Drove to Norwich with Gareth and Owen last night, to see Marillion playing live at the UEA.

I'm normally not much of a fan of live music. For a start, there's the inconvenience. It's invariably a total pain to get to the gig you want to go to, including figuring out how you'll get home if it goes on until after the last train; when you get there, you typically have to stand up for the whole time you're listening, which gets tiring pretty quickly. Plus it costs more to get into a one-off gig than it does to buy an album you can play over and over again; so given all that, I tend to feel that a gig had better be a mindblowingly wonderful experience to be worth the aggro. Which they're usually not: the music is often so loud my ears max out and I don't get to hear it properly, the sound balance has a nasty habit of sucking royally so that the instruments (especially the drums) drown out the vocals, any feeling of awe at being in the same room as a famous band in person is rapidly outweighed by annoyance at the sweaty punk next to me elbowing me in the ribs constantly, and if there's anything worth watching going on on the stage then I can pretty much assume that someone's head will get between me and it at the crucial moment. I find live gigs are particularly bad when the band is one I haven't heard before; on the one occasion I tried this, I came out with very little more idea of what their music is like than I had when I went in.

Despite this, I still go to gigs on occasion; I think I've now been to … um … between seven and ten, depending on which borderline cases you count. Mostly I'll only go if it's a band I like a lot and I expect to recognise a lot of the music played, because then my brain can fill in the details when all I can actually hear is a vague thumping noise in roughly the right rhythm.

And just occasionally it is worth it. Marillion's gig last night had an actually sensible sound balance, so that the music actually sounded like music played by Marillion; but it had more feeling and more energy than hearing the same songs on studio albums. The first half of the gig was from their latest album ‘Marbles’; I had already heard several of these songs coming out of Gareth's CD player and had largely felt that I could take them or leave them, but the same songs coming out of the live band did a much better job of grabbing me by the throat and making me enjoy them. Then they went back over their earlier stuff (i.e. albums some of which I actually own) and managed to make my spine actually tingle a few times, which generally takes some doing because I don't tingle easily. As it were.

I think the real low point for me was when they encouraged audience participation in ‘Cover My Eyes’, because the audience were utterly not up to the job. (A sharp contrast with the last NMA gig I went to, at which the band played the opening riff to ‘Poison Street’ and let the audience roar the whole first verse back at them unaccompanied, and it came out in time, with intelligible lyrics and in a clear consensus key. Evidently some bands have talented fans, and others don't.)

But overall, an enjoyable evening. Now all I need is to find an extra hour or two of sleep from somewhere (it didn't finish until 11:30 and then I had to drive back to Cambridge and drop off my passengers)…

Curiously small pizza gathering yesterday; instead of the usual 8-12 people we had nobody except me, Owen and Ian.

There had been an incident the previous week with a threatened boycott of the place (owing to the manager pulling up outside and parking antisocially while talking on a mobile phone), so we wondered briefly if a genuine boycott had been arranged and the three of us had somehow failed to hear about it. Apparently not, though; it seems it really was just a large coincidence that everyone else happened to have something else to do on the same day. How odd. That tends to happen on Bank Holidays, but I've never seen it happen purely by chance before.

Ho hum. Got up yesterday, felt moderately awful, had recovered twenty minutes later so went to work anyway. Got up today, felt utterly horrible, went straight back to bed, and apart from crawling out briefly to email in sick didn't emerge until nearly noon.

Hot baths are very good when you're ill. They're the closest thing to still being in bed that also gets you clean.

Now I feel basically human, though still moving a bit slowly. Probably best if I stay on the sofa for the rest of the day and rest myself thoroughly rather than trying to make it back to work for the afternoon.

Ho hum. That was a very nice evening up until about 10:30, at which point things began to go wrong.

Up until then I had been at Chris and Yasmin's in rainy Sawston, helping Chris celebrate his birthday. The invitation had said ‘bring a pizza’, so on a random whim I had instead brought a pizza base and Much Stuff to pile thereon, and in a fit of supreme confidence had even brought a second pizza base so I could feed Owen as well. This went mostly OK, and our pizzas were piled by far the highest of anyone's in the room, so yum. Then we all sat down and watched Amelie, which is still a thoroughly lovely film. So far, so good.

Shortly after 10:30 I drove back to Cambridge with the intention of dropping in on the Calling for an hour or so before going to bed. Leaving my bag in Sawston through sheer muppetry.

Curiously, several of the people I usually expect to see at the Calling seemed to be absent, and instead quite a few people who aren't normally there were present. So I chatted to those instead, and just when I started looking around for people to say goodbye to, then one of the former group turned out to have been there all along but invisible to muppets like me who don't look hard enough. Did I feel foolish.

