Here's a question I've been pondering for a while, to which I don't have any good answer.

( could we make the Unix shell syntax not unmanageably complicated? )

More migration seems to be occurring, so it's probably about time I got round to doing this: I'm now simont.dreamwidth.org as well as simont.livejournal.com. I have no plans to deactivate my LJ or stop reading stuff via it; I expect to cross-post everything and accept comments anywhere people feel like posting them.

There will doubtless be annoying teething problems as I sort out this dual presence and integrate it with the rest of my setup. In fact I've already made one cock-up just in the last half hour, by pasting the wrong list of usernames over from my previous OpenID-based presence on Dreamwidth and then hastily correcting. People who've unexpectedly found I subscribed to them and then unsubscribed again immediately: it was part of a mass update gone wrong, no personal insult was intended, and I'm very sorry.

More migration seems to be occurring, so it's probably about time I got round to doing this: I'm now simont.dreamwidth.org as well as simont.livejournal.com. I have no plans to deactivate my LJ or stop reading stuff via it; I expect to cross-post everything and accept comments anywhere people feel like posting them.

There will doubtless be annoying teething problems as I sort out this dual presence and integrate it with the rest of my setup. In fact I've already made one cock-up just in the last half hour, by pasting the wrong list of usernames over from my previous OpenID-based presence on Dreamwidth and then hastily correcting. People who've unexpectedly found I subscribed to them and then unsubscribed again immediately: it was part of a mass update gone wrong, no personal insult was intended, and I'm very sorry.

There's something about screwing the lid back on to a computer's case that seems to act as a magnet for bad luck. Especially if the same machine has been running just fine for weeks or months with the lid off; you finally decide that's cause to declare it working, so you put the lid back on and do up the screws … and the tightening of the final screw, symbolic of your overconfident belief that the job is at last done, is the cue for every intermittent fault, every surprising and hitherto unmanifested bug, every glitch and gremlin and gribbly to come out of the woodwork and make itself known.

Just occasionally there's a causally valid reason for this – the machine actually won't run with the lid on because its CPU fan is dead, or the act of putting the lid back on disturbed a loose connection that would have preferred to be left alone – but usually, it seems to me, it's just Murphy's Law.

(Preliminary indications suggest that the one of these that happened to me last night was not even a fault in the computer in question, but I'm half expecting further nasty surprises…)

If somebody had been programming exclusively in FORTH and PostScript for years on end, they'd probably think a change would be inorder.

Brushing the loose snow off the roof of my car, I found that the layer of more solid ice underneath had a message engraved in it. Some passing scamp had presumably written with their finger in the initial layer of snow, and when that solidified under the next layer the message was preserved.

The message just read ‘LOL’.

When I was a child, I remember that I used to have a peculiar problem whenever I replaced my watch. For days or weeks after strapping the new one on to my wrist, I'd wonder what the time was, look at my watch … and then feel unsatisfied, as if somehow I still didn't actually know what the time was in spite of having just read it off. I'd feel a strong urge to go and find another clock and look at that. It's as if I didn't trust the new watch.

I suppose it's possible that this was my subconscious reminding me of the practical consideration that I didn't yet have a feel for how accurate the new watch was, but that seems far-fetched to me. I think it was just a nonspecific feeling of ‘this thing is newfangled, it has to prove itself’.

I haven't replaced my watch in well over a decade, so until today I had no idea whether I would still have this odd feeling. But just now …

I've recently acquired an iPad, and also I've finally got round to setting up wireless networking at home to use it with. So today I thought I'd do my morning spod – check email, LJ, news, etc – before getting out of bed. (Just to prove I could, and also because it's warmer.)

So I did that; but as soon as I got up, I felt a strong visceral urge to make for the nearest ‘real’ computer and reassure myself that there weren't any urgent emails waiting for me. But I just looked! Arrgh!

(This is even less rational than the one about the watch. A new watch might have turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate compared to the old one, but I check my email over SSH, which is really, really not going to present me with wrong answers depending on where I connect from. If it gives me any recognisable answer at all, it'll be the right one.)

For a while now I've been trying to think a bit about the way I think. When I get something wrong, fail to solve a problem, misunderstand something, or whatever, I try to look back on what went wrong, and I try to notice if it's the same thing that went wrong on other occasions. I now think I'm in a position to write down some of my most noticeable intellectual weaknesses. (At least, most noticeable to me. I expect other people probably notice different weaknesses about me from the ones I notice about myself.)

