Today I have become older. Ho-diddly-hum.

It seems to have become a tradition in my group at ARM that on one's birthday, as well as buying doughnuts for the group, one also poses a puzzle of some sort whose solution is one's age. This seems like a fun enough tradition to propagate, so I'm going to do it here too.

At work last week I told hsenag that there was a really obvious puzzle for this age which I'd have to avoid using, and he correctly guessed my age just from that. If you can do the same, you can give yourself a particularly smug pat on the back.

For everyone else, here's a nonogram puzzle I prepared in advance. You can print it out and solve it on paper if you like: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050503-birthday-puzzle/nonogram.pdf or http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050503-birthday-puzzle/nonogram.png.

Alternatively, anyone who has the ‘Pattern’ program from my puzzle collection should be able to just type in ( some numbers )

I got randomly bellowed at this evening. I was walking up Milton Road towards my mum's house, when a van or minibus or some vehicle of that general type drove past. Some lads leaned out of the window and jeered incomprehensibly at me, then laughed as they drove off into the distance.

To some extent I get annoyed by that sort of behaviour simply because they tend to be large and intimidating louts with an air about them of ‘I can be deliberately obnoxious at you because I know you can't do anything about it’. But it annoys me an enormous amount more when I haven't the faintest idea what it was about. If they'd been laughing at my hat, for example, that'd have been at least understandable – but I wasn't wearing it. The tiger design on my T-shirt might have been a believable object of ridicule, except that they started bellowing before they saw my front, so that wasn't it either. My flies were done up (and see previous comment about them not having seen my front yet). What was it about me that obviously said I was someone they should laugh at? It bothered me all evening.

Fortunately, I think I've worked it out now. There was a match at the football ground near my home this afternoon; my suspicion is that the winning team probably wasn't the home one, that the louts were away supporters, and that they were jeering at anyone who looked like a Cambridge resident in a ‘we kicked your butts just now’ sort of way. If that's correct, then all I did to arouse their scorn was to be on foot in Cambridge at the wrong time. Phew.

In other news, I've spent today writing another game for my puzzle collection. (Yes, another one. It just seemed like a good idea.) Any devotees of Rubik-style puzzles might be interested to have a go at Twiddle.

I've just returned to work after a two-week break. This means that most of today will be spent clearing up the rather large email backlog that has accumulated in my absence. It's annoying that this happens: my job is by no means always boring, but the first day or two after coming back from a holiday is always boring, which means that the end of the holiday is always a bad moment. If only it weren't for the backlog, the end of a break would at least sometimes not be so bad.

My vague plan for the holiday was to spend the first week doing as little as possible, after which I expected to get restless and start doing something useful and programmingy. This didn't exactly work, because the first week was entirely taken up by annoying domestic chores and errands (MOT season, faffing with prescriptions, being repeatedly on hold to British Gas, that sort of thing), and after I'd capped it by spending Saturday driving down to Reading and back to visit an old friend, I found I was still not remotely rested and needed another week of doing nothing at all to recover. On the second Saturday I did actually rediscover my enthusiasm for programming, but by then it was a bit late to do anything major with it. Still, I did my best anyway: my puzzle collection now contains an implementation of the game most commonly known as ‘Su Doku’, although it's somewhat unfinished.

Anyway; back to the inbox. Wish me patience.

It occurred to me yesterday that the lembas eaten by Tolkien's Elves must have an extremely high energy density and thus I'd expect it to be explosive, or at the very least dangerously flammable to be hurling around near your campfire.

So it just occurred to me to try to actually estimate the energy density of such a fictitious food and compare it with that of some known explosives – and I discovered after some googling that in fact TNT has an energy density about one quarter that of normal carbohydrate-rich food. Fascinating. So high energy density is not merely insufficient to make something explosive, but in fact it isn't even necessary. I'm surprised; my intuition said otherwise.

In other news, lots of people have commentated on the recent papal election and have said many insightful, witty and/or heartfelt things about it; but I'm faintly disappointed that I've seen not one person entitle their post ‘Episode IV: A New Pope’. There. I have nothing else particularly intelligent to say on the subject, but I didn't want that one to slip by completely unsaid.

There are long-term roadworks on the M25, starting just south of the M4 junction. This means that if you're driving to Reading from Cambridge, as I was this morning, you get stuck in the tailbacks from those roadworks just as you thought you'd survived the worst the M25 had to offer.

After crawling along in this jam for a little way, I saw a sign warning me about it (gee thanks). The sign said ‘Delays possible until Dec 2005’. Whoever chose that wording, I thought, was having far too much fun; meanwhile, better phone my destination and let them know I might be a few months late.

