No more work for two weeks :-)

A reasonably well known cliché among fantasy novels where the fantasy world is accessed from the real one seems to be that at the end of the series some action is taken which seals the two worlds forever apart (perhaps to stop the publishers continuing to demand sequels), and those real-world inhabitants who have memories of the fantasy world gradually find those memories fading and eventually seeming like no more than a childish fantasy, or a dream.

(I can't actually bring to mind the name of any novel which did this, off the top of my head, but it feels like the sort of thing which wouldn't surprise me in the least if it happened at the end of any given book.)

Last night I had a dream involving a fantasy world, accessed from the real one through a doorway. At the very end of the dream I performed a magical action which closed off the two worlds from one another and turned the doorway into a cupboard – making sure to keep a couple of physical souvenirs so I'd remember it had really happened and not come to believe it was all a dream, because I knew that usually happened in this situation in books.

Then I woke up, and now (of course) I immediately believe it was all a dream. I suppose I must have lost those souvenirs down the back of the sofa or something.

I've noticed recently that it seems strangely common for me to find myself thinking long, philosophical thoughts during the journey to work. I can only assume this is a result of striking just the right balance between the aftereffects of a night's sleep (which tends to make me more creative and imaginative), the complete absorption of about half my brain in driving (all the bits of my mind that are useful for thinking about concrete things and the here and now are busy doing so), and perhaps also an unwillingness to start thinking about anything more immediately useful because I'll only have to abandon it when I get there and switch over to work stuff. (I don't think about work outside work, to a first approximation. Being able to hang it all on the hook when I leave the office is something I've always valued.)

This morning's thought was introspective in nature, and concerned a strange contradiction I've just noticed in myself.

If somebody goes to war against you, it's usually because they want something specific. Assuming that something is not your complete and total extinction, it might be some of the land you live on, some resources you control, access to a holy place, régime change, you name it. Whatever it is the enemy wants, if you fight back at all it's because you want to keep it badly enough to fight: you judged the cost of fighting to be less than the cost of giving it up. But if the war grinds on and it gradually becomes clear you're losing, that judgment has to be re-evaluated: as the enemy, through superior numbers, weaponry or strategy, manages to make the cost of waging the war continually increase, you eventually reach a point at which it costs you less to just let them have what they want than to carry on fighting. At this point surrender is the sensible option: just give them what they're after, in the hope that they'll at least stop hitting you.

That's the rational view. Emotionally, surrender is a state of mind; you just feel ready to give in, tired of fighting. It's the emotion diametrically opposed to stubbornness; a willingness to follow the path of least resistance, no matter what implications it has for your moral integrity, your pride or your rational best interests.

When I go to bed on a Friday night feeling more tired than I have been in weeks (owing to a hectic week of doing urgent things at work, in particular finishing up an urgent project and finding another even more urgent one taking its place, plus a night of total insomnia in the middle of all that), and then I fail to get to sleep at all until nearly 2am and wake up at seven with absolutely no prospect of dropping back off, still tired but no longer the least bit sleepy … I start to have that feeling of surrender. Whatever impish agency in my mind determines my sleep cycle, it is clearly waging some sort of war against me, and right now I feel as if I should just give it whatever it's after so it'll at least stop doing this to me. Whatever it wants from me, it can't be as bad as having this happen to me on a semi-regular basis.

Almost more frustrating than having it working against me in the first place is the fact that my sleep cycle isn't a rational general; its hostile actions against me are without objective; there is nothing I can offer it which will make it stop. When I have that feeling of surrender deep in my bones, there is no path of lesser resistance than the one I'm already taking, and I really wish there were.

I've always been a little suspicious of attempts to design a human-like artificial intelligence. Of course it often leads to good SF, which I'm strongly in favour of :-) but many things which make good SF are not things you'd want to go round doing in reality.

In particular, I feel strongly that making a computer behave like a human mind misses the vital point about computers, which is that they're good at things humans are not, such as repeatability, reliability, extremely fast linear processing, not getting bored and so on. The most sensible way to use a computer, it therefore seems to me, is to apply it to jobs where those features are virtues, not to try to convert it into a second-rate human. Also, if you want a human-level intelligence, it's surely easier just to hire one: there are a silly number of billions of us in the world already, and quite a few are looking for work!

Every so often I notice a particularly unhelpful feature of the human brain which reinforces this opinion, by making me feel even more strongly that what we need is a partnership with devices which don't have the same weakness, not an attempt to construct yet more things which do.

