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…’

There's a near-future SF novel called ‘The Armageddon Crazy’, by Mick Farren, which at one point describes a sermon given by a rabble-rousing preacher with the aid of high-tech holographic special effects.

During the sermon the preacher quotes a lot of doom-laden fire and brimstone and plagues and demons and bottomless pit stuff from Revelation, while the holographic special effects conjure illusions of demons from the Pit running among the audience (since this is in a rock-concert type venue I hesitate to say ‘congregation’) and the soundtrack produces screams and moans and the like. Then, very suddenly, the preacher shifts to quoting from the Gospels – ‘I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be to all people’ – and simultaneously all the scary special effects evaporate, the preacher is enveloped in pure white light, and a choir sounds in the background with hallelujahs. The effect, in both directions, is enhanced by subliminal hypnotics; so the audience is made to feel a great surge of relief and gladness and euphoria when Jesus makes his appearance in the sermon, which is presumably intended to reinforce their faith.

This is a shabby trick, of course, and (in the novel) only really works if you fail to realise it's being done to you. The preacher in question was preaching to a lowest-common-denominator audience for the most part, so it worked for him. But one of the main characters is alert enough to realise what's going on, and immediately the effect of the hypnotics reverses and he just feels exceptionally irritated.

The reason I mention this is that when I read the Bible from cover to cover earlier this month, an actually startlingly similar thing happened to me when I hit the boundary between the Old and New Testaments.

The end of the Old Testament is full of minor prophets who are mostly relaying God's words around the time of the Babylonian exile, and therefore a lot of those words tend to be along the lines of ‘you've all been very naughty and I'm very cross and I'm going to punish you severely’. Then suddenly you cut from the unrelenting wrath of God straight to the redemption offered by Jesus, who might not be entirely a nice guy at all times but by comparison to what came before is as close to sweetness and light as makes no odds. But it's not just the storyline; the very quality of the text has a reinforcing effect. The minor prophets are all rather similar and tedious and just sit there repeating the same things over and over, whereas the Gospels tell a story with a plot that moves forward. Additionally, the minor prophets are often cryptic and difficult to parse, and are written in more flowery language, whereas the Gospels are clear and straightforward. (I wonder if that might be partially a consequence of them being translated from Greek rather than Hebrew; perhaps ancient Hebrew lends itself less well to sensible translation into modern English.)

The combined effect of all this was that when reading the minor prophets I felt (with hindsight) a lot of pressure on my brain, due to the difficulty of parsing meaning out of the text at both the grammatical and semantic levels, the tedious nature of the meaning when I got it, and the depressing message of the Wrath of God once I got through the tedium. Rather like watching a TV programme full of static, in a way, and trying very hard to see through the static to find out what's going on. Then the sudden transition to the Gospels removed all these various kinds of pressure and mental static, and the result was that I felt a strong subconscious sense of relief and gladness at exactly the moment I was reading about the birth of Christ.

Unlike the incident in the novel I describe above, I don't think this was done deliberately; it doesn't seem to me that the Bible was really designed to be read from cover to cover in order. But it happened to me nonetheless, and it took me a day or two to recognise exactly what had happened to me and how. And, just like the preacher's special-effects trick, it's counterproductive if noticed: once I realised what had been done to me I mostly felt irritated by it.

On the other hand, I also felt dreadfully impressed that it's even possible to achieve this sort of effect without using any expensive special effects or subliminal hypnotics, using nothing but words written down in a book. I wouldn't have guessed it could be done at all.

Over the last couple of weeks, I did something I've been meaning to get round to for a while now: I sat down and read the Bible from end to end.

Not for religious reasons, I hasten to assure you; anyone who was expecting to be able to count on me as a staunch atheist can still safely do so. A minor objective was to find out a bit more about what the Christians I know believe, but primarily my motivation was literary: lots of modern writing refers or alludes to the Bible, and I've often not been entirely sure what the explicit references are talking about, and have probably missed quite a few of the subtle allusions.

