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".

I walk out to Tesco and back at lunchtime, and suffer not a whisper of hayfever. Come back to the office, sit at my desk in a clean air-conditioned room, and now I feel a sneezing fit coming on.

I also got bellowed at by louts cycling on the pavement on my way to buy lunch. In such situations I tend to relieve my annoyance by imagining that I could wave a hand and cause some vaguely appropriate justice to magically apply itself, but in this case I was particularly annoyed by being unable to think of anything suitably poetically just. For example, if I could have waved a hand and caused all the wheels to fall off their bikes, that would have been momentarily satisfying but would also have meant they were still being obnoxious near me rather than receding at high speed. Twanging them half way to Scotland would have preserved the latter property but would only have inflicted them on some other poor innocent. Nuking from orbit is probably excessive.

In other news, this is the kind of headline that makes me sorry Have I Got News For You isn't currently on air: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/02/wteapot02.xml.

This week I have been doing stuff at work, in all seriousness, which qualifies as an implementation of a design principle invented some years ago as a 1st April joke.

Also this week I have written twenty-five thousand words (of developer documentation for my puzzle collection, since an unprecedented number of people simultaneously threatened to write additional games for it and I thought it might help if they all knew how to). This mostly consisted of just dumping the entire contents of my brain into a text editor; there was very little need to think hard about what I was writing, since I had it all pretty clear in my mind already and the limiting factor was how fast I could type it. Except that, as it turned out, the limiting factor was the bit of my brain through which knowledge has to be squeezed to turn it into linear sentences; at one point I found that part of my brain suffering fatigue, so that although I still had the knowledge in my head I just couldn't form it into coherent sentences to write it down – and yet I could still type, and program, and do anything that didn't require forming sentences. A very strange feeling, and not one I've had before. Sleep sorted it out, thankfully.

Sleep, however, has not been a respite from the general strangeness of the week, because it's also Strange Dreams Season. On the majority of mornings this week I've woken up and thought ‘huh?’. To give the most memorable example: on one night of this week I had a rather upsetting and nightmarish dream in which I was very distressed to find I'd lost the power to levitate objects with my mind. The odd thing was that, as well as (obviously) not having this power while awake, I hadn't even had it during the dream!

It might make a change to have a sensible few days. Then again, perhaps it would just be boring.

The question ‘who are you?’ came up in a memetic LJ quiz the other day, and I gave a somewhat flip answer, as did many of the other people who answered it.

As befits a Babylon 5 fan, I have actually given some real thought to this question from time to time, and I do have a more serious answer to it. So I thought I'd muse a little, in my customary armchair-philosophical fashion, on the question and what it means.

I just discovered an optical illusion. Never had that happen before; I've seen optical illusions and heard explanations of them, but this is the first time I've experienced an illusion I'd never seen before and had to work out why it happened for myself.

The background image on my Linux desktop is an indistinct fuzzy cloudy sort of pattern, because I rather like it and I find it very easy to visually distinguish sharply defined objects in front of it. Over this indistinct image I brought up a window for one of my more recent puzzle games, and played it in the normal way. When I'd finished, I leaned back in my swivel chair; and when I brought the chair forward again, I noticed a strange thing. The fuzzy cloudy background around the Dominosa window looked as if it was expanding! That is, not just expanding in the normal way you expect things to expand when your eyes move closer to them, but beyond that – it looked as if it was expanding relative to the screen and to the puzzle window.

I leaned back and moved forward again: same result. Of course the background didn't really expand, but it looked as if it was doing so for just the moment when my head was in motion towards the monitor.

