In other news, I'm now back at work, which is a relief; there's only so much time I can spend lying on the sofa watching nonstop Blake's 7 before I start to feel restless. (Strange as this concept may seem to some of my readers :-).

And it has snown. Oh joy, oh rapture, oh treacherous footing, oh extensive faff with clearing it off the car, oh happy days of kids being extra-specially noisy for snowball-related reasons as they walk to school past my bedroom while I'm still trying to sleep. Yes, I know plenty of people enjoy snow, but bah and furthermore humbug to the lot of you. I shall be happy when it's gone away.

I seem to have a free evening tonight (so far). I'd almost forgotten they existed.

If a goth were so morbid as to drape actual shrouds over their furniture …

… would they be death throws?

I felt even worse this morning, but after another day of lying around not doing very much I'm feeling almost energetic. It seems to me there's a good chance I might make it back to work tomorrow, which would be a relief.

This morning drswirly unexpectedly visited me and lent me the first season of Blake's 7 on video, which was a welcome alternative to lying on the sofa reading books I'd read before and feeling uuurgh. And this afternoon lark_ascending gave me a lift out to the garage to collect my car from its MOT, for no better reason than that I asked her nicely. It's at times like this that I feel surprised that I'm surrounded by lovely people. (I shouldn't feel surprised, but I do every time nonetheless.)

Good job I feel better, too, because in just under an hour and a half I've agreed to be on a random IRC server I've never heard of to hold a meeting about Arabic support in PuTTY. I'm not remotely sure how that will go, but at least it doesn't look as if I'll have to do it with my brain out of order…

In the previous entry I also intended to mention that I feel ill as well as tired, and to speculate that perhaps I was putting off actually becoming ill until I'd finished all the hectic dashing around last week. But I completely forgot to say all that before posting the entry. I think that adequately illustrates my level of competence right now :-)

In other news, last week was possibly the busiest and most hectic week I've had in some time. This was partly due to work (impending release), and partly due to PuTTY (impending release). I've felt absolutely shattered since about Thursday, and today I couldn't face going in to work at all (it was taking me thirty seconds to get from one end of a single coherent thought to the other).

I would ideally go back to bed, therefore, but I know I wouldn't be able to fall asleep anyway. I suspect a relaxing bath might be the next best thing.

When I was about ten, I remember having a very hazy idea of what I would eventually end up doing when I was grown-up and didn't live with my parents any more.

I hadn't quite twigged that the majority of my time would be taken up by a regular job; and also I wasn't so much into programming at the time (since I'd sort of taken a two-year break from the whole idea to play computer games instead). One of the things I had just discovered, on the other hand, was the fun of building polyhedra and other models and objects using cardboard and glue.

I vividly remember wondering, in an incoherent sort of way, what I'd be doing around the year 2000. The best idea I could think of was that I'd be doing roughly what I was doing right then, which was sitting at home making cardboard models of things; only since I'd have grown up and left home, I wouldn't have a family around to wave them at once I'd finished and say ‘ooh, isn't it pretty?’. I remember the sudden chill as I realised that having a house to myself and lots of spare time actually didn't sound nearly as fun as it should have been.

I'd completely forgotten this rather depressing childhood vision of my future; but as a result of my recent venture into automated polyhedron construction, I actually have recently made two polyhedra using cardboard and glue, and this suddenly jogged my memory. I thought back then that I'd spend my adulthood wandering aimlessly around a house too big for me, trying not to feel lonely at the lack of a bickering family to share it with, and resorting to increasingly arcane hobby activities in a desperate effort to stave off boredom.

Good job it turned out to be almost completely wrong, really. Instead of that, I have so much stuff I either want or have to do that it's a constant struggle to find any peace and quiet; I know I prefer living alone to having a bunch of housemates and wouldn't have it any other way any more; and I may not have a family, but when I create something useful or pretty I'm decidedly not short of people to wave it at and impress.

Suddenly I want to go back in time and show my ten-year-old self a vision of this lot, to reassure him that it wouldn't end up being nearly that bad. This is unusual, since normally when I think of my ten-year-old self what I mostly want to do is go back and thump him.

Ahem. Yes. Well, this seems like an appropriate time to look back on the year just past and review what I've done in it and how I've spent it; or, and this is more to the point, what I've spent in it.

This, for me, has primarily been a completely ridiculous year for gadgets. In the course of this year my techno-toy acquisitions have included two enormous flat-screen monitors, an even more enormous TV, a GameCube, a set of DECT phones, an MP3 car stereo, an indoor hardware MP3 player, a load of additional computer hardware to support my new MP3 habit, and a digital camera. And that's just the gadgetry; it doesn't count the new pair of glasses (for the first time in ten years), the totally unnecessary long leather coat, and moving to a more expensive flat.

