(Well, to be fair, it was partly my own fault too.)

I recently persuaded my mum to provide me with her recipe for fish pie, which I have fond memories of eating in huge quantity through the later parts of my childhood and which tends to be the first meal that springs to my mind whenever I think ‘you know, I haven't eaten any fish in quite a while’. She gave me lots of detail on the ingredients, methods of preparation and so forth; I managed to fill up an entire sheet of A4 with my illegible scrawls. The one thing she omitted was any hint of quantities in the recipe.

As a result, when I tested the recipe on elise last night, it was slightly short of fish (the Sainsbury's fishmonger insisted that if I was cooking for two then I didn't need more than that much, and on reflection I think he was simply wrong) and extremely overendowed with cheese sauce. Still, that didn't make it inedible by a long chalk, and I'm sure I can do somewhat better next time, so yum anyway.

Cooking still seems to be something with a direct line to my ego. Doing it badly tends to make me feel utterly worthless for the rest of the day, but doing it successfully is a big boost and makes me feel really good about myself. And inviting someone round when I'm cooking a recipe that I've never tried before and know I don't have all the details of – well, that's just scary. I don't think I managed to finish feeling nervous until we'd almost finished eating it.

I can only hope that at some point I'll stop feeling that way about cooking. I used to feel the same way about driving when I first got a car, and I got over that after a while. So there's hope of recovery.

Good grief. The PuTTY team has just received an email containing the following highly impressive header:

X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, af, sq, am, ar, ar-dz, ar-bh, ar-eg,
       ar-iq, ar-jo, ar-kw, ar-lb, ar-ly, ar-ma, ar-om, ar-qa,
       ar-sa, ar-sy, ar-tn, ar-ae, ar-ye, an, hy, ast, az, eu, be,
       bs, br, bg, ca, ch, ce, zh, zh-cn, zh-hk, zh-sg, zh-tw, cv,
       co, hr, cs, da, nl, nl-be, undefined, en-au, en-bz, en-ca,
       en-ie, en-jm, en-nz, en-ph, en-za, en-tt, en-gb, undefined,
       en-zw, eo, et, fo, fj, fi, fr, fr-be, fr-ca, fr-fr, fr-lu,
       fr-mc, fr-ch, fy, gl, ka, de, de-at, de-de, de-li, de-lu,
       de-ch, el, ht, he, hu, is, id, ia, ie, iu, ga, it, it-ch, ja,
       kk, ky, ko, ko-kp, ko-kr, la, lv, lt, lb, mk-mk, ms, mi, mr,
       mo, nv, ng, ne, no, nb, nn, oc, om, fa, pl, pt, pt-br, qu,
       rm, ro, ru, sg, sa, sc, gd, sr, sd, sk, sl, so, es, es-ar,
       es-bo, es-cl, es-co, es-cr, es-do, es-ec, es-sv, es-gt,
       es-hn, es-mx, es-ni, es-pa, es-py, es-pe, es-pr, es-es,
       es-uy, es-ve, sw, sv, sv-fi, ta, th, tr, tk, uk, hsb, ve, vi,
       vo, wa, cy, xh, yi, zu

Now that's what I call a polyglot!

(I particularly like the two ‘undefined’s. :-)

It isn't often that I go to sleep at night and dream of the very next morning; and it's very confusing when I do.

In non-dreaming news, one of my fingers has been itching vigorously since yesterday. My best guess is that I dipped it in some irritant chemical, but no plausible recent incident springs to mind. Bah.

*blinks*

I've just received a bounce message from msn.com about a spam that was forged to look as if it was from me. That's not uncommon, but I like the wording of this particular one:

You sent the message below to an e-mail address that is not monitored for incoming mail.

… how did they know?!

Ho hum. I feel unusually empathic at the moment. I'll read on LJ that some particular friend is unhappy, and five minutes later I'll be thinking ‘hang on, didn't I just hear that the world was ending, why am I still sitting at my desk?’. Then I'll remember exactly what it was I heard, and although it isn't good, rationally it doesn't present any reason why I should start panicking, so I'll tell myself to relax a bit. And five minutes later, same story again. My subconscious is amazingly good sometimes at picking up really subtle hints, but often astonishingly bad at taking in things SHOUTED AT IT LOUDLY AND CLEARLY.

On the other hand, it might not be empathy as such. I've also been rather ineffective recently when it comes to (e.g.) believing people care about me, so it may not be that I'm unusually empathic so much as that I'm unusually pessimistic at the moment, and eager to find any excuse at all to believe the world's ending…

Oh, I'm sick of this.

When you buy little boxes of pills – pretty much any kind of pills, be they painkillers, antihistamines, indigestion tablets, or something more serious – the box contains one or two sheets of plastic with the pills embedded in them, plus a sheet of paper giving the instructions. That sheet of paper is typically bent in a U-shape around the pill sheets.

