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.

‘You have the right to an annoyance. If you do not have an annoyance, one will be provided.’

Today's annoyance is that the electricity side of British Gas has billed me for over £1000. Again. By exactly the same dodge as last time: switching round the day and night rates on my meter, leading to all the electricity used by my flat's night storage heaters being charged at day rates.

Regular readers may recall that they did this to me in April, and it took me until June to straighten them out. I am therefore troubled to find they appear capable of spontaneously unstraightening themselves; it suggests I'm going to have to apply constant straightening pressure. Possibly by means of a rack.

They've promised to send me a proper bill and suggest that I should chase it up if it hasn't arrived by 10th January. I am, understandably I think, not particularly hopeful that this will be the end of the matter. Sigh.

I received email today telling me that Coeliac UK is discontinuing the electronic version of their list of safe foods. That's very annoying; I find it much more useful than the book version, partly because I can access it from anywhere I have an Internet connection without having to lug a book about, and mostly because I can grep it for a useful keyword without having to think hard about which of several plausible categories a given product might have been filed under. But apparently the service has been fraught with problems (none of which I've encountered), and so they're discontinuing it on the basis that it's more trouble than it's worth (to everyone but me).

I've mailed them back to express my disappointment and my strong support for their half-hearted intent to try to introduce a replacement service, but I'm not hopeful.

As if that wasn't annoying enough, the same email also linked to an update to the safe foods list in which it transpires that my favourite breakfast cereal EVER, which I used to eat as a special holiday treat when I was a child and have been gleefully stuffing my face with since February after discovering it was one of the few cereals I could still eat, has just been re-tested and turns out not to be gluten-free after all. Bah! And double bah since I'd just stocked up on the stuff. Anyone (well, anyone to whom I can conveniently deliver) want to take some large boxes of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes off my hands?

I also just played a game of NetHack in which I was granted an early wish and was dead two turns later. This is clearly not my day.

I just got home to find a bill from NTL. Accompanying it in the envelope is a glossy sheet advertising their new recommendations scheme: ‘Tell someone about us and we'll give you £30’.

Somehow, I suspect that if I tell people that NTL is the single most useless and incompetent utility company it has so far been my misfortune to deal with, and that's including British Gas who tried to bill me for £1000 I didn't owe them, they will probably not be coughing up thirty quid of beer money in my direction any time soon. Shame, really.

My long-term plan, at present, is to take a longish break from writing free software and to relax and do nothing much. I am here to report that in the past week I have written one (1) new piece of free software, and thus my progress on the long-term plan is actually negative.

Still, on the plus side, my NetHack has definitely improved. Last week I got a couple of characters all the way down to the bottom of the Gnomish Mines and back up in one piece, and although both of them subsequently died avoidably, I'm certainly playing better NetHack right now than I ever have before.

I was annoyed yesterday by the ‘Mindbender’ level set (apparently lifted from a '90s game which I never played) in the puzzle game ‘Mirror Magic’. It advertises 100 levels, but it turns out that everything from 51 to 98 inclusive are pointless test levels, most of which are uncompletable due to not having an exit door anywhere, and even if they were they wouldn't actually be puzzles. That's annoying: I was really enjoying that level set. It's much more interesting than the ‘Deflektor’ set (which is lifted from a '90s game I did play). I'd just thought to myself ‘ooh, I'm half way through, which means there are another fifty levels of this high quality to look forward to’, and then found there weren't. Bah.

What's particularly annoying is that it wouldn't have been a disappointment at all if the maximum-level indicator had said ‘52’ from the start instead of ‘100’; I'd have felt a sense of achievement at completing the game, and only a mild sadness that there weren't any more fun puzzles to solve. So if anyone else is contemplating playing Mirror Magic, I thoroughly recommend the Mindbender levels over the Deflektor ones, but don't be fooled into expecting 100 of them!

My distressing tendency to see the other person's point of view to the exclusion of my own. I visited a cobbler at lunchtime to ask if the blister-inducing blemish in one of my new boots was fixable. He said yes but he'd have to keep the boots for a while and charge £20, and then asked me why on earth I hadn't taken them back for a replacement instead. I couldn't think of any good reason, so I left the cobbler's feeling very stupid. Ten minutes later, I remembered: I'd wanted to know whether the problem was cheap and quick to fix, because if so then I'd prefer to have it fixed and not have to break in the replacement boots all over again! After he told me it would take days and half the price of the boots, then it seemed obviously sensible to try taking them back first. But while I was talking to him, all I could see was the obvious stupidity of my course of action from his point of view, and I'd totally forgotten why I made sense really.

