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.

The agenda and minutes of the meeting I just went to started off something like this:

1. Simon T to report progress.
Um, none.
2. Simon T to report plans.
Make some progress.

Which was rather disconcerting, but there we go…

I walked to Tesco at lunchtime, as usual. On the way back to the office with my sandwich, an amusing thought struck me. Not very amusing, and not remotely worth repeating either (good job too, since I now can't remember what it actually was). But it must have caused one corner of my mouth to quirk upwards noticeably, because a woman walking past stopped, stared at me accusingly, and demanded ‘What exactly are you laughing at?’

I stopped walking myself in order to stare at her in bafflement. ‘Go on,’ she demanded, ‘what was so funny?’, for all the world like a schoolmistress who's just caught one of her pupils sniggering when he should have been paying attention.

Whatever it was that had momentarily amused me was far too long to explain to her, so I didn't try. I just shrugged, and turned to walk away; and she turned away too and stomped off in the other direction, muttering to herself as if I'd dreadfully offended her in some way.

I think that's probably the most bizarre encounter I've had in the street for some time. It seemed as if she must have assumed I was laughing at her; but I could see no obvious reason why that might have been plausible. (She hadn't, for example, accidentally left the house still wearing bunny slippers, or shaved off half her hair by mistake, or anything like that. She just looked like an ordinary random woman walking along a pavement in an ordinary way. And I hadn't even glanced in her direction, so it's not as if I looked at her and then cracked up laughing.)

I wonder what it was all about. (Bonus point for the least plausible suggestion :-)

I spent most of yesterday irritated.

I exaggeratedly told Owen and Gareth at one point that I'd been irritated by about six things during the course of the day, and as a result I was challenged to actually count them. I think there hadn't been six at the time I said that, but there were by the time I tried to remember them: I was irritated by misremembering the start time wrong for the party we went to last night, irritated by the manner in which the board game we played before that ended, irritated by chiark's recent misfortunes, and irritated by my continuing failure to get hold of a good copy of Season 3 of Babylon 5[1]. Having been irritated by that lot, I was then feeling generally irritable and thus managed to get more irritated than usual by what passes for my love life. Then I got irritated by the Dension being temperamental again, and by the time I'd got to the end of that list I was also irritated by not being able to remember more than four of the above items at any one time. That made seven. GRRRRR.

Still, everything improved once we reached Duxford for Richard and Louise's engagement party, since it contained large amounts of very nice food, large numbers of very nice people, bonus points for a doseybat who I'd barely seen for ages, and generally managed to cheer me up. The party ended in a couple of games of Werewolves; we didn't quite have enough numbers for a workable game the first time round, so we augmented the game the second time by allowing a stuffed lemur to play as well. Astoundingly this actually worked rather well; Ben in particular seemed to have a clear insight into the lemur's mental workings, and correctly suspected it of being a werewolf before anyone else did.

[1] Latest on B5: Black Star now list it as temporarily out of stock. If I'm lucky, this might mean the faulty ones have run out and the next copy will be from another batch which might have been produced properly. If not, I'm not sure what will happen, although weds points out that I could simply buy the region 1 set if all else fails.

Arrgh! If this goes on for another week or so, I'm going to get to the point where I jump up and down and scream if anyone so much as mentions Babylon 5. Which, given that it's one of my favourite pieces of television and has managed to come closer to turning me into a sad fanboy than anything else I can think of, would be a terrible shame.

My second replacement set of season 3 arrived in the post this morning. Black Star had not messed about; it was enclosed in two padded envelopes, wrapped in bubblewrap inside that, held together with a rubber band under that, and additional bubblewrap had been placed between the folding disc holders to make quintuply sure it didn't rattle around in transit. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, one disc was still not properly seated. I'm confident that Black Star's extreme precautions had prevented it rattling around while in the post to me, but I suspect it had rattled a little bit before it reached Black Star in the first place, because it still had two small scratches on it. And it's the same disc as one of the scratched ones in the first replacement set, which means I can't even put together a clean set by exchanging discs between the two!

These scratches are pretty small, though, and might be harmless. I'm probably going to have to watch disc 3 again this evening to make sure. And that irritates me in itself, because at this rate I'm going to have watched the whole season several times in a stupid order by the time I get round to showing it to my friends – and that means that doing that won't be nearly as much fun for me as I'd intended it to be.

I'm sure I shouldn't be this upset; it's only a TV series, after all. But it makes me very angry that what ought to have been a source of nothing but pleasure, for me and for four or five other people, has instead stretched into a two-week stress trip and completely spoiled my fun. And it makes me angrier still that I can't rant at the people who are actually responsible for the problem, because Black Star aren't them.

