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.)

There can't be very many jobs in which you get to phone people up and ask for tens of thousands of pounds, and have them be happy about it.

Conveyancing is one. I wonder how many others there are.

Every so often I want to yell very loudly as a means of letting off steam, and I tend to feel inhibited from so doing by my living arrangements.

It's not that I worry about disturbing the neighbours; it seems to me that the occasional brief howl of rage at a civilised time of day would be a very minor piece of noise pollution. If I had screaming rows with a partner for an entire hour at 3am, or late-night parties directly above beckyc's bedroom every week, that would be obvious grounds for complaint, but a single daytime yell of ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ or similar once every month or so is not something that would bother me particularly if it came from next door, and nor is it something I'd expect next door to complain about if I did it.

No, it's mainly that I worry about the neighbours worrying about me.

Just now I did in fact yell ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ very loudly. I didn't want to, though; what I really wanted to yell was simply ‘ARRRRGH!’, or some pithy four-letter obscenity or other. But I always irrationally worry that if I scream ‘ARRRRGH’ then some neighbour might assume I'd accidentally cut my own hand off with a kitchen knife, or some such, and come running to investigate and make sure I was all right, and I'd have to apologise and say ‘no, it's just my bank being useless’ and feel bad about putting them out and worrying them unduly. So even just now, on one of the rare occasions when I was pushed beyond my self-control and cut loose, I stopped to carefully construct a coherent sentence with which to express my frustration, on the basis that while ‘ARRRRGH’ might be misinterpreted as a life-threatening condition, ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ was very unlikely to be. And this is a bad thing, because having to delay my scream of primal rage to put it into a coherent sentence form rather puts a crimp in the frustration-relieving effects of the scream once I finally get it out.

There's also a privacy issue on some occasions (but not this one). If I'm feeling yelling-very-loudly levels of frustration as a result of an incompetent company, that's one thing, but if it's (say) a love-life frustration then I'm quite likely to feel that I don't want my neighbours knowing that I'm terribly upset; that's a matter between me, whoever caused the problem, and whichever close friend I specifically decide to unload on. So in that situation I feel particularly hemmed in by all those ears in nearby dwellings, and wish I lived in a detached house where I could scream my head off as much as I liked (within reason) and not worry about it too much.

(This isn't, incidentally, a post about my attempted house purchase. The house I'm trying to buy is only semi-detached, so I don't expect it to cure me of feeling inhibited by the existence of a neighbour.)

Curiously, my car tends to be the place where I feel most able to have a good shout and get it out of my system, because unlike my flat it is fully detached. So when I really need to shout about something private like woman-trouble, that's generally where I do it. That seems thoroughly silly, but it's the best I've got.

On Monday I fancied pasta for dinner (that is, special me-friendly gluten-free pasta), so I decided to buy the necessary stuff when I went to Sainsburys on my way home from work. I went to Sainsburys, bought everything else on my list, got home, and realised I had to resort to emergency food because I didn't have the wherewithal to cook pasta.

Today I fancied pasta for dinner, and was determined that I would definitely not make the same mistake again. And I didn't. Instead, I managed to forget to go to Sainsburys at all, so once again I got home and realised I wasn't going to have pasta this evening.

Also when I got home I discovered a letter from my bank helpfully informing me that they have helpfully been neglecting to deduct income tax from my savings interest this year, for no reason I can readily determine since they've been consistently deducting it from my other accounts for years. This will cost me some fiddly letters to the taxman, I expect. I insulted the bank at the top of my voice after reading the letter, but really I think I would have to admit that the frustration was at least as much pasta- as tax-related. Today my bank are not the only utterly gormless entity out of them and me.

Every so often, in conversation, I want to describe a commonplace human-scale object being scaled up to ludicrously large proportions. This tends to happen in science-fiction type contexts; for example, I was just whimsically discussing mammoth pieces of cue chalk, in the context of playing ‘celestial snooker’ to deflect an asteroid from an Earth-intersecting orbit. My usual habit in these cases is to describe it as ‘a piece of cue chalk’ (or whatever) ‘the size of New Mexico’; and people occasionally ask me why it always seems to be New Mexico with me.

