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.

I just posted a letter to my own house.

The reason being, I wanted to ask a couple of questions of the previous owner, but he didn't leave a forwarding address. He said he'd put postal redirection in place, though, so I thought the simplest way to get in touch with him would be to post a letter to him at his old address, and trust the redirection to get it to him :-)

This morning I spent approximately £20 on new-house-related stuff. Yesterday I spent something in the region of £200, and the day before that I spent about £2000 (mostly on white goods and furniture).

The progression stops there, because the day before that I bought the house itself, which (regrettably) cost me really quite a lot more than £20,000.

But tomorrow I might at least try to think of something house-useful I can buy for about £2, although 20p the day after is probably infeasible, and 2p the day after that is certainly silly.

I've recently discovered that I'm able to drink coffee again, which is very pleasant. For about six years now, as long-time readers may recall, I've been hypersensitive to caffeine to the extent that a cup of decaff has been able to give me something resembling a normal coffee buzz, whereas a cup of fully-caff has been known to send me into a gibbering panic attack or something close to it. However, recently I've been finding decaff isn't doing it for me any more, so one day when I was particularly sleepy I risked a cup of proper coffee in a spirit of experimentation, and it did its job and didn't have any ill effects. I still have to be a bit careful if I'm already in a jittery mood for other reasons, and I still wouldn't drink coffee late in the day for fear of trouble sleeping, but a nice cup of coffee of a morning now appears to be an option which is once again open to me. This is a good thing.

(Another option I thought of today, if I'm feeling cautious, is to mix decaff and caff half-and-half. This only works sensibly with instant, of course, but since my jars of decaff and caff instant at home are both the same brand, it works particularly well there.)

Less good is that I've been drinking quite a lot of alcohol (well, by my standards at least) as a means of coping with the stressful process of house-buying, and it's been starting to faintly worry me; so now that the seriously scary stuff is out of the way and it's mostly just hard work from now on I think I'm going to call a halt and stop drinking for a couple of weeks. When I actually manage to move in, an alcoholic celebration of some sort will probably be in order, but until then I'm taking the precautionary measure of staying off the booze.

Accordingly, in the pub this evening I drank non-alcoholic stuff. My usual non-alcoholic pub drink is orange juice and lemonade, but in a spirit of experimentation (yes, another one) I had a go at lime and soda today, which seemed to work rather well in that it had the refreshing citrus nature but unlike OJ+L it wasn't obviously chock full of sugar. If anyone can suggest other nice and not-excessively-sugary pub soft drinks to me, I may experiment further.

A man came to drill holes in the afternoon
And by the evening, most of the afternoon had gone

– Marillion, ‘Drilling Holes’

Dad came up today to look over my new house for the first time, and help me run network cables throughout it. We spent most of the afternoon drilling a lot of holes all the way through walls, which was somewhat nervous-making but also thoroughly satisfying in an ‘it's my own house and for the first time I am beholden to nobody in the matter of where I see fit to puncture it’ sort of way. Now there's CAT-5 strewn messily all over the place and I shall have to go back at some point and hide it all in trunking. And hoover; never drill holes in walls without having a hoover nearby.

I was a bit nervous about what Dad might think of the house, since he hadn't had a chance to give an opinion (or at least one informed by anything more than verbal descriptions) prior to me deciding to buy it; but although (as I expected) he produced an enormous list of things that could usefully be tweaked, repainted, fixed, grouted and generally meddled with at some point, he seemed to think it was basically a viable dwelling and certainly an order of magnitude better than my current place. Which was, after all, the plan.

Also I've now spent a day in the house in daylight and didn't get a repeat attack of the screaming abdabs at any point, so I can only assume it was indeed just post-completion nerves and nothing to do with the house itself. Phew.

I went to work as usual for the morning, in a miserly attempt to conserve my stores of leave for the year (which, frankly, are in no need of that level of care). Around half past ten I got the call telling me completion had gone off without a hitch and I could collect the key from the estate agent any time I liked, so at lunchtime I went out and did so.

Went into the house around 3pm; the previous owners and their extended family were still hanging around clearing out the last few bits and bobs, but that was vaguely useful because it let them show me how all the locks worked and where the non-obvious stuff was. Went in, measured a few things I hadn't got round to measuring already, faffed a bit, went home again.

And then I panicked. There was no other word for it, really. Somehow, during that visit, I'd managed to give myself the impression that it was actually an incredibly grotty and unpleasant place and I'd just spent mumble-hundred-and-mmph thousand pounds on a thoroughly disgusting house and it was far too late to back out. I think in retrospect that this was a combination of several factors, notably the fact that I spent a disproportionate amount of my visit in the really nasty bits (mainly the loft, and I imagine lofts are always nasty) and the fact that I felt a bit cramped by the previous owners still being there, plus lots of pent-up stress venting itself from the long purchasing process itself. Whatever the cause, the effect was that I spent an hour sitting at home thinking things like ‘arrgh, what have I done?’; but then when I went back this evening with Mum it was fine. I think it must just have been nerves.

