It was the Calling yesterday, and I completely forgot. That's unheard of for me since I started going back there. I've occasionally missed one due to other engagements, illness, bad mood or sheer tiredness, but this is the first time I've missed the Calling simply because I clean forgot it was on. I feel astonishingly silly.

I have a vague feeling that the unconventional timing of the last Calling might have thrown my normally reliable ability to count to two weeks, but even so that's not much of an excuse. So if anyone reading this would have expected, or perhaps even liked, to see me at the Calling, let it be known that I would have been there had I not been a complete scatterbrain.

I think I'm going to go and sit quietly on a sofa now. With any luck I won't be able to get that wrong.

This seems to be the month for me encountering TV programmes which I can't quite believe are real.

Recently I heard of ‘Sudoku Live’, and I was honestly convinced it was a joke. Then the Gallery caught thirty seconds of it on Friday evening; it isn't. Someone has genuinely turned Sudoku into live television.

I assumed that was a one-off, but today my credulity was strained again by catching sight of a newspaper's TV listing which contained ‘Ann Widdecombe To The Rescue’.

At times like this I want to say ‘you couldn't make it up’, except that somebody evidently could!

For the past few days I've felt very tired and apathetic. This morning, after what seemed like an excellent night's sleep, I feel as if what I need is to go straight back to bed for another excellent night's sleep. This is not normal, so I assume I'm ill in some fashion.

It might be a nonspecific viral uurgh of some sort, but actually I'm rather tempted to speculatively correlate it with accidentally being fed gluten on Tuesday evening. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand it would be pretty annoying to think that my entire week could be ruined by a small amount of undeclared soy sauce in a home-made beefburger, but on the other hand I've never before seen any perceptible symptoms of coeliac disease and it was also rather annoying to think that I was going through all this dietary hassle on nothing but a gastroenterologist's say-so; so it might be a relief to think that I am actually getting some benefit out of it.

Meanwhile at work, almost everybody in the office has disappeared to go to a marketing presentation. I avoid these (they're voluntary) on the grounds that marketing bores the wossnames off me; but when nobody else is in the room for an hour I occasionally start to wonder if I've missed some vital point and they're actually more interesting than they sound. Or if everyone here is actually expected to go to these presentations and I'm blighting my future career by sitting here doing real work instead. Or, in fact, any of the other collection of feelings normally grouped together under the umbrella term ‘peer pressure’. Bah. I avoided most of that at school (the really cool people smoke and drink already, the middling-cool ones can be persuaded, but nobody has any interest in even trying to persuade the geeky outcasts) and it's slightly annoying to find it turning up in the workplace :-/

I'm starting to get annoyed by the fact that I'm so biochemically unstable.

Coeliac disease is the obvious starting point: not only can I not eat obviously wheaty things like (ordinary) bread and pasta, but I have to be insanely careful of cross-contamination from things containing trace amounts of gluten. This makes it very difficult to eat anything I haven't cooked myself, either at restaurants or at friends' houses; there are only about three or four people I currently trust to cook for me, and it's annoyingly common when I risk letting someone else do it that I get most of the way through a delicious meal and then they tell me what one of the ingredients was and it rings an alarm bell.

In addition to that, as some of my readers will already know, I'm hypersensitive to caffeine. I haven't always been: I can pin it down reasonably accurately to mid-2001, at which point I suddenly started to find that drinking any perceptible amount of coffee gave me something approaching a panic attack. These days I find that a cup of decaff gives me something like a normal caffeine buzz, four cups of decaff make me uncomfortably jittery, and the last time I tried drinking even half a cup of ordinary coffee I got panicky and paranoid. (Oddly, though, I seem to be fine with tea, so perhaps it's not the caffeine but something else in coffee specifically.)