In addition, at around this point my stomach started to hurt, making me remember my hand-made pizza efforts and start to wonder if I'd inadvertently poisoned Owen.

This morning things look a little more sunny, since it turns out Gareth has rescued my bag. And since I felt fine this morning, I imagine my stomach hurting was more likely to be stress over my multiple muppeticities late last night. Though I won't know for sure until I hear from Owen…

Hmm, I seem not to have written anything in here for ten days.

I think I'm currently going through a boring phase. I'm finding it hard to think of topics of conversation, because every time I look back through recent things that have happened to me, they all seem like non-starters; and I suspect it's for much the same reason that nothing much has seemed worth writing about in here either. It's not that I'm not doing things, just that all the things I've been doing are – for one reason or another – unsuitable for random conversation. Either they're so technically specialist that even other geeks wouldn't be particularly interested, or they're things that only make sense inside my own head, or they're things I actively don't want to talk to people about.

The Dension is still broken. I mailed the shop I bought it from, and they talked to Dension themselves, who claim to have managed to figure out which part was faulty simply from my detailed description of the symptoms; so they said they'd just send me a new part. Incredibly convenient if it works, since I wasn't looking forward to the hassle of sending the entire thing off for diagnosis and repair. I just hope they've correctly identified the fault … Anyway, the shop mailed me back this week to say that they'd received the replacement part from Dension, but it had been damaged in transit so they'd sent it back again. While on the one hand it's nice that they're actually paying some attention, and it's certainly better than them sending the part all the way on to me just so that I could find it was broken, it's still somewhat annoying.

Also this week I did a good deed and saved someone some money. Prue, my Scrabble-addicted colleague and friend, had recently seen someone playing ‘Upwords’ (Scrabble-like game with the gimmick that the tiles can be stacked so you can overlay new letters on existing words) on a train and was considering buying it; now I'd actually played it before and didn't think it was nearly as good as Scrabble proper, so I tracked down the copy I'd played, borrowed it from (as it turned out) drswirly, and invited her round so she could have a go before spending money. She was as unconvinced as I'd been, so probably won't be wasting her disposable income on it.

Upwords is strange. The first time I played it, I was left with the strong impression that the scoring system didn't encourage the right kinds of play; most of the strategies that scored serious points didn't feel like worthy exercises of ingenuity, but more like cynical exploitations of loopholes, while really clever moves went largely unrewarded. Playing it for the second time this week, I still felt that, but in addition it got very hard to make any moves by the end of the game. It's all very well being able to lay a whole new word on top of an existing one, but when you have to preserve the wordhood of any words you intersect on the way, you end up rather depending on the first half of the game having involved lots of words that could be turned into other words by changing only one letter. If it didn't, all players are scuppered equally and the game becomes frustrating.

Still, on the plus side it made a good excuse to practice my new mushroom risotto recipe again, so it wasn't all bad :-)

It occurred to me the other day that I completely forgot to publicly mock the crackers who attacked the PuTTY website late last year. (Some of my readers will have heard this story already.)

Whew, my GameCube still works.

I booted it up last night for the first time after it crashed the other week; whatever was bothering it then appeared to have been only temporary, and it now seems to run fine. This is a relief, since it's my diversion of choice while I'm airing the house out at night, because I can play it without the lights on which means the open windows don't attract legions of insects.

In other news, hmm, what have I been doing? Went to Strawberry Fair on Saturday, rather against my better judgment since it's been entirely tedious in recent years. The purpose of going was to track down a particular T-shirt stall for drswirly, which turned out to be absent; the rest of the fair was exactly as tedious as we'd feared so we left it in a hurry.

In a break with tradition, pizza yesterday was at Zizzi's, a new pizza-and-pasta place a few doors down from our normal Pizza Express. On the plus side, the food was very nice. On the minus side, it was very loud, the seats were uncomfortably hard, the waiters really couldn't get their heads round the amount of iced water eleven Camgeeks can drink, and the service was slow. On the neutral but somewhat odd side, the garlic bread starter was the same size as a normal pizza, and the pizzas larger still; this would have been less puzzling if the other starters and the pasta dishes hadn't appeared to have perfectly normal portion sizes. Having one starter three times the size of all the others just struck me as weird.

Subconsciouses are amazing things.

Mine is astonishingly good at all sorts of stuff. It will frequently prompt me to do some moderately random thing, or to do something in a particular way, and it will later turn out that doing that had some fantastic consequence such as completely avoiding a potential large problem, even though that problem hadn't consciously crossed my mind at all at the time my subconscious prompted me to make the decision.