Neophobia. I often find that I'm extremely reluctant to get into a new piece of thought: picking up a new problem, or starting to learn about a new thing. Typically once I finally do get over that activation-energy barrier, I find it's not at all as difficult as I'd imagined it would be, but for some reason I still don't remember that the next time I'm having the same problem.

Too uninterested in the actual compared to the possible. To some extent this almost isn't a weakness – my feeling is that there's plenty of room in the world for on the one hand people who look at things that are possible and go and do them, and on the other hand people who have a good working knowledge of all the stuff that's already been done and can get it to where it's needed. But even the former kind of person needs to have some awareness of what's already been done, to avoid repeatedly reinventing wheels and wasting effort, and I think I err just a little too far in the direction of lacking that awareness: I'm reluctant to spend brain-space on holding a mental catalogue of stuff that already exists when I could instead spend it on knowing how to make new stuff.

Difficulty keeping track of many things. I much prefer to have a small number of problems to work on, each of which is complicated and fiddly, than a large number of problems each of which is in itself simple. I can handle complicated problems fine (or rather, I have at least as much of a fighting chance with them as anyone else), but keeping track of lots and lots of things without forgetting about one of them is much harder for me. Of course I can and do compensate by constant list-making, but as soon as I have to manage without a list it all goes pear-shaped.

Compartmentalisation. When I learn a fact in one context, I often find I've failed to apply it in another context, or failed to relate it to a fact I learned in another context which in combination with the first one would have told me something really useful. I seem to have a few mental compartments for thinking about different kinds of thing, and sometimes those compartments don't link up and talk to each other when they really ought to.

Insufficiently bold imagination. Quite a few times in the past couple of years I've tried to solve a problem by considering a lot of candidate solutions and then judging which of them are sensible or workable or likely. Often I've failed to solve the problem, and found out afterwards that this was because the real answer was completely outside the space of possibilities I'd considered – either because it was totally different from any idea I'd had at all, or (perhaps more embarrassingly) because it was an idea I had had but hadn't taken far enough. It typically seemed to me afterwards that my judgment was not obviously at fault at any point – all the solutions I dismissed as wrong were indeed wrong for pretty much the same reasons I thought – but in each case my imagination let me down by not coming up with a wide enough range of possibilities to submit to my judgment.

I wonder what can be done about these. One feels that the neophobia ought to be dealable-with just by more forcibly reminding myself that it's never as bad as I expect, but it probably isn't that easy in practice, and with the rest of them it's not even clear what I might be able to do to stop it…

Everybody knows what wisdom teeth are. But under the influence of booze it occurred to me to take the concept in an unusual direction.

Strength teeth must surely be the molars; the sheer leverage available to them allows them to effortlessly crush things that the front teeth would have a hard time getting into.

Dexterity teeth are the canines: they grip on to things to allow them to be manipulated.

Charisma teeth, as ptc24 pointed out, are the incisors right at the front, which are conveniently placed to (if properly cleaned and polished) catch the light photogenically when you smile.

What I'm not so sure about is where intelligence teeth and constitution teeth come in. Premolars are still to be assigned, but I can't make a good case for them being either of those…

As of yesterday, apparently, I am now Uncle Simon.

I'm in work an hour early today, as partial compensation for the fact that I have to leave two hours early to go home and wait for a boiler engineer.

Of course, it so happens that that's also the time I'd have shown up if I'd failed to notice that the clocks had changed. Naturally this occurred to me; naturally I suspected that somebody would make that assumption; and naturally, as I was sitting down at my desk, someone did indeed ask ‘You know the time changed, didn't you?’.

In such situations I can think of no better response than the QI alarm sound. (Though Stephen Fry pulling a foolish face is optional.)

If these things must exist on the Internet, let's at least have their idiosyncratic grammar be justified.

In other news, yesterday morning I walked into my bank, closed a savings account, and walked out carrying its entire contents in cash.

That felt like a very romantic thing to be doing. In fiction, it's the sort of thing people do just before quitting their tedious daily grind, leaving their home and life, and fleeing to a sunnier country never to return.

Well, quite apart from the obvious incongruity of me deliberately moving to a sunnier country, where fiction departed from reality in this case was the fact that the contents of the account totalled 22 pence, on which if I was lucky I might just about have managed to flee round the corner. In fact, I subsequently blew the whole account on a small fraction of a cup of coffee.