I'm currently off alcohol, because I suspect it of interfering with my sleep, and since some of the recent hot weather has certainly been interfering with my sleep I decided to stay sober for a few weeks on the basis that my sleep needed all the help it could get. (Particularly annoying is that last week I found some Hambleton GFB – a gluten-free real ale which I've wanted to try for a while – in Asda, and now I have to wait until I think I'm ready to go back on booze before I can drink it!)

I'm also unpleasantly hypersensitive to cannabis smoke. This one doesn't cause me a problem very often, thankfully; I think there have now been a total of two occasions on which I've been in the same room as someone smoking a joint and it's affected me. The effects are hard to describe, but I definitely don't like them, and in particular they seem to involve disturbed sleep. (The other problem with this one is that not everybody is willing to admit to smoking dope, it being technically illegal and all that, so it can be socially difficult to arrange to be warned in advance so I can leave the room! Not being able to get advance warning from the smell doesn't help there either.)

This is just getting beyond a joke. It's particularly aggravating when several of these things cause me trouble in the same evening; occasionally I feel that if I have to say one more time ‘I'm sorry, I can't eat / drink / go anywhere near that, I'm intolerant of it’ I'm just going to scream. It's also annoying because five years ago I had none of these problems; I was fine with alcohol and caffeine, coeliac disease was something that happened to my grandfather but not to anyone else I knew, and I might or might not have been hypersensitive to cannabis but it didn't matter because nobody I knew used it. Somewhere between then and now I've turned from a reasonably robust human being into someone brittle and fragile who has to avoid any number of perfectly normal things because they variously cause me to get cancer, lose sleep, panic or (I wouldn't be too surprised) spontaneously combust.

It's stuff like this that makes me particularly cross with Creationists. I can only assume that most fundie Creationists are extremely physically fit and healthy and have no food intolerances, no minor ailments, no dodgy muscles or joints, no missing senses and no aggravating psychological quirks; because some days I'm incapable of inhabiting this body or this mind for more than half an hour at a time without it being totally and infuriatingly obvious to me that it was designed very badly by trial and error. Intelligent design? Pah. You can stick it. If there was an act of intelligence in the design of the human body, it was the one where the designer realised that a sizable portion of the species would still worship him no matter what he did, and hence there was no reason he couldn't get away with doing a quick and shoddy job and sloping off early to the pub.

Games of hidden information are very weird in their randomness.

Minesweeper, of course, is well known to be annoying for its randomness, which is why I went to the effort of writing a version that didn't require random guesswork. When you have no choice but to take a risk, it's annoying to be wrong because it terminates your game.

But I've recently been sent an implementation of the puzzle/board game ‘Mastermind’ for my puzzle collection, and I've been finding that the annoying randomness works the other way in that: it's much more annoying to be right. When you've just constructed a guess which you've carefully designed to narrow down the possibilities and bring you one step nearer to the actual solution … it's terribly irritating if that guess turns out to be the exact answer. In a game played against an opponent, where each of you was scoring points for how quickly you solved the other's problems, this would at least be useful to you because you'd get a lot of points for it. But in a solo context, you're not really after the high scores; you're after the satisfaction of reasoning your way to the answer step by step, and to unexpectedly hit the right combination at an early stage rather spoils the fun.

My broadband connection has started working again. It's been down for three days, and annoying as I was finding it I was also rather hoping it would stay down until the NTL engineer arrived, so that he could see it being down right in front of him and also so it would be obvious whether he'd really fixed anything or not. Now I have a nasty feeling he'll prod ineffectually at it and fail to address the root cause.

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to find an alternative means of receiving broadcast TV and say goodbye to NTL completely…

I've done something horrid to my right forefinger, which is making typing alternately painful and inconvenient (depending on whether I'm currently remembering not to use it). I hope it'll go away by itself and I won't have to shift it by extreme measures such as laying off keyboards…

I collected a new pair of glasses today (my left eye has apparently become marginally less short-sighted, which I suppose is nice). They give me more peripheral vision than the old ones, which is good; but the arms are completely the wrong length and don't hook behind my ears properly. I suspect a trip back to Boots is in order, annoyingly.