Sometimes this gets taken to extremes, and I find myself behaving strangely and apparently erratically for an hour at a time, and I'm consciously thinking the whole time ‘I shouldn't be behaving like this’ but I keep doing it nonetheless because the hunch is too strong, and about 24 hours later I suddenly realise that there was an incredibly good reason for me doing so which my subconscious didn't bother to explain to me.

It's an absolutely amazing achievement; a tour de force of prediction, pattern-spotting and (on occasion) pre-emptive tactical planning. It's a much better driver than I am and has saved my life at least once behind the wheel; it programs at least as well as I do when I'm consciously thinking about it; I rely on it implicitly in so many circumstances that I'm sure I'd be completely helpless if it were swapped with someone else's.

I just wish that, once in a while, it would SHOW ITS WORKING.

Cooked mushroom risotto for myself and lnr last night. I had cooked this once before in November, and it was a perfectly edible meal then, but this time I made some modifications to the recipe and it came out distinctly yum rather than merely edible; one of the most mushroomy-tasting things I've eaten in quite some time.

I must rapidly find excuses to cook it for some more people :-)

Hectic weekend just gone. Yesterday I drove down to Oxford for hilarityallen's birthday party; partied, stayed overnight in a B&B, then next day drove the remaining group out to Uffington White Horse where we did a six-mile walk. Just come back to Cambridge.

Put like that, it doesn't sound too hectic, does it? Well, it gets a lot more so when you're transporting a different passenger in each direction of the journey, several other people have entrusted luggage to you that would have been more hassle to take on the train/bicycle, that luggage is again different in each direction of the journey, and you couldn't be bothered to travel light so you threw everything into the car and reckoned you'd sort it out when you got there. The logistics alone were as much effort as anything else in the whole weekend :-)

Made a welcome change from the week just past, though, in which I've mostly been spending my evenings at home sulking. (In principle what I was doing was avoiding the beerfest because I couldn't be bothered with the crowds and chaos, but in practice I think ‘sulking’ is a much better word for what it felt like.) I spent a lot of time working out some general annoyance on the GameCube, until Friday evening when the GameCube made worrying-sounding noises and then crashed. This didn't help my mood either! So it was just as well to get away from absolutely everything and have a weekend somewhere completely different. Now I'll see if I can start being usefully sociable again…

Ho hum. After a few generally rather nice weeks, yesterday was a bit of a comedown.

Work was somewhat demoralising, in that ‘you finish something which you spent weeks on, did at least two nearly-impossible things in the course of, and were generally feeling pretty pleased with yourself about, and by way of reward you get to have a blazing row with a colleague about whether or not it was a worthwhile exercise in the first place’ sort of fashion. (I'm sure that happens to everyone now and again.) Also I missed an office pub trip at lunchtime due to an incautiously scheduled appointment to get my car fixed (again).

Decided not to beerfest, since I don't really enjoy it that much. I went on Tuesday night, which was a lot better than my usual attempts to go on Thursday and beyond, since all the beers that caught my eye in the programme were actually still available. But apart from that, it still involves a lot of uncomfortable sitting on floors, a lot of completely ludicrous crush at the bars, and it invariably rains us all into the inadequate tent every time I go; in every respect other than the good and varied beer, as a drinking venue, it utterly sucks. So I stayed at home and took out my bad mood by restarting Metroid Prime from the beginning and blowing lots of things up, which just about managed to lift my mood enough that I didn't go to bed still aggravated.

I hope today will be better, but since it looks likely that it will involve repeating yesterday's row in the context of a formal meeting I'm unconvinced so far.

Ho hum. So I just walked into Cambridge Car Audio carrying my recalcitrant Dension and persuaded them to let me plug it into their indoor car-stereo connector, in order to find out whether my loose connection was in the stereo or in the car. I fully expected this experiment to tell me that the stereo was perfectly all right and the car's wiring was at fault, since that seemed only reasonable given that the car was the bit that had changed recently. Then I was going to go back to Wests and demand that they made a better job of fixing their loose connections, this time armed with clear proof that the stereo wasn't the faulty component.

Except that, as it turns out, the results of the experiment went the other way, and it is the Dension that's broken. Bah. I was really hoping not to have to send it away for repairs, since that's always a staggeringly annoying pain in the wossname.

Worse still, I asked CCA whether there were any other hard-disk based MP3 car stereos on the market, and they said yes, there were about three of them, with disk sizes ranging from 10Gb to 16Gb and prices starting at 600 quid. The Dension has a still-fairly-small 20Gb disk and cost me 400, and I thought that was bad! So it looks as if I'm stuck with trying to get the Dension fixed, on all counts. Sigh.

( geeky musings about how much code I've written in my life )

And a big BAH to electronics in general.