On the way back there was a jam on the M4, in which I crawled along for three miles or so at an average speed of perhaps 15-20mph, and eventually discovered that the entire cause of the congestion was an accident on the other carriageway, at which everybody on my side was slowing down to rubberneck. I imagine this will be old news to many readers, but I found it utterly gobsmacking that a slight glance to one side and perhaps a slacking-off on the accelerator, on the part of the drivers at the front of the queue, can slow down traffic by a factor of three two miles further back. Unless the drivers at the front really are slowing right down to 20mph to get a good look, which I'd find even harder to believe. I want to see a detailed replay of the incident (or one like it) as seen from a passing helicopter. Anybody got one?

Well, as it turns out, British Gas's specialist cock-up untangling team suck royally at returning phone calls, and I still haven't spoken to them directly at any point. However, they do seem to be good at their primary job: they just passed on some results through a normal peon and the upshot is that they have independently come to the same conclusion as I have about how my electricity bills got so weird. That's a relief; I expected the hard bit to be convincing them that I didn't owe them 1500 quid.

They tell me it's now all in hand and I can expect a more sensible bill within ten days. I confess I'm not holding my breath on the ten days bit, but it sounds basically hopeful apart from that.

Yesterday was a rather frustrating day on several counts.

For a start, on Sunday I had set up a particularly hard custom one-player Starcraft game against several computers, and won it on the first time of trying, so yesterday I tried to do it again quite a lot of times and was completely wiped out repeatedly. In the end it turned out that the computer had made a rare and vital mistake the first time which it never made again. I would have been perfectly happy to get wiped out every time I tried this; I'd have concluded that I'd bitten off more than I could chew and tried something easier. But to succeed with relative ease the first time and then get massacred repeatedly is particularly annoying! It's got that sort of ‘first time's free’ nature about it that sucks you in and gets you involved against your will.

Also yesterday I attempted to go to my local post office to do some administrative faff involving my food prescriptions, and was rather startled to discover the post office wasn't there any more and had turned into an ordinary newsagent when I wasn't looking.

When I got home from that abortive outing, I was even more startled to receive an electricity bill for nearly one and a half thousand pounds! On closer inspection it turns out that they arrived at this figure by switching round the day and night rates in the meter reading I provided recently; on even closer inspection it looks as if they have in fact been doing this ever since I moved in, and I didn't notice at first because the two readings started out roughly similar, and then continued not to notice because they've been estimating my bill (badly) and this is the first real reading they've had since 2003. So I rang up to complain and the guy on the phone said ‘oh dear, this is one for the specialist team I'm afraid’; so some time this morning I'm expecting a complicated phone call from a crack squad of full-time British Gas cock-up untanglers (what a job). Wish me luck. And probably them too.

Life continues to be relaxing. In particular, it rather carefully helped me relax for the last day or so by means of my broadband connection going down! It's just come back and NTL haven't rung me back as promised, which might mean I have to proactively phone them up and let them know that sending an engineer to get me out of bed tomorrow won't be necessary after all.

Actually sitting on the sofa physically all day would get tedious even in relaxation mode, so I'm pottering about the house doing tidying and organisational stuff. In particular, I've just catalogued my book collection, with the vague aim of using the catalogue as a who's-borrowed-what notepad among other things. In the process I discovered another practical use for a digicam: take snaps of each bookcase in the lounge, then go through to the study and type the catalogue up while referring to the pictures. Much better than running back and forth between rooms repeatedly with as many book titles as will fit in my head at once.

I fear, however, that even this is displacement activity to avoid the really daunting stuff, such as clearing up the study and cleaning out my ever-present rucksack of random useful stuff. Oh well. At least there's no pressure on me to do any of it.

I began my two-week break by going to bed and having what I can only describe as a very relaxing dream. In this dream, reincarnation worked, and worked properly with full memory of the previous life; so when I felt myself getting old, I transferred all my life savings into an anonymous web-based bank account and made very sure I could remember the password. Next thing I knew I was a five-year-old in another body with all my previous memories including that password, and lo, I was rich. Well, for a five-year-old, anyway.

There were two things that were particularly relaxing about this dream. One was the reasonably obvious one: that my second incarnation, and all subsequent ones, would never have the slightest fear of death, because they knew nothing permanent or bad was involved.

The other was that my biggest worry after being reincarnated was what I would say about it in my online diaries (whose passwords, of course, I could also still remember). It would, after all, involve recanting my lifelong lack of belief in weird supernatural stuff. (Specifically, my particularly strong disbelief in provable supernatural stuff; unprovable supernatural stuff like non-interventionist gods I have a marginally more open mind about, although I still think ‘probably not’ and ‘who cares anyway’.) The fact that merely posting to an online diary which was known to be owned by someone who was believed dead might make more waves than the things I chose to say didn't occur to me until I woke up :-)

Today my known commitments are to have lunch in a pub, and to sit on my sofa for three hours showing B5 to people. This seems likely to enhance my already considerable feeling of relaxation. Mmmmmm.

