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.

I'd like to waffle about music for a while. Specifically, I want to waffle about two particular pieces of music. In the process I will go on at great length, and will also perpetrate two things that I fear would be horrific faux pas in a serious article about music. If you can't cope with any of that, look away now.

I can tell this, because of what happened when I woke up. My alarm clock went BEEP BEEP BEEP and said 8:00; so I hit Snooze, struggled to semi-wakefulness, and started trying to remind myself of the things that had really happened yesterday (board games, Doctor Who, washing up) so as to form a clear distinction between them and the things that had only happened in the past night's dream (awaiting trial on a technicality in the strange and fictitious legal system of an unnamed state which wasn't sure – and spent a lot of time hotly debating – whether it was religiously constituted or not). Somewhere along the line I slipped back into sleep.

Fortunately, my alarm clock saved the day by going BEEP BEEP BEEP again. But, curiously, it still said 8:00, not 8:09 as I would have expected. I could only assume that this was in fact the first time the alarm had really gone off, and the previous very realistic occurrence had in fact been part of my dream. Somewhat bemused, I went straight to the computer to write a diary entry about this bizarre phenomenon before I forgot about it.

The computer's clock said 8:12, and when I went back into the bedroom to check, so did the alarm clock. This suggested that it had in fact been 8:09 when the alarm went off the second time; so either my alarm clock has a misfeature whereby it displays the primary alarm time while beeping after a subsequent snooze period, or I'm completely unable to read at that time on a Monday morning. Neither is beyond the bounds of belief. Nor is the possibility that I in fact did dream the first alarm occurrence, the second did say 8:00, and I then dozed for ten minutes without noticing before getting up.

Something tells me that experiencing that much confusion within the first fifteen minutes is going to set its stamp on the entire day. If you catch me unaccountably talking about wombats or walruses at any point today, you'll know why.

Today my new trackball was delivered, to go with my new Mac. I collected it from the post office on the way to work, opened the outer packaging to make sure it was the right thing, and immediately gave myself a paper cut. Bah.

Also today I am going to World of Computers to buy a colour laser printer, since (duh) I keep wanting to print coloured things. It'll be odd going back to WoC. I used to be the closest thing a home user gets to being a regular customer of theirs, but I haven't set foot in the place in over a year thanks to my 2004 no-gadgets resolution. I wonder if they'll still recognise me.

That means I've bought really quite a lot of gadgets this month, which is a little worrying given that the reason for last year's resolution was that I went somewhat out of control in 2003. But on the other hand, this month's spree is the result of an entire year of bottled-up acquisitive urges, and I don't have anything else on my to-buy list after this, so hopefully I'll be able to calm down for a few months. Until something else shiny catches my eye, at least.

Also I'm half asleep.

I can tell this for two reasons. One is that I just pressed the wrong button on my trackball, but because I pressed it with the correct finger (i.e. the finger I usually use for the button I meant to press), I somehow expected it to do the right thing anyway.

The other is that I completely forgot to put that paragraph into my previous diary entry.

It's at times like this that I wish I could take the day off work simply because I judged myself too incompetent to get anything useful done…

This is going to be a bad day, I fear.

While assembling my new desk last night, I seem to have managed to give myself a bruise on the very tip of my right index finger. Typing is actually painful if not done very carefully.

Perhaps I should arrange to spend most of the day talking to people and taking notes with pen and paper.

That was a faff and a half. On the way home from work, I stopped at Staples to pick up a desk for my new Mac. Stopping at home only long enough to drop that off, I then dashed off up the A14 to Bar Hill, to a delivery depot, and picked up my latest parcel. Straight back home and into Flat Pack Assembly Mode, in which the brain disregards virtually all its surroundings in a desperate attempt to make sure each panel of wood is oriented correctly, so as not to have an end with one hole next to an end with two holes. (Or was it the other way round?)

The desk is now assembled, and the Mac is looking a lot happier now it doesn't wobble with my every keystroke. Also I have been in constant motion since 5:30 and the pub beckons.

When I buy something expensive, I always forget to account for the auxiliary purchases that invariably follow it.

As of last week I have a shiny new iMac. Unfortunately, it's currently forced to sit on a small and rather wobbly ornamental coffee table that came with the house, so I need to buy a proper desk for it as a matter of moderate urgency. Also the mouse is already starting to annoy me, so another trackball for my collection seems in order. And I'm going to need another 4-way mains adapter in short order as well. I ought to try harder to anticipate this kind of thing and factor it into the total cost of ownership.

In other news, hmm, well. Over the weekend I looked up the pictures from the Huygens probe landing on Titan. It seemed very exciting; there's a certain thrill to seeing the first real pictures taken on an alien world with a real camera (there was with the Mars rovers too), particularly when it's a world I almost feel I know already thanks to novels like Imperial Earth. But when I actually saw the pictures, they were a terrible disappointment somehow; they just looked like a flat plain with rocks on it, and I'm sure anyone could have knocked up something similar in the Gimp if they'd wanted to. The Mars pictures gave much more of a feel of really being on a different planet; perhaps this is just a function of their higher resolution and better colour depth.

Also I was particularly depressed to find this morning that when I googled for ‘Titan’, the first link I got back was ‘The Titan Corporation: Homeland Security and War on Terrorism’, and Cassini-Huygens was only the fourth hit. Sigh.

Mine just filled my brain with the inviting image of a nice cool glass of water. I was on the point of getting up and going to the kitchen to get one, when I noticed I had one already – and then I felt disappointed.

