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.

Pizza Express now seem less good at giving me a gluten-free meal than they seemed at first glance. The first time I tried going there with my own pizza base, everything was fine. The second time they failed to cook the base properly. The third time, last night, they slightly overcooked it (probably overcorrecting after I politely drew their attention to last week's lapse), but more importantly they forgot to put the cheese on my pizza! When I queried this, they took the pizza back and did a complicated ritual involving pre-melting the cheese and then re-baking the pizza a bit to stick it down, causing the base to be further overcooked in the process. Their excuse was that the chef had apparently thought that ‘since it was such a small pizza base’ I wouldn't want cheese on it. Huh?

(The base comes in packaging that says ‘milk free’ as well as ‘gluten free’, presumably on the grounds that it's easier to make one product that's everything-free than to faff about with lots of slightly different ones, and I had initially suspected the chef had been confused by this and decided to make my pizza dairy-free just in case; but apparently not.)

Also in Pizza Express, I was rather annoyed by the overenthusiastic waitress who responded to all questions of the form ‘can I have’ (more water, $condiment, some cheese on my pizza) by saying ‘Of course you can!’, in a tone of voice calculated to suggest that it was a really silly question and we shouldn't have even needed to ask. While on the one hand it was certainly pretty unlikely that she would have said no to any of our entirely reasonable requests, so in that sense the reply ‘of course’ was pedantically accurate, on the other hand it seemed a bit much to imply our questions were superfluous, since we do at least have to make our desires known before even the best waiting staff can fulfil them.

I've been feeling a cold coming on for a lot of today. I'm still at work so far, since it's mostly manifested itself as coughs and sneezes rather than a loss of energy, but bah nonetheless.

And finally, last night someone sent me email drawing my attention to a blog entry in which Tom Duff commented on my coroutines article. At around nine this morning the blog website went down and hasn't been seen since, which means I can't show it to anyone! Bah.

So, lots of gripes and grumps today. Ho hum.

So there's a silliness going round LJ at the moment, which is to think up ten (originally six) things you've done which none of your regular readers have also done (or at least you think that's reasonably likely). I normally don't participate in LJ memetic sillinesses, not least because this diary appears on both Monochrome and LJ and a lot of them would look a bit odd to readers on the former; but this one's fairly self-contained, doesn't require much explanation, and is unusually interesting and fun. And in fact I'm startled at how extremely difficult it is.

I'd have thought that being the author of PuTTY ought to have netted me some reasonably unusual things, and indeed I have

• been sent money by the tax office of a country of which I'm not a citizen and indeed have never even visited
• had an e-mail correspondence with a Pentagon official, which was interrupted (thankfully temporarily) by 9/11
• been the sole cause of three computer security advisories
• been personally targeted by a computer criminal.

As a result of other free software interests I have

• been both praised and criticised in unsolicited private email by ESR.

My life outside free software is a lot less remarkable. Let me see. I've

• attempted to start a software company with a friend while we were still in secondary school.

(Outstandingly, we managed to sell zero copies of the program. We had three conditional orders from people who each said they'd buy it if it had one extra feature. So I worked hard to add all three features, but by that time all our customers had gone elsewhere. I've made more money out of free software than I ever did out of commercial!)

After that, though, my imagination starts to run out. The best I can conveniently think of is that I've

• asked for directions in a foreign country from a stranger who turned out to be of my own nationality

although that one crops up so often in elementary language textbooks that although I was very amused when it actually happened to me, it probably isn't all that unusual.

The calibre of my readership makes things difficult as well. I could try mentioning that I'd

• been awarded Certificates of Excellence for two of my four A-levels

but since quite a lot of my readers are Oxbridge graduates at least as intelligent as I am, I actually doubt that's unique.

Beyond that, nothing springs readily to mind. Perhaps I'm being too picky; perhaps there are perfectly normal things I've done which aren't unusual in the sense of being remarkable, but are merely unusual in the sense that not many people happen to have done them. With a bit of preparation, for example, I could announce proudly that I bet nobody else had

• rolled a six-sided die (or electronic equivalent) twenty times and got 43562522633613246253

but it wouldn't be terribly interesting.

