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…

I mentioned on Monday that it had not been an entirely stress-free weekend. What I didn't mention is that in addition to helping set up and clear up a wedding, doing an above-average number of household chores and having the Doctor Who gathering unexpectedly relocated to my flat, I was also frantically working to produce a new PuTTY release, after being notified of a second really bad security hole on Friday. With a side order of near-crippling guilt over having put the hole there in the first place, much like last time.

That release went out yesterday evening, so now I can relax. I feel as if I've been running entirely on adrenaline for at least the last couple of days. I didn't stay at the Calling long because as soon as the pressure was off the energy evaporated and I found myself close to being asleep on my feet.

Now I really need a weekend, but since one won't be forthcoming for a few more days I'll have to go with the next best thing, which is intensive sofa therapy in front of my shiny new James Bond DVD collection.

A woman in the corridor just asked me to let her through a security door, saying she'd forgotten her pass card.

Normally I'm happy to do this if I have some reason to believe that the person does in fact work here (if I see them around regularly, or if someone I do recognise were to vouch for them), but in this case I'd never seen her before in my life. It's extremely likely that she does in fact work here – I'm sure people forget their cards far more often than genuine intruders make a serious attempt to access secure areas in the middle of the working day, and certainly it's not implausible that there are a few legitimate employees round here who I don't recognise. But I couldn't quite bring myself to let her through the security door on this basis, because, well, what do we have these passes for if anyone who can smile sweetly and look plausible gets let in with no questions asked?

So I explained this (not quite that verbosely). ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘No you're not,’ she replied instantly.

Actually, until she said that, I was. I recognised that it was extremely likely that I was inflicting a minor inconvenience on an innocent person rather than heroically foiling a dangerous intruder. I made the choice I did because the consequences of the latter possibility would have been bad enough to balance out its relative improbability, but I did regret the need to (probably) inconvenience her.

But that's OK, because as soon as she said ‘No you're not’, I decided I wasn't sorry any more. It annoys the hell out of me when people expect that they have a right to be trusted. Trust has to be earned, and if the consequence of this is that leaving your pass at home inconveniences you, well, you were the one who forgot it so you can hardly put all the blame on me. Grump.

I made an LJ post yesterday which showed up on my journal proper, but didn't (and still doesn't) appear on any friends pages I could see. Can anyone see this one?

Update: Ah, now my previous post appears to be showing up as well. Evidently the arrival of a new one kicked something that needed kicking.

It's been a hectic weekend.

Saturday was entirely taken up by fluffyrichard and Louise's wedding, in Kent. The actual wedding didn't start until 4pm (well, more like 4:30 owing to the obligatory bridal lateness :-), but ten of us got up very early and were driven down by Yasmin in a minibus, in order to help with the setting up. This was mostly quite fun, and the wedding itself was very good, and the reception was good too. By the time the clearing up was half done, though, most of the minibus crew had seriously run out of energy; at least, I know I had, and they mostly looked like I felt. Then we all had to wait for transport back because the minibus had been pressed into service as a van to take away the large bulky stuff. Eventually we all got home at times distributed somewhere around 2am, mostly looking like zombies; quite how Yasmin was still cheerful and chirpy despite having done all the driving too is beyond me.

At the reception there was a silhouette artist: you'd present your profile to him for a few minutes and he'd cut a small piece of black cardboard into that shape. It was quite uncanny how much the result ended up looking like me. (Since I cut my own hair using an arrangement of two mirrors, I actually see my own profile more often than one might expect.) Quite a lot of people had one of these done; I predict a sudden outbreak of LJ userpics. drswirly managed to confuse the issue later on by tying a helium balloon to lzz's head and having the artist come back and do her again, so she is now the proud owner of a cardboard silhouette of herself with a balloon on her head. :-)

Yesterday was more normal, although it still contained rather more household chores and stuff-to-do than the average Sunday. In particular, I was just preparing to drive a bunch of people to Owen's for the roving Doctor Who gathering, but when they turned up at my door they told me it was suddenly happening at mine instead. In principle this saved me some driving, but in practice the sudden change of plan left me feeling as if things were more hectic than otherwise. Odd, that.

Now back at work, although I feel as if I could do with another weekend immediately to recover from this one…

(Bah. I've been trying to post this to LJ since 10am, and it keeps telling me ‘This journal is temporarily in read-only mode. Try again in a couple minutes’. I wouldn't mind that if it had only been a couple of minutes, and conversely I'd have minded a lot less if it had said ‘try again in a few hours’.)

It's strange dream season again, without question.

Last night's dreams managed to find a new way to confuse me about what was real when I woke up; this time they did it by cross-referencing something that had appeared in an earlier dream, causing me to assume on waking up that since that bit wasn't part of the current dream it must have been true. Took me five minutes to sort that one out.