Two of the four self-service checkouts in Tesco were out of order when I went there to buy my lunch today. Two days ago it was a different (but overlapping) pair. Is it really so hard to get them all working at the same time?

And my watch, whose battery I had changed a few weeks ago, gave me a battery warning today. It changed its mind fairly fast, but I worry that it might be time for a new one of those as well.

Add that lot to my ongoing NTL woes and my (landlord's) washing machine packing up and you're looking at a pretty annoyed Simon, who's currently hoping to see at least one thing working exactly as designed in the course of this week. Grrr.

On the plus side, this diary is now mirrored into a third location (*waves* to any new readers gained thereby), and today somebody sent me a Sudoku puzzle with the clues arranged into the shape of my initials. (3x3:a4_1_7e2c3d9h5d3_2_8b9_7_6b1f5a9f2a5b7c4a6c1_6_3e, for anyone with a copy of my ‘Solo’ program.)

The washing machine in my (rented) flat is becoming unusable. I've been suspecting for ages that it isn't rinsing entirely properly, but last night I had to run two and a bit washes on the same load to get it to do anything even remotely resembling a rinse. I fear a call to the landlord is in order, and that probably means I'll have to be at home at some point to take delivery of a new washing machine.

My broadband connection has been out since some time on Monday evening. I suspect that this is related to NTL's recent letter saying they were going to upgrade my bandwidth by over a factor of two and I didn't have to do anything, although the unbelievably slow phone drone I spoke to this morning outright refused to answer a complicated question like ‘have you upgraded me yet’, preferring instead to take over half an hour to schedule an engineer appointment. Which won't be until Saturday; until then I'm reduced to carrying a floppy disk between work and home containing any data I want to have available on my home machine.

Annoyingly, I had an NTL engineer come round last week, and I did ask him – while he was around anyway – whether my rather old cable modem would be able to cope with the upgraded service. He phoned a friend and said yes. I fear he is not going to be a millionaire.

One food I've particularly missed since being diagnosed coeliac in February is pies. I never used to eat that many of them, but I always enjoyed them a lot when I did. But gluten-free pastry is not the easiest of things to make, so I regretfully resigned myself to a pie-free life.

Yesterday I decided to make a pie regardless, using gluten-free flour for the pastry; I had found some GF flour which (a) had a pastry recipe on the side of the pack and (b) came recommended taste-wise by a non-coeliac (which tends to mean they can't easily tell the difference). Got to be worth a try, I thought.

In fact I didn't end up making the pie myself, due to mentioning the plan to Gareth and Verity on the phone; the next thing I knew it was being made at the Gallery on the grounds that they already had all the necessary equipment whereas I'd have had to go and buy it first, and also Verity did most of the work on grounds of having a lot more pastry-cooking experience. The result was definitely not indistinguishable from normal pastry; but it was undeniably a beef and mushroom pie, and it was the first pastry I'd eaten since February, and mmmmmmmm. Definitely something I'll attempt myself at some point.

In other news, this is possibly one of the more surprising ways to find out what became of one of your exes: http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/mail/news/tm_objectid=15642946&method=full&siteid=50002&headline=mp-in-love-child-shock-name_page.html.

I've just returned from spending the entire afternoon at the LiveJournal Memetic Flash Mob Picnic. For those who aren't reading this on LJ or who have unaccountably managed not to have any other friends spreading the meme: some anonymous person declared a few weeks ago that there would be a picnic on Jesus Green in Cambridge, named a precise location and time, and said ‘tell your friends’. The meme propagated widely, as memes do, and quite a few people turned up.

It occurred to me that it would be cunning to bring along a load of sticky labels on which people could write their usernames, to eliminate all the hassle of actually asking people who they were so that everyone could move straight on to the inevitable ‘Oh, so you're So-and-so’ stage. So in a fit of public-spiritedness and organisation, I did that.

