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.

I seem to be having a bad few weeks for generalised manufacturing defects.

It was two weeks ago that I had that trouble with a misprinted book, and on taking it back found that other copies had exactly the same flaw. And today, I received my replacement copy of Babylon 5 season 3 on DVD, and discovered that two of the discs had not been properly pressed on to the spindles in the case, had rattled about in transit and had become seriously scratched – which was exactly what had been wrong with three discs in the first copy and had been why I'd sent it back.

I have since made matters much worse by interacting with Black Star in probably the most incompetent and chaotic manner I've managed in some time. They almost sent me two replacement copies by mistake due to my error in driving their website; then they got my apologetic mail and cancelled the second one; so on Monday I shall have to phone them and explain that now I need a second replacement copy on purpose. I also sent them several mails trying to explain the confusion, and brilliantly managed to send them in the wrong order (referring to one I hadn't yet sent in another). When I phone them on Monday, I shall have to explain carefully – and apologise profusely – that this incident is not a case of Simon having a bad Black Star customer service experience; it's a case of Black Star customer service having a bad Simon experience. I really have been appallingly inefficient and confusing. But then, I suppose, I was ill.

*sigh*

Still off work; I have now had a splitting headache for about 28 hours solidly and it's still here.

Today the B5 DVDs have shown up, as expected. They were damaged in transit, so I have to send them back.

If I thought I had the slightest chance of getting any more sleep, I would give up on today immediately and go back to bed…

For the whole week I've been waking up in the middle of the night feeling as if I had a really nasty coldyflueything, but every day I'd feel fine again when I got up so I'd shrug and go to work anyway.

Today the lurg has finally come out of hiding and I still felt awful when I got up, so I'm at home trying to take care of myself. Infuriatingly, Black Star say they've shipped season 3 of the Babylon 5 DVDs to me today, so if only I'd waited to be ill until tomorrow then it wouldn't have been nearly so unpleasant to be stuck at home.

Yesterday evening was somewhat chaotic; I'd invited Prue round for the evening the previous week, before looking at a calendar and realising it was actually the 5th. So I suggested we should either reschedule or go to the fireworks from mine (which is terribly convenient anyway). So far no real problem – until she dropped the bombshell that she needed to meet her new housemate in the Zebra half an hour before the fireworks. This led to a very rushed dinner and a complete round trip of Midsummer Common through the heaving crowds, but we got there in the end and still didn't miss the fireworks. (Good job too; from previous experience I stay cross for weeks if I miss them, and when it would have been mostly my own fault that'd have been no fun at all.)

A hectic weekend, but largely a good one I think.

Spent most of Saturday in London, trawling Camden to see if anything nice had turned up there since I last visited (not really) and then visiting yvesilena, who was out when I arrived due to a misunderstanding but showed up just as I was on the point of going home, so that was all right. Definitely a worthwhile day, though; it was good to do something completely different, very good to chat to Yves for a few hours, and also rather nice and restful just to sit on trains letting my thoughts turn over at their own pace.

(I always forget how valuable that sort of enforced thinking time is to me; I think it's a legacy of the silent meetings at my Quaker secondary school. I've occasionally tried to get the same effect by just sitting and doing nothing at home, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well when I know I could just get up and do something else at any time. Quaker meetings and train journeys have the common factor that although you chose to be there in the first place, once you've made the decision you can't sensibly get up and walk away half way through.)

Got back at 10ish, in time to spend a few hours at ceb's Halloween party. Having been in London all day, I hadn't had time to come up with a costume, so I cheated shamelessly by re-using the dagger-wound half of my Julius Caesar costume from the_alchemist's party in September. Still, that went down well, so it looks as if I got away with it :-)

Yesterday was the usual Doctor Who stuff at the Gallery, but before that I dropped in on Mum's new house off Milton Road to have a look round and help her put up a curtain rail. It really is very scary how similar the house is to the one she moved out of in Wokingham; when Mum went upstairs to get the curtains to hang on the rail, she paused at the foot of the stairs because she was expecting me to follow her and have a look round the upstairs. The reason I hadn't already moved to do so was because I'd completely forgotten I hadn't been in the house before!

Putting the curtain rail up involved standing on Mum's TV stand to get at one end. Now Mum, unlike me, is keen on actually polishing furniture. This meant that (a) I had to be a little careful of my balance while standing on the thing, and (b) for the rest of the day I was sliding around in my shoes because there was furniture polish all over my socks! Very weird feeling indeed.

In roughly that order.

At about 3:30 this afternoon I went to the Gallery by way of Argos. Went out of front door, opened car, piled in several things I needed to drop off at the Gallery, drove to Argos, queued for half an hour buying poncy radio-synchronised alarm clock (seems slightly silly to buy one the day after the clocks go back, but it'll be one less thing to hassle me in March). On to Gallery, watched things and played games and in particular introduced hilarityallen to Mao which was fun, finally gave Owen a lift home and then came back here.

To find the one vital thing I'd forgotten to do when I left: shut the front door! It was gapingly wide open and had been so since 3:30. Evidently the number of things I'd been carrying when I walked through it had overfilled my poor little mind and shutting the door dropped out of the other side.

Cue cold sweats and frantic running around to see if anything was missing, to say nothing of a bit of healthy caution in case any putative burglars were still on the premises. But no; apparently nobody at all (hostile or friendly) had so much as noticed, and nothing seems to be missing.

