( 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.

Well, I lasted just over a year without a mobile phone, but I've given up now: after several incidents recently where it would have been really helpful to be able to make an outgoing call from a random place, I've decided it is after all worth buying the cheapest PAYG handset I can find and keeping it turned off in my bag for the occasional emergency.

I hurt my hand over the weekend while loading planks of wood into my car to take them to the tip (the decorators left me a front-garden-ful of rubbish because I decided it was cheaper than paying them to take it away for me), and since it was still quite painful this morning I went in to town and took it to a doctor to make sure there wasn't anything serious wrong with it. So I thought it would be polite to call my office and let them know I'd be late in at best (or perhaps not in at all if the doctor decided it needed to go in a sling); and I decided the sensible way to do that would be to first buy a phone to call them with. Slightly silly, perhaps, but it should solve my next few similar problems as well.

The doctor prodded my hand for about fifteen seconds and said I'd just overdone it and it was nothing serious; it'll apparently hurt like hell for 7-10 days but then it'll be fine, and in the meantime ibuprofen is my friend. Irritating, but at least that means I don't need to worry about it, and also that it should be recovered in time for me to pack the contents of my home into boxes for the move.

I've just been reminded of a thing I've been wondering for a while, which it occurs to me that my readers might be able to help me with.

There are a couple of pairs of words or phrases which are very similar in meaning, but which I vaguely remember having been told, at some point during my childhood, that there was a clear distinction between:

• ‘Recall’ and ‘recollect’: I remember somebody telling me these described specific and different ways to pull something out of your memory, but web-searching and dictionaries now suggest to me that they are in fact simply synonyms.
• ‘Polar opposites’ and ‘diametric opposites’: I remember being told that these too were distinct concepts in some specific way, but as far as I can now tell they're both just superlative forms of ‘opposite’ indicating that things are as opposite as they can possibly be.

It's mildly frustrating me that I can't remember what the distinction was supposed to be in either case. I don't much mind whether the distinctions turn out to be real or not (except insofar as their reality would have a bearing on how easy they were to look up), but I would like to know what they might have been.

So I don't suppose anyone else here might believe in a well-defined distinction between either of these pairs of words, and therefore be able to enlighten me as to what either of those distinctions might be? It wouldn't guarantee that they were the same distinctions which I've lost down the back of my brain, of course, but even if not they might jog my memory a bit.

(This is also reminding me, now I come to think about it, of a wordplay-oriented radio panel game I remember listening to as a child, whose actual name I've forgotten but one of whose rounds I remember being called ‘Deft Definitions’. In this round panellists were given a pair of nearly synonymous, or sometimes nearly homophonous, words and were asked to pithily define them both in a single sentence so as to illustrate how they differed. However, unlike the definitions I'm after here, Deft Definitions was humorous in intent: the answers often deliberately missed the real point, because it was funnier that way.)

I've mentioned getting gluten-free foods on prescription a number of times in this diary, and people often ask why I have to get them on prescription and can't just buy them.

This is a good question, and I've wondered it too; you can get a lot of GF stuff in supermarkets, but some products never seem to show up in shops and only seem to be available on prescription. Notably the Juvela products, which are made from wheat with the gluten cunningly removed, and which thereby taste (IMO) rather nicer than the shop-bought alternatives. I've never understood why these have to be prescription-only; it's not as if they contain any legally controlled drugs, for example. And I've often thought I'd prefer to just mail-order the stuff if it were possible, because the inconvenience of getting prescriptions is significant and I'd even tolerate a reasonable price increase to avoid it.

Well, I discovered today that you can buy Juvela products without having to go through the prescription rigmarole. But there's an excellent reason why you shouldn't, and why they don't appear in shops: they're gobsmackingly expensive.

My usual prescription load, for example, is 2kg of flour and 2kg of pasta. For that I pay two normal prescription charges, i.e. £13 or thereabouts, which a quick websearch suggests is about twice what I might expect to pay for the same amount of normal, glutinous flour and pasta. Well, it turns out that I could, if I so wished, order it commercially through a pharmacy – but if I did so, I'd pay a staggering £70.