Therefore, if you open the box at the end furthest from the bend of the U, you can take out a sheet of pills easily. Open it at the wrong end, and you are confronted with the instruction sheet, and the most convenient way to get at the pills is to close it again and open it at the other end.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I opened a box of pills and found I had gone to the right end first. I'm convinced I get the wrong end nearly every time, which means I'm doing significantly worse than I would if I flipped a coin each time to decide which end to open it at.

In fact, perhaps I should actually start flipping a coin.

Bah. I've lost my umbrella again.

This time I think I can remember where, though. I definitely had it when I arrived at Pizza Express on Monday night, I remember hanging it on their coat stand to dry, and I'm pretty positive I didn't pick it up again when I went out. When they open today I'll phone them and see if they've still got it.

It has without a doubt been Strange Dreams Week for me. Last night's was some sort of a cross between Doctor Who and a zombie-and-monsters movie; I think I was the Doctor's companion, but about half way through I got rather confused about which one of the Doctor and the zombies I was trying to get away from, and then ended up trying to escape from both by catching a train, but was foiled because they were all delayed. (I'm sure I've had train stress dreams before. I don't even use trains that much, but there seems to be a running theme here.) The night before I spent on the moon, only it was a moonbase designed by a second-rate sci-fi author who didn't see what the fuss was about airtightness; I kept running around complaining about this, but everyone ignored me and stubbornly carried on breathing regardless. The really odd bit was that what was mostly a sensibly futuristic-looking moonbase also had a small annexe containing a rather large and perfectly ordinary Sainsbury's.

The previous two nights weren't any more sensible, though I can't remember any of the details any more. I don't think there's been a morning this week on which I haven't got out of bed muttering to myself ‘Now what the hell was that all about?’.

Work has also been moderately odd, owing to a large design task which is currently hovering at the point of completion; it's now at the stage where I think I've got it right this time, but may at any moment suddenly realise it's all doomed and I'm back to the drawing board. Which means I'm unsure of whether to feel satisfied or apprehensive or what, which contributes to my general feeling of surreality.

And as if that wasn't enough strangeness in one week, on Wednesday night elise completed her quest to show me all of Neon Genesis Evangelion: a series which starts off strange, gets stranger 2/3 of the way through, and somewhere in the final four episodes we watched this week it went completely off the rails into utter bizarreness.

It has therefore, without doubt, been a very weird week.

Bah. This is now peak hayfever season as far as I'm concerned.

Every year, at least for the last few years, I have watched all my hayfever-suffering friends dissolve into little puddles of agony around May or June, sniffed experimentally, felt fine, and wondered if I was actually going to get away with it this year. Then, around mid-July, the first sneezing fits start to hit me and I remember that I just get it later in the year than most people.

I don't think I've heard anyone else complain about hayfever for weeks now. But I nearly exploded when I went out to buy lunch an hour ago, and my pills are not helping.

In other annoyance: the animal rights protesters came back today and blew their stupid horn outside the next office building again. And a colleague tells me that one of them has come over to our car park and has been sticking leaflets under everyone's windscreen wipers. Bah.

Unusually for a Monday, I feel more rested today than I did yesterday.

Saturday night was the house-cooling at Impropriety. The theme was ‘come as something improper’; lacking the means and the motive[1] to follow the spirit of this theme, I decided to hide behind the letter, so I put a sticky label on my T-shirt bearing the improper fraction 5/3. This got a wide range of reactions, from blank looks through groans to one or two honestly delighted laughs and/or hugs, so I think on balance I did OK there.

As I left the party at nearly 2am I heard noises behind me suggesting that it was just about to get really improper. I seem to have a knack for leaving parties just at the right moment…

Sadly, I still left too late for comfort, since after spending an hour at home airing out the house before going to bed it was nearly 3am and I needed to be up for noon the next day to have lunch with Mum. Still, I got there only ten minutes late in the end, so that was all right. And my surprise present to Mum seemed to go down well, so that was good too. Unfortunately, by the time I got home and guests began to arrive for the roving Doctor Who gathering, I was feeling pretty awful, and had little patience with either the Doctor himself or the board game we played in between episodes. But a good night's sleep has done wonders, so I'm feeling better now.

[1] Arrgh. I lacked the means and I lacked the motive. I'm unable to decide whether I should therefore say that I lacked the means and the motive, or that I lacked the means or the motive. Where's Augustus de Morgan when you need him?

It has been a bit of a strange week.

Last night I released a new version of PuTTY, fixing a scary security hole which has apparently been present since the beginning of recorded history. We received notification of this hole a week ago, and I've been frantically running around trying to clear up the mess ever since.