Also one of my dreams postulated the existence of a GCSE in Relationship Skills; I can't quite decide whether that's a fabulous idea or made entirely of doom. (I don't know much about what the syllabus was, though; most of the dream seemed to centre itself around people's displacement activities when they should have been studying for it.)

Today so far I have:

• foolishly picked a fight with the Axiom of Choice, which wiped the floor with me
• twice attempted unsuccessfully to review second drafts of things I had already reviewed the first draft of, and found that I was now too familiar with the material to do a good job any more
• been rather startled to find I can recite my bank sort code and account number from memory. If it were my credit card number I could understand, but I'm sure I don't need to give my bank details that often.

Some days, everything I do has a clear purpose and is part of a coherent whole. Today, by contrast, seems unusually disjointed.

Memo to self: When you are lying in bed, drifting in and out of a dream state, and feeling extremely thirsty, then despite all appearances the uninspiring glass of slightly warm water sitting by the side of the bed is infinitely preferable to the enormous tankard of chilled and nice-tasting Ribena in your dream. DRINK THE FORMER.

In other news, I'm now back at work, and by my initial estimate it will be mid-to-late afternoon before I finish clearing up my email backlog from the last two weeks.

Also my knee appears to have stopped being extremely painful, and now merely feels slightly fragile. Another week of being gentle to it and it should be back to normal. Still no idea what happened to it (and the doctor was unenlightening), but phew anyway.

At some point yesterday I did something utterly ghastly to my right knee, and I have no memory of doing it. I was fine driving to Reading, fine at the wedding, fine eating pizza after we saw James and Emily safely married, and fine driving home again. I think (but can't quite remember) that I was fine playing board games at the Gallery after that. But I know that by the time I was in the Old Spring trying to pick my jaw up off the floor on finding that nassus was ten feet away from me and not in Australia as I'd previously thought, I was already in a state where it hurt to kneel down on the floor (shortage of chairs). I don't recall doing anything that caused the pain; my best guess is faffing with an accelerator pedal for four hours earlier in the day, although I've done that before without this kind of ill effects.

I thought it had got better after a good night's sleep, but it's got worse and worse today until it hurts just to bend my knee. How I'm going to get my trousers off I have no idea. I may well attempt to take my knee to a doctor tomorrow. :-(

I've always had a problem with hymns. Now I'm entirely atheist, so one might reasonably assume that my problem with hymns springs from that. But it doesn't, in fact; as both a sci-fi reader and a pure mathematician (readers can choose whichever of those analogies they feel is more appropriate ;-) I have a strong ability to work within a set of axioms I don't personally believe, and when I look at the words to a hymn my feeling mostly tends to be ‘yes, all that makes perfect sense if you start from those premises’. Devout Christians clearly don't live on the same planet as me, but I can visit their planet in my mind without too much difficulty.

Where I start to have a problem is where the hymn departs from my expectation of it given what I imagine to be the premises of its author. Specifically: hymns are, as I understand it, written by deeply religious people who consider the glorification of God to be a major, if not the paramount, duty and privilege in their life. This being the case, I would expect hymn writers to either do a really good job of it, or find someone else who could. Not so much in the words – not being a believer myself I'm not really qualified to judge the quality of the words in a hymn – but more in the music. In my experience hymn music, by and large, sucks.

This is particularly noticeable as a non-believer, because when I go to the occasional church service (weddings and so forth), I don't already know the hymn tunes; so I bluff and mumble my way through the first verse while listening carefully, and thereby hope to have learned the tune for when the second verse comes round. But in most cases I don't, because the tune looks as if someone slung a bunch of notes together in an almost entirely random order and it is simply Not Memorable. Every time my finely honed musical instincts think it's obvious what the next few notes are going to be, they do something totally different; and not something inspired and better which leaves me thinking ‘wow’, but something totally random that leaves me thinking ‘Huh? What was the point of doing that then? The tune isn't going anywhere!’.

I've had this rant brewing for several years now, and was reminded of it by the wedding I went to yesterday (although this is not primarily a rant about that wedding; a couple of yesterday's hymns were well above average). So I've ranted it in person at a few people since then, and the most common response I get is ‘no, that's not quite fair, there are one or two good hymns, how about <foo>?’. I'm unconvinced that being told there are ‘one or two’ good hymns is actually a contradiction of my claim that most hymn music is drivel :-)

And the thing is, it isn't as if religious composers aren't capable of doing a good job. A lot of Christmas carols, for example, are really good, or if not really good at least decent workmanlike jobs in which the musical structure makes sense, with a sensible balance between repeating melodic motifs and introducing new material, with a harmonic structure which moves from a beginning to a middle to a resolution in a comprehensible manner. More like that, please, and less of the kind that sound as if someone attached a random number generator to a pipe organ.

Right, rant over. Offended Christians can start shouting at me now…

Hmmm. I think I've just found another genuine use for Bourne shell aliases, and it's almost as ghastly as my previous one (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/aliases.html).