‘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’.

My trouble, as a geek, is that I'm generally three quarters of the way towards working out how to do something from first principles before it even occurs to me to see if anyone else has done it already.

( this happened to me yesterday in some detail )

Every so often, in the course of my life, I think about something. Often, when I've thought about it, I write something down about it in a text file on a computer, to maximise the chance of me not losing the results of my thinking, and being able to look those results up when the thing in question next occurs to me.

As a result of successfully not losing a load of these files, I have a gradually growing collection of random unpublished musings; many mathematical (ranging from pointlessly pure mathematics through to applications to everyday life), some more practical (my recipe collection), and one or two in other fields such as literature. A representative set of examples might be:

• a collection of fractions with particularly cute decimal expansions (such as 100/9899, whose expansion displays the Fibonacci sequence)
• an analysis of the optimal strategy for a driver approaching traffic lights
• a failed attempt to derive a generally usable meaning for the phrase ‘twice as likely’
• a recipe for satay sauce
• a set of notes on the various ways in which I've so far failed to cook coeliac-friendly lemon chicken
• notes on my recent re-reading of the Narnia series (I hadn't read them since before I knew anything much about Christianity, and was curious to see just how extensive its reputed Christian allegory actually was)
• a small collection of ideas for SF or fantasy novels which I will (let's face it) never make even a token attempt to write
• instructions for teaching oneself the juggling trick known as ‘Rubenstein's Revenge’, which I posted to Usenet more than once back in my serious-juggling days and saved in case I ever needed to post it again

… and so on. All a bit eclectic, not all with a happy ending, and in many cases not very well written, because none of it was particularly intended for other people to read.

But the more stuff like this I randomly jot down, the more I idly wonder if any of it might be useful or interesting to anyone else. As a general supporter of the idea that all other things being equal information ought to be free, I occasionally feel faintly guilty that I write this stuff and don't even consider publishing it. It probably wouldn't take me too much effort to polish up quite a lot of these writings and shove them up on a junk-pile page on my website, and at times I'm inclined to feel that even if only two or three people have their lives the least bit enriched by that then it might be worth me putting the (minimal) effort in.

On the other hand, some of it's controversial; the Narnia example above is a good one. While I'd be happy to make my notes on Narnia available to anyone who's particularly interested in knowing what I thought, and also happy to receive genuinely interesting comments pointing out things I might have missed, I don't particularly fancy the idea of receiving hate mail from people who think I'm attacking their religion, or well-meaning attempts to persuade me to see it all differently. (And I also wouldn't want to get into a discussion deep enough to require reference to the books, since I've now given them back to the person I borrowed them from.) I worry that if I publish this sort of thing on my website it might be interpreted as a general invitation to send comment and criticism, and I'm not sure I want to do that.

I'd be interested to know what my readers think. People who read this diary, after all, are precisely people who are interested in random things that happen to cross my mind (or who are at least too polite to say they're not :-), so if anyone is going to want to read any of this stuff then I'd expect someone round here to be among them. Any thoughts?

Two hours ago I encountered a post on rec.puzzles asking why the type of puzzle known as a ‘ditloid’ is so named. I'd never heard the name before, but it turned out to have a brief Wikipedia entry which included an etymology, so I posted a link in response.

Just now, I went back to look at the Wikipedia page again, and found that it had more than doubled in size. Checking the revision history confirms that someone has filled it out significantly within the past two hours.

It seems reasonably likely that the timing isn't coincidence, which would imply that whoever edited it probably had it drawn to their attention by my post on rec.puzzles. That's just a little scary, somehow.

I now have a positive identification of the tune I posted yesterday. I had one piece of information I didn't mention in this diary when I posted the tune, because I wasn't entirely sure of its accuracy and didn't want to skew anyone else's unbiased judgment. That information was one of the lyrics sung to the tune; I eventually identified it by creatively googling for that lyric. (I'd tried this several times before, but this time I added some random search terms suggested by people who responded to my last post; so despite me having identified it myself, posting it here was a useful exercise. Thanks for all your help, people who helped.)

I had expected that this would be the end of the matter: that having worked out where the tune comes from, I would snap my fingers, kick myself, and exclaim something along the lines of ‘Oh, of course it is’, and be forevermore unpuzzled. Well, on this particular topic anyway.

However, as it turned out, it doesn't work that way: having identified the tune, I'm now more confused than I started out. The tune in question (adjusted slightly for my imperfect musical memory, but unmistakably the thing I was thinking of) appears in the middle of a '70s hit called ‘Playground in My Mind’ by Clint Holmes. The only trouble is, I've never in my life heard of either the title or the artist. And although the lyric I remembered is indeed present, exactly where I thought it was, not a single one of the other lyrics rings any bells whatsoever.

So I'm none the wiser as to where I might have encountered this fragment of music. Was it on a film soundtrack, perhaps? IMDB says yes: it was in a film called ‘Old School’ (2003), which I've also never heard of before. Furthermore, it looks like the kind of film I'd remove my own visual cortex with a wooden spoon rather than watch, so it seems extremely unlikely that I encountered it half way through on TV and decided to keep watching. So that probably isn't it.

I'm left with the suspicion that I encountered the same tune somewhere other than in the song I cite above. Perhaps someone else parodied it (and perhaps they changed all the lyrics except for the one I remembered, which is actually quite plausible). Or perhaps my snippet wasn't original to the Clint Holmes song: it's quite different from the ‘main’ tune surrounding it, and could perfectly well have been put in there as a reference to something pre-existing.

But bah. I wish I'd never started now. I'm more confused than I was to begin with!

