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.)

When the clocks go forward, every Catholic church in the country presumably suddenly has to hold its services earlier, and of course they are all earlier by the same amount as each other.

Does the clock change, therefore, force equal Mass times acceleration?

I just insulted a telemarketer by mistake. How odd.

A week or so ago someone rang my mobile and asked if I was interested in a new handset. No thanks, I said, I don't need one. (But it's free, they said. But I don't need one, I said. They gave me the telephonic equivalent of a very odd look, as if to say ‘who cares whether you need it or not, if it's free you should be jumping at it regardless’, and hung up.)

Today someone rang my mobile and asked if I was interested in a new handset. Hang on, I said, didn't someone ring me about this only last week? Oh, probably, she said, that'd have been a different company, you'll probably get quite a few calls now your contract's coming up for renewal. Fine, I said, then I'll turn my phone off until they go away. OK, thanks, bye.

It was only after I hung up and turned my phone off that I realised that I'd implicitly said ‘… turn my phone off until people like you go away’. She sounded surprisingly polite and amused given I'd just insulted her. Perhaps she hadn't noticed any faster than I had.

Simon's First Law: If you are searching for a particular type of thing, and you Google for various phrases and none of them comes up with anything particularly helpful, and you eventually give up and post on a public forum with a question along the lines of

Does anybody know where I can find a low-cost reconfigurable sponginator? I've looked everywhere. I tried Googling for ‘sponginator configurable’, ‘sponginator cheap’ and ‘sponginator flexible’ but didn't find anything.

you will invariably find that the phrase you used to describe the item in your question (here ‘low-cost reconfigurable sponginator’) was the one phrase you hadn't tried feeding to Google. Furthermore, when you try it as a last-ditch effort immediately after posting publicly, it will turn up the thing you were looking for as the first hit.

Simon's Second Law: Even if you compose one iteration of your question and don't post it publicly, and instead copy and paste the description out of it in the hope of foiling Simon's First Law, you will mysteriously happen to choose a different wording again when you make your real public posting, and the First Law will still bite you.

Grrrrrrr.

… only this time it's Owen's fault.

I seem to have picked up a Cold-Of-Death recently. I'm now sitting at home with an almost completely blocked nose, shivering, headachey and occasionally dizzy. I'm attempting to lie on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, but I fear I'm not even fit to do that competently…

I've now released my B-tree-tastic hex editor, now renamed from its (sadly already taken) working title to ‘Tweak’. Source download and a fuller writeup of the data structure are available at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/tweak/.

If you thought my previous bash alias hacks were evil, don't even read this one.

Some days the two-minute walk from the car to the office is the most challenging bit of my morning.

Just after I lock the car up, I'm generally holding my car keys, my bag, and my office pass card; by the time I reach the office front door I expect to have stowed the keys in my pocket, clipped the card on a belt loop, and slung the bag over my shoulder.

This morning I was also carrying the hard disk from the Dension (the weather is now cold enough that I need to take this indoors in the daytime as well as at night) which I needed to put in a coat pocket, and a collection of rubbish from the car bin which I needed to throw into a bin when I got inside. Just not dropping that lot with only two hands was moderately tricky; actually arranging to sort it all out without slowing down was quite a challenge, and I suspect nothing else I do this morning will require as much concentration!

It's an odd kind of feeling to actually achieve one of your personal Holy Grails.

This week, in among being ill, working and so on, I managed to find time to write a piece of code that solves a problem I've been wanting to see solved since 1994.

I was just standing in the office loo, washing my hands, and suddenly a device attached to the wall puffed a jet of unspecified vapour into the air, with no apparent provocation.

I can only assume that it's some sort of new automatic air freshening device, and that it squirts out a jet of sweet-smelling stuff at regular intervals during the day.

But to understand my initial reaction to this incident, you have to be aware that I've been off work with a cold for two days this week, and I mostly spent those two days lying on the sofa watching James Bond movies. In that state of mind it's deeply unsettling when an innocuous-looking device produces an unexpected jet of gas. I found myself half expecting to be knocked unconscious and wake up to see Blofeld…