Excuse me while I wibble hysterically for a while…

Borders didn't have another copy of the offending book, so the girl on the information desk gave me a refund and advised me (in an amusing stage whisper) to go and buy it from Waterstones instead. So off I trotted to Waterstones, only to find that the copy on their shelves had exactly the same problem in exactly the same place. Looks as if it is a problem across a whole print run. How peeving. And what a particularly annoying place to have an enforced pause, just before the climactic showdowny bit!

Goodness. Never had that happen to me before.

In eight years of being an independent adult, there have of course been many occasions on which I've had to take something I bought back to the shop because it was faulty. However, one type of item I've never before had to return is that single simplest and most successful entertainment device known to mankind, the one with the fewest moving parts and the least embedded high technology, the book.

But it's happened now, and thankfully I still have the receipt from my shopping trip a week or two ago. My copy of Brotherhood of the Wolf has a second copy of pp 37-84 in place of pp 517-564 – even the page numbers reflect this.

I do hope it's a one-off and not a problem with the whole print run; I found this out after reading the first 516 pages, at which point the book is just getting to the climax, so I'd really hate to take it back to Borders and find they couldn't replace it for me because all their other copies were the same!

Yesterday I felt excessively tired and found it hard to concentrate at work, and also seemed terribly prone to mood swings. When the Dension wouldn't play music in the chilly early morning it really annoyed me, but when it worked fine in the evening and I got to show it off while giving Owen a lift back from pizza, I felt disproportionately euphoric given that that was entirely expected. Then I went to House for acronym's watching-him-on-University-Challenge gathering, at which the trend continued; when someone had a few moments more time for me than I was expecting my mood went *wheee*, when I managed to say entirely the wrong thing within seconds of talking to someone else it went *foom*, and moments later it would go *wheee* again for some totally other reason. So I decided sleep couldn't hurt, and bailed out shortly after we finished watching Andrew's team roundly pulverise their Oxford opponents (woo!).

This morning the Dension has been even more uppity than yesterday – it wouldn't play me any music for the whole trip to work, and I'm actually starting to wonder whether it was fit for the purpose for which it was sold, to wit, playing music in a car. It's not even as if this is a particularly low temperature – February will doubtless be worse, and word has it that winters are worse still in Hungary where the company is based – so quite how they can sell something that simply doesn't work for a significant proportion of the time is perplexing me.

And now I've just had a vicious argument about IP law with my team leader, who I'm convinced is completely deluded but neither of us can provide any better reasoning than argument-from-dubious-authority. I'm starting to think I'd do better just to go home and go to bed until I can think straighter and function stably.

And I'm operating through network lag of doom. Perhaps I shouldn't get out of bed until the Internet works, while I'm at it.

*sigh*

Another hectic weekend passes …

I spent Saturday morning frantically trying to get my shiny new Dension car stereo installed. I had managed to acquire the magic metal release key from a colleague, which should have meant the old stereo would slide out easily (certainly according to the manual!); but when I actually tried it, the key went in to its full extent, met no resistance, and made no difference. So I lost my temper, applied pliers, managed to snap one or two non-essential bits of plastic, but still the old stereo remained stubbornly wedged.

Enough was enough, I thought, and took the whole lot to a professional to get it done properly. They apparently had no difficulty extracting the old stereo, though they wouldn't let me in the workshop to watch how they did it. When I got it home I had a close look at the old one to see what the key was actually supposed to do – and it turns out, the key really does do nothing at all that I can see. I'm completely puzzled as to how it could ever have worked.

Most annoyingly of all, though, I've now lost the old stereo's front panel. I took it off on Saturday morning before attempting the extraction, and I must have put it aside or in a safe place or something like that, but can I find it now? Can I bobbins. Which means there's an unpleasantly good chance that I won't in fact be able to sell the thing on second-hand after all. How deeply aggravating.

So I arrived at fanf and rmc28's engagement party in something approaching deep dudgeon – not even the fact that the Dension was now installed and working fine had managed to relieve my annoyance – but a few hours of good conversation and nice people eventually managed to lift my mood. Then on to the housewarming at ‘Rivendell’ in Girton, which is an unfeasibly large and lovely house. Bonus points to atreic's unfeasibly lovely house tour, in which she managed to find several witty or silly things to say about practically every room. I don't think I could do that for my place, and I've been living in it for over six months and it's got about half as many rooms :-)

This morning I find that the Dension, although still kinda cool, is rather delicate when it comes to temperature. It refused to play me any music for the first five or ten minutes of my trip to work, claiming it was too cold to do anything useful. Once it warmed up it worked fine, but that's slightly peeving. Ah well.

Oh yes, and that was the other idea I had in the pub last night.

Now we're in the Internet era, it's possible and fairly frequent for random people to do favours for each other over hundreds of miles' distance. But it's tricky to say thank you for that sort of thing; you can send an email saying ‘thanks’, but that's a bit weak. If someone does a small favour for me and they're in the same town, my immediate instinct is to buy them a pint.

So what the world needs, I reckon, is a widely accepted Beer Voucher, along the same lines as a book token. You don't want to send someone a couple of quid in the post; that feels much more like paying for a service, more like a transaction than an expression of gratitude. But a voucher that could be redeemed for a free drink the next time someone was in their local would be a really nice thing to be able to post to people who did you a favour.

(Ideally it would be internationally accepted, but nationwide would be a good start :-) And really ideally it should be available in some sort of cryptographically secured electronic form, so if someone gave you a vital piece of information by email you could send a beer voucher in your reply. But that's probably getting too ambitious…)