My best guess is that it's because (as I mention above) the usual conversation of this type is SF-related, or SF-like; and I have a long-standing mental association of New Mexico with science fiction. This is because a lot of SF invents place names on human-colonised planets by means of prepending ‘New’ to some existing Earth place name (up to and including the silly – I'm fairly sure I've seen at least one novel containing a place called ‘New New York’, though I can't place it right now); and when I first saw the name ‘New Mexico’, it was in some SF I was reading as a child (though I can't remember what), and I somehow formed the immediate assumption that it was just another SF place name invented in this way. It was some time later that I discovered it was actually a real place and not one made up by an SF author, and I still remember feeling slightly surprised and disoriented by that. So now, when I'm in an SFish conversation and need the name of a large piece of land for the purpose of illustrating scale, New Mexico tends to be the first one that springs to mind.

Does anyone else have an unusual favourite place name to use for this sort of purpose? (Come to think of it, what would qualify as a usual one? Is there an ISO standard, perhaps, for scale-illustrative place names?)

I've only mentioned it once or twice in this diary, but I've spent the last couple of months gradually trying to buy a house. (Status update, for anyone interested: nothing has gone wrong so far, and we're now at the stage where my solicitor might plausibly phone up any day and ask me for a lot of money in order to exchange contracts.)

During this time I've been almost comically superstitious about trying not to jinx the purchase – taking exaggerated care to refer to the house as ‘the house I'm trying to buy’, using ‘if’ rather than ‘when’ at all times, and looking around ostentatiously for some wood to touch when I slip up. One would be forgiven for thinking that I honestly did believe that as soon as I took the success of the attempt for granted, Murphy would intervene and ensure that it fell through at the last minute. Particularly if one were to spy on me when I was alone and found that I behave much the same way when muttering to myself, and it's not (or at least not solely) for the entertainment of my audience.

But I'm not, of course; however much I play up the superstition, I know perfectly well that my choice of language and whether or not I touch wood has no bearing on the actual odds of a successful house purchase. Nonetheless, I think one of the reasons I keep doing it is because it is serving a purpose, even if not the obvious one.

The purpose it's serving is to prevent me from taking success for granted, not because that has any bearing on the chance of failure, but because it has a significant effect on the cost of failure. As long as I'm pessimistic about the whole business, I'll be reasonably prepared to cope if it does fall through at the last moment; it'll be very annoying and a waste of a lot of time and money and effort, but not an absolutely crushing blow. But if I were to start assuming that the house was definitely going to be mine, make a lot of detailed plans about what I'll do with it, and reorganise the inside of my brain around the premise that only one or two minor formalities separated me from being a homeowner, then if it fell through at the last minute it would be a much bigger blow.

And it's hard not to get my hopes up. Having been thinking about this stuff for months, I'm now constantly aware of all sorts of things that irritate me about the place I'm currently living in (some specific to it, others general consequences of it being a flat or being rented), and I really want to believe that all of those irritations are things I'll only have to put up with for another month or two at most. The desire to give in to wishful thinking and start celebrating, without even noticing, is incredibly strong.

Hence, in self-defence, I've adopted this exaggerated cod-superstitious attitude at all times so that it's become a habit; so now, when my internal monologue on the subject does start to creep towards the wishful, my touch-wood habit kicks in, and in so doing it reminds me to get my thoughts back under control.

(Of course, if I were Murphy's Law, I'd be much more imaginative than having the purchase fall through at the last minute. That's downright predictable. Faced with someone perpetually touching wood like this, I'd arrange for them to pick up a really nasty splinter on the day before completion :-)

The build system at work occasionally generates entire directory trees full of files and directories with read-only permissions. Trying to delete such a directory is always a pain, because the procedure goes something like

• rm -rf directory
• rm gets EPERM on every file in a read-only subdirectory
• swear
• chmod -r +w directory
• chmod tries to take the r permission away from the nonexistent file +w
• swear
• chmod -R +w directory
• chmod now gets EPERM, because the previous invocation also successfully took the r permission away from directory
• swear
• chmod -R +rw directory
• rm -rf directory

… and since I mostly try to avoid generating these directories in the first place, this happens just infrequently enough that the next time I've forgotten all the pitfalls and do pretty much the same thing again.