As a result I'm uniquely well placed to provide a head count for the picnic as a whole. Of the four sheets of 28 labels I brought along, we got through exactly three, which is 84 labels. Four people took two labels for various reasons, and I counted fourteen people who weren't labelled for various reasons. Therefore, although it is of course possible that I miscounted one or both of those adjustment figures, I can state with a reasonably high degree of confidence that the total turnout was in the region of 94 people.

It's strange how disappointing that feels. At 75-85, we were thinking ‘wow, this worked really well’. But where 85 feels like a success, 94 feels like a failure, because with only six more we could have got into triple figures :-)

I was expecting not to be able to post this now, because my home network connection has been down since yesterday evening. I rang NTL this morning and they insisted that it was a problem with my cable modem, and promised to send an engineer out on Wednesday. Now I return from the picnic and it's working fine. However, I have had long outages like this quite often recently, so I wonder if in fact it is a problem with my cable modem; I think I might not cancel the appointment, let them replace it on Wednesday regardless, and see if it stops happening…

I upgraded my home Linux box to Debian 3.1 last night.

I remember upgrading to Debian some time around 1998, because of its surprising tendency to Just Work and to get things right which other distributions got wrong. Either I had a very unlucky and unusual experience last night, or somewhere between then and now it has lost its way. Badly.

The good news is that British Gas have managed to send me an electricity bill with the readings the right way round. And they did it within the ten working days they promised, too.

The bad news is that it still says I owe them £500, and (although I will check it carefully tomorrow) might perfectly well be right owing to two years' worth of meter reading underestimation. Still, it's not nearly as bad as the £1500 they made up to begin with. And their gas side owes me a vaguely comparable sum of money due to overestimation, so it all works out plausibly in the end…

Over the past three days I've been putting together a Minesweeper clone to go in my puzzle collection. As of now, it seems to be pretty much playable.

To write yet another Minesweeper clone in this day and age, you have to have some pretty impressive added value to avoid accusations of gratuitous reinvention of the wheel. My added value is that I use sophisticated grid construction to ensure that all puzzles generated can be solved without needing to guess. No more getting to the last four squares and finding you have no choice but to take a 50-50 gamble.

What I hadn't realised before actually writing this and playing with it is that it permits much denser grids. The Windows ‘Expert’ level has a mine density of a bit over 1 in 5, and it's already sailing close to the limit: I've generally found it quite rare to get to the end of an Expert grid without having to take a nasty risk. If you tried getting any denser with random generation, you'd just have a vanishingly small chance of actually completing anything. But with my intelligent generation, you can raise the mine density by nearly another factor of two: I've successfully played games on the same size of grid (30x16) with 190 mines. At that density there are barely any blank areas to work round the edges of; almost the whole grid is taken up by fiddly work involving squares marked between 3 and 6, and there's no let-up. And it's fun.

Now I just need to find a way to go to sleep tonight without dreaming about Minesweeper…

I have clearly become more mature and self-controlled since I was eighteen.

I can tell this because that was the previous time I had half an hour of sleep in a night due to insomnia. At the time it put me in such a bad mood that when I got up I had a temper tantrum, hurled a hairbrush I'd had since childhood across the bedroom, broke it, and spent several years trying to find a replacement that worked nearly as well.

Last night I had half an hour of sleep again, and all it left me with was a steely determination not to take any nonsense from anyone today. Which probably worked out well, since British Gas sent me another fictitious bill yesterday so I had to ring them up this morning to argue some more. After browbeating them with a pageful of facts that I'd carefully collected since our last frank exchange of views, they agreed (again) that they were wrong and I was right, and promised (again) to send me a revised bill which made sense. I don't feel 100% confident that they'll actually do so, given that they didn't the last time, but it's something to hope for at least.