Combined with other incidental expenses such as an unexpected car breakdown, this has actually caused me to go over budget; for the first year in as long as I can remember, I've ended the year with less money than I started out.

Although I don't have much truck with New Year's resolutions as a general concept, and certainly don't approve of people finding random things to resolve just for the sake of having one, it has recently been the case more than once that I happen to find I need a behaviour modification around this time of year; so in light of the above, this year my New Year's resolution is to STOP BUYING TECHTOYS. Perhaps in 2005, if I've managed to find anything else I really want, I might let myself have one or two treats, but this year I went completely out of control so I plan to tighten my fiscal belt for 2004.

(I decided a couple of months ago that this would be my New Year's resolution; it was rather scary the way my brain immediately started suggesting that perhaps I should buy a couple more gadgets, quickly, before it came into force at the end of the year…)

I think I'm going to interrupt the generally festive mood I'm seeing in other people's diaries around now, take a total change of direction, and muse for a while about the concept of leadership, specifically leadership as it applies to me personally.

Merry Christmas!

For what I think is the first time ever, I'm spodding on Christmas Day. This is because, for what is definitely the first time ever, I'm spending Christmas Day in my own home, on my own. Shortly my family will show up here, we'll do Christmas Day type things, and then they will go home.

This feels on the one hand slightly odd; ever since I left home, Christmas has always been a time for sleeping in strange beds, on parents' floors, or suchlike; it's been part of the standard routine. But on the other hand, it's also always been a part of the standard routine that's really annoyed me; and now that enough of my family live in Cambridge and within walking distance of my place, I hurriedly seized the opportunity to organise a one-day Christmas event so that everyone could sleep in their own beds both before and afterwards.

The downside, of course, is that this means I have to cook the Christmas dinner :-) But I managed that last year with Mum's help, so I'm reasonably confident of managing it again…

Oh yes, and I've just added some more Stuff to my website. It's now getting to the point where I might have to fiddle with the front page so that it has a usable index; all this chatty text introducing each of my subpages is fine if you're reading it because you want to know about me, but even I'm increasingly finding it a pain when I actually want to find a specific page.

Still. For anyone with any interest in polyhedra, or even simply with a desire to look at some pretty pictures or see what weird mathematical things I've been up to recently when I should have been lying on my sofa watching DVDs, you can now go and look at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/polyhedra/.

Now, with any luck, I ought to be able to actually relax for a bit. These momentary obsessions tend to take me over totally for a week or so, but then leave me in peace after that…

I really hate it when I look at someone and think, perfectly genuinely, something which I then realise is totally a chat-up line.

At the Calling tonight there was a girl who I kept looking at and wondering ‘now who does she remind me of?’. But, of course, if I'd gone up to her and asked ‘Excuse me, do I know you? I'm sure I recognise you from somewhere’, that would have been approximately the oldest chat-up line in the book, and I'd have had a very small chance of actually finding out what I wanted to know, compared to either getting slapped or (I suppose) accidentally pulling her :-)

Fortunately, I figured it out in the end and didn't have to bother her about it. Phew.

I seem to have finished work for the year :-)

That was a slightly strange meeting.

‘Simon T to report progress.’ Once again I hadn't made any progress since the last meeting, since a variety of other urgent things had come up. So I gave a lengthy excuse which turned into an explanation of why the main urgent interruption had taken longer than I expected, and when I was about half way through the explanation I suddenly realised that the reason I'd had problems was in fact absolutely central to the topic of the meeting! Suddenly I wasn't making excuses; instead I was giving an advance warning about an issue the project will need to tackle a few months down the line. And that is progress.

So today I can even be productive by mistake. I rock.

Oh yes. And I finally found the front panel of my old car stereo! After a rather ridiculous seven weeks of being lost, it finally turned up in the rear footwell behind the driver's seat. I'm sure I looked there twice, since it's the absolutely obvious place for it to have been (I must have reached behind me to put it in the front-panel-box pocket on the back of the driver's seat, missed the pocket and dropped it on the floor as I do frequently); clearly I should have looked there three times. Bah. Still, at least that means I can sell the thing on to hoiho as I'd initially intended. If he still wants it, of course, and hasn't found a replacement in the intervening time…

In other news, I seem to have given myself a paper cut under my thumbnail. On my spacebar thumb. OW.