In what order would you naturally list the four suits of a pack of cards?

While I'm posting silly and inconsequential things, a fun thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. You know those price signs you get in supermarkets which advertise (for example) 1.5kg of flour for 41p, and then say ‘(27p per kg)’ so you don't have to work out the overall value for money yourself? It occurred to me that it would be fun to apply that to the clothes section: imagine a pair of shoes, and a price tag saying ‘£35.00 (£17.50 per shoe)’. Or better still, trousers: ‘(£11.00 per leg)’. It wouldn't do to be swindled by pack prices :-)

stephdiary wrote yesterday about having been pestered by a ‘God-botherer’, as he put it, while stuck on a broken-down train. It's obviously the weekend for it: this morning I heard beckyc's doorbell ring downstairs, and shortly afterwards my own doorbell rang. On the way to answer it I decided it was most likely Jehovah's Witnesses or similar, since they seemed the most plausible people to be going door-to-door on a Sunday morning; and sure enough, when I looked out of the window above my door, there were two people waving a ‘tract’ (their own word) at me entitled ‘All Suffering Soon To End’.

I get a lot of mileage out of that little window. For those who haven't visited me: I live in a first-floor flat with internal stairs down to my own front door at ground level. One of the hall windows is directly above the front door. So when my doorbell rings and my fifth sense tells me it's an unwelcome door-to-door pesterer of some kind rather than someone I actually want to see, I don't bother going down to the door; I just open that window and ask what they want from up here, saving me the effort of going down and up the stairs and also protecting me from any attempts to get a physical or psychological foot in the door.

That said, I would actually quite have liked to have talked to them on this occasion. Owen's comment yesterday had reminded me of the fundamental curiosity I always feel about proactive religious evangelists of this nature, and I've never yet managed to actually ask one about it. Sadly, when I do encounter one it never quite seems to be the right time; in this case I was half way through my breakfast and it would have gone soggy if I'd left it too long, so I just said ‘no thanks’ and shut the window again.

( the description of my fundamental curiosity gets a bit long )

On my work machine, I've just discovered, /usr/share/dict/words contains no uncapitalised words beginning with ‘x’.

(Debian doesn't do much better, but Red Hat takes the cake.)

You know it's going to be a bad day when something topologically implausible happens to you before you even step into the office.

As usual, I took the excessively cold-sensitive hard disk cartridge out of my car stereo this morning and put it in my coat pocket so it could come inside and keep warm during the day. Today, I missed the pocket and accidentally dropped the disk down the hole in the coat lining, so that it fell down into the cavity between the lining and the main coat fabric.

That's not too surprising; that hole has been steadily growing for a while and it probably wants fixing now. What was odd was that I then stuck my hand into the hole in search of the thing, but when I found it there was a layer of lining fabric between it and me. Huh? Did it go into the pocket after all? <grope> No. Are there two different holes in the coat lining? <examine> No. Are there in fact two layers of lining at all to make this occurrence topologically feasible? <rub between fingers> Apparently not. So how the devil has the wretched thing managed to be separated from me by a layer of fabric no matter what I do?

I did get it out in the end, but not by any means that yielded a greater understanding of what had happened. That coat has served me well for <counts> seven and a half years now and survived several major repairs, but I wonder if it starting to flout basic mathematical principles might be a sign that it's time I finally started thinking about getting a new one.

We've been having some problems with the electronic door locks in the office this week. At various points they've stopped being able to recognise our pass cards. On most of these occasions they set themselves to always-unlocked, which was unhelpful in security terms but at least not a serious inconvenience to the building's population of legitimate employees; on one occasion they set themselves to always-locked, so people were actually trapped in the building (though only briefly).

I had assumed that these two failure modes covered the full extent of the ways in which an electronic door lock could plausibly fail. Foolish me. This afternoon the speakers which make the locks go beep on unlocking have jammed on, so that all the locks in the building are emitting a continuous high-pitched whining noise.

I think this is the locks' way of letting people like me know that they haven't nearly exhausted their options yet; they're only just getting started, and doubtless have several more acts of imaginative malice lined up for the near future.

I booked today as holiday, so I could be at home for someone to come and replace the gas meter.

I've only just remembered this, after working most of an uncommonly productive day. Oops. Hopefully HR will be nice enough to let me have my day of holiday back, and I suppose I'll have to apologise and reschedule the gas meter people.