What I want is for rm to support the -F option, which is like -f except that it also authorises rm to temporarily restore write permission (if permitted to) on any directory from which the lack of it is preventing it from deleting a file. Or possibly it should only be allowed to do that if the directory is one it's planning to delete completely later in the operation anyway; that might be safer. But either way, the point is, if the Unix permissions system makes it possible in principle to arrange for the directory not to be there any more, then I want to be able to get rm to just do so, by any means necessary short of requesting the root password, and not bother me with trivial details of how.

On my desk at work I keep a box of tissues, of the quick-draw type which always has one tissue sticking out of the top so that it can be extracted and moved into position in about half a second if I feel an unexpected sneeze coming on.

This just happened (bah, summer). So my eyes began to close involuntarily as they do when you sneeze, and I rapidly grabbed for the protruding tissue, snatched it out of the box and held it in front of my face. Achoo.

Then I opened my eyes, and was rather bemused to find a section of my desk completely covered in inexplicable unidentified white fluff. Huh? I'm sure I'd have known about it if I'd been carrying that lot around in my nose!

I can only assume the fluff must have been lurking inside the tissue box, owing to some sort of manufacturing defect; perhaps it was a proto-tissue which had somehow skipped the step of being bound together into one sheet. So, presumably, it wasn't the sneeze that scattered it all over my desk but the act of yanking out the tissue which was next to the fluff in the box.

But it was very disturbing for about a minute, because my eyes were already shut when I grabbed for the tissue; so all I was consciously aware of was that I sneezed, opened my eyes, and the desk was covered in inexplicable fluff. That's not something you want to see when you haven't finished your first cup of coffee yet!

I've known for some years that driving a car while perceptibly under the influence of any alcohol at all is a terrifying experience. Once, due to bad organisation, I drove after drinking half a pint of Guinness (which ought to have put me a comfortably long way within the legal limit), and that was so scary I decided never to do anything like it again.

Since then I've discovered that a number of other things involving drinking and cars make me scared in much the same way.

For example, a couple of months ago, I was sitting in the pub with some friends, and the conversation turned to the fine points of road safety, and what drivers and cyclists should do in particular situations. After a few minutes I found that I needed to go and find some people who were talking about something else, because being perceptibly drunk and even imagining myself at the wheel of a car brought on much the same sort of fear.

It gets sillier. Being in a car driven by somebody else while I'm drunk can also, I've found, make me somewhat anxious. I think this one is because, having my own car, I'm very rarely driven by somebody else at all. So usually if I'm in a car I'm also in the driving seat. Hence, my subconscious must have felt, if I'm in a car and I'm drunk then I'm probably doing something dangerous.

The thing that brings this to mind today is that yesterday evening I went to the pub, and then walked home and went to bed. I fell asleep, and had a dream involving driving a car. Somehow, in the dream, I was drunk, which turned the dream into a nightmare. I don't know whether being drunk in the dream had anything to do with being drunk when I went to bed, but I suspect it probably did; in which case, even drunkenly dreaming about driving appears to be unacceptable to me.

I suppose it's comforting to know that I have such good defences against accidentally doing anything stupid of this kind in real life. But it would be nice if those defences didn't keep firing for the wrong reasons…

I just went out to get my lunch, and found that the whole of Cherry Hinton is absolutely crawling with ants. There are a lot of normal-looking ants swarming around the pavements, but also the whole place is teeming with winged things which look about the right size and shape to be flying ants.

I wonder how far the swarm extends. Anyone in other bits of Cambridge noticed any unusual insect activity today?

Every time I listen to ‘The Planets’ it strikes me strongly that the very last few bars of ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’ sound, more than almost any other piece of music I know, as if they ought to be the fanfare that introduces a TV news programme.

With any luck, one day, humanity will spread across the solar system and colonise the various moons of Jupiter. When that happens, if they do TV news broadcasts local to the Jovian subsystem, I really do hope they use that snippet as the signature fanfare.

‘And now, over to the studio desk for the weather. Jason?’

‘Thank you, Dennis. Well, the Great Red Spot is particularly active today, with wind speeds reaching a bracing 300 mph, so if anyone in that region was contemplating taking a shortcut through Jupiter's atmosphere I recommend staying at home instead…’