(It was an archaic savings account with such a useless interest rate that I hadn't been using it for real money in years, but until now I'd had to keep it open because it was the nominated account for some shares I had to pay dividends into, and nobody seemed to know how I could nominate a different account. Recently the company concerned sorted out its share management systems, so I was finally able to redirect the dividends at another account and close the obsolete one. I had of course more or less emptied the whole thing into a more sensible savings account in advance by electronic transfer, which was why only a few odd pence were left. But saying all of that spoils the fun.)

One of my smoke alarms has recently been intermittently making the ‘please change my battery’ plipping noise. This morning I took it down, took out the battery, and put another one in. It didn't turn on at all.

A duff battery? Got another one out and tried that. Same thing.

Entire alarm gone dead? Put the old battery back in, and it was fine – did its ‘thank you for activating me’ triple bleep and started flashing its light.

Surely both my fresh batteries can't be dead? I put one back in and had a closer look.

On the old 9V battery, the positive terminal sticks out a little further than on either of the new ones. If I insert one of the new ones and look carefully at it, I can see that the positive contact in the battery socket isn't reaching as far as the terminal! It must have been pushed out of shape by the old battery, and isn't springing back. Gaah!

When I got home from work today I found that somebody had put a takeaway menu through my door. Ever since being diagnosed coeliac I have thrown those straight on the recycling, on the grounds that they don't list anything gluten-free on their menu (or don't say it is, if they do) and are therefore of no use to me.

But today's does! First one that's ever bothered, in my experience. I shall have to try it out some time soon; that sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.

Every so often I trawl the most common entries in my website's referrer logs, just to see if anyone interesting is linking to me (and what they're saying about me if so).

I was quite surprised today to come across this page which links to my puzzle collection: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LuckBasedMission.

Makes sense in retrospect, of course; TVTropes touches on video games, so why shouldn't they link to a video game I wrote? But it surprised me at the time; it would never have occurred to me that a site I mostly associate with commenting on plot and characterisation and setting and so forth would be remotely relevant to anything I've done.

(Disclaimer: the link above goes to TVTropes, a website renowned for its almost irresistible power to make you follow links all afternoon until your browser runs out of tabs. It will ruin your life if you're not careful. If in any doubt, don't click through! You have been warned.)

In the past 24 hours I've received four emails from random people asking me if I wrote a computer virus.

The emails have been relatively nonspecific (they've tended to assume I already know what they're talking about), but from what I can gather, lots of people's Windows boxes are suddenly putting up error boxes referring to an executable file with a variable name (all the reports I've had have called the file by some different jumble of random letters), which lists ‘Simon Tatham’ as its author, and apparently this file is infected with the ‘GoldG’ virus. I suppose all the people who have emailed me must have googled the listed author's name and found my website and email address. So I'll probably have to put up a notice on my front page saying it's nothing to do with me, if only because I anticipate the email load getting worse rather than better…

Supposing my correspondents' analysis is accurate, I wonder if the virus writer would be liable for some sort of defamation of my character? Or, I suppose, of the character of someone else with the same name – after all, there's nothing unambiguous to indicate that they mean me. Indeed, for all I know, the real virus writer might turn out to be a guy who genuinely does share my name. That would be even more annoying.

(Not that I expect it'll be realistically possible to catch them, and defamation would doubtless be nowhere near the top of the list of stuff to haul them into court for if anyone did, but just out of curiosity.)

And not before time, I must say. It has been an unusually stressful summer (in large part due to the car accident, but not solely that) and I've been eagerly anticipating this much needed break.

Snooze now.

What's the best way to receive bad news?

Is it better to have something unpleasant announced to you completely out of the blue, so that you go straight from having no idea anything was wrong to being fully aware of what is? Or is it better to have some sort of foreshadowing, before the full awfulness is made clear to you?

One form of foreshadowing could be that you first find out that something is wrong, but don't know exactly what. So you might speculate as to what it could be, and think up a variety of possibilities. You'd turn those over in your head, and get used to them all at least in hypothetical terms. Then, when you find out for certain which one of them is true, you're at least slightly prepared for the blow, and you can also at least be relieved that it's none of the worse possibilities (assuming it didn't turn out to be the worst of the lot). On the other hand, if any of the things you thought of was much worse than the reality, you'd have suffered a lot of avoidable worry if it happened this way. (Also you might feel very silly if you'd overlooked the real answer when thinking up your various possibilities.)