This morning we have a network outage at work, and none of the computers in this room can talk to the network.

Except, for some undoubtedly bizarre reason, mine, which is perfectly all right.

I fear I'm not going to get to stay sitting at it for very long; one colleague has already tried to kick me off so he could check an ‘urgent’ email, and I strongly suspect others will be doing similar sorts of things soon enough.

(Mind you, this kind of makes up for yesterday. Yesterday we had a three-second power cut and all the machines rebooted; everyone else's was fine after it came back up, but mine stopped talking to its trackball for several hours. Karma is very quick these days.)

Yesterday at work I went to a training course in time management.

I had originally been booked to go on this in 2001, but had missed it! (This is really true. In my defence, my entire group had moved office buildings that very day and things genuinely were hectic; but even so, I forgot to go to a time management course.)

This time round, they set me homework to do before the course (preparing a detailed log of one day in my job, so that I could analyse it in particular ways during the course). I had a vague feeling that anyone who turned up having actually done the homework would be told to go away because they clearly didn't need to be there :-) But in fact what happened was that the course instructor said there was always one person who hadn't done the homework, and then he asked if everyone had – and it turned out that there was precisely one person who hadn't done it. I wonder how often that joke doesn't work for him.

It was odd how much the start of the course felt like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Every time someone I knew walked in, it was as if I was hearing them say ‘Hello, my name's foo and I'm hopelessly disorganised’. Which, of course, I'd said as well by being there myself. (Although I'm uncertain of whether I'm still as disorganised now as I was five years ago when I originally booked myself on the course; I think I've improved a lot on my own since then.)

People on training courses get lunch provided; I had told them I was coeliac but wasn't sure whether they'd manage to do anything useful. As it turned out they provided me a salady sort of lunch which had no gluten in, but also had no carbohydrates, so I was rather hungry for the rest of the day. If I have another training course I might write something pointed in the dietary-requirements box (‘I have an intolerance of gluten but I still need some carbs’).

This morning I'm back at my own desk and have just started up Evolution, and it immediately put up the reminder window it didn't get a chance to show me yesterday (because I didn't log in), telling me that I should have been at a time management course yesterday. For some reason I find this wildly amusing.

I dreamed last night that I was jailed for ten years. The dream actually covered the entirety of this period, which was good going for something that lasted only an hour or so in real time. When I was collected from the prison on my release, I thought how strange it was that I had such a good memory of what I'd been doing the day I was put away. ‘It's as if it was only yesterday,’ I said to myself, ‘or perhaps as if the whole thing was one long dream’.

One would have thought I could have managed to take the next imaginative step from ‘it's as if this were a dream’ to ‘hey, maybe it is’. But I didn't, so the mystery of why my memory of ten years ago was so vivid continued to baffle me … until I woke up, and thought ‘oh, I see’. I felt quite silly for having been so close to what was actually the right answer!

Although I also spent a lot of the dream resenting the loss of ten years of the prime of my life, I was also fascinated by the futuristic world my subconscious dreamed up for me to be released into. For example, small two-man helicopters were readily available as an affordable alternative to owning a car. I was rather disappointed that I woke up before getting the chance to play with one.

My plan for the Easter weekend was to fix one bug in PuTTY, and other than that to laze around, relax and generally do as little as possible. I accomplished all of this. I'd have preferred to do it the other way round (fixing the bug first rather than last, so that it wasn't hanging over me during the rest of my relaxation), but unfortunately I needed a lot of the relaxation before I felt ready to tackle the bug.

Also I ate two enormous curries: one because I had a one-evening gap in my dinner plans and suddenly remembered that quite a lot of ready-meal curries were gluten-free, and the other last night because the Carlton had an all-you-can-gobble-for-a-tenner curry night. I turned up to that half expecting to be told that they weren't set up to cater to coeliacs and to go straight home, but it turned out that two of their existing curries were OK and they also prepared me a special pot of gluten-free chicken bhuna. Which, I might add, was delicious: the others weren't bad either, but this one was fantastic. I don't recall ever having eaten a bhuna before, but clearly I should have. Definitely a tenner well spent.

lnr's party on Sunday night was very good too; I normally bail out of parties early these days because my desire for sleep outweighs my desire to stay at them (translation: because I'm getting old), but this time I got very drunk and went home around 3am having had a thoroughly good time. (And was rather hung over the next morning, but fortunately it was the kind of hangover that only bothered me when I tried to move, so I cunningly sat on the sofa and ignored it.)