So that's why nobody talks about that option much. My curiosity is amply satisfied. I had vastly underestimated the gratitude I should be displaying toward the NHS for paying that much of the cost of my staple foods; and that price difference more than justifies continuing to go through the hassle of the prescription mechanism so that they'll continue to do so!

Addenbrookes appear to be nearly organised these days, IME, but the last few times I've dealt with my GP's surgery I have found phrases such as ‘piss-up’, ‘brewery’ and ‘wet paper bag’ unfailingly springing to my mind.

So I've recently been trying to get a repeat prescription for some gluten-free staple foods. This involved:

• going into town on Wednesday lunchtime and being startlingly unable to find the surgery.
• going in again on Thursday morning armed with better directions, finding the surgery's new premises, and dropping off the form.
• going in on Friday morning and finding I was a working day early: they take 48 hours to renew a prescription. I probably knew that once, but it's been a while and nobody thought to remind me.
• going in again this morning and finding they had declined to renew my prescription. Probably, they said, because it was overdue for review; but the receptionist couldn't find that out for sure, and in fact the doctors never confirmed the reason either. It didn't seem to me that much medical review ought to be necessary in this particular case, but I was willing to work with the bureaucratic requirement if I had to.
• arranging an appointment on short notice to rectify this.
• wandering around town for half an hour, coming back, and seeing a medical student who was supposed to be supervised by a GP, who was absent.
• talking to the medical student for twenty unproductive minutes before the supervising GP bothered to turn up and authorise him to prescribe anything.
• finding that the surgery thought they'd filled half my repeat prescription, but couldn't find it, and it might have been sent to Boots non-consensually. No indication of why they might have done one half but not the other half.
• receiving both halves of my prescription, with instructions to have the disputed half shredded if it turned out to have already been filled by Boots.
• going to Boots, who hadn't heard of it.
• getting to work over an hour late.

So, I now have some actual prescriptions in my back pocket, and will drop them in at a slightly more convenient Boots on the way home from work. The other copy of one of them is still unaccounted for; I predict that some completely random pharmacy will turn out to have got it by accident, and will send me a letter in a month's time asking if I can please come and pick up my stuff. That's what happened the last time I was prescribed anything (which is one of the reasons it's been so long since I had to go through this!).

On the plus side, they've shown me how to request repeat prescriptions over the web, but really I'll have to do a lot of those before the cumulative saving in hassle manages to outweigh this week's sheer confusion.

Also, during the half hour before my appointment I wandered around town doing some hasty shopping, and was rather scared by the queue outside Northern Rock. It reached most of the way down Sidney Street, and there was a guy who looked like a newspaper photographer snapping away at it with a camera the size of a trumpet.

Went back into town this morning, and this time found the doctor's surgery. The receptionist seemed surprised to hear there wasn't a notice on the old front door; she thought it was still supposed to be there and said she'd look into getting it put back. Fair enough.

In other news, I'm still really, really enjoying being able to drink coffee again. I think I'd managed to forget just how much I like the stuff. Mmmm, coffeeee.

I popped into town at lunchtime to run errands. One of those errands was going to be dropping off a repeat-prescription form at my GP's surgery, to replenish my dwindling stocks of gluten-free pasta.

Only, when I got to the surgery, I found it had vanished. The nameplates on the door had been replaced with blank plates, and there was no indication that a doctor's surgery had ever been there. No notice saying ‘we have moved to new premises’, or even ‘we have closed permanently’. Just a blank door and no explanation.

I'm somewhat surprised. I'd have expected a letter to all their patients, or something. I stood and gaped at the door for quite a while before wandering off looking confused.

On Saturday my plans were to go into town and do some errands, and to go to kaet and sphyg's wedding. I wasn't sure I'd have time to do the former in the morning without risking being late to the latter, but when I woke up at about 6am by accident I decided I could probably manage a sufficiently early start after all. So I dashed about town faffing with things, and was able to go back home and faff there too, and still finished in plenty of time to get to the wedding without having to hurry.

I was amused to notice, at the wedding itself, that we're now officially well and truly in the age of the digital camera: just before the bride began her entrance, there was a chorus of four or five of those ‘boop-bip-bup-BEEP’ noises that digicams make when you power them up. In an earlier era there might have been situations where many mobile phones would go off at once, or lots of digital watches would chime the hour over a period of about five minutes, but I think this was the first time I'd heard digicams in chorus in that way.