So after an unusually large number of Bible references happened to go over my head during a period of three or four days the other week, I decided enough was enough and set out to actually read the thing. I allowed myself to skim-read if it got boring (the censuses, the genealogies, the endless indistinguishable psalms and proverbs and prophecies, the extensive theology and moralising in the New Testament etc), but I wanted to at least get from one end of the book to the other and be left with an understanding of its overall structure and plot.

( the good, the bad and the curious )

Nasty-looking rain around noon today, so I waited until it seemed to have stopped before venturing out to Tesco for my lunch. I was right, as it turned out, and the umbrella I'd brought with me was more than adequate to protect me from the last remnants of a light drizzle.

It didn't, however, protect me from a white van driving through a puddle at me with perfect aim and timing. Bah. Umbrellas are clearly inadequate; I want a semi-permeable personal force field which lets in air but not liquid water.

$ pwd
/village
$ ps ax | grep find &
[1] 12890
$  3122 ?        R      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
 
$ ls -l /proc/3122
ls: /proc/3122: Permission denied
$ 35868 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
38892 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
39562 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/find . -name information
 
[1]+  Done                    ps ax | grep find
$ rm */information
rm: cannot remove `hook/information': I/O error
rm: cannot remove `crook/information': I/O error
$ ps axu | grep 3122
number2   3122  0.0  0.1  17796  8800 ?        S    Apr26   0:00 /usr/bin/find
$ grep 1: /etc/passwd
number6:x:2671:2671::/village:/bin/sh
$ su `cut -f1 -d: /etc/passwd | grep -v number | head -1` -c 'man free'

I just had a piece of paper come through the door looking like this:

I doubt they're going to get very many ‘unwanted Ladies’ out of the average householder, somehow :-)

I posted last week about the strange lift sign in the new Lion Yard car park. I went back there this evening with a camera, and the weird sign was still there and I managed to capture photographic evidence of it.

The sign on the left is reasonably sensible, and looks like this:

But the sign on the right says this:

See, I wasn't going mad! (Or, at least, it wasn't just that I'm going mad.)

It seems traditional for me to have a morbid mortality moping moment every five years or so; and since my last one was around my 25th birthday, I'm now about due. I had vaguely expected to have one last month when I turned thirty.

But actually, I don't seem to feel it coming on at all. Human mortality keeps striking me as a basically reassuring thing at the moment.

Partly this is because it relieves me of the responsibility to do various things absolutely perfectly. If I were theoretically capable of living forever, then it would be greatly in my interest to keep my body in perfect shape, keep my brain properly organised, and generally never do anything to myself or my possessions whose effects I couldn't somehow repair – and also to actually get round to repairing everything I did do. Instead, the fact that it's all going to run out in a finite time anyway means that a certain rate of mental and physical entropy can be tolerated: although it's worth making some effort not to be a total wreck by the time I'm 75, I at least don't have to take the quantity of care that would be required not to be a total wreck by 175, or 1750, or 175000000. And a good job too, since I imagine that diminishing returns would set in, and the amount of maintenance effort required would rapidly become unmanageable.

Also, since I seem to gradually accumulate traumatic experiences and bad memories as I go through life, it's occasionally reassuring to think that at some point that slate gets wiped clean and someone else gets to start afresh, that the effects of any given betrayal or unintentionally hurtful action are limited in their extent. Just imagine if someone did you the kind of wrong you never really forget, and you immediately knew you were doomed to live with that in your memory for an entire unimaginable eternity. And just imagine if you knew that any such blow you inadvertently dealt someone else through (say) not paying attention would stay with them for eternity.

It's not that I want to die. Far from it. I want to carry on for a good while yet. It's just that, well, given that we all have to go anyway, I keep seeing silver linings in that.

Something that came up in conversation the other day: the English language is annoyingly badly designed for programmers.

