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).

Well, my two weeks of holiday started last night, and now I'm utterly knackered. I think that for at least the last week, during all the frantic preparations to (a) arrange that my stuff doesn't fall apart in my absence and (b) arrange a handover of vital code and information from a colleague who'll be away when I get back, I must have been running largely on adrenaline. Because today something in me seems to have gone ‘right, show's over, now I can collapse’ and I've duly done so.

This made it a very stupid plan to try to get to two parties on the same night; I did OK at yvesilena's, left for beckyc's when I started to feel myself getting tired, but nonetheless was practically on the point of collapse when I arrived there so I've now come home to collapse properly.

Walking home I just saw a strange glowing Cyclops on a bike. On closer inspection it turned out to be a very old woman with a blue light mounted on the bridge of her glasses. From a longer distance it appeared that a single blue glowing eye was the only feature on her face. Very odd; I wonder what it was there for (it didn't seem to be actually illuminating much).

A guy has been going round the office today testing the electrical sockets. This requires each employee, in turn, to power down their PC and go and do something else for about ten minutes.

Suddenly I think I've figured out why they installed a pool table in the office kitchen/dining room the other week. It's a perfect way to kill those ten minutes until you can come back and turn your machine back on :-)

About half way to Tesco, the heavens opened and let forth a torrential drenching which even my already-open umbrella couldn't properly shelter me from. In correct ‘ner ner ne-ner ner’ form, they slammed shut again just as I managed to get under cover, removing any doubt that the weather gods were specifically attempting to dissolve me.

I think I'll just sit here and drip for the rest of the afternoon.

A friend visited me the other week and left a pack of chewing gum in my living room, which I've been trying to give back.

This got me thinking.

(Another thing that this has got me thinking is that I must be pretty bored if the sight of a pack of chewing gum can inspire profound philosophy!)

A typical Monday morning: feeling slightly sleepy owing to the usual Sunday-night insomnia.

This is a much more positive thing than it normally is, since the fact that I had Sunday-night insomnia last night exonerates my Sunday evening Chinese takeaways (one of which I experimentally avoided yesterday) from the accusation of causing it. I can live with a bit of sleepiness this morning if it means I'm not required to swear off lemon chicken forever. Phew.

Also yesterday all sorts of bits of my body were aching without explanation. I feared that might portend flu of some sort, but apparently it didn't. Phew again.

… of course, as soon as I'd posted saying it's very hard to find the ISO 2022 register of character sets, I then tried googling for the one phrase I hadn't yet tried googling for, which was ‘ISO 2022 register of character sets’. And of course that immediately turned up a very plausible-looking thing as the very first link: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/.

The bad news is that it appears to support my accusation against Emacs. Looks as if embrace-and-extend isn't a sin unique to proprietary software folks :-(

I spent yesterday discovering a truly horrid mess.

I know I shouldn't laugh too hard at a serious subject, but it's hard not to when the Independent starts an article with

A suicide bomber struck for the second time in 24 hours yesterday…

Phew. I picked up my replacement copy of Star Wars from the Royal Mail depot on my way to work, and tried out ‘A New Hope’ on a colleague's Mac. This time it appears to do what it says on the tin. I had had a bad feeling about this: from everything I'd heard it looked as if sendit.com in particular had received a bad batch, so I was worried that I'd get three or four identically broken sets in quick succession; but apparently not, which is a relief if only in terms of hassle avoidance.

Last night was amazingly productive given that I'd mostly intended to spend it slumping on the sofa; about half way through the evening I got restless and went and faffed with media software, with the result that I can now listen to streaming from Radio 4 without going through the horror that is RealPlayer, and even record it easily to disk should I feel so inclined. Pity I didn't figure all this out before the new Hitch-Hiker series started on Tuesday, but there's still time to record the repeat of the first episode.

You know you've been me for too long when you instinctively capitalise the last two letters of ‘Pity’.

I don't play chess. That is, I know how to play, but I'm really pretty bad at it and don't like it much, so I hardly ever try.

Part of this is because I find it difficult to do the planning-for-all-eventualities kind of strategic thinking. It just seems to be a blind spot in my intellect. I'm an engineer type, who will do a competent job if given plenty of resources and a good safety margin; strategy in a fair fight is more a question of squeezing every last bit of juice out of the limited resources you've got, and that's not my forte.

But also, chess specifically annoys me in one particular way, and that's the uniform vulnerability of the pieces. I'm much happier playing games like Starcraft, in which the more powerful units are generally better armoured as well as better armed, so although a high-value unit can still be mobbed by enough small pieces, it's not usually possible for (say) a single marine to take out a battlecruiser. But in chess, the powerful pieces can be captured exactly as easily as the feeble ones, and this paradoxically makes the feeble ones more scary due to the concept of piece exchanges; a knight protected by another knight, for example, has little to fear from the lightning strike of the opponent's queen (if he wants to swap his queen for one of my knights that's fine by me) but is likely to run like hell from a slowly advancing pawn (his pawn for my knight is much more in his favour). It irks me that the powerful pieces are so circumscribed by this sort of consideration that it's very hard to actually use them for anything worthwhile. My intuition as to how battle games ought to work is much more in the Starcraft mould than the chess mould, and as such I've always felt this feature of chess to be counterintuitive and somewhat artificial.

It occurred to me recently, though, that in fact the chess model can apply worryingly well to less military aspects of life, because some vulnerability models aren't as linear as they are in battle. Suppose, for example, that you believe yourself to be good at doing something because you've never failed to do it yet, but that a lot of what makes you good at it is precisely the confidence that comes from a 100% track record. Suddenly your vulnerability is increased in proportion to your success so far: if you fail just once, you know your confidence will be badly shaken and you're likely to start failing a lot more in future. So although you have this theoretical great strength, in practice you often don't want to have to risk using it.

This annoys me just as much in real life as it does in chess. Except that in chess you can always say ‘oh, this is a stupid game, I can't be bothered’ and walk away from the board.