Hmm. Well, that mushroom risotto seemed to work believably well as it turned out. At least, it tasted plausible after it cooled down enough for my taste buds to start functioning again; my habit of already being ravenous at 6:30pm does have a tendency to make me scoff half my food while it's still far too hot :-)

Now I need to find a cookery expert to talk to about appropriate herbs and suchlike; that's one area in which my restricted palate makes me unable to judge sensibly for myself…

Goodness, I seem to have slept properly. I'm sure this bodes no good; the current exchange rate between a good night's sleep and all other forms of karma seems worryingly high, so I've probably sacrificed all sorts of other good stuff just for the sake of not being completely out of it on a Monday morning.

Also I seem to be turning into a cook, or at least into someone with delusions of cookhood. My continuing campaign of inviting nice people round to eat dinner with me has recently run me to the edge of my rather limited recipe collection, so I thought I'd extend it. The phrase ‘mushroom risotto’ came to mind, so I looked it up in my risotto recipe book and found myself thinking ‘no, that'll never work, it'll have the same problems as the last risotto I tried to make out of that book’. So I googled for alternative recipes, found a few, and found myself criticising them as well for different reasons. Eventually I put together a recipe that I felt looked vaguely believable, by means of cobbling together the best features of several different ones and fixing any obvious bugs.

I've always been the sort of cook who mindlessly follows recipes; I've never considered myself to have the imagination or the intuition to make food up as I go along. So it slightly puzzles me that it seemed so obviously right in this case to scoff at the various recipes I saw and invent my own. Also, while on the one hand it seems right and proper and good that my confidence is growing in this way, on the other hand I feel really quite nervous at the fact that I'm going to attempt to cook this for a guest this week without having had time to test it out on my own first!

Still, I suppose if I blow up the kitchen we can always send out for a takeaway. And a fire engine.

Shinier still. drswirly has found a much better proof of my geometric theorem than mine, and in particular his proof demonstrates that the polygon doesn't need to be regular – it only has to be convex and have all sides the same length. Very pretty.

(Someone pointed out that I wrote ‘shortest distance’ where I meant ‘perpendicular distance’, as well. Each edge of the polygon should be considered to be extended as far as necessary.)

I should shut up about maths, really. Particularly since I've been doing maths at work for a few weeks and it's been quite stressful, and to my immense relief it all started working properly today so I can take a break and do something less taxing, so quite why I'm now wibbling on about maths in this diary for fun is beyond me.

Anyway. This evening is supposed to contain sofa therapy, so I shall return to the sofa.

Hmmm. While contemplating my previous entry about little things not typically making me either any happier or any less happy, I seem to have accidentally proved a theorem in geometry. Oddly this has made me happier, because geometric theorems are shiny :-)

(Consider a polygon, and a point moving around inside it. Consider the sum of the shortest distances from the point to each side of the polygon. Theorem: if the polygon is regular, then this sum remains completely constant no matter where the point moves inside it. Proof, and relevance to my emotional life, left as exercises for the reader…)

aiwendel asked me that at the Calling last night. It's odd; I've always known that I had an unusually strong tendency to answer ‘How are you?’ with an actual description of how I was, rather than with the ISO standard ‘Oh, fine, fine’ that satisfies the demands of small talk with minimal effort. But on being asked ‘Are you happy?’, which should in theory be practically the same question, I actually found myself stopping and thinking, and giving a very different answer. It seems my answers to ‘How are you?’ haven't been nearly as truthful as I'd thought.

And (after thinking about it a bit) no, I'm not happy. But on the other hand, neither am I unhappy. I'm sort of in-between, balanced between lots of things. There are an enormous number of things I want; there's no way I can possibly have all of them (often simply because there's not enough time in the day), and just to add confusion, some of them I simultaneously want and don't want. So every time I get some of one thing I want, it's necessarily balanced by losing (the possibility of) some of something else I want. Hence, it's been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely happy without simultaneously making me feel sad for another reason. On the plus side, it's also been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely upset without also having a bright side to look on.

It's difficult to imagine a way in which this might change in the foreseeable future. I suppose something would have to come along which would make me so happy that it outweighed the myriad little disappointments it would inevitably cause in other areas. This would take quite some doing, I suspect…

It was an excellent question to be asked, though. I urge anyone else who hasn't happened to give it much thought recently to do so.

Strange and almost nightmarish dreams last night. In part one of the dream, Italy was taken over by a generally unpleasant government which abducted me from Cambridge and held me as a political prisoner; then I escaped across the border to a neighbouring country, and in part two I attempted to catch a series of trains back to England. The odd thing is that part two was a lot longer, more stressful and much more unpleasant and nightmarish than part one. Evidently I had underestimated my subconscious's dislike of train travel!

(Also Italy seemed to turn into Spain half way through and I didn't notice the discrepancy until I woke up, which suggests I need to get in touch with my inner continuity man…)

This morning, I woke up feeling fabulously refreshed, came in to work, and discovered that I'd received mail from someone whose surname is ‘Wible’. If I didn't know better I'd swear that was an omen heralding a good day.