This isn't the first time I've accidentally come to work when I was supposed to be on holiday. The other time was a few years ago, when I booked an afternoon off to go to a garden party, but forgot to go home at lunchtime. What seems to happen is that it simply doesn't occur to me to wonder if today is anything out of the ordinary; I just get up, do the morning routine, go in to work and sit down. It's much easier when I take the whole week off, because I'll have disabled my alarm on the previous Friday morning so I can tell it isn't a normal Monday when I don't get unwillingly dragged out of bed…

Over the past few months, as many of you will already have noticed, I've been making an unusually determined effort not to suck at NetHack. I am delighted to report that at the weekend this effort finally produced its intended result, and I managed to ascend my first character. Since I've been sucking at NetHack for something approaching twenty years, this is really quite satisfying.

Aside from the various tactical problems within the game, my biggest problem with NetHack recently has been that I can't sleep when a game is going well. People laugh when I say that, but it's true: because NetHack doesn't let you replay from your last save point, the further you get the more there is at stake if you make a mistake, so I get more and more nervous and cautious and stressed and try to plan ahead, and when I take a break from playing and do something else I keep jumping up and thinking ‘ooh, I know what I need to do, better write that down before I forget’. This gives me rampaging insomnia (or ‘sleep resistance’ as I tend to call it), which (a) causes me to be useless at work if I'm at work the next day, so I feel guilty, and (b) to add insult to that injury, it also makes me play NetHack badly so that I do make the fatal errors I was trying so hard not to.

I've tried a couple of pharmaceutical solutions to this problem (Nytol and the like), but they didn't seem to help at all. This weekend I went for a completely different and rather simpler approach, which was to go to Mary's excellent flatwarming party on Saturday night and drink a large amount of very nice bubbly. That produced something resembling a normal night's sleep, and although I was a bit dopey the following morning I was together enough to finish the game without doing anything fatally stupid.

So that's a significant personal achievement, an excellent party and a lot of very nice bubbly. Altogether, I feel, a good weekend.

I woke up this morning feeling moderately awful, but ignored it on the grounds that it's not too unusual for me to bitterly regret having to drag myself out of bed early in the morning. Half an hour later, after a shower and breakfast, I felt fine, as usually happens in this situation. So I went to work as normal, but felt uuurgh for most of the day. By the end of the day it was clear to me that I'd been right the first time, and should probably have gone straight back to bed.

Tomorrow, if I should feel fine at any point within an hour of getting out of bed, I think I should decide I know better and stay at home regardless :-/

I don't seem to write much in this diary these days. I think partly it's because the things that strike me as interesting enough to repeat to people are shorter and less meaningful, so where previously I might have written three paragraphs on the subject of (say) seeing something unusual walking down the street and what it indicated about the way I looked at things, I now just have one paragraph mentioning something momentarily silly with no conclusion or implication, and that means it hardly seems worth walking all the way to the computer to write in here.

Right at the moment I happen to have a small collection of such fragments which haven't escaped my memory yet, so I can at least produce a credible diary entry by amalgamating them:

• Last week I bought some Boursin, as a means of using up some spare savoury biscuits. This caused me to form a new conspiracy theory, which is that Boursin was invented by somebody whose primary business was in selling kitchen-cleaning products. I don't think I've made such a mess in five minutes for years.
• Also last week I received a spam whose subject line, for one glorious and perfect moment, I thought said ‘Fly Under the Radar with Stealth Socks’. Sadly, it was ‘Stocks’.
• Today I woke up to find my brain had somehow brought ‘The Matrix’ together with ‘The Gasman Cometh’: Neo singing ‘He called me Mister Anderson, which isn't quite my name’. Fortunately, I have no other worthwhile lyrics for this and hence am in no serious danger of perpetrating a filk.

In celebration of getting a major release out of the door, my section of the business was just treated to champagne and cakes at company expense. (Well, fruit rather than cakes for me at least.)

It's traditional in this company to have a modest champagne celebration when we release something. Usually they happen in the late afternoon, which is of course terribly inconvenient for anyone who has to drive home; this time, however, the champagne showed up at ten in the morning, which I think is a much better idea. Not only is it more practical, but it feels a great deal more decadent, which enhances the feeling of celebration.

(When they serve alcohol late in the day, it's not unheard of for me to drink it anyway, take the bus home, and leave my car at work overnight until I can take the bus in the next day and rescue it. It would be more inconvenient to do that over a weekend, though, so I'm particularly glad I didn't have to make the choice.)

The only flaw is that nobody is going to get anything particularly useful done for the rest of the day. So it goes :-)

When people change things in their lives – jobs, houses, marital status, whatever – it is often customary to send cards saying things like ‘congratulations’ or ‘good luck in your new job’.

