of random stuff I'd completely forgotten about which is going to take another box. So my estimate of the number of boxes still to do remains largely constant, which is another demotivating factor. By contrast, again, when I'm emptying boxes it's much easier because the boxes are big and discrete and in my way and I can't possibly miscount how many I've got left.

I hate this, with a passion. I remembered from my last move in 2003 that I disliked packing and was slow at it, which is why I'm starting it a week ahead of time instead of a few days. But I had forgotten just how much I disliked it; in fact I had even forgotten the order of magnitude of how much I disliked it. I hate packing.

On Friday evening, the last thing I tried to do before leaving work was to write an email to my boss. I opened up a composer window in Evolution, typed in the message, attached the attachment and hit Send. Evolution put up an error box saying ‘Unable to send message’, or something comparably uninformative, and when I clicked the ‘OK’ button (which really should have been labelled ‘it's not OK, dammit, but I'm resigned to there being nothing I can do about it’) Evolution closed the composer window. No draft of the message saved anywhere I could find.

That annoyed me enough that I decided to just go home and deal with it after the weekend. So this morning I came back in, remembered about it, sighed, and prepared to rewrite the message.

Only, on a hunch, I checked with my boss first – and it turns out he did receive it. Bwarghle.

Concealing a large muddy puddle underneath an unstable paving slab, so that when an unsuspecting pedestrian steps on the slab it all squirts out and covers their trouser leg in soaking wet grime, is clearly one of those golden-oldie physical gags that never stops being hilarious. And doing it to somebody who's already had to trudge half an hour out of their way in the rain can surely only make it funnier. Ha ha ha. Oh, my aching sides.