So here I am at work regardless, brain mostly made of cheese (and not even nice cheese – perhaps that plastic cheese-alike you melt on top of beefburgers), rather hoping that I can find something to do today which won't require me to think very hard. Perhaps I'll empty my inbox, or something like that. I fear I might not manage to get to the Calling tonight either, which is a shame, but if I'm going to fall asleep then better to do it at home…

I spent the weekend working on my puzzle games (again). This time I arranged for Net to guarantee a unique solution, and also wrote code to print out Net puzzles so you can solve them on paper. The latter was a crazy idea I had on Saturday, but actually seemed quite playable once I'd got used to the idea and tweaked the graphic design a bit. If anyone's interested, I've put up a sample sheet (one wrapping and one not) at http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050523-netsample.pdf.

I was staggered by the low quality of the competition I'm up against in the desktop-puzzle-games niche. I discovered this week that there are several more implementations of the Net concept than mine and the one I pinched the idea from; quite a lot of the others go by the name of ‘NetWalk’ or trivial variations on same, and I count two or three Linux versions and a Windows one. The Windows one is particularly impressive: as far as I could tell from the website, it has no ability to generate its puzzles automatically, relying instead on a large stored database of them. Once you use up the database, you're stuffed, unless you design your own by hand – at which point you're apparently encouraged to submit them back to the authors for inclusion in the next version. And for this privilege they charge you $10 for a copy (and I wouldn't be surprised if they also charge for upgrades and extra puzzle designs), while all the free versions generate an endless supply of random puzzles. That's the Windows world for you.

Also it occurred to me recently that writing solvers and generators for puzzle games is a field in which I feel extremely at home, for some reason. I think it hits a sweet spot between several of my skills. I'm first and foremost a programmer, but also I have maths training, which means I'm well placed to be able to prove properties of the puzzles I'm working with and thus simplify my code. Also, writing solvers is about half algorithms – a particular interest of mine – and the other half is figuring out how to write an automated solver for the puzzle in question in the first place, which seems to me to be a self-awareness thing: solve one by hand and pay attention to the things you're thinking as you do it. And self-awareness itself is something that's always interested me. As a result, when I'm been doing this sort of stuff, I get extremely absorbed and enthused by it and it's a terrible let-down to come back to (say) work, at which I usually get to use at most one or two of my core skills at any one time.

Oh well. I'd better get back to work anyway…

I left work at about 16:15 today, due to a crippling network outage which the sysadmins couldn't even provide an estimated fix time for. I decided that meant it was futile to hang about and hope it got fixed, so I came home. Hopefully it'll be sorted out by tomorrow.

(Of course I don't doubt it will actually turn out to have been sorted out five minutes after I left; that'd be just Murphy's style.)

Anyway, I put the time to good use. I came home and finished work on a ludicrously clever idea I'd had yesterday, to ensure that puzzles generated by my ‘Rectangles’ program have unique solutions. To my surprise and delight, it worked, and worked nearly first time, in spite of being a pretty outlandish blue-sky sort of idea.

(If that ‘ludicrously clever’ sounds rather self-congratulatory compared to my usual tone of ‘people might conceivably be interested in…’, then this is my diary so tough. It is pretty rare in computing – in fact, it's pretty rare at all – that I do something so impressive that it makes me want to bounce around the room shouting ‘WOOHOO’ and ‘HOW COOL IS THAT?’ and ‘DO I ****ING RULE OR WHAT?’, but this is such a thing. I am excessively pleased with myself for what I've just accomplished.)

In other news, twenty-four hours of watching my electricity meter has re-convinced me that I am right and British Gas is wrong. The reading marked ‘normal’, which I claimed was daytime and they claimed was night, moves only during the day. The reading marked ‘low’, which I claimed was night-time and they claimed was day, moves only during the night. Now all I need to do is convince them of this…

This morning I finally got round to ringing up British Gas and chasing up the revised electricity bill they said they'd send within ten days of 13th April, after agreeing with me that my day and night meter readings had been switched around and therefore I didn't owe them £1500 as they had previously claimed.

