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.

Dreamed last night that I was struggling with a particularly persistent and inventive band of car thieves desperate to get their hands on my poor innocent Clio. I walked up to my car to find them lurking around it and obviously trying to figure out how to get in. I shouted ‘OI!’ at them, but they just looked at me briefly and ignored me. So I pulled my mobile out and called the police. They watched me with amusement for a few moments, then casually sauntered off down the street. After they were out of sight, a police car turned in to the road. I sighed with relief and unlocked the car. Policeman promptly jumped out of police car, sat in my car's driving seat and started the engine, then turned to me to reveal that he was one of the same group of car thieves. I somehow managed to open the driver's door, kick him out and drive away, whereupon my car developed some sort of fault and he came after me in his phony police car.

At about this point I woke up, thankfully. I often have strange dreams, but very rarely have actively bad ones; but that was definitely one. It wasn't so much fear for my own skin; the bad guys at no point gave the slightest indication that they had any interest in causing me physical damage. It was the sheer feeling of helplessness at the thought that everything I could think of to get rid of them had been anticipated and prepared for.

I think I preferred the previous dream, which was much more fun.

I just had a very silly thought.

Fully formed into my brain sprang the idea of the US Constitution displayed as a LJ or other blog entry. At the bottom there would be a pair of links along the lines of

27 amendments | Add an amendment

and if you clicked through to the ‘comments’ page, the first comment would start off

F1RST 4M3NDM3NT!!1!

I was almost tempted to actually mock up a page or two, but that really is too much effort in the pursuit of such a small joke…

I was planning to lay off the Chinese food last night and see whether it helped my Sunday-night insomnia. However, after the extreme hangover of doom I decided that my sleep patterns were likely to be completely disrupted anyway and I'd probably manage to have insomnia no matter what happened, so I ate Chinese anyway and will do the experiment some other weekend when it has a better chance of being controlled.

Good job too, as it turned out, since I was completely wrong in the other direction and slept like a log. If I'd avoided Chinese just before that happened, then I might have wrongly convinced myself that it was to blame, and sworn off it unnecessarily! That's pretty scary. I hadn't fully considered the risks of this business until now.

In other news, songster pointed out a blog entry suggesting that at least one other person had the same problem as I did with the Star Wars trilogy, so it doesn't seem to be a one-off. How depressing. My second copy has apparently already been dispatched, as well; I bet they just shoved another one in an envelope and didn't actually check it was OK…

Well, this hasn't been a terribly productive weekend.

Yesterday I took delivery of the newly released Star Wars DVD box set, and decided a good way to relax after a long week at work would be to sit on the sofa watching some number of the films. Unfortunately the box turned out to contain Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, and … another copy of Return of the Jedi on a DVD labelled A New Hope. I've made arrangements to return it for a replacement; I hope that this time the error will turn out to be a one-off. If this is a problem with an entire production run like the fiasco with B5 season 3, Lucasfilm is going to have enough egg on its face to make the world's biggest omelette.

Then to the party at Milton Road (or ‘Lemoncurdistan’ as someone dubbed it in the pub on Thursday, in honour of its new domain lemoncurd.org.uk). Generally a good party, but several upsetting things managed to hit me all at once part way through it; I probably could have coped with any one of them at a time, but between them they gave me a serious desire to go and get properly drunk. So I did that (on Merlot and rose, uncharacteristically, since I've never got on well with either of those types of wine; but the alternative was a Shiraz so egregiously bad that even those were an improvement), and then went and nattered to Rachel/xanna about life, love, the universe and everything for some hours, and eventually emerged to find that it was 3:30am and everyone else had gone home. So I did that too.

Woke up this morning and really wished I hadn't. Any thought of doing something useful today after relaxing yesterday was immediately dispelled by a horrifying hangover of death. After a very long bath and some self-pampering I'm now feeling almost human, but not quite.

I can tell this for two reasons. One is that I changed over to my winter quilt last night. I reckoned this would be a good idea, but I wasn't prepared for just how good it was; I slept like a log and feel ready to take on the world today.

The other, annoyingly, is that the Dension has begun to have trouble in the cold again. Time to start taking its hard disk indoors overnight, I fear.

Prue came round last night and I cooked her Mum's fish pie, and this time I really got the recipe right. Some days I think a passing layperson might find it reasonably hard to distinguish me from somebody who can cook :-)

It's amazing how being an incompetent gibbon can work out in your favour.

Yesterday I broke the Gallery's networking. I had logged in to their firewall remotely in order to fiddle with VPN-related stuff, and I managed to hose their outgoing network connectivity to the point where I couldn't log back in to start it up again. So when I got home from work I phoned the Gallery, got through to lzz, apologised for being a buffoon, and offered to come round and fix it. She was delighted, because she'd assumed it to be an NTL problem which would take them days to sort out. So the net effect was that I got to see Liz (which I wouldn't have otherwise since she was too busy to go to the Calling), and furthermore she was effusively grateful.

It's not just her, either. When we had the PuTTY security hole last month, not one person wrote to us to complain, and lots of people wrote to thank us for our prompt response; in fact our steady trickle of small donations from random grateful users took a major spike on that day.

I know that everybody's human, and humans all make mistakes, and the occasional mistake is to be tolerated if it's fixed promptly. I can understand merely not blaming me; that's fair enough. But it does strike me as downright odd that incidents like the above would seem to be giving people an incentive to make mistakes (provided they fix them promptly, of course); it doesn't seem to me to bode well for the human race.

Last night I found myself in the rather strange position of hoping to be unable to sleep properly.

I occasionally have mild insomnia. I've noticed over the last few months that it tends very strongly to be on Sunday nights, making me even more zombie-like than one would expect on a Monday morning. Last week I mentioned this to Owen, and he pointed out that on Sunday evenings I usually eat Chinese takeaway with the Gallery, and that my insomnia might be a reaction to something in the food (probably MSG).

As it happens, Gareth was away this weekend, and since yvesilena and the_alchemist were having a party on Sunday night, the usual gathering didn't happen in the usual way and I went to that instead. So I ate non-Chinese food to see what would happen to my sleep. And since (of course) I really want it not to be Chinese food that gives me insomnia, I was rather hoping that I'd have trouble sleeping as usual.

In fact, I did sleep better, but on the other hand the whole of the rest of my Sunday routine was disrupted as well, so this hardly points the finger conclusively at my diet. Next week I may try changing just the food, and see if that helps.

The appropriate response to a fire is not always an extinguisher.

Just occasionally, it's a bellows.

Uuuurgh. I've felt a bit grotty all week; my theory is that I've been putting off getting ill and have now finally succumbed.

If I stay in bed I just lie there feeling uuurgh and not sleeping; but now I'm out of bed I sit here feeling uuurgh and not feeling like doing anything.

*sigh*

It's one of those mornings on which I'm uncertain of whether I'm ill, tired and annoyed, or merely tired and annoyed. And, of course, although the dividing line between the two states is too fine for me to be certain which side I'm on, it makes all the difference as to whether or not I can reasonably go home and back to bed. Not that I'd be able to do anything useful, like sleeping, if I did.