My tentative explanation for the phenomenon is: the cloudy background I use doesn't look like a foreground object. It's more of a background thing, something that you expect to see at a very long distance (like, in fact, clouds). Now the apparent size of an object is inversely proportional to its distance from your eye[1]; so if you move your head twice as close to something it appears twice as big. So suppose I were looking at a foreground object in front of a distant background, and I moved my head sharply to put it twice as close to the foreground object. The apparent size of the foreground object would double, yet the apparent size of the background would barely change (since the relative change in my distance from it would be a tiny fraction of a per cent). So the foreground object would expand relative to the background, in my vision, and in particular a larger amount of background would be hidden from my view behind the foreground object. Thus, this is what my eye expected to see when I brought my head sharply towards a well defined foreground-looking object against an indistinct and cloudy-looking background; and when that didn't happen (because in fact both were displayed on the same monitor and their apparent sizes expanded at the same rate), my visual cortex must have initially assumed it to be because the background was physically expanding – as if the clouds themselves were changing in shape and size as I moved my head.

[1] (That is, in conventional flat-plane perspective; it gets fiddly and trigonometric if you start thinking in the more correct terms of angles subtended at the eye, but the flat plane approximation is adequate for this purpose.)

It's stopped happening now, annoyingly; I think my visual cortex must have figured out it was being had and adapted. Perhaps it was listening in on my conscious mind while I was working out what had happened.

I don't know if this illusion was specific to me or will happen for anyone else; so, in a spirit of experimentation, here's a snapshot of the desktop around the window in question: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050723-illusion.png. To (hopefully) activate the illusion, arrange to move your head rapidly towards the image from a distance of (say) about 1m to (say) about 1/2 m. I found a good way to achieve this was to lean back in my swivel chair and then rapidly let it return to the upright position, but your mileage may vary. (This diary does not endorse dangerous leaning-back-on-chairs and accepts no liability for any injury incurred as a result. If in doubt, get a responsible adult to help you.)

My weekend was taken up almost entirely by my puzzle collection. The maintenance load for this is starting to ramp up, which is a bit scary for a software project intended to supply nothing more than a bit of fun.

On Saturday morning, marnanel posted a link to a rather fun Flash game, at which I took one look and thought ‘very nice, shame it runs in a huge web browser window and only has a fixed set of levels’ and promptly took steps to rectify the situation. By Saturday evening, ‘Untangle’ was part of my puzzle collection.

While I was writing that, three patches arrived in my inbox from various people: a bug fix, a speedup, and one implementing another new game. So I applied one, quibbled with another, and made a note of the things I'd need to polish before committing the third; and then, satisfied that I'd left myself enough notes that I'd remember what I was doing the next day, I wandered off to the Rivendell house-cooling.

On the way to the party I told myself I must try to avoid being a Puzzles bore; when I've been concentrating on one thing all day I tend to find it hard to change gear and start talking about something else. Didn't work, because of course people said things like ‘so what have you been up to recently’… And then claroscuro showed off her new mobile phone which is also a Palm, and of course someone has recently ported my puzzle collection to run on Palms, so she downloaded that and I actually got to see it run for the first time, which was kind of cool if also quite scary.

Slept badly on Saturday night; woke up before 8am the next day with good ideas running through my head, so I got up and went and polished the new third-party puzzle, ‘Black Box’, until it was committable, and committed it. Also I dug out the piece of magic CSS which Owen had written for me the other day, and used it to redesign the Puzzles web page so that you don't have to scroll down quite so far to get to the downloads. Then the rest of the day, until I headed Gallerywards for the usual Sundaying, was taken up with small polishings and fixes and emails pointing out mistakes in my recent work. Even at the Gallery I checked my email part way through the evening and discovered another patch I'd been sent, which I quickly checked and applied before going back to being sociable.

Considering that last week, before all this started, I had just implemented a new puzzle ‘Dominosa’, the net result is that (a) in the space of one week the collection has acquired three new puzzles and a new website design, and (b) I'm now simultaneously sick of the word ‘puzzles’ and unable to think about anything else!

I remember when the collection started; it had four games, running on two platforms. I always said that my aim was eventually to collect lots of games and have them all run on lots of platforms, but I felt a bit uncomfortable about it at the time because it really wasn't a very impressive collection – just a small webpage with big ideas. But now we have seventeen puzzles running on four platforms, which I think is actually pretty good going.

