If I'm trying to solve a puzzle and I accidentally find out the answer through some sort of cheating means (e.g. somebody spoils it for me), it's quite common for me to continue working on the problem and try to convince myself that I would have got there on my own. So I might, for example, ignore what I now know the answer to be and continue to grind through the step-by-step solution process regardless, to make sure it does come out to the answer it's supposed to.

This all seems reasonable enough given the premise that a major purpose of solving puzzles is to prove to myself that I can, and that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable premise. So far, no surprises.

Yesterday I did surprise myself. I had a small problem at work (some piece of code wasn't working as expected and I couldn't figure out how we hadn't noticed before); after staring fruitlessly at the screen for a while I decided to take a break and go and refill my water glass. In the process of doing that I had a sudden ‘aha!’ insight and instantly knew exactly what the problem was.

That by itself isn't uncommon either; but what was odd was that I then found myself, pretty much instinctively, doing the thing I describe in my first paragraph: trying to convince myself that if I hadn't had that insight, I would still have been able to get to the solution by step-by-step means. It's as if I subconsciously consider sudden flashes of intuition to be cheating in some sense. Which is weird, because flashes of intuition come from my own brain, so it's hardly as if they constitute being given the answer by somebody else!

I suppose it might be that I didn't feel that I'd worked for the answer, and hence didn't feel I deserved credit for finding it. Or perhaps it was that I was worried that next time the insight might not materialise and I'd want to be confident that my step-by-step debugging process was adequate to compensate for its absence (which is admittedly a potentially valid concern).

Or perhaps I'm just slightly weird. Yes, that seems far more likely.

By way of making conversation he mentioned that the taxi he had arrived in had had the number 1729, and remarked that this was rather a dull number.

‘On the contrary’, his interlocutor replied, ‘it is a very interesting number. When it appears on my clock, it is one minute to going-home time.’

The entryway to the office gents' currently contains a big yellow warning sign saying ‘Caution: wet floor’.

In fact the floor isn't perceptibly wet at all, and certainly not nearly wet enough to cause an increased risk of slipping; but I nearly tripped over the sign. I'm therefore unconvinced that this safety measure has reduced the risk of me falling over and cracking my head…

I just had a strange and vivid dream in which a large bear had somehow got into my house. (Not my house, actually; I seemed to be living with a largish family which included, for instance, a completely fictitious Uncle Henry.) It seemed quite happy in there and wasn't trying to kill or eat anyone, but most of us were nervous of it (of course) and wanted it gone. Only you can't exactly argue with a large black bear, and we weren't quite sure who you call in the UK when you have a problem with a bear. We tried to lure it outside once or twice, but there seemed to be a bit of confusion: occasionally we'd think we'd managed it, but find it indoors again. We didn't seem to be very good at bear-luring. It also didn't help that at least one member of the family seemed totally untroubled by the bear's presence, and never seemed particularly bothered about helping our eviction efforts by having the right doors open and shut.

Eventually we noticed that there was one time of day when it seemed to particularly want to be outdoors, so we left the door open to let it out and then shut and locked it once it had left, breathing a sigh of relief.

Only it didn't end there; the bear was subsequently seen lurking around the garden and making life difficult for people trying to get in and out of the house. So the family thought about it a bit and eventually came up with a plan to scare it away for good using electrified booby-traps in the garden. This involved people going outdoors, of course, to set the traps.

Now comes the twist in the tale which really made me think my subconscious had turned into a short-story writer.

While an unspecified family member and I were outdoors fiddling with electric wires, we were grabbed and dragged into the bushes by other members of the family, and tied up. I think it was around this point that the dream switched to an omniscient third-person perspective, in which we see an identical-looking copy of me return to the house, which turns out to now be completely full of people who look like my family but are in fact were-bears, and have just finished kidnapping the real family one by one and taking their places. The original bear turns out to be the alternate form of the fake Uncle Henry, who (unlike the rest of the fake family) happened not to be happy spending all his time in human form. The real family, by now, is all either dead or tied up in the bushes.

At this point the story ended, because I woke up and went ‘wow, I have to write this down’. It's a perfect natural end point for the short story anyway, though.

