You know you're half asleep when you realise you've been participating in a Usenet thread for a couple of days without even noticing that one of the main participants is using the outstanding name of ‘Vladimir McBadger’.

For not very interesting reasons, I just calculated 11 factorial; it came to 39916800. On a random whim, I then typed that number into Google.

The first search result told me confidently that the number I'd entered was 12 factorial. Oops.

‘Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion,’ says the guard who had spoken on the telephone. ‘You can't miss it.’

Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is, indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute, trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched urban row-houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.

– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

As part of beckyc's birthday celebrations, I was part of a bunch of about ten people who went to the Bletchley Park museum yesterday. I'd never been there before, although I had of course read Enigma and Cryptonomicon so it was a familiar setting in my imagination if not in reality.

One of the major things I noticed on getting there was that the above quotation is all absolutely true. The crowning touch, I feel, is the gable and cupola which interpenetrate in a manner which suggests they were accidentally overlaid in a ray-tracing program by somebody who wasn't paying quite enough attention to their coordinates. It's a monstrosity, and that's coming from somebody who doesn't usually have enough interest in architecture to express any strong opinions about it at all.

As for the rest of the park, well, it was good, but somehow more museumy than I'd have hoped. As a museum it's definitely good – many of the display cases and information boards tell you genuinely interesting stuff – but somehow I felt that you could have set up a conventional glass-cases-and-posters museum about Bletchley Park anywhere you liked, and if you were going to do something on the site itself then you surely ought to make use of that in a more creative fashion, such as by trying to reconstruct the interiors of the huts in a way that actually gave an impression of what it might have been like to be involved in the codebreaking efforts. Hut 4, for example, should have been cramped, crowded, and full of filing cabinets and exasperated naval intelligence officers dashing back and forth with small slips of paper, or failing that at least given the impression that said officers had just popped out for an important meeting and would be very busy again as soon as they came back. Instead, it was a largely empty shell containing a lecture room.

I got into an argument with the tour guide at one point, over a technical point about the codebreaking procedure. I did some quick calculations using my watch's calculator mode to support my claims, but he said some of my assumptions were faulty. I went away and thought about that; it occurred to me that if I had a computer handy instead of a piffling little calculator then I ought to be able to knock together a real demonstration of my point pretty quickly. Then it occurred to me that the hands-on exhibits in the history-of-computing museum included a BBC micro, so I wandered over there and quickly typed in a twenty-line program which tested my assertion; the tour guide came back half an hour later while we were eating lunch and I was able to cite the results of that program as part of my argument :-) He eventually conceded my point after discovering that he'd misunderstood it. (Phew.)

It hadn't occurred to me, but clearly should have with hindsight, that Bletchley Park's visitors would be likely to contain a high proportion of geeks. While I was hacking on the Beeb, a random old guy came over to watch what I was doing, and then said in a slightly puzzled voice ‘You don't look old enough to know how to program a BBC’. This struck me as slightly odd, since I didn't even encounter a BBC until about seven years after starting to learn to program, by which time it wasn't about to present me with any conceptual difficulties; but I suppose if (as he did) you'd programmed the things yourself when you were forty, you might be slightly surprised that a teenager would have been doing the same things.

Still, a good day out all round. A tiring one, though, so it's a good job I have today to recover from it before going back to work!

Well, that's pretty much it. Four weeks ago I began a four-week break from work; so tomorrow I'll be back in the office, probably struggling through a month of email backlog to begin with and then resuming the big project I was in the middle of implementing when my sabbatical began. (Which was pretty silly timing, but sabbaticals are booked six months in advance and the big project came up on shorter notice than that…)

When my company introduced the sabbatical scheme, I'm sure I remember them trying to encourage people to use the break to do something constructive or at least purposeful. Last time I had one, four years ago, I used it to do some serious PuTTY development including porting some big chunks of PuTTY to Unix, which seemed pretty constructive to me.