Apart from that, this week has been pretty good so far. Skipped the usual Pizza Express gathering on Monday because I had arranged to be feeding home-made ad-hoc pizza to lnr, which was great fun (if messy, in a throw-everything-randomly-around-the-kitchen sort of way) and I should make home-made ad-hoc pizza more often. Then Calling yesterday, with the surprising addition of the_alchemist, who it was particularly nice to see.

The company in the building opposite this one is apparently involved with Huntingdon Life Sciences. I can tell this because there's a protest going on outside that building right now; from my desk I can hear a lot of scary mob-type yelling, an occasional amplified voice, and a variety of parping noises which are either someone playing a brass instrument terribly badly or car horns from motorists trying to get past.

I'm finding them moderately intimidating just sitting in the next building having nothing to do with the subject matter. When I went out to buy lunch they were only just beginning to gather, but by the time I came back half an hour later they were looking worrying enough that I decided to avoid them by going back into the office via the back door.

They'd better have given up and gone away by 5:30 when I want to leave. With any luck all that manic yelling will have given them sore throats by that time.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html is Paul Graham's latest essay, on what makes a Great Hacker. In it, he writes:

The people I've met who do great work rarely think that they're doing great work. They generally feel that they're stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it's only a matter of time until they're found out.

Now if only cause and effect pointed in the other direction… :-)

Insomnia for the second night running. Bah. Yesterday's was normal enough; Sunday nights often give me a sense of ‘it's important that I get enough sleep so I can get up for work tomorrow’, which is of course precisely the kind of pressure you don't need while trying to relax.

Tonight's is unusual. So normally with insomnia I wonder about the cause; it might be an odd mood, or it might be some physical thing just below the conscious threshold. If the latter, it might be any of the temperature, or indigestion, or hayfever, or an ordinary call of nature.

As best I can tell right now, the reason I currently have insomnia is all five of the above at once. I suppose at least that means I don't have to worry about which one it is.

Dark mutterings toward my doctor's surgery, which has apparently changed its appointment policy. You now can't pre-book an appointment by more than a day or two, and there are very few pre-bookable ones even then. You have to ring up on the day and get an appointment, which means you have pretty much no chance of getting one at a time of day that's convenient to you.

Previously you could pre-book by a week or so, which was great for non-urgent appointments because you could generally arrange a useful time of day, and there were also some emergency slots for booking on the same day if it was urgent. This seemed to work very well for me, although presumably it was somehow less good from the surgery's point of view or they wouldn't have changed it.

I rang up recently and said ‘Hello, I'd like to make an appointment to see a doctor’. My old GP had left Cambridge, so I had no particular preference out of the available doctors; it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to give the surgery the maximum possible latitude to set up whatever was convenient for them. So the above was all I said: I simply wanted to see a doctor. Whichever doctor was convenient, at whatever time was convenient. And at this simple request, the receptionist went all doubtful and said ‘Ooh, er, I'm not sure we can do that’.

I boggle. If you can't do that, why are you even answering the telephone at all?

Today, for the first time since early May, I drove to work with music playing. After about a month of faffing, Dension have finally got themselves in gear and shipped a replacement front panel to Car Audio Direct, who shipped it on to me in somewhere under 24 hours, and astonishingly it actually works – I was gloomily convinced that Dension's identification of the faulty part from my description of the symptoms would turn out to have been wrong.

Now all I have to do (apart from waiting a few days before I relax, in case it cuts out again immediately like last time) is to figure out how to get the wretched thing back into its slot in the dashboard. It goes in most of the way, but won't go in the last centimetre and lock into place properly. I think the cables behind it must be getting in the way, but I've been unable to discover the correct knack for tucking them into niches. I have a nasty feeling I'm going to have to go back to a professional car audio shop and look like an idiot asking them to do something so simple. And they'll probably charge me tens of pounds for it as well…

Still, it lifted my mood noticeably on a day which began with me getting out of bed and immediately groaning ‘oh god, I feel a Monday coming on’. After two months of absence, I'd pretty much got used to having no music in the car, and I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoy it when I do have it.

‘What do you eat?’ I was asked the other day. This is not an uncommon thing to be asked by people thinking of cooking for me[1], but it's something I always have trouble answering coherently.

There aren't many things I really won't eat, so telling someone what to avoid is quick and simple. But sometimes people also want to know what I particularly like, and that's the bit I have trouble talking about. I think it's psychological: if I tell someone who's planning to cook for me that I like (say) parsnips, it feels as if I'm somehow morally obliging them to cook something involving parsnips, and that makes me uncomfortable because they're my host, not my servant. I feel a lot less uncomfortable once I've listed so many things I like that you couldn't possibly fit them all into the same meal (because then even my conscience can't believe I'm placing a detailed order), but getting over the initial hurdle is really hard.