The thing I find fascinating about this, as a dream, is its sheer coherence and plot consistency. There were admittedly some slightly dreamlike oddities I've glossed over in the description above (notably that the original bear was inexplicably carrying around a telescope, and the reason it liked to be outside at a certain time of day was that it had apparently learned that looking through the telescope at things was fun), but the twist at the end actually explained what had seemed like dreamy inconsistencies at the start (such as the mysterious difficulty in evicting the bear, and the one other family member who didn't seem bothered by its presence), and thereby turned the whole thing into really quite a satisfying narrative experience. It's almost as if it had been planned from the start by an actual writer. The idea that a subconscious without free access to my logic centres was able to come up with that in sequential order is frankly very impressive.

Unless, of course, my memories of the first half of the dream were subtly modified during or after the second half, to make them match up to it better; I don't think that would be beyond the bounds of possibility, since memories of dreams are pretty fragile in general, but that would have been pretty impressive too! It paints a picture of my subconscious as a short-story writer with a word processor, who gets to go back and edit the beginning bits once it knows how the story's going to end.

I don't seem to have felt moved to write a review of last year, which I think is probably because it was neither interesting enough nor (as 2005 was) boring enough to be remarkable. Roughly, I continued doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of ways. Towards the end of the year things looked up in a couple of ways, among which is that I seem to have recovered enough energy to actually do some free-software coding for a change.

I'm mostly not one for formal resolutions, but my most coherent general plan for the coming year is to buy a house. (For all the usual reasons: lack of interfering landlords, freedom to mess the place up how I want, the pleasant knowledge that while I'm still paying the same amount per month it's gradually turning into a capital asset for me rather than paying somebody else's bar bill, etc.)

I'm also probably going to have a gloomy mortality moment some time around May, because I'll be turning thirty this year. (I'm currently trying to limit myself to only one morbid mope every five years, and the last one was on my 25th birthday.)

I just got into work for the first time this year and found an envelope lying on my desk addressed to me c/o my company, from HM Revenue & Customs. That immediately made me nervous, of course: the imagination can think up plenty of dramatic reasons why they might write to me, and they're all bad news. It's harder to think of nice reasons they might write to me, because ‘you've paid too much tax, here, have some back’ is so improbable and all the other nice or neutral reasons are just so bureaucratically tedious that the imagination shies away from thinking them up.

So I opened the envelope, and it said that HMRC would like my personal details because Royal Mail have been returning their recent letters to me as undelivered.

I have no idea why RM should be doing this. But then, I don't even know what HMRC think my current address is; they didn't bother to mention that in the letter. (Perhaps I should suggest they read ‘How To Report Bugs Effectively’.)

But most annoyingly, I still don't know what they've actually been trying to write to me about, which means that that feeling of nervous anticipation and potential doom hasn't gone away. Of all the things the letter could have said, this is probably the only one which could have left me in this state of mind. Gah.

(I'm also slightly disturbed that the date on the letter says 25th December. Do taxmen really work right through Christmas?!)

After a somewhat hectic first week of holiday, today I finally got round to doing the thing I usually do when I take time off work, which is to pop down to the local Blockbuster and rent all the recent films that I was too disorganised to see in the cinema.

So I browsed around the shelves, picked up some DVDs, took them to the counter, looked in my wallet for my Blockbuster card, and to my great embarrassment it wasn't there. Moreover, I had not the faintest idea where else it might have been – it never comes out of my wallet except in Blockbuster stores, so unless it fell out of its own accord somehow I was at a loss.

The woman at the counter was unfazed. She asked me for a credit card for ID, which I handed over, and within about ten seconds was able to tell me that I'd accidentally left my card in the store the last time I'd been in (September), and that they'd destroyed it.

I was reasonably impressed by the fact that they routinely kept notes on that sort of thing and could retrieve them that efficiently (and also somewhat relieved that I wasn't going to have to go hunting round dark corners of my house and car desperately trying to work out where the errant card could have got to). But ‘reasonably impressed’ gave way to ‘gobsmacked’ when she then – pretty much as part of the same motion – promptly reached under the counter and handed me a shiny new card with my name on it and everything.

