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--

Normally, anyone who phoned me up at 6:30am to sell me something would find themselves the lucky recipient of a lot of shouting before I put the phone down.

This morning, though, after I staggered to the phone in a sufficiently half-asleep state that I didn't even consider asking ‘do you know what time it is’ because I didn't know, it turned out that the person at the other end wanted to sell me something to do with congenital anosmia (i.e. no sense of smell). I was so utterly startled to be cold-called about something so astonishingly relevant to me that I totally forgot I'd been woken up at an ungodly hour.

Unfortunately he then hung up, or was cut off by a glitch, before telling me what he was actually selling; and he didn't call back; and the sheer amazement his call had caused me prevented me getting back to sleep. Then I was annoyed.

Clearly it can't be coincidence that two months after I put up a web page about having no sense of smell, someone phones me up knowing I have no sense of smell. I just wish they'd been slightly more competent about it.

Today I am 27. Coo, gosh etc.

And I have a present for everyone reading this. Partly in the Hobbit tradition of giving rather than receiving presents on one's birthday, but mostly because it happens to be today that I have it just about ready to roll.

Over the past week or so, I've been starting my own small collection of puzzle games, of roughly the Minesweeper class (i.e. things in tiny windows which you can pop up on your desktop and give yourself a two-minute break from whatever else you were doing). That collection is now working well enough for me to put it up on the web for other people to have a play with and try to break it.

So if you're bored with Minesweeper, or bored with work, or just generally bored, or if you just feel like selflessly helping me to beta-test some newly written software (ho ho wot a good excuse), you can point your browser at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/, and have fun. (Windows and Linux are both supported; anything more exotic than that is currently not, but could easily be if someone contributed some effort).

Bonus points to anyone who suggests a good overall name for the collection as a whole. It's currently called ‘puzzles’, which somehow just doesn't have that snappy sound to it…

(This is still beta software; there might well be really silly bugs in it. Feel free to test and play the games, but I'd rather people didn't start linking to the web page until I'm reasonably convinced it all actually works properly.)

From a commentator today: ‘… [Ronnie O'Sullivan is] brilliant with the right hand … and brilliant with the left hand … and pretty good with the rest.’

I know it made sense really, but we all thought it was a wonderful image.

You have spent the whole day at work looking for ways to improve some code, and almost everything you think of turns out to be something you already did a couple of years ago. After this unproductive day, you go home. Your neighbour rings the doorbell and asks for help with a practical problem; you can't think of anything useful to do or say, so she goes and posts the problem on LJ and the very first response is something you immediately realise you should have been able to tell her because you learned it yourself not too long ago. Then you go out for the evening, completely forgetting about the errand you had been telling yourself all day you meant to run on the way.

You get home just past midnight, with a splitting headache, and when you start getting undressed for bed your T-shirt gets stuck while coming off over your head. You reflect that this perfectly illustrates the kind of day it has been.

If this ever happens to you, then under no circumstances should you now relieve your feelings by hurling the offending T-shirt vigorously across the room. If you've had a day like that, you will manage to pull a muscle in the process. Trust me.

Whew. Well, that was a massive faff and a half.

This morning I drove to Newmarket in my battered old Peugeot 106. This afternoon, I've just driven home again in my new Clio.

This has taken the entire morning. I had prepared a lengthy checklist of everything to remember on the day of the handover, but of course several things managed to cause trouble nonetheless. First we had insurance doom: Direct Line's computers had crashed, so they were unable to update my policy – meaning that I was dependent on them getting their computers back up before it would be legal for me to drive the new car away! However, this turned out to be a boon, since I still needed to be able to drive the old car in order to nip home and pick up its current MOT certificate, which I had cleverly left in my ‘to be sorted’ pile of paperwork and despite checking twice had not noticed that the topmost MOT in the pile I was taking with me was last year's. Meanwhile the people in the garage were trying to install the Dension into the new car, and had discovered they were missing a piece of radio aerial which it took them an hour to go and get from somewhere else.

Once I got back with the proper MOT certificate, I phoned Direct Line again and this time managed to get them to take my details and say they'd call me back on my mobile. Brilliantly, they did this just as I was on the garage's phone talking to my bank (who were doing routine checks on a Switch transaction that large, and who can blame them?), so I genuinely had to do the thing where you talk into two telephones at once.