So, that was a slightly odd weekend. Up until about 7pm on Saturday night I had every intention of going to doseybat's birthday party in Purley. I had planned this extensively, checking various map sites and the AA route finder before deciding that it would definitely be better to nip round the right-hand edge of the M25 than to slog across London on four separate trains, and I was rather looking forward to proving to myself that I can deliberately take my car inside the mystic barrier of the M25 without anything terrible happening to me or it.

Unfortunately (or so it seemed) I slept appallingly on Friday night, so on Saturday I decided I really wasn't in a fit state to drive for two hours to get to a party, and certainly wouldn't be in a fit state to drive home again when I started getting sleepy. Luckily, I knew Richard B was also planning to drive to the same party, so I rang him up and arranged to get a lift.

So at 6:30 he picked me up, we drove back down to his place to collect Louise, and at 7pm we got back into the car to open up maps. Imagine my surprise at this point when he looked puzzled at my choice of map page and told me we weren't going to Purley at all, but to Leytonstone!

Apparently the location of the party was changed some time ago. Since doseybat didn't have my email address, she'd asked yvesilena to forward me the invitation, which she did, and also asked her to forward me the notice of change of location – which she didn't. So it was a good job I was too sleepy to drive, or I would have ended up in Purley feeling very annoyed!

(Earlier in the week, once I'd decided to drive to the party, I had phoned up the_alchemist to offer her a lift since she lives very near me. She sounded terribly confused on the phone when I jabbered about parties in Purley – and now I think I might understand why!)

Still. Reasonably fun party, anyway. Other highlights of the weekend included drswirly's birthday party on Friday night, but that was exactly where I expected it to be so it wasn't nearly so interesting :-)

Wow, last night was an astonishingly productive evening.

On Tuesday night, realising I had an evening to myself, I came home vaguely planning to get lots of useful things done (primarily a hefty chunk of coding on my new pet project). Unfortunately, a few setbacks and a lot of tiredness dictated that I instead spend the evening slumped in a chair with a book and then get an early night. Which was certainly a worthwhile use of the time in itself, but not quite what I'd planned.

Last night, I made up for this. I tidied my study. Now I can play the keyboard again! (That is to say, I can't play the keyboard particularly well even at the best of times, but I think for these purposes a good way to define ‘the best of times’ is as those moments when my keyboard is not unplayable owing to being covered in a six-inch snowdrift of unopened envelopes, receipts, cardboard boxes and bubblewrap. And by that definition, one of them started last night.)

And after that, I still had enough energy to manage most of the hefty chunk of coding I'd planned for Tuesday, and after that I still had enough time to treat myself to a glass of Stone's Special Reserve to wind down pleasantly before going to bed. It's very rare that I manage to make such good use of my free time. I'm still feeling smug about it now.

Just got an email in French, which my French was mostly too rusty to understand. The only bit that made any sense to me was the very last sentence, ‘Vous remercions de votre comprehension’.

I'm sorely tempted to mail back and demand ‘Quelle comprehension?’

The room I work in is accessed through a pair of double doors.

Whenever I am approaching the doors from one direction and someone else is approaching it from the other, what almost invariably happens is that whoever gets there first opens one of the doors, then either stops and holds it for the other person to go through, or holds it for the other person after they've gone through. Always, there is a politeness-door-holding moment, and someone stops and waits until the other person has gone through whichever door was opened. This is exactly identical to what would have happened if there had only been a single door.

But there isn't only a single door. These are double doors, the whole point of which (you would think) is that the opening is wide enough for two people to go through simultaneously without getting in each other's way.

What's with this? Holding the door is utterly instinctive in this circumstance – once or twice I've deliberately ignored the other person and opened the other door so we can both go through without either of us having to stop and wait, and it felt horribly unnatural and rude.

I suppose it's vaguely possible that the effort of pulling a heavy door open might be deemed worse than the delay of waiting for someone else to go through, so that having both people go through the same door works out more efficient; but in that case, why build the double doors in the first place if they were never going to be used?

It's weird. Someone has wasted a lot of time and effort, but I can't work out whether it's the people who built the double doors or the people who keep stopping and waiting for each other when it's unnecessary.

So, Saturday night was lark_ascending's birthday party, so I trundled along and attempted to have fun.

With very little success, though. For an unpleasantly large fraction of the evening it seemed that all the people I most wanted to spend time with were already preoccupied with talking to one another, often about things that didn't interest me; so I spent a lot of the party staring into space, moping, or making a token effort to seem like part of a conversation so as not to be obviously mopey.