I asked whether they'd been keeping that card ready to give to me since they knew I'd lost my previous one, or whether she'd just printed it on the spot on no notice in under ten seconds. She said the latter. In retrospect, I'm not sure which would have impressed me more: the former would have involved very shiny corporate procedures, while the latter involves very shiny technology. Either is good.

(The new card is prettier and less flimsy than the old one, too. Bonus :-)

In the last couple of days I've been updating the PuTTY online help mechanism in anticipation of Windows Vista discontinuing the old-style Windows Help. I've prepared a new-style HTML help file, but I want to keep the option to use the old one, because (among other reasons) PuTTY still tries to work on Win95, which doesn't support new HTML help. So I hacked together an automatic detection mechanism which will use the HTML help file if it's both present and supported by the OS, and will fall back to WinHelp otherwise.

In order to make sure this really worked on Win95, I needed a Win95 machine to test it on. The PuTTY team used to have a real Win95 machine available, but currently doesn't; so lacking any other convenient options, I dug out my old Win95 install media from a dusty pile of CDs (amazingly, even the boot floppy which accompanied the CD was in full working order) and attempted to install it on a Bochs virtual machine.

It took me twenty minutes of editing configuration files and installing extra Debian packages to even start Bochs; no individual hoop I had to jump through seemed actually unreasonable, but it all added up to a lot of hassle. Eventually I had a working virtual machine and was able to run the install process – which ran very smoothly and promisingly up until the install program said ‘Setup is preparing to install files’ and then sat there beating its little drum icon for over an hour until I lost patience and killed it.

So then I tried QEMU instead, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't even need a configuration file. I gave it command-line arguments pointing it at a floppy image, a hard disk image, and a CD image, and let it rip; it just worked, it ran much faster than Bochs, it installed without a hitch, and it's now cheerfully running a working Win95 system for me on which I've been able to test the help file switching mechanism and confirm that it works fine.

Somebody told me once that if you buy a medium-price hi-fi amplifier, it will come with tone controls, graphic equalisers, and no end of knobs and dials on the front so you can adjust it to exactly the sound you want, but if you buy a really expensive one it will just have a power switch and a volume control and get everything else right without having to be told. That was the feeling I got from comparing Bochs to QEMU.

(Unfortunately, it all went a bit pear-shaped when I tried to get the networking to work; I managed it in the end, but it wasn't nearly as painless as the rest of the process. I think this was mostly Win95's fault, however.)

The other day I found a cheap copy of Arthur C Clarke's ‘2010: Odyssey Two’ in a charity shop. My bookshelf was lacking a copy and I hadn't read it in years, so I snapped it up and re-read it.

At one point it describes the means by which the people on the spaceship secure their communications links back home:

[…] the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe.

It doesn't take more than a nodding acquaintance with cryptography to recognise the cipher being described here as RSA; but two prime numbers of 100 decimal digits each come to what in modern terminology we would usually describe as a 665-bit RSA key, and that's frankly feeble by modern standards (768-bit keys are a thing of the past and 1024-bit keys are starting to look shaky). For once, Clarke's vaunted foresight seemed to have let him down.

Then I stopped and thought a bit harder. He was writing this around 1980, trying to look thirty years into the future, and not only has he got the encryption algorithm right (well, probably – it isn't 2010 yet and there's still time for surprises, but it doesn't currently look as if RSA will be generally abandoned by then), but he's also within a factor of ten of the right key length – and over a thirty-year period, to be out by even a full factor of ten only needs a 10% error in the doubling period of Moore's Law (although I'd guess it's more likely that what Clarke really failed to anticipate was improved factoring algorithms). So, actually, that's not bad at all!

It's now been nearly two years since I was diagnosed with coeliac disease. In that time I've mostly come to terms with the required changes in my diet. I've adapted to a life without pizza; I've either learned to cook, or found gluten-free varieties of, the Chinese meals I missed most; I've done the minimal necessary adaptation of my usual bulk self-catering habits; and generally, apart from it being nearly impossible to eat out and often severely inconvenient to have friends cook for me, I basically don't feel too annoyed most of the time by the whole business.