I can only assume that what my subconscious really wanted wasn't the water itself, but the getting-up-and-stretching-of-legs involved in getting it. I wonder why it didn't just say so.

At lunchtime I drove to the delivery company's depot to collect my shiny new iMac, which arrived yesterday but (surprise) couldn't be delivered since I was out at work.

Driving to the depot is normally my favourite way of collecting failed parcel deliveries; the depots are usually either easy to find in Cambridge or are in nearby villages like Bar Hill, and the latter has held no fear for me ever since Philip's got round to publishing an all-Cambridgeshire street atlas. So it's not too much effort, and it means I get the parcel at my convenience rather than having to arrange myself round the delivery company's convenience (which is even harder when they can't generally tell you in advance whether they plan to deliver at 09:10 or 17:20).

In this case, however, the depot was at Stansted Airport, and the combined faff up and down the M11 stretched my lunch break into an hour and a half without even providing me with lunch. Under these circumstances I would normally have tried a bit harder to arrange an alternative delivery, and indeed I did try having the parcel redirected to my office. No such luck: the courier company refused to redeliver to a different address, not because their own procedures were inflexible but because (apparently) Apple had given explicit instructions that the delivery address should never be changed on their packages. At this point I was faced with driving to Stansted, or taking an entire day off work for the delivery, or repeatedly phoning both Apple and the courier company and trying to get them to communicate to the point where a redelivery to my office could be usefully authorised; so I decided just getting in the car was the least of the evils.

I swear, this is even more hassle than it used to be. The delivery companies aren't getting any more flexible: they still seem to expect people to be in during the day to take deliveries. I suppose if I had a stay-at-home wife that would be fine, but I have no wife at all and even if I did I doubt she'd be a stay-at-home one. But when I ring up, they ask ‘well, will somebody be in?’ (like who, my invisible friend?) and ‘what about leaving it with a neighbour?’ (fat chance, the only neighbour I trust works normal hours as well) and ‘can we leave it in the garage?’ (just because I can afford an iMac doesn't mean I can also afford 100 times as much to have a house with a garage; and furthermore you sent someone to my house yesterday so you could have known this already). Absolutely anything rather than, say, learn to deliver in the evening. I mean, they couldn't do that, that would be useful.

I suppose half the problem is that I'm not the courier company's actual customer; that's Apple, and it's not Apple's problem how much hassle I have to go through to get my delivery, because it doesn't get fed back to them. If only it were Apple's problem that delivery companies are unhelpful to recipients, then they'd have an incentive to give their money to the least unhelpful of them and improvements might be seen.

Still, on the plus side I have actually taken physical possession of my shiny new toy, so things could be a lot worse. On the minus side, my car was ailing noticeably during the excursion; I feel another long lunch break coming on tomorrow, this time to go to the garage…

Specifically, I want to introduce regression testing in physical design work, and have a worldwide list of test cases across all companies making a given thing.

(Warning: lengthy rant ahead.)

( the office coffee jar has a design flaw )

( and the office itself has a design flaw )

( watches and clocks have design flaws too )

( and one of the office back doors used to be downright dangerous )

There's something deeply disturbing in the above list. In all these cases, there's a design flaw – sometimes quite serious – in an everyday item that as a species we have been building for decades (digital alarm clocks) if not millennia (buildings). How can we still be making this kind of fundamental mistake, on what appears to be a regular basis?

I'm not blaming any of these designers, per se, for failing to anticipate a particular design flaw. Each of the flaws I've described above is something I think one could reasonably be forgiven for not having foreseen, the first time. It's only because I can't believe it was the first time in every case that I get angry about it.

My guess is that there are two factors in operation. One is that there's no central Design Authority which works out the best possible shape for a coffee jar or an alarm clock; instead, each individual company does its own design independently. This is great from some points of view – it means innovative new designs can prove their worth without having to convince a committee of closed-minded theoreticians – but one area in which it falls down is fault-fixing, because companies don't appear to routinely go around learning from one another's mistakes.

The other factor is that companies don't internally seem to be good at keeping track of the reasons for their design decisions. Casio had been making watches with flat display faces for years and years and years. I suppose it's possible that they had previously never even considered anything else, that at some point they discovered how to make curved faces cheaply, tried it, found the watches all scratched, and returned to Plan A, and that I happened to be a victim of that ill-fated venture; but it just doesn't seem likely to me. Far more likely, I think, that someone actually put in some thought at one stage and decided that flat faces were a good idea, and later on some overzealous designer thought it would be fun to move to curved faces, and somehow the good common sense of the first guy didn't communicate itself to the second.

So it would be a good start to have companies who design things just do regression testing, even if only as a thought experiment. Every time someone fixes a design flaw, they should add the flaw and the fix to a list somewhere. ‘1988-04-05: Curved display faces can scratch in the middle. Reverted to using flat ones universally.’ Then arrange that it's a serious gaffe for any designer to make a gratuitous change in a product without first checking that list and making sure they haven't reintroduced a problem that someone had carefully fixed fifteen years ago.

Better than that, though, would be to have some kind of a cross-company repository of good common sense: things to take into account when designing buildings, doors, clocks, coffee jars, whatever. I realise that this is the seriously unrealistic bit, since it requires competing companies to cooperate, but at the very least there should be some mechanism whereby a brand new building firm, starting up in business for the first time and landing a large contract for a great big office block, can somehow benefit from the experience of all the office building that has happened in the previous fifty years.

I wonder if there's any way that could be arranged to happen.