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.

It's rather disturbing to compare the first paragraph of http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1574003,00.html with the Four-Stage Strategy: http://www.yes-minister.com/polterms.htm#4%20Stage%20Strategy.

Sparked by a random song lyric, I've spent a fair amount of the past few days reading back through various text archives I have from 1997-8, the second half of my time as a student. Online diaries, messages exchanged with friends; that sort of thing.

I understand it's traditional to look back on one's time at university and see it as the best years of one's life, and indeed that's what I find myself thinking. So I thought I'd muse a bit about how and why that's the case.

I lost several hours of sleep on Friday night owing to excessive cold. Therefore yesterday I switched over to my winter quilt (it would probably have been clever to have done this in the middle of Friday night, in fact, but I was too half-asleep to think of it), and last night I wasn't too cold any more.

I still didn't sleep properly, however; I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep because of a strange rapid thumping sound at the barest threshold of audibility. For a while I seriously thought it was my own heartbeat, which would have been rather worrying since it was really quite fast for a pulse rate. It also kept fading in and out of audibility, so I also wondered whether I'd imagined it. And the more worried I got, the more my heartbeat became faster and louder, which didn't help either.

Eventually I convinced myself that it was real enough to investigate; opened the bedroom window and discovered that then it became much louder and had chords above it; it was of course the insistent bass beat of some neighbour or other's party. If I'd figured that out immediately, I'd probably have gone back to sleep, but my curiosity had been piqued and I'd woken up fully in the course of figuring out what was going on. Sigh.

One more week of work, then I'm off for two weeks. I'm building up rather a large sleep deficit which I intend to spend a lot of my holiday catching up on; in the absolutely ideal scenario I'll go to bed on Friday evening and not wake up until Tuesday afternoon, just in time to eat an extremely large meal and head out to the Calling :-) Until then, I've just got to carry on operating through increasing levels of exhaustion and hope I don't mess anything up at work too badly…

On a more frivolous note, here's a silliness that occurred to me at emperor and atreic's housewarming last night.

‘Why, Grandma, what big prepositions you've got!’

‘All the better to end sentences with.’

As I was coming down Milton Road on the way home, what had been a plausible but uninteresting shower quite suddenly turned into an absolute torrent. I believe this is the first time ever in my history of car-owning that I've had to use the ‘frantic’ setting on my windscreen wipers just to be able to see out properly. Also notable was that I had a serious need to use an umbrella when walking from the car to my front door – despite parking (as usual) in such a way that the walk was three metres.

This is serious rain. I am impressed.

A few months after I started working for ARM, I missed my first day of work due to illness. I was living at the Gallery at the time, and I clearly remember telling Gareth I'd called in sick. ‘Ooh,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I can phone Marcus and call in stupid.’

Some days I think one should indeed be able to call in stupid. Some days I'm so completely incompetent that I have a hard time believing I'm capable of having a beneficial or even a neutral effect on the affairs of my company; on those days I think they ought to allow me to stay at home and not get out of bed – and this ought to be justifiable to them on grounds of purest corporate self-interest, with no need to bring socialist ideas like employee welfare into it.

I have an hour and a half of today left in which to try really hard not to break anything. Wish me luck.

It seems to be a common form of words in fiction to talk about people's eyes being ‘alight’, or ‘blazing’, or occasionally ‘flashing’, or having suddenly ‘lit up’ at some particular moment.

I've always vaguely wondered about this. Obviously they don't literally mean that people's eyes emit self-generated light under the influence of particular emotions. (Well, perhaps they do in some SF or fantasy, but the use of this descriptive form is by no means restricted to technologically or magically enhanced characters.)

A reasonably plausible fallback option might be that when eyes open or move in a particular way it alters their reflective properties; but I honestly can't say I've ever seen anything in the real world which could remotely be attributed to a phenomenon of this type. On the other hand, I don't tend to watch people's eyes all that much – I couldn't tell you my own eye colour or that of people I've gone out with, let alone that of anyone else – so perhaps it does happen and I just fail to notice.

It's been brought particularly to my attention in the last week because I felt an expression on my own face which I somehow subconsciously associated with one of the above phrases. It felt somehow right to me that if I'd been writing fiction involving that expression, I would have been forced to describe it as ‘his eyes lit up’ or something similar; and yet I've never seen anyone's eyes actually do that, and have no particular evidence to suggest that mine did at that moment. I just felt that in an ideal world they ought to have done.

This question has been faintly bothering me for years and years, but as a result of the above it's finally made it to the top of my list of things to be curious about. So, a straw poll for my readers: has anybody ever seen someone's eyes genuinely do, in real life, anything that could be described by any of the luminous metaphors listed above?

While we're at it, I've also never been entirely convinced by descriptions like ‘his face didn't move, but his eyes clearly showed his gratitude’. Has anyone seen that in real life, or is it a commonplace exaggeration appearing only in written fiction?

It's been a puzzly few days. Again.