One thing I have had trouble finding, though, is good gluten-free bread. I have several options which are suitable for making into breadcrumbs for stuffing and bread sauce, and one or two which make passable toast if you lay on pâté with a trowel, but last week I would have told you I knew of no GF bread products which I'd be willing to eat in the form of actual bread.

Within the last few days I've been fed three startlingly good GF bread products, all of which were made by Dietary Specials, a company which I previously knew for making decent GF steak pies and utterly inedible GF ready-meal pizzas. I don't know if any of them would be good enough to adopt as a regular part of my diet, but for the occasional sausage butty or light snack they're definitely an improvement on anything I'd previously encountered. I will have to go and buy some more.

In other news, the reason I was walking through a shopping centre at all just now is because as of this lunchtime I've finished work for the year. :-)

I was just walking through a shopping centre, and some random girl walking in the opposite direction handed me a flyer as she passed. I looked at the flyer, but it wasn't entirely obvious what it was advertising. The large print just says ‘TwentyTwo’, and ‘Free admission to any of these events with this flyer’, and ‘join us over the festive season’. After reading the smaller print, which says things like ‘over 18s’ and ‘10pm till 3am’ and describes a dress code, I've concluded that it's a nightclub of some sort, but (a) I'm still none the wiser about what kind of nightclub (what music? what sort of people? is there any particular reason I might want to go to it?), and (b) it seems barking mad that I should have had to read as far as the small print to even get that far!

Now I think about it, this seems symptomatic of a more widespread tendency I've been noticing here and there for a while, which is that people increasingly seem unwilling to spend the effort to tell other people what things are.

Another good case of this: two months ago, somebody sent me a link to some website's terms-and-conditions page with a comment along the lines of ‘Wow, that's the biggest T&C page I've ever seen’ (which it is!). Naturally I was curious to know what website was so important and unusual and difficult that it needed such elaborate terms and conditions; so I followed a link to the front page of the site, and it didn't tell me. It has links on the front page to web forums, user registration, chat, and a FAQ, and it has site news about downtime and server upgrades, but apart from one or two hints that it might do something related to BitTorrent, nowhere is there a clear description of what the site actually is, or why somebody might want to register for an account on it. Even the FAQ is unhelpful on this score, diving straight into tiny little details without any kind of introductory ‘yes, but what is it?’ section at the front.

Computer industry marketing is another area in which this sort of thing is widespread. Occasionally somebody will mention a computer-related term to me which has its own website, and I'll go and read the website and still have just as little idea what the wretched thing is. Increasingly I'm finding Wikipedia fills this niche for me: it told me, for example, what U3 was rather better than www.u3.com did. (Though it doesn't always win on this count: I still haven't got a clear idea of what UML is, because even Wikipedia just seems to define it in terms of other buzzwords. I know it involves diagrams in some way, but I've never quite worked out what you do with the diagrams once you've got them and whether there's anything else to it except diagrams.)

Finally, you also get a lot of this sort of thing in blogs and discussion forums, where people will post a URL without any explanation of what it is or why you might want to visit it. If it's a web forum, one might argue that it only takes a couple of seconds to find out for yourself, but even so, the Usenet effort economy still applies: thirty seconds of one writer's time works out to less overall than two seconds each of twenty readers', and if lots of people post bare URLs then I don't have two seconds to spare for all of them so I'd like some means of deciding which ones are worth looking at in advance. Particularly bad is if the link goes via one of those URL-squashing services which removes any chance of you being able to look at the URL itself in advance and know whether it's a news site or a comedy site or what. Also particularly bad is if the thing being linked to is a ten-minute YouTube (or equivalent) video which you have to watch all the way through before you have any idea whether the person had linked to it because it was bad, or good, or funny, or sad, or just tedious, or what.

I'm not asking for huge elaborate descriptions of things which remove any need for me to go and read the actual thing. I just think that writing, say, ten words or so to give people the first idea of what something is shouldn't be that difficult for anybody, and yet it seems to be taking the first steps toward becoming a lost art.

I've never had the urge to display bumper stickers on my car. But last night it occurred to me that a bumper sticker simply reading ‘THE BUTLER DID IT’ would have the amusement value of being able to claim my car had a spoiler on it :-)

I don't often get cross when people are rude to me. (At least I don't think I do: statements like that always carry the risk that I might do it and not notice, or not remember.)

