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…

Hmmm; that's an interesting result.

Yesterday I dared to suggest that gaffer tape might not be the answer to everything. I got quite a few responses, some agreeing, some disagreeing.

Intriguingly, almost everyone who responded on LiveJournal contradicted me and strongly defended the Way of the Tape, whereas almost everyone who responded on Monochrome was agreeing with me (if not always with great conviction).

I wonder why LJ seems to have a greater affinity for gaffer tape than Monochrome. (I'm trying not to speculate that perhaps LJ itself might be held together with gaffer tape. :-)

I'm about to express an opinion which may be controversial. In fact, hell, never mind controversial, it may very well be an opinion that would get me burned at the stake in certain sections of society.

There exists at least one mechanical problem to which gaffer tape is not the right answer.

Sorry an' all, and I know that's almost an article of faith to some people, but.

(My car key has fallen apart again. Next stop, I think, superglue.)

‘Sorry I was late turning up; my bath overran.’

There ought to be a word for the moment when you realise you've made a joke by accident. It's sort of the opposite of ‘esprit d'escalier’: it shares the property that you belatedly realise there was a joke opportunity, except that in this case you find you absent-mindedly took it rather than missing it. Perhaps ‘esprit d'ascenseur’?

In other news, this has been a weekend almost exclusively dominated by Spectrum games. I slept badly on Friday night because I'd been up until late playing Exolon; I continued playing things when I got up on Saturday and by the time I went to the pub for beckyc's three-years-in-Cambridge celebratory afternoon my left thumb was killing me; by yesterday it had recovered enough to play a bit more, so I did. And I missed both the parties / film nights on Saturday, because Friday night's poor sleep had left me too tired even to watch films.

It's slightly worrying that this latest acquisition has caused me more immediate delight than any of the enormous number of gadgets I bought last year, and was entirely free. It suggests I didn't look carefully enough for the best possible value for money…

(It's also slightly worrying that of all the Spectrum emulators out there, the one Owen and I were able to run on the PS2 turned out to be written by a friend of ours. Every so often I get the strong feeling that my group of friends has written most of the useful stuff in the world. :-)

And that's been another good week.

Admittedly two of the three major reasons it's been good were the same reasons as last week (finally polished off the nasty maths at work, and actually released PuTTY 0.54); but. The third. The third reason this has been a good week is that Owen discovered FUSE, a Spectrum emulator which is able to run on PS2 Linux. I've been looking for one of those ever since I got PS2 Linux in the first place, since obviously if you're going to play Spectrum games you want to be playing them in your lounge on your TV rather than in a tiny little window on a PC in the study. So I'm happy.

It took a bit of hackery to get it to support the PS2 controller, but nothing too difficult; so I've just spent the entire morning playing some of my old favourites from 1986ish. The only reason I've stopped now is that I've bruised my thumb through overuse of the controller; what I really need is a rubber-keyed Spectrum keyboard with a USB interface :-)

Now I should probably eat lunch, before I forget…

So I've been trying to get a PuTTY release out for some weeks now; and finally I found time to actually do the deed this evening. So I worked my way through my extensive and brand new checklist of How To Do A Release and, satisfied, wandered off to the pub.

Three hours later I return to find that I failed to set the correct permissions on the actual program files, and furthermore about sixty-four people have mailed me to point this out. Up until then I was feeling pretty smug. Oh well…

So a colleague just celebrated his birthday, in the time-honoured manner of giving out cakes and doughnuts to everyone in the room. There's a semi-tradition that one also coyly hints at one's age on these occasions, by providing some sort of riddle. His riddle was simply ‘Rubidium’. (Of course, referring to an actual periodic table or using Google would have been cheating.)

So, after nearly ten years, my A-level chemistry came in useful for something. I was willing to bet it'd never happen. :-)

I suspect that today I'm going to be even sleepier than usual for a Monday.

At about 6am my smoke alarm went off. Not in an isolated-blip ‘my battery is running low’ sort of way, but in a full-on BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP ‘get your carcass out of bed and look for the fire’ sort of way. So I did so, with something approaching alacrity, and could find nothing in the flat that was either on fire or imminently about to be. (Except the gas flame in the boiler, which was entirely under control, as I checked by turning it off and on twice.)

