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’?)

For several months I've been toying with the idea of writing a FAQ about myself. This is because people often ask me the same questions when they find out I have no sense of smell, and in any such situation my finely-honed netizen instincts cry out to me to write a FAQ.

Today I gave in to them, and did so: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/smell.html.

It was a bit pointless, really, because most people who find this out about me do so when talking to me in person, which makes it unlikely that they would naturally go and read the FAQ before asking me questions about it! So I don't actually expect this to cut down on the number of times I get asked the same thing. But it made a nice break from work, and the chances are that someone out there will find it vaguely interesting, and it's stopped my Internet conscience from pestering me about it, so there we go…

It is a day of loud noises in the office.

There's a workman installing power and network points in an unused corner of the room, so that next week's new starter can have a desk there. This has caused some very loud drilling noises for several hours, although things have quietened down now.

Also, there's a rhythmic crashing sound coming from the kitchen. This is because a couple of guys from upstairs are moving desks tomorrow, and have somehow managed to accumulate between them two huge packing crates full of empty Coke cans, which they're now crushing and feeding into the can recycling bin, mostly by stamping on them since the can crusher is broken. I estimate that they have about a thousand cans and that it will take about an hour for them to deal with the whole lot. Quite where they were storing all these empty cans before they gathered them into two enormous packing crates, I have no idea.

Bah. Now the workman's power tools have started up again…

That was a rather good weekend, all told :-) And it was just what I needed after a really excessively stressful week (largely but not exclusively due to difficult worky stuff).

On Saturday morning I managed to get one of my computers sensibly running an Amiga emulator, which meant I was able to resurrect the other set of computer games from my childhood which I had fond memories of. Well, most of them, anyway: some of them don't quite work, since UAE appears to have faithfully emulated the original Amiga's extreme flakiness when loading from floppy disks, which seems to me to be above and beyond the call of duty but there we go.

On Saturday afternoon I learned a new skill: lnr came round for a visit and to have her hair cut with my clippers. I'd let her talk me into this in the pub on Thursday, and the next morning I'd woken up, felt a beery feeling in my head and thought ‘oh gods, what did I promise last night?’. (Cutting my own hair with clippers is trivial since it's a same-length-all-over buzz cut; doing something complex to someone else's was a lot more scary.) But as it turned out it went very well; the instruction video that came with the clippers turned out to know what it was talking about, and the result was a haircut I could look at and feel reasonably proud of.

After that general day of accomplishment and achieving things I'd never done before, I was probably due some karma, and it duly turned up in the form of Owen and Gareth coming round to play board games and me losing spectacularly at Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence and Domaine in rapid succession. Still, it was a fun evening even if I did lose everything…

So, back to work this week, where my stressful task is almost over. Hopefully, therefore, my stress levels should drop steeply throughout the week.

I replaced my shaver yesterday. It was six years old, and finally starting to wear out after giving me long and faithful service. I remember that it's six years old, because I remember that I bought it while going out with Kirsten, in turn because I remember deliberately getting one with a battery so as not to be tied to the shaver socket in my college bedroom where she might still be trying to sleep some mornings. It's odd, the routes you have to take through your own memory just to retrieve a perfectly simple thing like a timestamp.

(And yeah, part of the reason I'm posting this is not because anyone's going to find it particularly interesting, but because six years from now when the new one is wearing out I'll be able to look back at my diary archives and remember how old it was :-)

It feels really weird to be using a shaver that's a subtly different shape. I almost feel that getting a completely different type which was a totally different shape would have been less disorienting! I suppose that must be because you use a shaver first thing in the morning when you're still half asleep, so your conscious mind isn't really very active and it's all done on instinct and habit…

At 8:45 this morning, I finished a project that has been ongoing since 18th October last year.

On that day I got my Dension car stereo installed, and since then my entire music collection has been available in my car, instead of the small fraction of it that I picked out as being particularly good driving music and copied on to Minidiscs. Therefore, I've been playing through my whole music collection other than the stuff I already had on Minidisc in the car. This has taken four and a half months. On the way to work this morning, the last album on my list came to an end, and now I have no choice but to listen to music I've already listened to.