Today I've finally managed to commit mpinna's new puzzle into my collection. The collection now stands at 21 puzzles, which is – not to put too fine a point on it – a fair few. I'm half tempted to have a coming-of-age party for it :-)

Also today I've implemented a new difficulty level in Solo, after a brainstorming session with Gareth earlier in the week turned up an interesting new form of deduction.

Earlier this week somebody mailed me and offered to pay to have me implement a particular type of puzzle, which is rather scary. And several times in the last week I've been speculatively sent descriptions of puzzle rules in the hope that they'll strike me as interesting enough to implement. I fear that if things carry on this way my puzzle collection will take over my life the way PuTTY did. It's terrifying.

Particularly worrying is what happened this morning, when someone said they'd like to write a puzzle for my collection but wasn't sure what, and so I passed on one of the suggestions I'd been emailed. That seemed like an obviously sensible thing to do, but it struck me as typical of what always seems to happen to me, which is that I start software projects out of a love of programming, but can't seem to stop ending up in these managerial/coordinator roles where I'm passing on suggestions from people with ideas but no time to people with time but no ideas, or constantly accepting and rejecting other people's code submissions, or running frantically to keep up with maintainer workload, or drafting broad policy and finding it being implemented by other people; I'd like to just sit down and write code, and I do so every chance I get, but it seems terribly difficult to find the time some days in among dealing with all the consequences of having done it in the past.

Anyway. I've been slaving over a computer for the whole of yesterday evening and the whole of this evening, so now I'm going to go and get some well-deserved sofa time before bed. Phew.

Just came back from the hospital, where I had my six-month follow-up appointment after being declared coeliac in February. I said I hadn't noticed much difference in everyday life since going on the diet; perhaps I need a bit less sleep than I used to, but perhaps not, and not by much in any case. The gastroenterologist pointed out that I was gradually gaining weight in spite of having stopped pigging out on pizza and Chinese takeaways, and that this probably implies that I'm absorbing nutrition better than I used to.

He stated that as if it was a good thing, but it seems somehow unfair to me. If I'd continued to eat pizza and lemon chicken and continued to get fat, fair enough, that's the price you pay for nice food. And if I'd gone on a diet and got thin again, that would be fair enough too. But the net effect of this gluten-free diet appears to be that I'm not allowed to eat pizza and Chinese and I still get fat, and regardless of subtle positive effects on my long-term health I can't help feeling a bit hard done by there.

Oh well. The good news is that he doesn't think it'll be necessary to have me unpleasantly poked and prodded a second time; a routine blood test should be adequate to confirm that my condition has improved as a result of the diet.

Back at work today, after two days of a cold. Except that when I came in this morning I had a horrifying sneezing fit which made it quite difficult to drive: I hope that's hayfever (for which this is roughly my peak season) rather than the remaining cold, in which case it should go away now I'm in the air-conditioned office. If it's the cold I might have to go home again, and I was getting restless.

Being off work with a mild cold is terrible for guilt, because I sit on the sofa, do nothing, and feel fine, making me feel bad that I'm at home. Fortunately (ish), at one point I ran out of food and had to go out shopping, and then I felt headachey and dizzy and that reminded me that I really was ill; but it's difficult to remember that when you're sitting on a comfy sofa and feeling OK.

In other news … the other day mpinna sent me a draft of the puzzle he's working on for my collection, which is worryingly good fun; I can tell it's a good one when my code review goes slowly because I keep stopping for just one more go. Then I sent back a mail which said ‘I'll be happy to accept this into the collection provided the following corrections are made’, which made me feel worryingly like a PhD examiner. Perhaps I should award a qualification for successfully submitting a puzzle. Puzzle Developer, or PzD for short :-)

At the weekend I watched cjwatson and ghoti get married, which was nice. The wedding was disturbingly Catholic; the congregation kept being expected to mutter ‘amen’ and ‘and also with you’ and similar miscellaneous stuff at various points, and in the absence of the usual cheat sheet I had absolutely no idea when it was appropriate to do any of this. Then they said the Hail Mary, of which I know virtually nothing beyond a vague feeling that I can guess the first two words. Then the Lord's Prayer showed up and I thought ‘thank goodness, something I do know’. Except that I didn't even know that, it turned out, because their version was two lines shorter than the one I knew. All of which, I think, conclusively demonstrates me to be a Protestant atheist.

Still, that wasn't a big problem. And there was a silly photo session, a mead-enabled reception, caterers who had specially provided gluten-free food for me (and a terrifying quantity of it too!), and all the usual good stuff. At one point my umbrella became filled with confetti, which was odd.

Anyway. Now I need to wade through a rather scary quantity of e-mail backlog from the two days I've been off work.

In principle it ought to be a good thing that, when you think of a really appalling pun, you can type it into Google and find out whether it's original or not. In practice, it so often isn't that it's just disheartening.

Results 1 – 8 of about 10 for "paypal infallibility".