My impression is that this is partly because I habitually decouple the things somebody says from the precise words they use to describe them, so that if somebody says something to me in a rude way then I do notice that they said it rudely but often find it easy to dismiss that as irrelevant compared to the actual concept they were trying to communicate; and partly it's also because I don't start from the premise that everybody deserves respect, so if (for example) a random stranger from whom I haven't done anything to earn respect doesn't show me respect then that's not a big deal.

Despite these usually reliable defences, one or two kinds of rudeness definitely get on my nerves. One of them is when people send me software support requests by email, and phrase them in a manner similar to the following:

How do I perform [some task] with your software? I need to do [some more details]. Please provide step by step instructions. Thank you.

The surface trappings of politeness, the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, are there. But in spite of them, there's an unmistakably peremptory tone to a request phrased like this which makes my blood think seriously about boiling; and what's odd is that I can't quite work out why this gets under my skin in a way that many other kinds of rudeness don't.

It isn't just the fact that the guy wants step-by-step instructions and providing those on demand isn't my job. A quick thought experiment suggests that if he'd merely rephrased the offending sentence as ‘Simple step by step instructions would be best, if you can manage it’, then while I might or might not have had the time or inclination to provide them, I at least wouldn't have been offended by the mere request. So it is definitely something about the way he said it.

One possible cause is that the way he said it implies that he isn't in any doubt that I will do what he asks. The more polite rephrasing of the request which I give above indicates an awareness that I might or might not choose to help him, and hence an awareness that the onus is on him to try to arrange that I want to. To phrase it as he did suggests that he believes there's no need to even try to persuade me.

Another thing that might be a key point is that he only needs step-by-step instructions in the first place because he doesn't really understand what he's trying to do. If he showed any awareness that this lack was a partial cause of the situation (‘I'm afraid I haven't been able to work this out for myself; can you give me some simple instructions, please?’), instead of implying that I'm completely to blame for not having already provided a step-by-step how-to for exactly the thing he wants to do, I think that would have irked me less as well.

But why should either of those, or even both at once, make me so cross? They're only misunderstandings of his position relative to me. And misunderstandings per se shouldn't – and usually don't – offend me: if I can tell that someone's only saying something nasty out of ignorance or confusion then my usual impulse is to try to educate them rather than to become angry. For example, I've occasionally had people send me deliberately offensive email containing lots of four-letter words and insults, and if I know the whole thing is based on a misunderstanding (for example, someone forged a spam in my name and the recipient believed it was really me who sent it) then I find no emotional difficulty in dismissing the whole slew of invective as unimportant and replying politely to explain their mistake.

So I actually can't work out why this particular type of unthinking rudeness makes me so much more annoyed than many kinds of deliberately offensive behaviour, and makes me not merely want to ignore their message but to ignore it as a lesson in manners. It's very odd.

The term ‘WTF-8’ occasionally circulates in geek circles, often as a derogatory nickname for UTF-8, and occasionally for other purposes. I keep thinking, for example, that it ought to be the character encoding used in all standards documents published by the OMG.

A week or two ago I realised what it really ought to mean.

It seems depressingly common for Windows software to encode text in Windows-1252 but to claim (in MIME headers and the like) that it's actually ISO 8859-1. The effect of this is that while most characters are displayed correctly, characters which the author thought were single or double quotes in fact turn into strange control characters which are either ignored completely, have weird effects on the terminal, or are simply displayed as error blobs of one kind or another.

A particularly annoying thing that can happen to text which is mislabelled in this way is that it can be converted into UTF-8 by an application which believes the stated encoding. When this happens, the things which were originally intended to be quote characters are translated into the UTF-8 encodings of the ISO 8859-1 control characters which occupy the same code positions as the original Windows-1252 quote characters. In other words, you end up with UTF-8 sequences such as C2 93 and C2 94 (representing the control characters U+0093 and U+0094) where you should see E2 80 9C and E2 80 9D (representing the Unicode double quote characters U+201C and U+201D).

This, I feel, should surely be described as a Windows Transformation Format, and is additionally exactly the kind of snafu you'd expect to see near the letters WTF, so I think that on two separate counts it has an excellent claim to the name WTF-8. Perhaps someone ought to publish an Internet-Draft specifying it.