Still, all sorted out in the end; we did all the paperwork, I piled all the stuff I'd taken out of the old car into the new one, got in, started the engine, rebooted the somewhat miffed Dension a couple of times until it started playing music again, put it into gear and moved off. At which point the Dension suddenly stopped playing music and started flashing ‘TEL CALL’. Apparently it thought my (non-existent) car phone had just rung, and had helpfully stopped the music so I could hear the fictitious person at the other end of the putative line.

Read the Dension manual; no help. Went back in to query this; the guy I'd been dealing with was now talking to another customer and it looked like a long job, and the other guy said he didn't know much about stereos and I really needed to talk to my guy. Sigh. Sit back down with book (at least I'd remembered to bring that), wait my turn. My guy, it turned out, figured the problem out fairly fast, cut one wire in the manner of a bomb-defusion expert, and then I was really on my way home with my music playing merrily.

So, phew. Now for some lunch.

In the course of the car-buying process and getting the RAC in to have a look at the prospective purchase, I've had occasion to practise my radio alphabet quite a lot, since the RAC needed the registration and chassis numbers, everyone needed everyone else's postcode, and as usual nobody could spell my name.

There was one particularly confusing bit where I used the word ‘Peru’ for P, and it was misheard as the digit 2. That struck me as odd, since I thought the whole point of radio alphabets was that they were designed so that sort of mishearing just didn't happen. Of course, the fault turned out to be mine, since the standard NATO radio alphabet uses ‘Papa’ for P. So why could I have sworn it was ‘Peru’?

I've only just worked it out. I bet I was thinking of Peru because the radio-alphabet for L is ‘Lima’. D'oh!

Well, I've been saying I need a new car for some months now, and this week it's actually started to look likely that I might acquire one soon. Having test-driven a bunch of possibilities and decided which one I liked best, I've been telling everyone I was after a VW Polo, and therefore it makes obvious and perfect sense that yesterday I should have put a deposit down on a Renault Clio.

This is because nobody actually seemed to have any second-hand Polos of the kind I was after (5-door with half-decent engine); at least none that weren't apparently selling like hot cakes. I counted three that were brought to my attention by the local VW dealer and turned out to have been sold already by the time they phoned me back. On the other hand, when I made an exploratory pass through Newmarket, a couple of identical-looking 5-door Clios caught my eye on the forecourt of Wests, and after a test drive and some thought I decided that one of those would be just as plausible a replacement for battered old Arthur as a Polo would, particularly since the Clio's slightly smaller size might make it that much less likely to have arguments with my somewhat contorted driveway.

So, ooh, goodness. If all goes to plan, then by the time I go back to work in a week and a half I'll be going in a different car. That's slightly scary.

At about 3am on Friday night, I got up briefly in the middle of the night, and on the way back to bed I managed to stub my little toe painfully on a doorpost. At the time I thought nothing of it (well, apart from a brief ‘ow’) and went back to bed; in the morning I found it was still feeling a bit painful but still didn't think it was terribly significant. Certainly it didn't cause me any trouble slobbing around the house in slippers all day.

I didn't leave the house until about 7pm, when I put some shoes on and tried to walk into town for James's birthday dinner. I got about three minutes away from home before the pain had got so bad I had to turn round, hobble back home, and get in the car instead, which left me unable to drink and extremely cross.

I'm reminded very much of breaking my toe on a doorpost in Trinity in 1998; it was even the same toe. I don't think it's broken this time – it hurt significantly less and it wasn't actually impossible for me to put a pair of shoes on – but it's certainly pretty badly bruised and I'm not going to be walking anywhere much for a few days.

It's odd how a foot injury suddenly gives me a really strong desire to do lots of foot-related things; one moment I wanted nothing more than to sit around the house going zzzzz for two weeks, but injure one toe and suddenly my brain is convinced I'd planned a miniature walking holiday interspersed with dancing and badminton, just so that it can feel hard done by at not getting it.

Dear oh dear, I am tired.

On Wednesday I misread the word ‘FLIPCHART’ as ‘ELEPHANT’. Today I have been absent-mindedly attempting to wash up things I should have thrown away (but fortunately not vice versa, unless I didn't even notice of course).

Fortunately, as of this evening, I am also now on holiday for two weeks. So zzzzz to that.