The following tune has been wandering occasionally around my head for some months if not a year or so, and I've no idea what it is, and it's really bugging me that I can't remember.

It took me some faffing to get this into a suitable format; I actually ended up with several suitable formats. So here we go. I've got a MIDI file (very small to download, and Windows Media Player ought to cope): http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20051107-name-that-tune/tune.mid. Just in case that doesn't work for everyone, here's an MP3 version (larger, but ought to get the job done): http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20051107-name-that-tune/tune.mp3. And finally, for those without sound or who prefer to do these things visually, here's the tune written down:

(I don't have absolute pitch, so I've transposed it into C for minimum sharps-and-flats hassle. People who do have absolute pitch should not take this as indicating anything whatsoever about the key the real thing is in.)

I woke up this morning with a fragment of a tune running round my head, and no idea where it came from. I've just managed to identify it, thankfully, but it's been driving me mad in the two hours between then and now; and there's another tune fragment which I've been trying to identify for months if not years.

What I'd therefore like to do is to post the tune in my diary so that all my readers can see if they know it; but I don't know of any sensibly standard way to represent music in ASCII. I could sing it into a microphone and post a link to an MP3 (or, probably more usefully, synthesise it programmatically into an MP3, which wouldn't require recording hardware and also wouldn't involve my poor singing voice complicating the issue), or I could write it down in musical notation and post a link to a picture; but both of those solutions strike me as woefully wasteful of bandwidth given that the actual information content of the few bars I can remember ought in principle to be no more than a line or two of text. I could enter it into some sort of sequencer program and post the file saved from that, but that suffers from standardisation problems: it would limit my audience to people with the same sequencer program.

If only everybody had a Spectrum, I could post a sequence of BEEP commands which would play the tune, and this would actually be a more standard low-bandwidth approach than anything else I'd thought of. It even briefly occurred to me that you can get Spectrum emulators for most operating systems… But that's not a good idea either, because the trouble with Spectrum emulators is that you can't cut and paste into them, so it would be a matter of everyone manually typing in the BEEP commands I posted.

I must be missing something obvious. Is there no sensible way at all for me to post a few lines in a text-based forum and have the majority of readers be able to cut and paste that text into something which will convert it into a possibly recognisable tune?

I want a device which consists of a pair of lower legs and feet, jointed in the right places, modelled exactly on my own lower legs, but made of metal. When I buy new shoes or boots, I should be able to put the boots on the metal legs, turn the device on, and have the legs spend a few hours automatically running on a treadmill.

Then I'd be able to break in new footwear without getting all the bruises and blisters on my own feet. It would probably be faster, too.

(I'm at work in my old shoes today. I doubt I'll be ready to wear the new boots on a regular basis for a while yet. Ow.)

Someone apparently sent an SMS to my landline last night, which was very weird. I'd recently heard you could do this, but had been uncertain of exactly how it would work. What happened was that an automated message centre phoned me up and told me I had a message, then offered a menu of options including reading the message out loud. It also offered me the choice of deleting or keeping it, so I assume that if I hadn't answered the phone at all it would have kept it and perhaps tried again later.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem 100% prepared to deal with an answering machine, which is what it in fact got. It seemed to have started reading its automated spiel as soon as my answerphone picked up, which meant that what my answerphone actually recorded cut in half way through the incoming spiel after it had finished reading its outgoing automated spiel. So the first thing I heard was the second half of the sender's phone number, which was less than helpful.

Then it offered me a phone menu (press 1 to listen to the message, 2 to delete etc), and of course my answerphone did none of these things. Fortunately, after a delay it defaulted to reading the message at me (albeit rather badly). Then it gave me the menu again, and after a delay it read the message a second time, complete with the full sending number (aha!). After my answerphone did nothing the third time, it automatically deleted the message from the message centre, and proceeded to advertise the landline-SMS service at me, giving me two phone numbers and a URL. Then it hung up.

So I do know who the message was from (the phone number wasn't one I recognised, but I found out whose it was by typing it into Google, and the answer I got was consistent with what I could make out of the somewhat garbled message itself) and I basically know what it was trying to say, which I suppose is pretty good going. However, I'm mostly very amused at the idea of two machines talking to one another on the phone in English :-)

(Oddly, the text message appears to have come to me via BT Text, which is strange because I'm not a BT customer.)

It's not often that you go shopping, return empty-handed, and consider the trip a success.

I did yesterday, however. My two objectives were to sell a signet ring which my grandfather had left me many years ago and which I've been putting off doing anything about, and to buy some new footwear. So I went into town with the ring on my finger, on the grounds that this seemed like the best way not to lose it, and returned without it and with the new boots on my feet. (I was admittedly carrying my old shoes in my rucksack, which is sort of cheating on the ‘empty-handed’ stakes, but nothing I'd bought was in my hands or in my bag so I think the letter of the claim isn't violated. Quite.)

( wafflings about jewellers )

( wafflings about boots )

So I returned from my shopping trip with an absence of rings on my fingers and an absence of annoying laces on my toes, and nothing in my hands whatsoever. Success!

Got up yesterday, went to work as usual. Half way through the day, began feeling a bit off; this wasn't terribly surprising since I'd been feeling as if on the verge of a cold all week. Stuck it out until 5:30, went home, did nothing all evening.

Woke up this morning, didn't feel all that bad but decided it would be safest to stay off work anyway in case things got worse. Accordingly, spent the day doing absolutely nothing on the sofa. I'd normally expect this to make me feel better, but in spite of my best efforts I now have a splitting headache of doom. I suppose that at least vindicates my hunch that today would be a good day not to go to work, but on the rather more immediate downside MY HEAD HURTS. So much for cunning plans.