It's been a fascinating experience. All sorts of things that I'd never have thought would make good driving music have turned out to; all sorts of albums I'd completely forgotten I owned have come to light, and I've rediscovered a great many tracks I love.

dreamingchristi was right: once you've got used to MP3 solutions that make your entire music collection available to you at all times, you never want to go back. The Dension may be temperamental (geddit?) in cold weather; it may occasionally get confused, stop after every track and need to be rebooted; it may have annoying glitches when changing tracks (which most MP3 solutions seem to, admittedly); but in spite of all that it's now become indispensable.

All of that said … I've also been slightly looking forward to getting to the end of the list, because now I'm going to go back to playing some of the stuff I originally had in the car. Which, after all, I did put there because it was a lot of my favourite music, so that'll be good too.

By the time I actually got to Saturday, the four parties I knew of that night had become an even scarier five! But I did my best anyway, driving Gareth down to Sutton Courtenay to go to Emily and James's housewarming in the afternoon, and then coming back for ceb's pancakes in the evening. Combined with the fact that one of the five parties was the second of lzz's matched pair and I'd been to the first the previous week, I think that just about counts as three out of five, which is over half and therefore Not Bad Going :-)

I'm sure I've become busier since I got round to setting up some calendar software. I have a feeling that one of the major reasons I ever used to have free evenings was because when people asked if I was free I wasn't certain. Now I can be sure when I'm free or not, and this appears to have allowed me to book myself pretty much solidly. I'm unconvinced that this was a net benefit to me…

Oh no. I have a horrible sinking feeling this morning.

Well, reading other people's diaries this morning it sounds as if most people did something about Pancake Day last night.

I didn't, because I'd already organised to have an expensive Chinese meal with the PuTTY team in celebration of having managed to get a release out, and this Tuesday had been free for everyone so I booked it before realising it was Shrove Tuesday. We did the best we could, though, by ordering a double quantity of pancakes with the crispy duck :-)

Sometimes I think I really must get better at noticing this sort of generally-significant calendar event in advance. I'm terrible at bank holidays, as well, although that usually works out in my favour since the extra day of weekend tends to come as a nice surprise which I haven't already booked hectic social events to fill, so I get to spend it actually resting. And in this case I haven't really lost out because ceb's party this weekend will have pancakes anyway (and not being a Lent subscriber it isn't too late for me). But I'd at least like to arrange not to feel silly when I forget this sort of thing…

Over a board game at the Gallery yesterday evening, someone mentioned that ‘echolalia’ was the technical term for the habit of repeating your interlocutor's last few words as they say them. drswirly looked at me and said ‘It's also a thingy on whatsit, isn't it?’. Now normally I giggle gently at Gareth's fondness for whatsits and oojits and thingys in place of genuine nouns, but in this case I didn't even notice until after the fact, because I had effortlessly (and correctly) parsed this as ‘a track on a Dead Can Dance album’, without registering that all the actual content in the sentence had apparently been telepathic. How very silly.

In other news, it occurred to me last night that Zeus was the original Philanders & Swan. Ahem.

Ho hum. It's always depressing to have a cold at the weekend.

Partly this is because, well, no matter how much I enjoy my job, it's still stuff I'm doing because other people want it done rather than stuff I'm doing because I want it done, so it's understandable that I should feel less happy about missing a chance to do the latter. But also, it's a rest thing: the tiringness of sitting at home with a cold trying to rest but not really managing it properly is vaguely comparable to the tiringness of being at work, so replacing a day or two of work with a cold leaves me about as tired as I'd otherwise have been, whereas replacing a weekend with a cold is liable to leave me at the end of the next week feeling as if I've worked twelve days non-stop.

Which will be great fun, given the rather silly number of parties next weekend. (I count four that I know of. One is the other of lzz's matched pair, which I can reasonably miss given that I went to the first of them two days ago, and by dint of extreme effort I hope to make it to two of the other three…)

One of my colleagues has just quoted the phrase ‘proactively on demand’ at me from some other company's marketing presentation. It says something about modern business that it took me several moments to work out what was wrong with that phrase – I seem to have become so accustomed to assuming ‘proactive’ is a content-free buzzword when I hear it in a marketing context that it honestly didn't occur to me to think about its real meaning in that phrase! That would be worrying if I didn't think it was probably a good defence mechanism against marketroids…