On the other hand, if I'm not actually talking to someone who's imminently planning to cook for me, I'm perfectly capable of going on for ages about what I do and don't like to eat. I did this into a text editor yesterday, as an exercise, and I now have a three-page document describing my food tastes in ludicrous detail – which probably means it isn't suitable to be waved at people who ask me this question, because now there's so much of it that they'd lose the will to live half way through!

I wonder what a sensible solution is to this dilemma. I suppose I ought to be able to take the three-page document and ruthlessly edit it, but I'm naturally verbose and ruthless editing doesn't sit well with me…

[1] Interestingly, I don't tend to ask ‘what do you eat?’ myself, when it's me doing the cooking. I'm more likely to suggest a particular meal and see if it meets with approval; but that's probably just because I have a rather limited recipe collection.

‘Why are they chasing you?’
‘I don't know.’
‘Oh, come on! There must be a reason.’
‘Oh, there's plenty of reasons. I just don't know which one.’

– Terry Pratchett, ‘Sourcery’

I really, really wish that more people understood the difference between ‘I don't know what the answer is’ and ‘I don't believe there is an answer’.

If I ask, for example, ‘How are you going to do this?’, I don't mean ‘this is impossible so you would be ill-advised to even consider trying it’. At least, sometimes I mean that (and I'll usually make it clear), but just as often I mean ‘there are several ways to do this and it might make a difference which one you pick’, or ‘I would like to do this myself and would be interested in your opinion of which way is better’, or ‘I don't doubt that if you say you can do this then you know of a way, but I haven't managed to think of one myself yet, so I want to know what I missed’. A question is not necessarily a challenge. Sometimes it's just a question.

I remember an infuriating conversation I had once while in the grip of a painfully strong crush on someone. She had said something ambiguous and I wasn't sure what she'd meant by it; I was agonising about this to a friend. Well, said my friend, she might have meant <this>. Yes, I said, she might have. Or, said the friend, she might have meant <that>. Indeed, I said. Or perhaps, my friend added helpfully, she meant <something totally opposed to both of the above suggestions>. Yes, I said, she could perfectly well have meant that too. The friend looked puzzled. ‘Then,’ he asked, ‘what's the problem?’

Not knowing the answer to a question doesn't necessarily mean you lack any possible answers. It may equally well mean that you have too many possible answers and can't choose between them. Or, indeed, that you have exactly one possible answer but are unconvinced that there aren't others you haven't thought of.

Somewhat to my relief, I feel OK this morning.

The past week has been a little bit hectic. There was the Marillion gig on Tuesday, which involved driving up to Norwich; this meant that, pretty much straight after getting out of work, I spent seven solid hours either driving or standing up, and ended up getting to bed late. Then the Carlton Arms had its own beer festival, causing me to drink alcohol two nights running (which I usually try not to do, but a Carlton beerfest struck me as an exceptional circumstance), and I suspect that didn't do wonders for my sleep. By Friday evening I was pretty much good for nothing except wandering around like a zombie going ‘uurgh’; so naturally I let myself get talked into helping lzz sort out her ailing computer, stayed at the Gallery nattering and went to bed late again, and the next day drove Gareth down to London (through some fairly horrifying traffic) for Vicky S's random gathering-in-the-garden, then drove back again in time to go to pjc50's party as well.

When I woke up on Sunday morning I felt so utterly shattered that I seriously wondered whether I still had lingering traces of last week's illness. However, a concentrated programme of doing very little indeed all day seemed to help matters; hosting the Doctor Who gathering was useful as well since it meant I didn't even have to make any effort to go to that. This morning I felt surprisingly OK, so I think I might have survived after all.

The Carlton beerfest was good though. I said a few weeks ago that in all respects other than the nice beer, the ‘real’ beer festival utterly sucked as a drinking venue; so, of course, on this basis the Carlton must be an absolutely ideal place to hold an alternative one. And it was good; admittedly in two visits I only found one beer I was particularly interested in continuing to drink, but that one was very nice so that was OK. (Entertainingly, mobbsy, sion_a and I all independently picked that one off the programme within about ten minutes of each other. Evidently its description was by far the nicest-sounding one on the sheet. And the beer wasn't bad either :-)

Last year, I wrote a diary entry mentioning that I'd hacked a better mode of job termination notification into bash(1).

I've just got round to fixing the major bug in this patch, putting it up on the web, and mailing the bash maintainers about it. So if anyone who hasn't already got a copy of this is interested in giving it a go, you can get it from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bash-notify/.

Oddly enough, when I went back and checked my original diary entry on the subject, I was rather startled to find that it was actually written on 1st July – precisely a year ago today. That wasn't even intentional! How silly.