Last night I did an experiment on a supermarket. I'll be interested to see the results in a few days' time.

I usually shop at the Coldhams Lane Sainsburys, which is on my direct route home from work. One of the many things I buy there has, for some months now, been cartons and cartons of grape juice, because I tried a great many fruit juices and decided that it's by far the nicest.

Last month Sainsburys went into Christmas mode, which involved turning an entire aisle into Christmassy tat and squashing its previous contents into what was usually the fruit juice aisle. Some products therefore disappeared from each of the two compressed sections, and my beloved grape juice was among them.

I was somewhat put out by this, but kept my temper, and went and politely asked Customer Service if I could persuade them to rethink the precise set of product lines they were discontinuing over the Christmas period. I can't, for example, believe that that many people prefer carrot juice to grape juice. I've tried carrot juice. I suppose it takes all sorts and a few people might acquire a taste for it, but more people than like the obvious sweetness and freshness of grape juice? It just doesn't make sense to me.

The customer service person was sympathetic to my plight but was unable to help, because she couldn't find grape juice in the product database at all. We conjectured that it might have been discontinued across all Sainsburys, which I suppose would be more convenient for them because their manufacturing side (it was own-brand) could actually stop producing it completely for a few months. So I muttered a bit, and went away, and eventually discovered that the Asda down the road still sells grape juice. And there the matter rested.

Or rather, there the matter would have rested, if it hadn't been for the fact that last week I was sitting in a line of traffic queueing for the Coldhams Lane roundabout, and through my passenger-side car window I could see through the window of the Sainsburys petrol station. Specifically, I could see the petrol station's fruit juice shelf. And guess what was on it?

So. Either the customer service person's database was malfunctioning and grape juice is still available from some part of the greater Sainsburys organism, or that was simply left-over grape juice from the month before last when they were still stocking it. I managed to find the same customer service person, who remembered me, and she was as baffled as I was and unable to shed any light on the question. That only left one way to find out; so in a spirit of scientific enquiry, I went into the petrol station last night and bought all the grape juice they had. Next week, if I remember, I'll see if they've managed to get some more, and if so then I'll go back to the customer service desk and say ‘ah-ha!’.

Someone just phoned me up and mispronounced my surname at me. It turned out he was a phone droid for a market research company, calling on behalf of the garage who repaired my car last month, and wanted me to answer a few questions about the quality of the service.

In fact, I was very impressed with the quality of the service; it was significantly more fast, efficient and professional than I'd had from any other garage before, including other branches of the same organisation. So I thought I could probably spare a few minutes to tell them so.

We got off on the wrong foot to begin with, because after a couple of reasonably sensible-sounding questions he then asked whether the purpose of my visit had been regular service, mechanical or electrical repair, bodywork or MOT. Hang on, I said, why don't you already know that? If the garage gave you my name and phone number, surely they ought to have been able to tell you that as well? Well, he said, we just wanted to make sure, we're really ringing to ask about the service. At this point I lost my temper and explained that I'd been a lot more impressed with the service before somebody rang me up this afternoon asking me stupid questions he already knew the answers to.

I let him carry on, though, and it gradually became clear that the droid had a questionnaire in front of him which had two or three labelled tick boxes for each question, and didn't have the intelligence to do anything except read it out over the phone including all the box labels. I persistently refused to meekly pick one label: I had specific things I wanted to say, and when his list of options didn't encompass them I gave him a full answer in entire sentences. He responded each time by saying ‘so that's ‘completely satisfied’, then’ or similar, and I could almost hear him making a totally uninformative tick on his completely pointless questionnaire.

Eventually he came to a question for which my answer was sufficiently equivocal that he couldn't decide which of ‘completely satisfied’ and ‘not completely satisfied’ it should fall into, so he asked me to clarify whether I meant one or the other. At this point I lost my temper the second time, and explained to him that he was the one with a questionnaire with only two boxes, so he should decide which of them to put a tick in. I'd given him the real facts of the case, and it was his problem to decide what to do with them.

