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As a result of successfully not losing a load of these files, I have a gradually growing collection of random unpublished musings; many mathematical (ranging from pointlessly pure mathematics through to applications to everyday life), some more practical (my recipe collection),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.

Trying to recapture your childhood is always dangerous. Books you read, games you played and TV you watched as a child are all things you can dig out and read, play or watch again; sometimes they'll be as good as you remember, but often they won't.

Usually that's because you have changed, of course; but not in this case. This month I remembered a game my father taught me some time around my late teens: you take the four digits of the current year, and you attempt to combine them arithmetically to form each number from 1 upwards and see how far you can get. You're allowed to add, subtract, multiply and divide, you're allowed to use parentheses (of course), and you're also allowed to start by concatenating some of the digits into larger numbers if you want. The catch is that you have to use all four digits every time; if one or two of them can easily be combined to produce the target you're after, you have to find a way to safely dispose of the others. The next year, you can start all over again and it'll all be completely different.

So in 1992, for example, I might have started with 1=2-1+9-9 and 2=1+2-9/9, got as far as 22=21+9/9, and had trouble with 23. It needn't stop there, of course; I might have skipped 23 and tried for things above that.

Like so many things one remembers fondly from one's childhood, this game is not as much fun as I remember it being; but this time it isn't me who's changed. When two of the digits of the current year are zeroes, it gets very boring! If anyone is contemplating having a go at this game, I urge them to wait until at least 2011; and I don't think the game will really recover all of its fun until some time around 2134.

I just popped into my local shop, ten minutes before it shut, to buy some milk for tomorrow's breakfast. Some of the plastic milk bottles were stamped with a best-before date of ‘21 OCT’, and some with ‘23 OCT’. So far, so unremarkable; but to the right of those groups were some bottles stamped ‘22A OCT’. Huh?

This time it was British Gas, who have sent a meter reader round to my house three times this week, but brilliantly did it during office hours every time; you'd think the obvious thing to try after a failure during working hours would be to try again out of them. Sometimes this sort of treatment makes me wonder whether normal-office-hours workers are actually an oppressed minority. But only briefly.

Anyway. Today's note said they needed to do a legally required inspection of my meter and I should call their 24-hour automated service to arrange an appointment. I duly dialled the number, got a menu saying ‘if you have a card-operated meter…’, pressed the ‘no I don't’ button, and found myself hearing a recorded voice telling me the office was now closed and I should call again during business hours.

Clearly this company doesn't understand the meaning of ‘24-hour’, ‘automated’ or ‘service’.

(As I write this, my brain has unexpectedly invented the word ‘Nonseal’, for things which do nothing remotely resembling what they say on the tin. Hmmm.)

I just phoned the city council's rubbish-collection helpline, in the hope of asking them to send me a black recycling box (which I've never had one of, and thought it was about time I did).

The phone promptly started blaring very loudly into my ear, starting half way through a recorded message of somebody telling me to make sure I had my black box. Er, yes, that's what I'm calling about; not a good start. After a minute or so this loud blaring recorded voice was interrupted by a much more bored recorded voice saying ‘your call is important to us’, at which point I realised that the first recorded voice was in fact on-hold music, only (even) less musical.

After five minutes I came off hold and got through to … wait for it … an answering machine. Arrgh! Given that my call was answered by a machine anyway, you'd think it could have taken a message immediately if it was going to, and ought only to have kept me on hold if I needed to speak to a human. Having one machine make me wait me five minutes for the privilege of speaking to another machine is staggeringly bad. I almost didn't manage to leave a message at all, because I was literally speechless with a mixture of umbrage and sheer bewilderment at this mindbogglingly stupid policy.

I did leave my address in the end. Perhaps they'll send me a black box. Perhaps they won't. I don't think I have it in me to try again any time soon.

As I was walking to Tesco to buy lunch just now, a very pretty girl going the other way on a bicycle gave me a dazzling smile.

My first thought was to wonder if she was someone I knew but hadn't immediately recognised. My second was to wonder if I might have appeared to be smiling at her due to screwing up my face slightly because I was facing into the sun. The idea that she might have smiled at me just because she felt like brightening my day only came third, and by the time it occurred to me to just take the smile for what it was and have my day brightened by it regardless of the reason, I'd already spent too long trying to work out the motivation for it and puzzlement was outweighing pleasure. Deliberately smiling back certainly wasn't an option, because by the time I thought of it she was long gone.

I think my problem is that the wrong parts of my brain are the quickest to start up, so that I've already looked it in the mouth by the time I notice that it's a gift horse. Sigh.

I hauled myself painfully out of bed at only the second alarm, and dragged myself into work for the first time in two weeks.

On the way in I stopped for petrol. My current habit whenever I buy petrol is to write down the details: date, volume, price and current mileage. (This is so that I can later on work out my car's real fuel consumption and compare it with the advertised one, so I can get a genuinely accurate figure for the total cost of car ownership, and generally just in case it comes in handy for any other reasons.) I did manage to write all that down this morning, but then I dropped the pencil into the passenger-side footwell. When I got to work I looked for the pencil and it simply wasn't there. Neither had it ended up down the side of the seat, or rolled into the rear footwell. I couldn't find it at all. I have a horrible feeling it's somehow managed to fall into a vital mechanism of some sort and this evening I'll change gears and hear an HB crunching noise.