High points of the day included:

• the bride and groom making their exit after the ceremony accompanied by the Blake's 7 theme – and also accompanied, not entirely sotto voce, by ceb telling them they were ‘very, very, very silly’ :-)
• Dan's quintessentially Dan introduction to his speech: ‘the groom's speech should be short, sweet, and contain no linear algebra’
• Benedict scoring a palpable verbal hit on me while we were all sitting around after the wedding breakfast: he reached across the table with a long modelling balloon (of which there were quite a few about) and either poked or patted me in the head – it was unclear which he intended – twice. ‘Did you just kill me or knight me?’ I asked, ‘It was hard to tell which.’ He gave me that contemptuous look that only small children can manage, and said ‘It's … a … balloon.’ :-)

Eventually the fact that I'd woken up at 6am asserted itself, so I went home earlyish and fell over.

However, I wasn't due for a proper night's rest just yet, because the next day I had to get up early to go out to the new house and take delivery of my new white goods. (Yes, on a Sunday.) So I did that, and then spent a lot of the afternoon actually washing some clothes in my shiny new washing machine (which I've been looking forward to for some time, because I'm convinced the landlord's washing machine in this flat doesn't rinse properly at all), getting home just in time to discover that I'd missed most of Dan and Lucy's post-wedding pub get-together. Oops.

Then Sunday evening was unexpectedly taken up by an email from drswirly, who's on holiday in Cornwall and has therefore had a chance for uninterrupted thinking about maths; in this case he'd managed to solve a well-known mathematically impossible problem, by a method of cheating I'd thought up a month or two ago. So, of course, I immediately had to check his answer and write it up to go on the web, which took me a lot of the evening. So, for anyone who's interested, there's now a new mathsy page up on my website: ‘Reaching row 5 in Solitaire Army’.

And I had this morning off work, but still no chance for a lie-in, because this time I had to go out to the house and meet a guy coming to measure up for my pre-emptive recarpeting. That's done now, and I'm back at home with a couple of hours to spend relaxing before I go to work for the afternoon. Phew.

In the kitchen at work there's a stop-smoking advocacy poster, which starts by listing ‘Changes your body goes through within 20 minutes of last cigarette’. Unfortunately every time I see it I tend to think of ‘last cigarette’ in the context of the one they traditionally give you just before putting you in front of the firing squad, which leaves me with a rather drastic idea of what those changes might be. Still, I suppose it would be a fairly reliable way to stop smoking.

Unrelatedly, it occurred to me in the pub last night that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, claiming as it does that one's basic view of the world is dependent on one's language, surely ought to be described using the soundbite ‘ontology recapitulates philology’.

(Yes, I'm aware that I've stretched a number of concepts in that sentence to within an inch of their warranty limits if not beyond. I plead punster's licence.)

As of this week I find myself maintaining code written by a C++ programmer in the Strict Orthodox style. This means that the program is divided rigidly into classes, even the parts that are entirely procedural in function; that there is a strict convention of one class to a source file even when this means separating fragments of code which are doing a semantically related job and would benefit from being near each other; and, in general, that classes and templates and namespaces and long multi-word names are used in a manner that suggests the author specifically wanted to avoid writing

    do_foo(arg1, arg2);

if he could possibly instead write

    FooDoingClass<inexplicableTemplateParameter>::getInstance()->
        doFoo(RandomNamespace::arg, RandomOtherNamespace::arg2);

only, for added annoyance, without the line break in the middle.

It's not generally my practice to propagate LJ memes in this diary just for the sake of saying something, but on the rare occasion when someone posts one which includes a question I actually find interesting, I don't let the fact that it came from an LJ meme stop me from answering it.

So naath posted a relationships questionnaire [friends-locked, but a public copy of the questions is here] recently, which contained a lot of questions which I don't feel like answering because they're (variously) inherently uninteresting, badly specified, oxymoronic or simply wouldn't elicit any particularly interesting answers from me; but in among them was the old chestnut ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’, which reminded me that I relatively recently acquired a definite opinion on that question and it isn't as simple as a yes or a no.

( Half of it. )

Of course, as I mention above, other people's minds might turn out to work entirely differently from mine. But for the moment, that's my opinion.