A difficult dilemma about whether to wake up beckyc and see whether anything in her flat was on fire was resolved when I found she was already awake, so I got her to come upstairs and see if she could smell any smoke. (One of the rare occasions when my lack of sense of smell has made me feel seriously disadvantaged; if something had been smouldering, I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint it for myself.) Nothing; so I went back to bed, still a little uneasy but at least feeling that if I did burn to death in the next half hour I'd be able to look back from the afterlife and say I'd done my best.

Half an hour later, the smoke alarm went off again. That's the trouble with not finding any cause the first time: you may have assured yourself you aren't going to burn to death, but you haven't solved the immediate problem of a loud smoke alarm keeping you awake… So I've changed the battery, on general principles, and if that doesn't hold it I suppose it's new-smoke-alarm time. Bah. Final score: I'm down two hours of sleep and the price of the drink I owe Becky, and I still have to come in to work and at least try to behave as if I'm awake.

Sometimes technology just annoys me.

At work, I have been struggling for months with a particulary large and nasty piece of maths-related coding. This week I finished all the hard bits, moved into the home stretch, and although it wasn't actually quite finished by the time I went home on Friday, it will almost certainly be finished in a couple of days. That's an enormous load off my mind.

In free software, I've just this moment completed all the pre-release faffing, and placed an initial release tag, for the long-awaited PuTTY version 0.54. Owen has been (rightly) badgering me about this for a month or two now, so that's a good feeling as well.

And finally, a rather silly side project I've had for a month or so has come to fruition. Now that I have a program which automatically prints out nets of polyhedra, it occurred to me that it might be rather cool if the program could take a picture designed to cover the surface of a sphere (for example, a globe, or a star map), project it on to the polyhedron, and print a net with the picture ready-drawn on it, so you could fold it straight up into (for example) an icosahedral globe. Yesterday I produced the first successful output from this process, which was a dodecahedral model of the Gallery's resident small panda, Amble (see tartarus.org/~gareth/people/eek/).

So I call that a pretty good week, really. Now I think I'll mow my head and then go to the pub…

Quite often these days, when I get home from work on a Thursday night, I find myself thinking it's been a long week and I could murder a pint or three of beer. So I go to the pub, and the first pint is bliss, and lots of lovely people turn up and I have a good evening; but increasingly I'm finding that by the end of the evening I'm wondering why I drink beer at all. I seem to stop enjoying it somewhere around the end of the second pint, which I'm sure never used to happen. Odd.

This morning my car key began to disintegrate: the loop that holds it on to my key ring has broken. I'm frankly staggered at this. Although my car engine remains extremely reliable, practically everything non-essential or vaguely peripheral has managed to fail in the past year (battery, thermostat, exhaust, horn, two of the doors, that sort of thing), and I had started to think that it might have run out of creative ways to inconvenience me while still claiming to be a basically reliable vehicle. But for the key to fall apart is an act of sheer malevolent genius which makes me worry that perhaps, after all, it's only just getting started. I need a new car.

And finally, I figured out the other day why I occasionally get confused mail about my port of Monochrome's puzzle game Enigma[1] which appears to be talking about a different game. It's because, two years after I wrote it, someone else wrote a puzzle game also called Enigma[2], and people are mailing the author of the wrong one. This is annoying; on the one hand I'll cheerfully admit that ‘Enigma’ is a very bad name for a puzzle game because everybody is going to think of it, but on the other hand Amf and I had our one out there on the web two years before this other upstart thing, so they could at least have checked first. Hmph.

(And the other game is awful, as well. I downloaded it the other day and had a go. No wonder one of the people who mistakenly mailed me about it was complaining about the mouse control: the mouse control is utterly dire and lets the entire game down.)

[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/enigma/
[2] http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/enigma/en/

Ho hum. I'm sitting at home feeling unexpectedly annoyed, for no particular reason.

I would be wandering out at this point to find out whether people are in the pub or at the Winter Ale Festival, but I'm unconvinced that I'd be good company if I did; and also Mary points out that this feeling of general grumpiness might be the tail end of my illness from earlier in the week, in which case I should probably stay at home and rest just in case.

*sigh*

I fear this means I'll miss the Winter Ale Festival entirely this year, owing to one or more prior bookings both tomorrow and Saturday. Oh well; such is life.