People who can't distinguish between a premeditated punishment and an inescapable logical consequence of their action, and who expect mitigating circumstances to protect them from the latter as well as the former. ‘Sorry I didn't do X for you; I had no idea you needed it, but I would have if I'd known.’ ‘Well, that wasn't my fault; I couldn't tell you, because my phone (as it might be) was on the blink.’ I don't doubt it was; but that doesn't change the fact that if I don't know something needs doing, I'm unlikely to spontaneously do it! It's not as if I deliberately didn't do it to punish them for their failure to tell me about it. Just because you weren't to blame doesn't mean I was.

The spurious ‘of’ in phrases of the form ‘it's not even that funny of a joke’. Only remarkable, really, because it's not one of my usual pet grammar peeves; but I've encountered it several times very recently, so it's temporarily appeared in my top ten. I don't care whether you can tenuously justify the presence of the ‘of’; the additional word costs time, effort and space and the phrase is definitely correct without it, so why not save everyone the hassle and leave it in the inkwell where it belongs?

The way hot drinks accelerate their cooling when there are only two mouthfuls left. It honestly shouldn't be too much to ask that I should be able to drink my coffee at a constant slowish rate and have it still warm by the end of the cup; but no, the laws of physics have to get all ‘heat capacity’ and ‘surface area to volume ratio’ about it. If there is a Creator, he obviously doesn't drink coffee, or he'd have sorted this one out at the start of the universe.

This weekend I have done very little. Yesterday I had a lie-in, a very long bath, lazed around with a book, then went to a party. Today I have had a long bath and lazed around with a book, and will probably wander over to the pub this afternoon to see who's there before going on to the Gallery for usual Sunday things.

This seems to be a running theme recently. Usually I attempt to pack work, free software, social life and sleep into 24 hours a day, with mixed success; for the past few weeks I've been experimenting with leaving out the free software, and I've been feeling a lot less tired. (Apart from this week just past, admittedly, but I blame two consecutive late nights and a nearly-cold for that.)

When I first started full-time work, I gave up free software completely because I simply didn't have enough energy to do it. I resigned from the head of the NASM project, which was my major thing at the time, and passed it on to a new maintainer. For about a year I existed solely as a corporate drone, doing virtually no programming beyond that required by my job. After a year I found I'd recovered enough energy to do free-time coding again, much to my relief, and so I resumed work on PuTTY (which was pretty new and primitive at the time) and that became my biggest project. Ever since then I've been struggling to fit what I want to do and what I have to do into the limited time I have, and I've been gradually running out of energy in the process.

So now I think it's time for another longish rest. I don't think I can sensibly resign from the PuTTY project; I think I wouldn't feel comfortable without giving my personal attention to ensuring urgent security fixes are done promptly and well. However, for anything short of urgent security fixes, my current intention is to do very little, to the maximum extent possible, for several months at least. This applies to PuTTY, it applies to my puzzle collection, and it applies to anything else I might take a fancy to doing. If I really get the urge to do something, I won't deliberately stop myself, but I'll restrict it to things which don't take up too much of my time or energy. (Perhaps one or two new puzzles, for example; those currently only seem to take me a couple of days each to write.)

Around this time next year I qualify for my second sabbatical from work (four weeks' contiguous paid holiday in addition to the normal year's allocation), due to having worked there for eight years. With any luck I ought to have enough energy by that time to be able to spend my sabbatical doing something useful. But on present showing, if I keep pushing myself until then, I'll just fall asleep for a month.

I certainly hope to resume my activities at some later date; I don't like thinking that my biggest contribution to society is as a small cog in a corporate machine, because I feel strongly that I can do more good than that. (I don't dispute that it is useful, in spite of my corporate efforts being directed primarily by profit rather than objective usefulness; it just never feels quite useful enough to be satisfying to me.)

Last month I emailed the city council and requested a black recycling box, because my flat didn't have one when I moved in and I'd got tired of taking stuff to the supermarket bottle bank. They said they'd deliver one, but I heard nothing further from them.

I mailed them back today and asked what had happened. They said they'd definitely left one outside my door, so someone must have walked off with it.

I wondered out loud, in the office, why anyone would bother to steal something you could get free of charge anyway by writing to the council. Someone said that perhaps it was more hassle to do it that way. Well, yes it is actually, because some blighter is stealing the things! But I'm sure that's circular reasoning, somehow. Arrgh.

They said they'd deliver me another one. I hope it stays put this time.