Still, it was fun thinking up this many. Perhaps I'll finish the list at some later point…

I wanted a lazy weekend last week, but ended up slaving over PuTTY for most of it. This week I tried again and definitely succeeded.

On Friday evening I bought some gluten-free beer from Sainsbury's. At lunchtime on Saturday I decided to drink one and see what it was like, on the basis that that way it'd have long since worn off if anything happened in the evening that I wanted to drive to. Barely had I finished it than I got a phone call from lnr, who was sitting in the Carlton and calling to let me know that they had just got in three different kinds of gluten-free beer. So I went and sat in the pub for the rest of the afternoon and sampled them all. Then ewx declared a party, so I took some more of the Sainsbury's stuff along to that and drank it there. Net result: about ten hours spent almost continuously (though reasonably slowly) drinking beer. If that's not a good way to do nothing on a Saturday, I don't know what is.

Today I have cunningly avoided having a hangover, kicked copious alien posterior in my gradual replaying of Starcraft, and come close to my personal best for the longest bath ever. Even when I'm deliberately doing nothing I still achieve :-)

My sense of timing is getting sharper with age.

When I was a child I vividly remember that I had no idea whatsoever of how much time was passing. I could read for five minutes and find an hour had passed, or I could sit and wait in a waiting room for a million years and discover it had only been ten minutes.

These days I'm better at it. Of course time still seems to move faster when I'm enjoying myself, but experience has taught me how to anticipate and correct for that and I'm generally not too bad at guessing how long things have taken and how much time is passing. I test myself every so often: when someone asks me what the time is, I guess what I think it probably is before I look at my watch. I'm usually somewhere within 20-30% of the right answer in my estimate of how long it's been since I last knew what the time was.

It's more than that, though. My time sense seems almost uncannily accurate in particular circumstances. For example, I have digital countdown timers in the kitchen which I use when I need to leave something cooking for (say) ten minutes before coming back to it. So I'll set one of these timers, go into the lounge and read a book for a bit, and then at some point I'll find myself looking up and thinking ‘Shouldn't that timer have gone off by now? Perhaps I forgot to start it’. So I'll get up and walk towards the kitchen to check, and I could swear that about half the time the timer will go off as I'm in the process of going to check on it.

Of course this could be something I've convinced myself of by the usual means humans use to believe in improbable things (including but not limited to the supernatural): remembering the times it worked and forgetting the times it failed, that sort of thing. I freely confess that I haven't done a genuinely controlled test of any kind to see whether I'm right about this. All I know is that I'm normally pretty sceptical about such things and it feels statistically significant, and in particular I'm certain that ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to get that close to the mark even one time in fifty.

I'm reminded of this by what just happened at work, which was definitely just a silly coincidence. I just flicked Evolution over to calendar mode, because it had just occurred to me that I remembered a meeting being scheduled quite a while ago and it was probably about time for it this week. Sure enough, there was the meeting on my calendar, and in fact it's this afternoon. And one second after I clicked Calendar, a reminder window came up telling me that the meeting in question was in fifteen minutes' time :-)

I'd better stop waffling now and go to the meeting, in fact…

Well, things aren't as bad as they seemed.

Pizza Express have turned out to be astonishingly clued up about gluten-free diets. (I hadn't expected a pizza-and-pasta shop to need to know about it at all: I'd assumed that coeliacs wouldn't be so silly as to set foot in the place. I only gave it a try because Owen googled up a blog entry by another coeliac who'd tried it and had a good experience.) They don't actually stock GF pizza bases, but they're quite happy to use one if I bring it along, and they were able to look over the starters menu with me and tell me what I could eat. (And in particular they left off one of the things that looked from the description as if it could reasonably have been safe, which somehow gives me confidence that they're not just guessing.) They even have a GF dessert on the menu – lemon polenta cake – which is really rather nice.

So I went to Monday geek pizza after all yesterday, and will probably continue going back. The only snag is that the GF pizza bases I'm currently buying from Sainsburys are rather small; as a matter of moderate urgency I need to find some bigger ones.