So, tomorrow Dad's coming up to look over the place and (almost certainly) give me reams and reams of assorted advice; some time next week some furniture and stuff will start to arrive; one of the upstairs rooms might actually need preemptive redecoration (or conceivably thermonuclear rehabilitation); and at some point after all that I need to arrange to actually move in.

It's almost beginning to be exciting now.

(Be gentle if I've messed this up; believe it or not, it's the first time I've ever posted a poll!)

Exchanged contracts at last. Barring last-minute bizarre banking incidents, meteorite strikes, and other fairly extreme Acts of Murphy, I become a homeowner a week from tomorrow :-)

When you try to test someone's recent bug fix, and can't because the compiler crashes, so you try to build an up-to-date version of the compiler and the build system crashes too, I think you're justified in muttering something involving the phrase ‘game of soldiers’ and going home.

I've noticed a couple of times recently that about half my brain is naturally able to read upside down without thinking about it, but not the other half.

Yesterday I happened to see a blog post about image processing, which included a sample image apparently scanned from a map the wrong way up. On this image were the capital letters ‘ATH’ (presumably part of a word), upside down. Now when I see them out of the corner of my eye or while my eye scans past them to look at something else, I read ‘HIV’ (because my pattern-recogniser loses the horizontal of the T and the crossbar of the A, and reads what's left the right way up); but the odd thing is that when I look directly at those letters, I instinctively read ‘ATH’, without having to think about it, and can't see them as anything else.

The first time this happened, the blog post in question was scrolling past at high speed on my LJ friends-of-friends page; I was somewhat confused, and I braked to a halt and backpedalled the scroll bar to find out why I'd just seen the letters ‘HIV’ in a post about image processing. I stared directly at the letters ‘ATH’, saw them as ‘ATH’, and assumed I must just have hallucinated. Then the next time I worked the scrollbar, *blinks* there was ‘HIV’ again. It took me several goes before I figured out what was going on, because when I looked at the letters with the top half of my brain I absolutely could not see anything other than ‘ATH’ there.

In the kitchen at work, there's a big box sitting on the floor with ‘Squashes’ written on it. (Presumably it contains bottles of soft drink, rather than unusual vegetables, but I haven't opened it to check.) The orientation of the box is such that when I walk past it I see the word ‘Squashes’ upside down; and usually at first glance I somehow read it as ‘Squashages’. Then I look at it again and can't see why I would have thought that, because obviously it has no g in it and clearly says ‘Squashes’ – but then it happens again the next time I go to the kitchen.

It's taken me a couple of days to figure this one out, but now I think I've got it. The last few letters of ‘Squashes’, when read upside down, look quite like the first few letters of ‘sausages’. So I think what's happening is that my right-way-up reading instinct sees ‘sausa…S’ and assumes the existence of the ‘ge’ in the middle, and then my upside-down instinct starts to kick in and realises that the word starts ‘Sq’, and some overenthusiastic part of my brain's language module has combined the two to synthesise ‘Squashages’ before I manage to notice that it's being silly.

So the conclusion I draw from all this is that there are two largely independent reading subsystems in my brain. One of them can only read the right way up, apparently does so by whole-word pattern recognition, and produces answers extremely quickly; the other one can read upside down as well, has a slightly higher activation threshold (it won't fire at all if I'm not deliberately trying to read something) and takes a fraction of a second longer to give its answer, but once it's working it overrules the other one to the point where I can no longer perceive what it had been telling me.

It certainly doesn't surprise me to find that my brain supports multiple strategies for extracting meaning from the written word. Having a fast word recogniser and a slower but surer letter recogniser seems like an entirely sensible architecture, since the latter can fill in gaps and correct errors in the output of the former. But it does surprise me that they're so independent of one another that they can fight.

Yesterday my personal hayfever season began.

As far as my records can tell me, this is actually the latest in the year it's ever started. I've always tended to get it later than most people (with the annoying effect that every year I wonder if I'm going to get away without it, and am always disappointed), but as far as my records can tell me it seems to have been getting gradually later and later over the past decade. Around 1998-2000 it was starting in late June or early July; in 2004-2005 it was more like late July; and now it seems to be mid-August.

(My ‘records’, admittedly, are the archives of this diary since it started in 1998, and since I never expected to be doing this sort of retrospective analysis I haven't been recording every single hayfever attack or anything like that. But when I do mention it in here it's usually because it's become irritating enough to complain about; so while the absence of a complaint by a particular date might not prove my hayfever hadn't started, I think the presence of one can reasonably show that it had. So this somewhat unscientific means of measurement wouldn't be adequate to prove it if my hayfever were starting earlier than usual, but I think it's valid to conclude that it's starting later.)

My hayfever has often seemed to me to start later than I expected, and so I tend to spend the early and middle parts of the summer hoping against hope that I might get away without it this year. I had assumed this was simply because I was stupidly optimistic and could never quite remember when it was supposed to start; but if it has actually been starting later each year then perhaps it's not such a silly thing to have thought after all.

(Mind you, this year might be a bit of a freak; as someone pointed out to me yesterday, July was so wet that it might easily have had a noticeable effect on pollen patterns.)