Just picked the car back up. Wests have apparently fixed the rattling sunroof (yay!). They haven't fixed the rattling steering wheel, but will do so next week once they have the necessary part.

And they fixed the Dension, which had stopped playing MP3s about a week after I got the new car. I had hoped that the problem was in the car rather than the Dension, and it seemed likely enough given the timing of the failure; and, indeed, the garage said they just pummelled all the connections and made sure everything was properly seated and it all started working again just like that. Fantastic. I was really not looking forward to sending the stereo off for repair under its own warranty.

So I drove back to the office, with some celebratory music playing on the Dension; and about three minutes from arrival, the wretched thing suddenly cut out and went back to radio-only mode, exactly as it had done the last time. I can only assume that whatever loose connection the garage had nudged back into place has slipped back out of place again.

I get very annoyed when electronics behaves like this. :-(

Don't you hate it when you think you're hugely exaggerating the extent to which the world can be deliberately unpleasant to you, and suddenly realise you're not?

Driving back from dropping my car off at the garage at lunchtime: ‘Yuck,’ I thought, ‘is there some rule that says when a garage lends you a courtesy car it has to be horrible?’

Moments later, I realised that there probably is! At least, it certainly seems to me that it's in a garage's interests never to give you a courtesy car which you'd rather have than your own. This realisation entirely failed to cheer me up noticeably.

(I'm also now curious to know what a garage does if you come in needing repairs to an absolutely bottom-of-the-range vehicle.)

Get up. Blear into bathroom to shave. Half way to bathroom, suffer attack of absentmindedness about why I was going there. Arrive in bathroom, squeeze toothpaste on to brush, insert brush in mouth.

About two nanoseconds after doing this, taste of toothpaste shocks me properly awake and I realise that now I have to miss breakfast since it would taste vile if I didn't. Quite why I couldn't have figured this out two nanoseconds before committing myself will be for my subconscious to explain shortly before it gets FIRED FOR GROSS INCOMPETENCE.

(A colleague of mine says that a friend of his apparently used to use this as a weight loss technique: after every meal, as soon as you think you've eaten as much food as you really need, get up and immediately clean your teeth. This will discourage you from continuing to eat, and as an added bonus you keep your teeth healthy too :-)

Still. I hope I can be more useful than that for the rest of the day, or I might do better just to go back home to bed…

A few weeks ago I came into my office to find a promotional pen lying on my desk. Apparently a company we deal with had dumped a load of free goodies on our team leader, who'd then gone round putting them on people's desks before they came in in the morning. Fair enough.

Uncommonly among promotional pens, this one was really quite nice. Wrote evenly and smoothly, didn't look cheap and plasticky. Lovely. Unfortunately, the company logo printed on it had failed to adhere to the surface of the pen, and began gradually flaking off and covering my desk in gunk. Just now I finally lost patience with it and rubbed off what remained of the logo, which only took me about thirty seconds with a dry tissue.

So now I have an unmarked really nice pen, which I got for free, and which is doing nothing whatsoever for the brand recognition of the company that gave it to me. You would think, since the logo was the entire point of the exercise from that company's point of view, that they might have devoted a little more attention to not making that the only bit they screwed up!

Not that I'm complaining; but that's precisely the point, that they've benefitted nobody but me when the clear intention was to benefit themselves. It makes me think they're both greedy and stupid. If they'd simply given me a free unmarked pen to start off with, I'd probably have thought they were generous and lovely…

At the Calling last night, I found my eye drifting over the ‘X-Men versus Street Fighter’ beat-em-up arcade game standing unplayed in a corner of the Kambar. It's been there for months if not years, but it only just occurred to me yesterday to wonder if the choice of characters was done as a deliberate play on ‘X-Wing versus TIE Fighter’. And now I've thought of it, it suddenly seems horribly likely…

Meanwhile at work, yesterday our documentation team called me a SME. I had no idea Kryten had found work as a tech author.

(‘Subject Matter Expert’, I eventually found out from a glossary, so I suppose I am indeed a complete and total one.)

In all my years of writing software, I have never had such rapid and high-quality beta testing as I did with the puzzle collection I mentioned in this diary recently. Evidently writing programs that people can use to waste time is a fantastic way to get a lot of testing very quickly. (Not that that should have surprised me, in retrospect, but.)

As a result I've now decided the beta period is over. There will still be bugs to fix, and I'll continue development as and when I have the time and energy, but I reckon these games now work plausibly enough to open them to world scrutiny. So in the unlikely event that anyone who read my previous entry on the subject was absolutely dying to link to my puzzles page and scrupulously didn't do so, they should now feel free :-)

Also, I've just added a fifth game to the page. If you're bored of the other four, go and play Rectangles for a while…

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

The computer gets faster! --Moore--