This morning I got up, looked out of the window at the roof of my car, and saw that the ice on it had formed a beautiful pattern of six-inch semicircles for no very clear reason. None of the other cars I could see from my window had the same thing. I immediately dived for my camera in the hope of posting a photo for people to admire and/or explain, only to find that important-looking bits were falling off said camera after I bashed it around unmercifully in my ever-present rucksack for two and a half years. Oh well. Apparently we're in for a cold winter, so if I get a new camera then the ice phenomenon will probably happen again at some point.

At the weekend I bought a packet of biscuits from Sainsbury's Freefrom range. They're rather nice; shortbread biscuits with bits of raspberry jam inside. They have one odd property, though, which is that the raspberry jam has not entirely stayed in its blobs, but has slightly permeated the entire inside of the biscuit – but not the outside. The result is that from the outside you see a normal-looking golden brown disc of shortbread, but when you bite into it it looks pinkish at the centre, giving you the rather curious impression that you're eating a medium rare biscuit. I fear that by the time I get to the end of the pack I'll be craving steak.

I got an old-pupils newsletter from one of my old schools last week. A girl I was at school with is now wicket keeper and opening batsman for the England women's cricket team, which won the women's Ashes this summer. I found an account of the matches on Wikipedia, and you couldn't go more than a few sentences without it saying something of the order of ‘and then Claire Taylor did something impressive’. I wonder if any of it managed to be televised in among the huge fuss made of the men's matches; I might have made an effort to watch some if I'd known.

Saturday was good. I wasn't really sure what I'd do for most of the morning, but then xanna phoned me up and suggested a pub lunch with some other people, which was very enjoyable; in the evening I wandered along to vyvyan's birthday drinks in another pub, and then we went on to hoiho's party where I played with bass instruments. That was odd. I used to be a violinist and I've dabbled a little in guitar and piano since then; a cello is a concept I can cope with (just about), but a double bass scares me because fundamentally I'm used to musical instruments which I can win a wrestling match with. Also everything I know how to play is a leading melody of some sort and sounds very odd played on a bass or a bass guitar.

Having demonstrated yesterday that I tend to think more readily about how to do something than about who might have already done it, it's now occurred to me that this is actually something of a theme in terms of what I find interesting.

In computing, I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin. One of the key differences between the two, it seems to me, is that a sysadmin has to be much more aware of the range of available software to do a job; they must know the pros and cons of the various options, and be able to determine the optimal choice to provide a given service in such a way as to strike the right balance between cost, reliability, speed and so on. A programmer, by contrast, is mostly dealing in the basic question of how to do something which either hasn't already been done or (for whatever reason) needs doing again. And one of the reasons why sysadmin attracts me much less than programming is simply that I find the latter much more interesting. I'm primarily interested in abstract questions of what can, or should, be done; the grubby details of what all the actual people in the actual world have done is of secondary interest to me.

This carries over without much change into other areas. A few years ago, for example, I had an opportunity to attend a talk on feminism, and I decided against it on the basis that it sounded likely to bore me rigid. The reason being, in terms of abstract moral philosophy and what should happen, feminism is pretty much a non-subject: you treat each person as a human being independently of sex except when there's a genuinely good reason for their sex to be relevant, and that's pretty much it. Everything else falls into the general area of how well the human race is currently doing at living up to that very simple principle, and/or how previous generations of the human race have made it unhelpfully difficult, and that's all much less interesting to me; once I've worked out what I should be doing, I simply do it to the best of my ability and move on to thinking about something else.

This morning I went to one of my company's regular marketing presentations, on the basis that I'd never actually been to one and I ought to at least have some idea of what went on in them. It turned out that a large part of the presentation centred around which other companies were doing stuff in a particular field, how much market share they had, what the differences were between what they were doing and what we were doing, and (to some extent) what we wanted to do about all this. And the same phenomenon turned out to apply: obsessively tracking what other people are doing is of very little interest to me compared to doing stuff myself. (Which is fine; I'm in the doing-stuff department, and the Marketing people are in the tracking-what-everyone-else-is-doing department, so they can get on with their jobs while I do mine and we'll communicate as necessary when the two interact.)

Of course, this isn't completely one-sided. I'm perfectly capable of being interested in what other people are doing if there's some reason why it's actually interesting: if it's a friend of mine doing it, or if it's something startling and new which I wouldn't have thought was possible, or if it's something whose results are important to me but which (for whatever reason) I'm not attempting myself, or no doubt many other reasons which I can't be bothered to list. But it seems to be generally the case, for me in particular, that ‘can’ and ‘should’ are of more intrinsic interest to me than ‘is’.