The way I describe that, it sounds as if it's just one of those things, just bad luck; statistically that sort of thing must happen to everyone at parties once in a while and it just so happened that it was my turn last night. But on the other hand, that just-bad-luck argument seems to be the excuse I've used the last three or four times I failed to enjoy myself at parties, so I wonder if it's worth looking deeper for reasons why it might happen to me more often than to other people.

I think part of it is that I'm not very conversationally assertive. I can remember this as far back as childhood; it often seemed to me that I'd be saying something at the dinner table, my sister or my dad would interrupt and start their own conversation, and when I protested Mum would say something along the lines of ‘that's just the way conversation naturally goes, it's rude to make a fuss about it’. Yet when I tried to do the same thing, it would be more like ‘shush, it's rude to interrupt’. (Even more unjustly, I recall occasionally being ticked off for interrupting when what I was actually doing was protesting about having just been interrupted!) In retrospect I'm sure this was actually my biased childish viewpoint either selectively noticing only the times where it went against me, or failing to spot some vital distinction between the specific cases, or both; but it seemed to me after a while that I'd better get used to what I wanted to talk about being less important than what other people wanted to talk about, no matter whether they were older and wiser than me or younger and more enthusiastic, no matter whether I was in the middle of saying something or was trying to interrupt them.

Now I am older and wiser, or at any rate older, and I can now look back on that and see it as an unfortunate childhood experience which doesn't actually mean I'm worthless or boring or stupid or in any other way intrinsically deserving of having a smaller part in conversations than other people. But unfortunately, the habits seem to have persisted; when other people are talking about something I find tedious, I'm very reluctant to attempt to change the topic to something I'm more interested in, and yet when I'm talking about something interesting with people, I'm just as reluctant to resist when someone else changes the topic on me.

Another thing I notice is that when there's a group of people I like having a conversation, my instinct is to wander up, join the circle, and listen quietly until I understand the topic of conversation before beginning to join in. Other people seem much more willing to wander up to someone I'm in the middle of talking to, say hi to them and start their own conversation with them, often about something I don't even know about (a mutual acquaintance, for example) and can't usefully contribute to, leaving me thinking ‘Oh. Now what do I do?’. Now on the one hand this is reasonably easily explained by the phenomenon I describe in the previous couple of paragraphs, but on the other hand it also strikes me as textbook Usenet etiquette (lurk for a bit until you understand the rules before attempting to post), so I wonder if Usenet might also be a partial cause :-)

So I suppose what I'm really wondering here is, to what extent is this a problem with other people (I find it difficult to imagine that none of the cases I've listed involved someone else being rude or insensitive), and to what extent is it a problem with me (taking politeness to the extreme of ridiculous overcaution and self-effacement)? And also, to what extent have I misperceived the situation to begin with (do I actually monopolise conversations without even noticing, for example)?

It's concerns like this which have recently made me make an effort to try to spend time with one other person, or at most a very small group, as often as I can. None of these social dynamics issues really seems to apply in a one-to-one conversation, so it's very relaxing and I actually get a chance to enjoy people's company more.

On the way back from the Gallery just now, Owen, bjh21 and I encountered a cat in the road, and a couple of concerned passers-by said it had been run over and was injured. Since this was about two houses away from Relativity, Owen stood guard to make sure the cat didn't get run over again while I went to Relativity to phone the RSPCA. Sadly what the RSPCA advertise as an emergency phone number in fact kept me on hold for ten minutes while persistently repeating a recorded FAQ about baby birds, and then Owen showed up and said the cat had at least displayed enough mobility to get itself off the road and out of immediate danger, so I left a message on the Blue Cross answerphone instead and we decided we'd done all we could do.

I'm sure it's terribly interesting to know that baby birds tend to spend a couple of days floundering around on the ground immediately after leaving the nest because they haven't quite got the hang of flying yet, to be reassured that this is perfectly normal and the mother bird is typically not far off while it's going on, and that the RSPCA can't help because they are unable to teach baby birds the life skills required for their long-term survival, but I'm unconvinced that I needed to hear it four times instead of, for example, hearing something I didn't already know.

When I rule the world I will make a law about keeping people on hold, and that law will make it mandatory to give statistics to help the caller judge how much longer they will be on hold. Current average rate of call handling, number of calls ahead of you in the queue, that sort of thing. Because I have a suspicion that in fact my call wasn't in a queue just now; I suspect there might have been nobody around to take my call, and the automated queuing system hadn't bothered to signal this to me in any useful way. If I'd heard ‘There are currently zero people ahead of you. The last call was answered at six p.m.’ or some such, it would have been clear to me instantly that I was wasting my time.