Nowadays the company doesn't seem to be emphasising that angle so much; I suppose they must have accustomed themselves to the idea that if you give people four weeks off work it's going to take more than well-meaning encouragement to stop most of them from treating it as a four-week holiday. When I left work four weeks ago they just said ‘enjoy your break’. Regardless of this, I wanted to do something useful with my time, and I had laid plans for some far-reaching PuTTY infrastructure renovation. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I spent the first week lying on the sofa watching DVDs, punctuated by an occasional walk to Blockbuster to rent a succession of films I'd recently failed to go and see in the cinema. By the end of that week I was feeling rested and energetic enough to want to do something useful, which was pretty much how I'd planned it. But at that point the machine on which I read my email changed its spam-filtering configuration and I suddenly found myself deluged with a flood of Japanese newsletters and stock-market scam mail from which it was quite difficult to pick out anything legitimate; so I hastily changed direction and devoted a couple of weeks to writing some spam-filtering code which would solve my immediate problems. As a result, my inbox is now quieter than it's been in months and I have some reasonably convenient ways to make it quieter still as necessary, but PuTTY's data storage infrastructure remains stubbornly unrenovated.

I suppose I should be glad that the spam emergency came up when I did have time and energy available to devote to it; if I hadn't been on sabbatical last month then I might still be struggling with it now. But I can't help feeling somewhat peeved that a bunch of spammers stopped me from having the time and energy to do what I really wanted to do with that month of freedom.

Still; aside from that annoyance it hasn't been a bad month. Even though I haven't written the code I'd hoped to write, I have at least reassured myself that I can still write useful code in contexts other than work; and I've had time to laze around, time to sort out various things that have needed sorting out, and time left over to spend with a variety of nice people who I don't see nearly enough of. So, could have been a lot worse really.

It often occurs to me that if a Martian were to eavesdrop on my home, pick up all the random mutterings I mutter to myself when I'm alone, and try to parse some meaning out of them, he'd be left with a lot of strange ideas.

Foremost among those strange ideas, it usually seems to me, would be that there is some unspecified item in my home which I lose far more frequently than anything else, called the ‘oh there it is’.

Today I decided to get rid of my mobile phone. I've had one for a bit over six years (initially got it just before moving house, on the basis that it would be helpful to have a stable method of contact while everything else was up in the air), but hardly ever used it.

My biggest problem with a mobile is that I'm very bad at keeping battery-powered things charged. I initially kept the phone on all the time, but found that it would be on for a few days and then off for a week or more before I remembered to recharge it. So for the last few years I've mostly kept it turned off, on the basis that that way it's almost always got some charge in it, in case I need to turn it on and make an outgoing call. (I'd occasionally turn it on if I knew I was going to need to receive incoming calls, for example if I was trying to do a complicated piece of organisation involving meeting somebody in London.) Meanwhile, I've also been paying for it on contract, rather than PAYG, on the basis that PAYG would mean another thing I could never remember to keep charged up. Expensive for my usage pattern, but if the aim is to have it work when I really need it, it seemed the most reliable way.

A week or two ago I tried to turn the phone on for an outgoing call and found it wasn't working. This is the fourth phone I've gone through in six years, and it's now getting to the point where they fall apart (presumably due to battering in my pocket) almost as often as I need to make calls. So I decided enough was enough; I was just about willing to pay for the wretched thing's upkeep when it was occasionally actually useful, but if I can't even rely on it working on the very rare occasions I ask it to, it just isn't worth keeping. So enough is enough; I'm getting rid of it. Today I posted a letter to Orange cancelling my contract.

So now I've got all this space in my left pocket. I wonder what I should keep in there instead.

As of now I don't have to go to work until 2nd October. That's a good feeling :-)

My hayfever has been mostly unproblematic this summer, but it seems to be seizing its chance to have one last go at me this week. I've had several sneezing fits already this morning, and I'm currently sitting here experiencing physical symptoms that feel exactly as if I've been crying: the puffy eyes, the lump in the throat and the sniffling all match. But I haven't been crying, of course; I've just been sneezing.