And, of course, there was Doctor Who, which was good fun. They might have been trying to do a little too much in the first episode, but on the other hand the West Wing had that even worse and it didn't seem to hurt it too badly. There were a couple of specific points where I felt the CGI was excessive or gratuitous (notably the wheely-bin), and the burp joke was beyond what I could reasonably forgive on grounds of humorous licence, but on the whole, no problems with that.

So, a good weekend. Now I suppose I'd better stop talking about it and do some work.

Good grief. This has surely got to be the most hilariously awful thing I will see all day: http://www.pricelessart.org/bible.htm.

There are six whole books of verse of that quality. It hardly bears thinking about.

I re-read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency the other day, and was rather startled to find what appears to be a genuine continuity error. In most books this wouldn't be cause for remark, but this book in particular seems so careful about its continuity the rest of the time (particularly given the nature of the story) that it was quite a surprise.

Sarah, the little girl we encounter being bored at a formal dinner at the very start of the book, has blonde hair when described by the narration, but when Dirk gets a description of her from Richard later on it says she had dark hair. Gosh, ooh etc.

What is it with Cambridge being in a perpetual state of being dug up and rebuilt? I've been noticeably inconvenienced by three different sets of roadworks in the past two days, just driving to and from work and going shopping in town. Before that there were others, and others still before that. Some months I get the strong feeling that it must have been ten years since my daily experience of Cambridge didn't involve any roadworks at all, and even that was only because I was a town-centre-based student who never had to go more than five minutes' walk in any direction from Trinity.

Are all cities like this, and I only notice it with Cambridge because I move around it a lot and so deal regularly with a large proportion of the potential roadwork sites? I suppose that's possible, but it doesn't seem likely to me. It feels much more as if Cambridge in particular is so flimsy that it has to be being perpetually repaired or it would fall apart completely.

This week I've got round to starting to arrange getting gluten-free foods on prescription.

This is really silly. I would have hoped that the sensible way to do this would be to issue me with some sort of coeliac certificate, which I could then display in some fashion to get a discount when buying whatever I happened to fancy that month from gluten-free-food companies. But no; instead it's done through the ordinary prescription mechanism, and each GF food product is individually prescribable. So I had to actually go and talk to my GP and make a specific request for each of the particular things I wanted.

It seems completely daft to me that I have to waste the time of a highly trained medical professional on business which could be handled just as well by a supermarket checkout clerk. She insisted that because it really was a form of medical treatment it was perfectly reasonable, but she can insist that all she wants and it won't shake my opinion that changing my mind about my preference in pizza bases is not a worthwhile use of a doctor's valuable time.

So yesterday I dropped my prescription off at Boots, and today I have to go back and collect the stuff (which they had to order in). This is silly.

In the terribly unlikely event that I need reminding: remind me never, ever, ever to go to China and become a chef.

I have just attempted to cook sweet and sour chicken for one, on the grounds that if I can't get it from a Chinese restaurant ever again then it might be a good idea to learn to cook the stuff myself.

I was entirely prepared to produce something totally inedible and be forced to fall back on the portion of frozen stew I had standing by for emergencies. What I wasn't expecting was to produce something so absolutely awful and yet not actually inedible; I had assumed that at even half this level of culinary incompetence I would produce a complete write-off. To have so many things wrong with a dish without committing any of the faults that would make it unsafe or impossible to eat must take a certain level of skill in itself.

Ideally I ought to do a post-mortem and try to work out at least some of the mistakes I made for next time; but after the stressful cooking process, the exercise of willpower involved in eating it, and the sheer hard work of clearing up the unbelievable mess in the kitchen afterwards, I really don't have the energy.

So last night the PuTTY team went out for an expensive meal at ‘Chez Gerard’, during which I accidentally departed from my strict gluten-free diet. The waiter sounded entirely clued-up on the subject and confidently pointed out the (large) subset of the menu which was safe for me to eat; but just as I'd finished my starter he dashed up looking very apologetic and said it had had breadcrumbs on top.

In fact I had noticed this myself when the starter arrived, and had almost called someone over to double-check before starting to eat, but didn't quite do so because the waiter had seemed so knowledgeable that I decided to trust him, and therefore assumed that the apparent breadcrumbs were something breadcrumb-like but gluten-free. As Ben pointed out, though, it's perfectly possible to be both knowledgeable and wrong :-/ Next time I'll be less trusting.

It's very annoying that I don't quite know whether to feel cross with the waiter or with myself. If the breadcrumbs had been non-obvious then it would clearly have been nobody's fault but the waiter's; but they were obviously there and I nearly double-checked but didn't, which makes me feel as if I knew perfectly well I was making a mistake but made it anyway.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive; I didn't have any perceptible symptoms even before going on the diet, so it wasn't as if I was in any immediate danger of exploding violently. I do slightly worry, though, that experiences like this might make me more reluctant to risk eating out at all, which would be a bad thing.