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.

This week at work, we have all been migrated to a new mail setup, which means in particular that Linux users (i.e. most of the people in this room) have to read their mail using Ximian's ‘Evolution’ client.

It occurred to us this morning to wonder why there isn't a rival mail client, called ‘Creation’. Notable features would be:

• There is no version number, because there is no process of incremental improvement. Creation was in its final form at the moment of initial release.
• If you think you've noticed any bugs or flaws in the design, you just don't understand it well enough. Every aspect of the program is in accordance with a higher purpose.
• If anything really bad happens, such as Creation losing all your mail, it's because YOU DESERVED IT!
• There is no acknowledgment when you ask Creation to perform an action. Users are expected to have faith.
• It is of course hoped that Creation will become the default mail client for Jesux[1].

Come to think of it, actually, I'm quite surprised that googling for ‘Creation MUA’ hasn't already turned such a thing up :-)

[1] http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/4081/

Oh, and I invented a silly game last night in the pub.

rmc28 was describing a card game to me called ‘Nuclear War’, which sounded like a reasonably complex affair involving warhead cards, propaganda cards and all sorts of rules. It crossed my mind that surely nuclear war would be better modelled by a very simple Hofstadterian non-game, along roughly these lines:

The first player to shout ‘BANG!’ is the winner, unless the other player also shouts ‘BANG!’ within four minutes, in which case both players lose.

I didn't think I was serious about this. But later on, it occurred to me that if you cut the four-minute warning time down to about two seconds (after all, in this simulation the players aren't separated by half the world!), it might actually become a halfway plausible game to be played between (for example) small children on a long car journey. They wouldn't be playing it to the exclusion of all else, of course; they'd be conversing, squabbling, staring out of the window, asking ‘are we nearly there yet’ and all the other things small children do on long car journeys; but every so often one of them would shout ‘BANG!’, and if the other one didn't remember and react quite quickly enough, they'd score a point. Experiments in the pub suggest that it's actually quite tricky to realise why someone is shouting ‘BANG!’ at you fast enough to respond in kind within two seconds, especially after a couple of pints.

(It's an important feature of the game that a draw involves both players losing, so that it's undesirable to be the first to attack unless you think you have a reasonable chance of getting away with it. Without this feature, your best strategy would be to attack first, and to do so constantly, on the basis that that way you could never lose and just might win.)

Of course, you'd build up a reflex reaction fairly fast and then the game would get boring due to mutual assured destruction; so it wouldn't stay interesting for too long. But I was rather amused to find that it was actually a more challenging game than I'd initially thought when I jokingly proposed it :-)

Gaffer tape disappointed me again today; this time, by being semi-transparent.

This week I've started to have my usual summer sleeping difficulties, caused by it getting light outside my bedroom several hours before I actually need to get up. I'm a light sleeper (ahem) and that tends to wake me up; I already have excellently thick and dark curtains, but plenty of light still comes in round the edges of them.

So, on being awoken at 6:30 this morning by the sun, I lost my temper with it, and decided that since it had caused me to have an hour and a half to spare, I could usefully spend that time dismembering cardboard boxes and gaffer-taping them to my bedroom windows. Some hard work and a nasty paper cut later (thick corrugated cardboard is a lot sharper than it looks!), this was duly done, and I went to bed last night feeling fairly optimistic.

This morning, well, there was an order of magnitude improvement, but quite a lot of light was still coming in round the curtains, and it turned out that almost all that light was shining through the gaffer tape. Bah.

In other news, I woke up this morning feeling not merely better, but bursting with energy and itching to get back to work and do something, so I did. Phew.

I've been noticing recently that I have terrible trouble using e-mail (or its close equivalent, Mono messages) in a conversational context.

I think it's because I mostly see e-mail as a means of getting a job done; it's a businesslike medium, used to send instructions, questions, answers, acknowledgments, and in general information that people need for some reason or another. Therefore, I tend to keep my messages to the point, answering precisely the questions asked.

So when someone sends me a message on Mono asking ‘How are you?’, my immediate instinct is to respond with a paragraph or two telling them how I am, and nothing more. Typically a few seconds after I send that message, I suddenly remember that this is a conversation, and that therefore it's entirely appropriate to ask ‘How are you?’ at the end of the message, so I send a hurried follow-up with that.