Curiously, this is having an emotional effect on me, presumably by associative memory. On the very rare occasions that I do do serious crying, I tend to feel fragile afterwards: prone to treat minor setbacks as major, on the basis that I've only just returned from beyond the limit of what I can cope with and so even a minor frustration pushes me perilously close to going back over that limit. And what's odd is that I'm feeling very much like that now, for no better reason than that my current physical state is similar to the way I would be feeling just after a crying fit. I keep having to actively remind myself that my life is quite good at the moment, that nothing has gone seriously wrong recently at all, and that it's only hayfever.

I think I've mentioned before, haven't I, that the human brain is a shoddily designed piece of ad-hoc-ware and should be sufficient in itself to refute any feeble excuses a creationist can come up with? Well, perhaps it's worth saying it one more time. If I were an omnipotent god, or even just a finitely-but-extremely potent one, I'm sure I could do a better job than this, and if I couldn't then I'd deserve to have my deification revoked.

Over the past three days I've put real new features into PuTTY, which is pretty unusual these days.

( for those who speak geek )

Last week something rather surprising happened to me: I discovered I'd become a morning person.

Normally my natural inclination on any given day is to stay in bed until absolutely forced to get up by the oppressive tyranny of regular employment, or failing that the lure of breakfast. Eventually, after a decent run-up, I become able to concentrate on doing useful things.

However, for about a week now, this has no longer been my pattern. I've been consistently finding myself wide awake and raring to go about half an hour before my usual alarm time; moreover, when I do get up I then find I'm filled with energy and alertness and enthusiasm and do lots of useful productive work. Then, some time around four in the afternoon, it wears off and I begin to feel less like manically doing work and more like sitting on a sofa and not moving much.

So I've just spent most of the Bank Holiday weekend getting up early and doing real PuTTY development, which I think is the first time I've done anything more to PuTTY than occasional bug fixing for about a year and a half. This is a very, very satisfying feeling.

But at the same time, I'm filled with a sense of ‘yikes, what's happened to me?’. It's often said that people are divided into larks and owls, but it's news to me that somebody can spontaneously mutate from one into the other!

Around 10am yesterday my flat had a power cut. I was out at work, of course, but I know this because when I got home I found my microwave needed its time resetting and my computers claimed only to have been up for a few hours. (Also my alarm clock lost its alarm settings and enabled both of its independent alarms for midnight, which was very loud and particularly startling.)

And my firewall machine didn't turn itself back on again. Investigation shows that the power supply is at fault, so it'll be a trip via Maplin on the way home to pick up a new one.

I'm getting sick and tired of this. I've already spent a week without Internet connectivity at home recently, due to the lightning strike blowing up my cable modem; and I've already had to replace a power supply in one of my computers due to the same lightning strike. Now another power supply has gone, and in the process it's cut me off from the Internet again, and I'm getting cross.

It seems plausible to me that this isn't in fact coincidence, and that the same lightning strike that caused all the recent hassle was also the cause of the current outage. I've had power cuts before and things don't generally go pop when the power comes back on, but this is my first power cut since the lightning strike, and I wouldn't have a hard time believing that the power surge had nearly wrecked my firewall's power supply and that the dropout this morning was the last straw.

It's getting close to the last straw for me, too. If anything else of mine blows up in the near future I'm really going to lose my temper. If I meet Thor in the afterlife, I think I'll taser him.

On Wednesday lightning struck near my house and my main computer broke down, along with my network connection. I repaired the former a few days later (it was only the power supply), and an NTL engineer has just come round and repaired the latter for me too.

The lightning strike occurred just as I'd finished sorting out the software upgrades I needed in order to do a long-overdue backup of my main computer, which made it a particularly annoying moment for it to blow up! Fortunately, the data wasn't lost and now I have backed it up.