It randomly occurred to me this afternoon that nobody ever sends cards like this when things are staying the same. How about sending a ‘good luck staying in your current job’ card to an employee of a company whose stocks have just plummeted? Or ‘congratulations on staying in your current job’ a month or two later, after the mass redundancies have finished? ‘Good luck in your old home’ if it's slowly falling apart or local property prices are falling? ‘Well done for still having all your limbs intact’, sent at irregular intervals to someone who does particularly extreme sports? Lack of change is sometimes just as much of a risk or an achievement as change, and can perfectly well merit celebration.

I suppose you could see birthday cards as congratulating the recipient on still being alive, and wedding anniversary cards likewise on still being married; but I think those lack ambition. There must be a fortune to be made in non-event greetings cards if you're willing to push the cynicism just a bit further :-)

Started off oddly, because as I walked towards the dental surgery I could hear loud drilling noises, and for a moment that seemed perfectly natural until it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't expect to hear a dental drill that loudly when I was still twenty metres from the building in which it was being used. Turned out to be the shop next door being renovated with more conventional power tools. Just as well, I think.

Then, after the dentist finished with me, I walked back out into the reception area and found drswirly standing at the counter; it turned out he had the appointment two after mine, which was an odd coincidence.

I'm now back at home; my brain feels a bit better than it did yesterday (although I still didn't sleep well) but now my body is falling apart excitingly. Sigh. Still, at least that means I might play half-decent NetHack today…

I barely slept at all last night due to a strange feverish feeling, so this morning I not only feel strange and feverish but am also three-quarters asleep. I keep deciding which room of my flat I want to go into, and then walking into a different one by mistake. I therefore decided going to work would be bound to do more harm than good, and hence didn't.

My current preference for passing a sick day would be to spend a fair amount of it playing NetHack. Today, even that is denied me, because my current NH saved game is looking really quite promising and I don't want to blow it by playing like a pudding while groggy. So I suppose it's the sofa for me. Oh well.

I thought I was doing well this week, logistics-wise. I've managed almost all the annoying faff of getting re-prescribed my gluten-free food items (all that remains is to actually collect the stuff tomorrow), and the guy who was dithering over the faulty boots I bought last year has finally managed a replacement (all that remains is to actually collect them tomorrow). Feeling generally smug about these successes, I arrived at work today to find my calendar telling me I'd just missed a dentist's appointment. Oops.

On closer investigation, the timed reminder email I scheduled six months ago for yesterday was not delivered, apparently because the machine on which I do my personal email currently has a broken at daemon. That'd explain why I'd totally forgotten. (Worse still, its sysadmin is on a theatre tour, so it's probable that a fix will not be forthcoming before next week's replacement appointment.)

Oh well. On the plus side, I suppose, one could argue that it's better to avoid going to the dentist on Friday the 13th!

(Well, it's vaguely traditional around this time of year and everyone else is doing it…)

For me 2005 has, in almost all respects, been a year in which virtually nothing has happened. I'm still living in the same flat, doing the same job, driving the same car, and going to the same pub and social events with pretty much the same people. I was single when the year began, I've remained single throughout it, and I'm single now. In fact, I think my love life has been more of a flatline this year than any previous year since 1995: this year I spent a grand total of about five minutes snogging somebody, and that was pretty much it.

(There are admittedly four hours left in 2005, as I write this, and I'm planning to spend most of them at parties. Hence that figure of five minutes is at least theoretically capable of increasing by about a factor of forty before being finalised; but I wouldn't bet on it!)

The biggest thing that happened to me this year was being diagnosed with coeliac disease in February. This has caused me a wide range of minor annoyances with regard to finding appropriate food, but since I was mostly cooking for myself already and could never much be bothered with bread or pasta in any case it's been less of a headache than it might have been. The most noticeable single consequence is that I almost never eat out any more, which has slightly impacted my social life.

The other thing I did was to go on a longish break from my major leisure activity of writing free software, on the basis that I was running out of energy from trying to pursue that and a job and a social life at the same time. My vague plan is to resume it some time in the second half of next year, but that will depend on how I feel by then. But even that, although it represents a change in my life, doesn't really break the general theme of nothing happening in 2005, since it involves even more nothing happening!

So, that was 2005. Health deteriorated, hobby activities declined, nothing else changed at all. I'm sure it could have been a lot worse, but I doubt it could have been a lot less interesting.