And when a friend sends me angsty mail about their life problems, I often find myself completely at a loss as to how to respond. In person, if I had nothing helpful to contribute, there'd be a whole range of appropriate responses: nods, grunts of acknowledgement, sympathetic looks, hugs etc, to reassure the person that at least I was listening and I cared even if I didn't have any concrete help to offer. In email I find this dreadfully awkward and quite often will fail to respond to such a mail if I don't have any actual content (as some part of my brain sees it) to contribute. A couple of weeks ago this caused someone to assume I didn't want to talk to them, which suggests that it's something I ought to work on solving…

I wonder if it might be about silence. In a face-to-face conversation, long silences feel very awkward, so one naturally brings up additional topics, starts new threads, etc, so that the conversation continues. But in email, long silences are perfectly normal. It's fundamentally interrupt-based: you get an email, answer it, and go back to what you were doing, and because turnaround time is often hours or days, you don't spend your time doing nothing but wait for the reply. So if the reply takes a bit longer, that's normal and you just find something else to do; and if the reply never arrives at all, it's often not something you'll even notice unless you were genuinely depending on it for something.

… of course, in my last post I missed a golden opportunity to say that I will always remember this as the day I almost watched Jack Sparrow.

Oh well; better late than never.

Ho hum. I've made so many mistakes today just trying to do very little that it's a good job I didn't go to work; who knows what I might have found a way to break there!

I nipped briefly into town, because I had a cheque to pay in, because I'd planned to cook an interesting new recipe for dinner for which I didn't have enough spices, and because I wanted to buy some DVDs to flop in front of while I was ill. I got the spices; I left the cheque at home; and although I did get a load of DVDs, I then managed to tear Pirates of the Caribbean to pieces when I got it home!

This was due to the clever new anti-theft device HMV had put on it and forgotten to remove, which looked to me more like a fancy catch on the DVD box, so I tried pretty much everything I could think of to remove it and put just a little too much force into one approach. Crack. One ripped-apart DVD box and probably scratched discs. Fortunately HMV cheerfully admitted on the phone that their staff are rubbish at remembering to take the new locks off (they're so new the staff haven't learned yet), took all the blame for me having shredded Jack Sparrow, and said they'd willingly replace him with a new one.

Then I tried to cook dinner, and discovered that I had massively overcatered; what should have been one panful of stew making three or four portions is currently simmering in the two pans I had to split it between, and I'm unconvinced that I split it evenly (it might, for example, have all the beans in one pan and all the peppers in the other). We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, I suspect I should avoid moving at all for the rest of the day in case I do anything else gratuitously silly.

But it's 8:20. It seems very strange to be out of bed bright and early, typing at a computer over half an hour before I would normally be awake enough to do so, for the purpose of announcing that I'm ill. You'd have thought I ought to stay in bed until about ten before feeling ready to even bother to call my boss.

Nonetheless, my sleep patterns are disrupted, my brain isn't working straight, I can't type fast or accurately, and if I sit at this computer for about another ten minutes I will end up staring blankly at the screen and doing nothing. Therefore I'm ill. So I'll mail the boss and then go and go ug on the sofa or something :-/

Hmph. I'm sure I used to be able to cook a decent steak dinner. I remember when lark_ascending and I were going out, cooking steak was always my job (because it was within my meagre capabilities and therefore one of the few viable opportunities for it to be my turn to cook). I'm sure I could get it basically right back then.

Not any more, though. Steak medium rather than medium-rare, mushrooms burned, mashed potatoes rather more like a potato milkshake than solid food. Still edible, and not too unpleasant, but hardly the luxury meal I'd planned. Amazingly, the only thing I didn't somehow screw up was the pepper sauce, which despite being out of a packet was actually the most complex single component of the meal.

Ho hum. Could have been worse, I suppose. At least it was edible, and at least nobody was supposed to be sharing it with me…

Goodness, I'm in a really good mood this morning. I suspect that's at least partly due to a particularly good night's sleep.

If I sing along to my car stereo on the way to work, that's noticeably more cheerful than I usually manage on a work morning. This morning I caught myself singing along to the totally repetitive ‘dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum’ of the bass line, and I hadn't even noticed. Now that's excessively perky.

Oh well. Another day of project planning will probably dampen my zest for life…

(Hmmm. Is ‘zest for life’ perhaps related to ‘if life gives you lemons’?)