‘I don't think I can talk to you any more,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’ <click>

Well, I suppose that's better than me having to slam the phone down; at least this way I'm reasonably sure he won't call back and annoy me again. But at the same time I'm slightly peeved, because I had expected this conversation to be an entirely positive experience for both of us in which I gushed about the ways in which the garage staff were useful and efficient and helpful and well organised. But somehow, the phone droid managed to turn even that into such a joyless and infuriating bureaucratic hassle that neither of us had the will to finish the call. Bah.

I woke up this morning, got out of bed and walked out of the bedroom into the hall. I was immediately struck by a strange shimmering stippled pattern of light on the hall wall, whose cause wasn't immediately obvious.

I walked over to it and had a closer look. It was a pattern of spots of white light in a roughly hexagonal lattice, each one varying slightly in brightness over time but not moving in space.

I looked around for strange-shaped light sources … and all became clear. The light source was the sun shining through the blobby glass[1] in my flat's kitchen window; the kitchen door was closed, and the shape of the blobby window was being projected through the keyhole in the door to make a perfect upside-down pinhole-camera image of the kitchen window on the hall wall. Cool!

(I'd have taken a photo, but by the time it occurred to me the sun had moved on and the image had faded. Shame.)

[1] Is there a proper name for that, incidentally? The kind of glass you put in bathroom windows so that it lets in light but doesn't let out an undistorted image of what you're doing in there. Sometimes it's simply frosted glass; other times it has a pattern of distortion of some sort. The stuff in my flat has hexagonally tiled round blobs. There must be a name for the general concept of glass-for-bathroom-windows-and-the-like, but I couldn't find it in a quick trawl of Google and Wikipedia.

Good: feanelwa's party last night was fun, and almost completely filled with people I didn't already know, which made an interesting change.

Good: the Calling on Tuesday was also particularly good, leaving me with a sense of having had a generally good week filled with nice people.

Good: I stayed in bed last night for a full twelve hours, from just before midnight to just before midday, and was actually asleep for most of that. Since I usually can't manage a lie-in like that without first spending two weeks getting out of the working-life rhythm, that was unexpected and very welcome.

Bad: my bruised thumb is much worse today than it was yesterday. If this were a work day, I would be seriously considering staying at home on the basis that I wouldn't be able to type for a day without causing myself serious pain and possibly making it even worse. It's that bad.

Good: fortunately, this isn't a work day and neither is tomorrow, so I can rest my thumb and hopefully it'll be on the mend by Monday. I'm currently using different fingers for the space bar, which feels very clumsy and unnatural but will do for brief things like this diary entry.

Bad: then again, that means I don't get the opportunity to do what I want with a computer this weekend, which is a pain. I start to feel unproductive when my only serious computer use is in the line of work. Still, it's only temporary; my thumb will recover.

Good: when somebody (_proserpina_, I think) at the Calling asked me how I was, I realised that it had been a couple of weeks since anything made me seriously upset (as opposed to mildly annoyed, which is an unrealistic thing to even hope for two weeks without!), which seems to be well above average for me this year. The run of non-upsetness is still unbroken as of today, which is even better.

Bad: then again, it seems faintly depressing that that's the most I can currently aspire to. Things that make me seriously happy appear to be significantly rarer than those that make me seriously upset.

Good: however, out of all the above things, two of the bad ones are temporary and the third is not an immediate problem. So on balance, I think, things are good.

It's funny; when I'm away from a keyboard, if somebody asked me, I generally wouldn't be able to tell them which thumb I use for pressing the space bar. The obvious approach to finding out would be to do some mock-typing on a table and see which thumb I find myself using, but that never quite seems to work, partly because tables don't feel enough like keyboards and mostly because when I know I'm doing it as a test I feel self-conscious and am never quite confident I'm doing what I would naturally do.

But today I know very clearly which thumb it is, because as of last night I have a nasty bruise under the right side of my left thumbnail, and now it is very obvious to me that that's the bit I normally use for thumping on the space bar. Ow.

(Still, I've only been at work for a quarter of an hour and I've already evolved a typing posture which just about avoids the most painful bit. I suspect this is an advantage of never having formally learned to touch-type; my ad-hoc typing style is naturally adaptable in the face of the unexpected.)