This was also an interesting experiment because it narrowed down the cause of my home-made pizzas lacking cohesion. When I make pizza from a base and some toppings, they never seem to stick together properly, and the toppings slide off all the time when I'm eating the result. It wasn't clear to me whether this was the fault of the base or of my preparation. I can now confidently state that it's the latter, since Pizza Express managed to make toppings stick properly to the same base that I failed to last week. I wonder how it's done.

… and this was nothing like a pleasantly relaxed weekend.

I went to bed on Friday anticipating a weekend of lazing around not doing very much. I'd planned to visit my sister for lunch on Sunday and receive helpful advice on a gluten-free lifestyle; there was the usual Gallerying lined up on Sunday afternoon; and I'd vaguely intended to spend some of Saturday dreaming up a costume for lzz's ‘myth, legend and fairy-tale’ themed party on the Saturday. Other than that, lots of lying around, I thought.

Dragged myself out of bed on Saturday morning with a shiny new sore throat. Got as far as the computer and discovered a report of a security vulnerability in PuTTY. Yes, again. Not nearly as bad as the last two, but three security releases in a row is doing nothing for my self-esteem. (On the other hand, a response time of under 48 hours is a new personal best by over a factor of two :-)

So I spent most of Saturday frantically testing and re-testing a variety of possible fixes, and therefore had to turn up at the party without a costume at all, which always depresses me; I like to manage something even if it's only a bad pun. In fact, especially if it's a bad pun.

Got up on Sunday and began to slog through the PuTTY release process; had to stop half way through for the planned family lunch, which also involved giving Mum a lift there and back and helping both her and Sophie with assorted minor DIY. Dashed back home, finished release, dashed straight back out to Gallery. At this point the sore throat had expanded into a full-blown cold and I'd used up all my energy reserves, so I collapsed.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if I woke up tomorrow, went uuurgh and crawled straight back into bed.

‘You know, if this is a software department, there's something very strange about it.’

‘You mean the way the C stays steady as a rock and the build system keeps washing up and down? Yes, I thought that was odd too.’

<drrrrum-dum da-da-da-da-dum dum dum, drrrrrum da-da-dum>

I've been saying this around the Gallery for a while and they're probably sick of hearing it, but: I'm fairly sure watching The West Wing has permanently changed the rhythm with which I drum my fingers.

I occasionally wonder if this happens to everyone who watches it. If so, you'd be able to pick out other fans during boring meetings and exchange subliminal recognition signals. What a silly idea.

I've just come back from Addenbrookes, where I was told I had coeliac disease and recommended to go on a permanent gluten-free diet.

Looks as if I won't be going to Monday evening geek pizza any more then. Bah. Or eating Chinese food with the Gallery crowd on Sundays (despite the main carbohydrate being egg fried rice, I'm told soy sauce and such things tend to be problematic). Bah. Or drinking beer ever again, which is at least three bahs all by itself.

It almost wouldn't be so bad if I'd had perceptible symptoms at any point; at least then I'd have some reason to hope that something would improve in return for all the aggro. But no; I only got checked out because my sister (who did have real symptoms) was diagnosed coeliac, and on the basis that it's partly genetic I was told I ought to get checked. So now a bunch of gastroenterologists have stormed into my apparently perfectly good life and told me to stop eating lots of nice things.

BAH.

Prue just came round for dinner. Since she's been round here a fair number of times and I've already cooked her pretty much everything I know how to cook, I thought I'd stretch myself by making up something new to add to my repertoire.

This is a nervous business, as elise – my last guinea-pig – will probably remember. I get slightly edgy anyway when I'm cooking a dish for the first time; significantly more edgy when the first attempt is cooked for a guest; and quite a lot more edgy still when it's a recipe I only just assembled and I've no idea yet whether it'll work or not.

Fortunately, it did, and unlike my last new recipe I didn't even have to take notes on how to improve the next attempt. Lemon pepper chicken breast served with lemon, pepper and peppers risotto[1], and the whole thing Just Worked right down to the timing. A few more successes like that and I might even manage to stop being so nervous about the whole business :-)

[1] Arrgh. Putting peppers (as in the multicoloured crunchy vegetable) and pepper (as in the powdery hot stuff) in the same recipe tasted nice, but is a linguistic nightmare.