The most obvious example of this is that almost any pair of words you can think of to represent boolean values have different numbers of letters, so that it's inconvenient to line them up in tabular layouts in a fixed-width font. TRUE/FALSE, YES/NO, ON/OFF. All of them out by one. Even if you look further afield to things like YEP/NOPE and YEAH/NAH, you don't find a matching pair. AYE/NAY works, but it's a bit specialist in its connotations (it suggests there's a vote taking place) as well as archaic. This is just useless. French can find OUI/NON with no difficulty at all (although I have no idea whether French programmers actually use those for booleans), so why can't we manage one pair of suitable words that are the same length?

(Some years ago, lark_ascending and I gave some thought to this, and the best we could come up with was VERILY/NOWISE, which is even more archaic than AYE/NAY. However, it does have the advantage of allowing MAYHAP to be inserted in the middle if the application demands it.)

Another annoying thing is that one of ‘width’ and ‘height’ shares an initial letter with one of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ – and it's the wrong one. So if you're looking through some code which has dimensions in it, and you encounter a variable called h, you can't be sure which dimension it contains until you find out whether it's accompanied by v or by w. I suppose we can at least count ourselves lucky that ‘width’ isn't spelled ‘vidth’, in which case we'd be even worse off.

It feels particularly unfair because these sort of accidents of language happen to work better in less programming-specific contexts. For example, the fact that ‘his’ and ‘her’ both begin with the same letter is very convenient for acronyms such as HMRC and HMG.

Also annoying is that I've been planning to post this rant for months, and have been delaying because I had a strong feeling that there were several other examples which I couldn't quite bring to mind. But they still haven't come to me, so I'm just going to have to post it like this and kick myself when I realise what they were moments afterwards…

This morning I looked at the BBC website's 24-hour forecast for Cambridge in order to judge how wet I was going to get walking out to Tesco at lunchtime; it said it was raining a bit at 11:00, would be raining a lot by 13:00, and would become an outright thunderstorm by 16:00.

Trouble was, it was already after 11:00 and there wasn't a drop of rain in sight. So, on the basis that it might just be late, I went to Tesco as early as reasonably possible, and it was still bone dry.

But it's now past 13:00 and still not raining, and the BBC website still thinks it's pouring down out there. It's very much like the motion-tracker scene in Aliens, where the guy with the detector keeps insisting that the aliens are already inside the room and the guy in the room keeps saying no they're not. Only it would be rather hard for the weather to turn out to be hidden where the aliens were…

In programming, I often find myself faced with a task that has easy bits and hard bits. My usual policy is to tackle the hard bits first, for two reasons:

• The hard bits are the bits that are most likely to turn out to be actually impossible or infeasible due to some unforeseen wrinkle. So if that's going to happen and the entire project is going to turn out to be doomed, it makes sense to find that out as early as possible so as not to have wasted any more time than necessary.
• If the easy and hard bits are basically similar in structure, so that their methods of solution are also likely to be similar, then doing the easy bits first runs the risk that as I go along I might develop a standard method which works for them only, and then get a nasty shock when I come to the hard bit and have to work it out all over again. By contrast, it's generally much easier to simplify a method that worked for the hardest bit so that it works for the easier cases, so that way I only have to work out my method once.

So this generally seems like a sensible strategy to me. I've used it for nearly all my programming life: I have a clear memory of advocating it to a couple of schoolmates who were giving programming a try when I was twelve.

Just occasionally, though, it backfires on me. In the past week I've had a task to do with hard bits and easy bits, and of course I did the hard bits first. I beat my head against them for days, and after great effort I'd managed to cobble together something which would probably just about work – and then I suddenly thought of an alternative method which made it all much easier. If only I'd done the easy bits first, that insight could have saved me all the trouble I had with the hard bits. As it was, I had to rip up the mess I made of the hard bits and do them all over again by the sensible method. Bah.

(It is of course possible that I wouldn't have reached the insight in question without the experience gained from struggling with the hard bits, so that the apparent waste of time was unavoidable; but in this particular case I don't think so.)