And today I booked an emergency afternoon off work so I could be at home between 12 and 6 for NTL, and of course the NTL engineer has now been and gone, so if I'd known that I could just as well have called it a long lunch break.

Finally … the computer which blew up, and the cable modem which also blew up, and the router which lost one of its network ports presumably by means of the surge going right through the cable modem, were all behind a surge protector which I had thoughtfully installed after my last annoying lightning experience. The power surge laughed at my surge protector, went straight through it without slowing down, blew up several bits of kit beyond it, and left it intact and unaware that anything had happened. Clearly I need a better surge protector; but without a reliable means of producing lightning on demand, it's probably difficult to test them!

Murphy has definitely been having too much fun with me this week.

At lunchtime I went to World of Computers and picked up a scanner, which I've been meaning to buy one of for some time and which I ordered at the weekend. When I got it home this evening I found that its USB cable was about four feet too short to reach from the only free surface in the study to the computer I needed to connect it to, so I'll have to go back and get an extension cable tomorrow.

Also this evening I managed, thanks to helpful advice from Ian, to debug the mysterious software crashes I'd recently been seeing on my main home machine. That caused me great relief and a sense of triumph for about five minutes. Unfortunately, the next thing that happened was that an incredibly loud, sharp and nearby crack of thunder and flash of lightning made me jump out of my seat, and when I settled down again I discovered that the machine whose software I'd just fixed had turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again. It just sits there with its power light glowing at half brightness, and does nothing else no matter how often I press the On button. For good measure, the same lightning strike also fried something in NTL's cable network or possibly my cable modem, because the latter is blinking some very unhappy-looking lights at me and not providing me with network connectivity. I'm having to type this from the Gallery.

So, that's two counts of nearly getting something working in one day. I'd probably better not go near another computer until tomorrow.

I just went down to the front door to go to work, and found a small business card pushed through it. This card turned out to be paper spam, and it started with the words ‘HELP! Our natural organic healthcare business is exploding!’.

It was, of course, inviting me to take part in a dubious business opportunity. But reading the first two lines I couldn't help thinking that what they wanted was for me to call a fire engine, or possibly a bomb squad :-)

To continue on the random language use theme: I've noticed recently that I seem to have completed a gradual transition from being a ‘moreover’ person to being a ‘furthermore’ person.

Ten years ago I was a maths student. ‘Moreover’ is part of standard mathematical idiom. You find it a lot in statements of theorems: ‘there exists exactly one thingy satisfying these conditions, and moreover it is the limit of the following sequence’. So, naturally, hanging around a lot of mathematicians and dealing with a lot of theorems and proofs and mathematical writings, I got used to using ‘moreover’ when I had a concept of this nature to express.

These days I don't hang around with that many mathematicians any more, and I do hang around with IWJ who tends to say ‘furthermore’ a lot, particularly often (and particularly loudly) when he's ranting about some company being stupid: ‘they made this error, and that error, and furthermore refused to give a refund’. So my idiolect has gradually adapted so that I now say ‘furthermore’ where I might once have said ‘moreover’.

At some point during this transition, a few years ago, I noticed that I was willing to use both words but felt them to have different connotations and emphasis. I would tend to say ‘moreover’ if I was talking about good or useful things (‘and even better…’), but ‘furthermore’ if I was talking about bad or annoying things (‘and even worse…’). It seems likely to me that this derived from the difference in usage: mathematical theorems are good and useful things because they provide you with knowledge, and ‘moreover’ tends to prefix an extra piece of useful knowledge, whereas Ian's rants tend to be about a sequence of annoying things of which ‘furthermore’ introduces an even more annoying one.

I consciously tried to retain this usage once I'd noticed it, because I thought it would be rather nice to encourage a subtle difference between two otherwise redundant words, but it doesn't seem to be happening any more: even in ‘good’ contexts I now find I naturally say ‘furthermore’. Shame.

I've been idly wondering for a while about the circumstances under which people use other people's names while talking to them.