Then I walked into the office, sat down at my desk, and discovered that a localised network outage had taken out my computer and about four near it. After all that, I could have had another hour in bed if only I'd known!

Clearly it is going to be one of those days. I also have two hundred and thirty emails to clear out of my inbox from the last two weeks…

For the past two nights I've found it actually difficult to get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 in the morning, which appears to be because my personal time zone has been slipping gradually over my two weeks of holiday. Yet tonight I was sitting in the pub and practically fell asleep, so I came home very early on the grounds that it's a better place to do so.

In other news, today's achievement was that I finally got round to printing up a sign to stick on my front door saying ‘NO FREE PAPERS PLEASE’. When I went to the pub I found a free paper on my doormat, which was annoying. I stepped over it, shut the front door from the outside, and discovered what appears to be the problem: the notice is barely even visible – let alone legible – when it's dark, which it is when the news distribution operative comes round.

Not sure what to do about this. Solutions include self-illuminating paper or getting the porch light fixed (it hasn't worked as long as I've lived here but never seemed very important before), although I'm uncertain that the latter would actually light up the sign owing to the wall casting a shadow. I wonder how other people solve this problem.

(What I really want is a semi-permeable letterbox which simply won't allow free newspapers or blatant direct-mailed adverts to be pushed through it, but will let through proper letters. I often think that being a programmer and an SF reader both contribute to my general impatience with the rather feeble limitations of real-world physical tech. I still want my stasis fridge and force-field saucepans, too.)

My primary aim for the two-week holiday which I'm now about two thirds of the way through was to catch up on my scary sleep deficit and stop feeling like the walking dead. I think this has been pretty much achieved; yesterday I woke up with a restless urge to do something interesting and start a new project.

I was admittedly then disheartened when the project I attempted turned out not to work terribly well, but I expect that to happen every so often: even with my fairly risk-averse habit of thinking carefully about something before I set finger to keyboard, there will still turn out to be cases once in a while where something unforeseen makes the project impossible or much harder than I'd thought or causes me to go a long way down a blind alley. These things happen. It might still be salvageable.

A lot of my relaxation for the past week has revolved around using emulators to rediscover computer games from my childhood. I've tried this a few times before with varying degrees of success, but last week I managed to do significantly better than before in finding versions of my favourite games which could (for example) be played right to the end without crashing, and which didn't suffer from strange keyboard handling bugs. So in the past week I've accomplished one or two things that I tried and failed to do when I was thirteen, which is nice.

Also I've just finished reading ‘The War of the Flowers’ by Tad Williams. Tad Williams has a tendency to write things that are too long, either slightly or massively: his ‘Memory, Sorrow and Thorn’ series is only a bit too long and is good apart from that, but the ‘Otherland’ series was at least three books too long. So when I saw a one-volume stand-alone – i.e. short – Tad Williams work in the bookshop, I thought it had to be worth a try, and in fact I really enjoyed it.

So all of that has been pretty good in general; but the major success of the last ten days has been in the area of food. I've discovered that Sainsburys sell gluten-free fish fingers and chicken kievs, the latter of which in particular is a comfort food I've definitely missed since being diagnosed coeliac. I've also discovered that their packaged egg fried rice is gluten-free, which is good because although I can now cook a couple of halfway plausible Chinese-like meals I have as yet not managed any credible attempt at EFR. And a visit to my family the weekend before last introduced me to ‘Real Foods Corn Thins’, a biscuity snacky thing which appear to be the ideal GF base on which to spread things such as sardines if you can't be bothered with the lengthy hassle of preparing GF toast. As a result of all this, the range of things I'm able to eat and enjoy has expanded by quite a lot within the last week; in addition, the extra time granted by being on holiday has given me the leisure to cook for myself more than usual, so this has been a gastronomically varied and good week.

I might or might not actually manage to do something seriously productive with the remaining few days of my break. I generally hope to, but try not to push myself too hard because there's no point in trying to force enthusiasm and energy to appear. I have at least managed to rest convincingly without finding my time taken up by endless annoying chores, and that's an achievement in itself for a holiday.

Those who would sacrifice essential correctness to buy a few minor performance gains deserve neither correctness nor performance.

(with apologies to Benjamin Franklin)

There's something special about the very last day of work before a holiday. I think it has to do with the fact that when my alarm goes off in the morning, I don't just reach out and shut it up as usual; I reach out and turn it off, not to be re-enabled for weeks. Somehow, that tiny action – involving only about four more button presses than the usual operation – is enough to put me in a holiday mood right from the start of the day, and makes the last day of work feel more like a passing inconvenience than part of a long-term demand on my time.

I suppose that it must be an early-mornings thing. Nice though it would be if all my time were my own, the actual time spent at work isn't actively unpleasant on a continuous basis. The single most intensely nasty part of a working life is getting out of bed at 8am every weekday; so I suppose in that sense this is already holiday, because I've now done that for the last time until 10th October. There are seven hours of actual work left to do, but the worst is already over.