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.

The trouble with Google is that it spoils all the fun. If you think you've come up with a fantastic pun, it's one thing to guess that probably someone else had thought of it before, but it's quite another to have Google actually tell you who and when.

(It just occurred to me to wonder whether there'd ever been a kill-or-cure asthma treatment called Vlad the Inhaler.)

I also feel a sudden urge to review the year, but I'm not entirely sure how. It seems to me that my life has been pretty much the same this year as it has been for the last several: I've been struggling to cram into only 24 hours a day a full-time job, a social life, free software, and sleep. So I suppose I could do worse than break it down into those components:

Job. Pretty good, I'd say. I've done some things at work this year that I'm really quite proud of. Particularly cool was a piece of work that happened in the last few months, which I suggested almost as a joke (in the sense of ‘if we did this it would solve lots of problems, but I don't seriously expect we'll have the time or the will’) and was surprised to find it leapt upon with great enthusiasm; colleagues pitched in and did their bit with terrifying willingness while I was still worrying about whether I'd got the design right or whether I was wasting all their time; but thankfully my fears proved to be groundless, and a startlingly short couple of months later the whole thing was working, apparently without problems, and even the colleague I normally argue with about everything is saying good things about it.

Social life. Same as ever, pretty much. Love life has been slightly more interesting this year than the last two, but since its natural state appears to be a flatline that isn't saying too much :-)

Free software. Lots of that. Three PuTTY releases (two of which were panic security fixes, which is still a new enough experience for me that I feel honest guilt rather than jaded acceptance that these things happen). Several brand new pieces of software, my desktop puzzle collection probably foremost among them. Another PuTTY release probably due soon, after we've given some reasonably serious testing to all the new features I've just finished writing. Definitely a good year there.

Sleep. Mediocre at best.

Right; that's quite enough waffling. It's New Year's Eve and getting perilously close to party time, so I'm off :-)

Gosh, is that the time already? It's nearly 2005 and I haven't even got my shoes on yet. Or something.

In principle, I don't hold with New Year's resolutions. It doesn't seem sensible that you should wait for a particular time of year and then look around for suitable ways to change your behaviour; it seems far more sensible to me that you should be constantly in a frame of mind in which, when a need to change your behaviour does present itself, you're ready to recognise and act on it no matter what the time of year.

Given this attitude, it was probably a deliberate Act of Murphy that more than once in my past I have recognised just such a need during the second half of December, and hence ended up with a New Year's resolution in spite of my dislike of the concept. Murphy likes to show off his good aim, I've found.

But not this year; this year I am blissfully resolution-free. Unless, of course, something springs to mind in the next four and a half hours, which now I think about it would be just Murphy's style.

I am also eagerly awaiting the expiry of my resolution from last New Year, which was to avoid buying any expensive electronic gadgets in 2004 in order to plough lots of money into my savings to repair the dent made by changing cars. I'm delighted to report that the dent is almost entirely repaired, and I can therefore declare the resolution a success. Which means, of course, that if I last even three days into 2005 before ordering a gadget it will be quite a surprise :-) First on the list is a Mac, I think, and then possibly a colour laser printer…

( [GEEK] Amazon customer reviews save the day )

Driving around and visiting people at Christmas time is good; none of the drives are too long, it's good to get a few days away from home every now and then if only because it forcibly prevents me jumping up every two minutes with a sudden idea about some coding, the family Christmas meals are always excellent, and so on. But nonetheless, when I've pulled up in my own driveway, unloaded the car, unpacked my stuff and sat down in my own home, there's also a feeling of ‘phew, back home at last’.

So, yes; I'm back from the Thames Valley, ensconced in Cambridge once more, and intend to do very little for at least the rest of today.

Heard a strange loudhailer noise in the street today. Stuck my head out of the window and listened carefully; a Cambridge Water van was driving slowly down the street shouting very loudly about a burst water main and warning me that the water would be off in my street for two hours.

Indeed, it's now off. Just as I was planning a nice hot bath. Though I suppose it could have been more frustrating: the bath could have been half run.

Even more annoyingly than that, though, I stupidly failed to actually note what time the van went past, so as to know when it was two hours after that and I could expect the water back. It might have been ten minutes, or an hour ago: I really wasn't paying attention. What I need is some household object which will make a loud noise when it gets wet, so I could leave it under an open tap; but I can't bring one to mind…

As of this lunchtime, I don't have to go to work until 4th January.

That should feel good, although I mostly just feel tired. Perhaps after a few days of rest I'll have regained some energy. Until then, I think intensive sofa therapy is likely to be the order of the week…

I've felt very very tired for the last few days. This isn't very surprising. For the last month or two I've been terribly efficient. I've done enormous amounts of useful work on PuTTY; I've managed all sorts of feats of organisation of which I'm usually incapable; and I've been generally unable to sit down for a rest without immediately thinking ‘ooh, I know what I meant to get round to doing’ and jumping up again. It was inevitable that I'd run out of energy to maintain this pace sooner or later.

Accordingly I did very little indeed on Saturday; and nonetheless on Sunday I was so tired as to be unusually grumpy. It felt as if I was being grumpy about the appalling state of my love life (having spent way too much of my life feeling pretty bad about having hopelessly fallen for people who weren't interested in me, it comes to something when I feel as if that would be an improvement on the current state of apathetic listlessness!), but in fact I suspect I was just short on sleep and hence in a mood to turn background annoyances into foreground annoyances without particular provocation.

Fortunately, beckyc unexpectedly rang my doorbell in the afternoon and invited me to a mulled wine and mince pie gathering downstairs, and then I went round to the Gallery for their version of this year's Christmas, and those managed to lift my mood for most of the rest of the day.

Now I'm back at work until midday on Wednesday, and then I'm off until the New Year. Somehow it feels like holiday already, despite me having dragged myself out of bed on a Monday morning to come to the office as usual.

I'm reasonably organised about keeping a calendar these days; I generally have a good idea of what I'll be doing for most of a week before I go shopping to buy food for that week. However, somewhere between the calendar and the shopping list I always seem to have a failure of organisation.

If I've arranged to cook a particular meal for a guest, I'll generally remember to buy the ingredients for that; but that's about as far as my efficiency goes, because at the same time I'll tend to forget that this also means my normal weekly cookery needs to contain one portion fewer, so I'll overcater for the rest of the week. And conversely, although I've known for some weeks that yesterday was not going to be the normal Doctor-Who-and-Chinese-takeaway gathering at the Gallery, I totally failed to anticipate in advance that this meant I had to arrange something else to eat.

I suppose that ideally, when I make my shopping list, I should look at the calendar for the coming week, and go through it day by day actually concentrating on each meal. But I can't imagine that working: I have the horrible feeling that after I'd tried it for a couple of weeks, I'd get really bored, start taking mental shortcuts, and thereby allow all the same errors to creep back in.

I visited Prue last night, for dinner and (as it turned out) half a game of Scrabble. Another visitor arrived while we were playing, and we thought it would be rude to ignore her and carry on.

So we thought for a bit, applied my camera to the problem, and now on my hard disk I have pictures of the board, my letters, her letters, and the score sheet. Some day we'll meet up again, reconstruct the game state, and finish it off :-)

(We got some very odd looks from Prue's sister and the other friend for doing this. I think they thought we were doing it because we cared about the Scrabble game so much that we couldn't bear to leave it unfinished, and therefore they seemed to think it was kind of sad. In fact it was more that once we'd had the idea of preserving the game by camera, it was much too silly an idea to waste. Perhaps this is one of those mindset things that stops normal people understanding geeks.)