( medium-length musing )

Two days ago, at work, I was relating to my team leader a tale of mild annoyance involving the company sysadmins. I began the story with the words ‘Last Thursday, …’.

It then became rather difficult to concentrate on what I was supposed to be telling him, because some part of my brain started singing ‘Last Thursday, I gave you my heart’. I struggled through my story in spite of this mental cacophony, but within the next few minutes the same part of my brain had managed to prefix ‘Last Thursday’ to several well known phrases or sayings:

• Last Thursday, I gave you my heart
• Last Thursday, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation
• Last Thursday in a galaxy far, far away…
• Last Thursday God created the heaven and the earth.

I'm sure there must be some even better ones of these which I haven't thought of yet.

In a perfectly appropriate end to yesterday's catalogue of errors, I went to my bedroom chest of drawers last night to get out a pyjama top, and the front panel of the drawer came off in my hand. So this morning I slathered it in Araldite, hit it a couple of times with a mallet and left two heavy rocks on top of it, and with any luck by the time I get home this evening it'll be willing to cooperate for fear of more such treatment.

Also last night I went to the pub and drank beer, which is the first time I've touched alcohol in nearly two weeks. I didn't find drunkenness as enjoyable as I used to, and the (very mild) headache this morning leaves me thinking it wasn't worth the effort. Perhaps I'll continue not drinking, or barely drinking, for a while longer after all; enjoyment versus health is a debate that can go either way, but if I don't even enjoy it there's clearly no point in drinking the stuff.

It hasn't been a good day, so far.

I took the day off work so that an engineer could come round and replace the gas meter. Shortly before noon he showed up, took one look, and said it couldn't be done: apparently regulations have become stricter about the minimum distance between gas meters and electric wiring since mine was installed, so that if he changed it in place he'd be breaking the law. Which presumably means some other engineer will have to come round and do a much more extensive job on it at some other point (the word the guy used was ‘re-site’; I am continually amazed at the number of synonyms people feel the need to invent for perfectly simple words like ‘move’) and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to make me use up another of my days off work for that.

Also today I have stubbed my toe painfully on the sofa, crashed my main home computer so hard that it required an hour and a half of filesystem repair before it would boot again, and thrown breakfast cereal all over the newly hoovered kitchen floor.

Now I'm going to go and spend the rest of the afternoon at the Gallery. With any luck nothing worse will happen to me there than an embarrassing defeat at some board game or other, which I'm pretty much used to by now.

I cooked a big stew yesterday evening, which will probably feed me for most of the week.

I never actually decided to do my cooking like that; it sort of grew over a period of years. When I started cooking for myself a few years ago I acquired a couple of lark_ascending's easy stew recipes I remembered from when we were going out, which were originally intended to serve two; but every time I shopped for ingredients I always came back with slightly more than I needed (‘just in case’), and once the stews started getting big enough to feed me for three days instead of two I thought that was actually quite useful (cooking for myself is annoying, so having to do it less often is pleasant) and started intentionally trying to buy for three days, and then overestimated again… At some point the stews began to overflow the saucepan, and my response was to go and buy a bigger saucepan.

This week I went somewhat out of control in the Sainsburys vegetable section. (I find it easy to overbuy vegetables because there's no guilt pressure working against it – after all, veg are good for you, right? So more veg must be better than less.) When I came to cook the stew I discovered it wouldn't all fit in the saucepan – and this was an enormous 4-litre casserole pan from the top end of the John Lewis range and if you can buy a larger one anywhere short of institutional-catering suppliers I don't know about it. Fortunately it all fitted in the pan once the veg had reduced a bit, but it was touch and go.

Well, they say the first step in kicking a bad habit is to admit you have a problem. So I hereby confess that I am a compulsive overcaterer and cannot be trusted to buy vegetables in manageably small quantities.

I think that perhaps it's time I abandoned the practice of judging veg quantities in the supermarket by instinct, and started setting myself a weight guideline and sticking to it. This is getting beyond a joke.