Another foreshadowing option would be to get rid of the certainty rather than the detail: instead of knowing for sure that something's wrong but not knowing what, you might see hints that lead you to suspect the particular thing that's wrong, but not yet know whether or not it's true. That way you at least don't worry about totally different possibilities that are far worse than the real one, but you still have the opportunity to get used to the idea in your head before you have to deal with the certainty that it's happened.

If you think either type of foreshadowing is good, is there an optimum length of time between hint and revelation? Does it even count as foreshadowing if someone says ‘I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you’ a few seconds before telling you the whole thing? At the other extreme, once you've had the worrying hints, is there a length of time to spend worrying beyond which it was more painful done that way rather than less?

Or does the best one of the above options depend very much on what type of bad news it is? (What subject area, or what approximate level of badness, or some other distinguishing factor such as whether anything can be done to mitigate it.)

Or are these all much of a muchness? Perhaps with any bad news worth its name the unpleasantness of the thing itself vastly outweighs the differential nastiness of the various paths from blissful unawareness to horrible certainty.

When I was younger, my usual clothing choice tended to be black jeans, and a black T-shirt with something on it. I had a big collection of black T-shirts containing a variety of stuff I'd found amusing or pretty or inspirational at the time: things containing references to fiction I liked, things that were just aesthetically pleasing, things that were funny, you name it. I even dabbled once or twice in designing T-shirts myself to add to the collection.

A few years back I decided that in some unspecified sense those T-shirts were not really me any more, and bought a whole set of plain black ones that I've been wearing ever since. My collection of T-shirts with stuff on them is still sitting in my wardrobe, but hasn't been touched for years.

When I send email or post to Usenet, I put a signature file at the bottom of which I also have a largish collection, mostly containing quotations or comments that are at least vaguely humorous in intent. One gets randomly selected to go on the bottom of any given email. Now I'm starting to feel that that, like the T-shirts, is ‘not me’ any more, and that it reflects the taste of my five- or ten-years-ago self rather than that of my current self, and I increasingly find myself contemplating ditching the lot of them or at least narrowing down to one standard one.

I'm not quite sure what my essential objection is to these collections, but it feels as if it's the same one in both cases.

It could be that it's the random selection. Every so often my software picks a sig quote for a given email that's specifically inappropriate in some way for that particular context, or even if not specifically inappropriate it sometimes just carries the wrong tone (e.g. too jokey for a serious email regardless of specific subject matter); if I notice that, I force the generator to re-roll, but probably I don't always notice. And likewise, not quite as often, with the T-shirts: there was always the chance that on a given day I'd happen to be wearing a T-shirt that had some unfortunate relevance to something I was going to be doing (e.g. there are some moments when it's tactless to wear a T-shirt with Neil Gaiman's Death on the front). So vetting my sig generator's output is an extra chore added to the process of sending any email, and perhaps I'm just getting bored with having to do that.

Alternatively, it could be that the phrase I've been using above – ‘it's not me’ – is pretty close to the answer in itself. Any given T-shirt or sig quote doesn't say very much about me, but the whole lot taken together gives a broader picture of what sorts of things I like or find amusing. And that picture is of somebody I used to be, not of me as I am now; so perhaps the point is not that I want not to blazon slogans and pictures across myself at all, but that I just don't want to blazon that collection across myself and haven't the energy to start a new collection from scratch.

On the third hand, I don't feel any desire to go out and start a new collection of decorated T-shirts or sig quotes, so perhaps that's not my essential objection and I've just become a person less inclined to broadcast information about my tastes in art and wit; not that I haven't still got tastes (and at least some of them haven't changed), just that I'm more inclined to feel that they're a thing to be talked about among friends rather than shouted to the world at large by my torso.

A related possibility is that I might have subconsciously begun to succumb to the annoying notion of ‘looking professional’ which for some reason says that professional people aren't supposed to have visible personalities at all. I rather hope not – that's a concept that has always irritated me – but it can't be denied that I feel particularly uncomfortable at the idea of wearing a silly T-shirt to come into work in particular, and I don't use my collection of sig quotes in my work email either.

What do other people think about this stuff? Anyone else reading this have strong opinions for or against wearing clothes that say things about you other than (unavoidably) your taste in clothes specifically? At work as opposed to at home? Does anyone else think it's sensible to draw a parallel with a collection of sig quotes, or is that just me?