Bah. It's got all hot again; it's been very hard to get my brain into gear this week. The air conditioning at work helps, but not really enough.

Also my personal hayfever season seems to be beginning. I was hoping it'd hold off until August, but I suppose we're half way to August already…

Anyone pointing binoculars through my open kitchen window a couple of hours ago would have encountered a rather strange sight: a software engineer industriously chopping onions, while wearing a pair of blue-tinted Speedo swimming goggles. I had suddenly remembered that I had these in a cupboard along with some very elderly swimwear, and decided in a spirit of experimentation to see how they worked as impromptu eye protection against onion vapour.

As protection, they worked pretty well; the onions I bought this week are of a type which usually produce a well-above-average quantity of noxious vapour, and yet my eyes didn't sting perceptibly at all. Unfortunately, they misted up rather quickly (which I'd always assumed was an effect of wearing them in water, but apparently not) and so my vision was significantly impaired; I'm not totally convinced it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

My goggle-impaired vision was particularly inconvenient while trying to work out what had happened to my garlic crusher, which decided today was a good day to die. I put a clove of garlic in, worked the handle as usual, and was rather surprised to find a whole clove of garlic arriving on the far side of the mesh. This is where the Speedo MurkyVision™ didn't help; if I hadn't still had the goggles on I probably would have noticed quite quickly that the entire mesh had broken off the frame and swung to one side. As it was I stared at the assembly in some confusion for several minutes before finally working out – mostly by touch – what was going on. This is now the second garlic crusher I've broken by means of what I thought was perfectly normal use, viz. using it to crush garlic. (Though the previous one was much more impressive, since the mesh basket was made of thick metal and yet somehow a normal garlic-crushing level of force managed to bend it so far out of shape that it never worked again.) I'm almost tempted to wonder if I've missed some vital point about how to use the things.

Still, a garlic crusher doesn't do anything that a sharp knife and some patience can't do in a pinch, so I got my food in the end. Phew.

I had a thought yesterday about guessing games.

It sounds like a fun idea on paper, if a bit brain-bending; also it strikes me that someone must have thought of it, or something like it, before. If not (and perhaps even if so), I wonder if it's worth a try.

So Luke and Darth Vader are having their lightsaber duel in Cloud City, and Vader is just about to reveal Luke's parentage and offer him co-rulership of the Galaxy…

… but at that point he might perfectly well have thought ‘oh, sod it’ and just killed him. Easier dead than son.

I could tell I was a geek, because as I sat in fanf and rmc28's wedding this afternoon, I was sure that I was supposed to be thinking solemn thoughts about love, lifelong companionship, and possibly God. Instead I found myself – as usual at weddings, come to think of it – mostly worrying about the transactional integrity of the procedure.

What happens if the bride and groom have exchanged vows but haven't yet been pronounced man and wife, and then the ceremony is unavoidably interrupted by (for example) the church catching fire: does the wedding roll back, or commit? What happens if the interruption occurs after they've been pronounced man and wife but before signing the register: are they married in the eyes of God but not the Law, and might they have to rectify the legal side at a registry office at some later date? And worse still, what happens if one has made the vows to the other but not vice versa: do you end up with one person having sworn in the sight of God to be faithful to someone who has sworn nothing in return, and thus (at least theoretically) the latter is able to go and marry someone else leaving the former poor sap in a bit of a bind? It all seems terribly fraught with danger; there should be proper backups kept in case of accident.

Anyway; fortunately nothing of the sort happened and the happy couple are now safely married. I'm off out to the bring-and-share-food reception soon, but first I'm briefly back at home so as to cook the food I'm bringing.

Extra points to this wedding for having the hymn music in the service booklet as well as the words, so that I actually knew what I was supposed to be singing; unfortunately it turned out that I'd forgotten how key signatures worked (or at least couldn't dig it out of my dusty mental music-theory attic fast enough, perhaps because I was still worrying about wedding atomicity :-), but I got there in the end.