It turns out that their specialist team has reversed its verdict, and just didn't bother actually telling me or anything. They have reverted to the opinion that the two meter readings are the right way round. I told them my meter had the words ‘low’ and ‘normal’ written on it, and they told me those are simply misleading and do not refer to the low night-time rate and the normal day-time rate as one might expect. They insist that the night rate is the one marked ‘normal’, which means that the expensive day rate is the one which has been rocketing skywards at high speed.

If this is accurate – and while on the one hand I find it easy to believe British Gas is talking twaddle, on the other I would also find it easy to believe that someone had connected up my meter back to front – then I may actually owe them £1500 after all. If this turns out to be the case, then I suspect it might be because my night storage heaters have also got the wrong idea about which half of a 24-hour period is which, and are helpfully doing all their heating in the daytime rather than at night. Annoyingly, the heaters don't have a clock or any kind of timing control on them, and neither do they have obvious lights to indicate when they're on, so it's rather hard to check this. I can only assume that they get some magic information transmitted down the mains line itself to tell them when the low rate begins and ends – in which case, perhaps a side effect of my meter swapping the rates round might be that it also misinforms the heaters? I know very little about this kind of technology, so I'm not sure what's a plausible explanation and what's not. (And it doesn't help that the heaters are currently off; if British Gas had phoned me back promptly then I could have done some tests in April, when it was still cold enough that I had the heating on anyway.)

It's all terribly confusing and not a little annoying. In the immediate short term I'm going to take meter readings twice a day to see which reading really moves during the day and which moves at night; after that I suppose it's going to end up being a complicated N-way faff between me, British Gas, the landlord, whoever installed the meter and so on. In the absolute worst case I do actually have £1500 I could blow on a backlogged electricity bill, but I'd really rather not if it can possibly be proved to be somebody else's responsibility.

Bah and grr. Perhaps I shouldn't have done this early in the morning; there's nothing like a blazing row before 9am to put a downer on your entire day :-/

I said in my last entry that I'd been inspired to reflection as a result of adding two new games to my puzzle collection, and then I proceeded to comment on something that had been brought to my attention by the first of those games. Here's something that was brought to my attention by the second.

Since I added two new games to my puzzle collection recently, I've had a renewed interest in playing puzzle games. As has happened before, this has led me to notice things about the way I play them and start having deep thoughts about how I – and how people in general – think.

Yesterday is the first time in my life that I've voted for a Parliamentary candidate who then actually won. That's a good feeling. It means I was a part of the boot that kicked Anne Campbell out of Cambridge, which feels good, and it means the person representing me is the one I'd actually have chosen out of the options, which is good as well. Also, I feel much more that my vote has been heard: it's one thing to make your lone gesture of defiance against the government and show up as a change in the last digit of the detailed vote count, but it's quite another when another few thousand people stand up and roar their defiance with you loudly enough to be heard in Westminster and seen as a yellow flare on the national election map.

On the other hand, it feels kind of strange that my MP is now not part of the government party. Before today, Cambridge had Anne Campbell, who was; and when I lived in Berkshire with my parents and the Tories were in power I remember their (our) MP being John Redwood. They wrote to him on at least one occasion and got some impressive results from doing so; I admittedly wrote to Anne Campbell and didn't (which is one of the reasons I'm so satisfied to have helped boot her out), but at least I felt that when I had a beef with government policy I could conveniently communicate it to a member of the government. So suddenly I feel a bit disconnected from the people in power; it seems to me that if I write to my MP to complain about some barking mad government initiative or other, he's more than likely to write back and say ‘well, duh’ or ‘*sigh*, yes, isn't it awful’ or some such. Which would be nice if I were after validation of my opinion and someone to commiserate with, but less helpful if I want something done about it.

Still, on balance things seem basically positive from here.