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…)

Whew. It's been another slightly hectic week… It would have been only slightly hectic had it not been for the fact that I started it without a car and rapidly accumulated urgent errands I needed a car to run, so I had to run them all in something of a hurry when I got the thing back. A pain.

Still, mostly all over now, and I even have my shiny new Dension car stereo. Only I can't install it, because I lack the specialist tool required to extract the existing one! I think a lot of today is going to be spent trying to get my hands on a Sony car stereo release key. Gah. If I have to end up paying tens of pounds to get a professional to install the thing, I shall be most annoyed.

Went to the Carlton last night as usual, and was very amused by their new jukebox. It displays the title and artist for each track, with no intervening punctuation, in a box that isn't really big enough so a lot of the titles are truncated. This leads to such wonderful gems as ‘Living On The Blancmange’, ‘Town Called Jam’, ‘Don't Dream It's Crowded House’, and the outstanding ‘You Can't Hurry Phil Collins’. I feel a word game coming on. Anyone come up with any other particularly amusing examples?

I was right; my Dension DH102 has indeed arrived. Waiting until the weekend to play with it will be hell :-)

(I can probably find time to play with the MP3 player itself before the weekend, but I don't fancy trying to install it in the car in anything less than broad daylight…)

So if you're driving around town and you pass a young female cyclist with vividly bright pink hair extensions in very large quantity, you're going to remember her when you see her again, right?

I've been seeing someone matching that description quite a lot over the last few months, on my way to and from work. The odd thing is, when I drive past her in the morning, she's going the opposite way to me, towards town. And when I drive past her in the evening, she's going the same way as me, towards town. It's as if she's constantly finding herself in Cherry Hinton and needing to get out.

So my theory is that she's a physicist, working in a top-secret teleportation research lab somewhere in the town centre.

Well, I feel silly now.

Yesterday, on the assumption that the Cambridge bus system would be painful doom in one form or another, I took a taxi to work, costing me eleven quid.

In the evening, since I was going into the town centre for pizza, I felt safe taking the bus, because, well, practically all buses go through the town centre. Imagine my ‘D'oh!’ when I find that the C1 bus, which goes between the town centre and the nearest stop to ARM, happens to also be the bus which goes between the town centre and the nearest stop to my own front door. So this morning I got on the bus at home, got off it at work, and paid about a fifth of what I did yesterday. I feel very silly.

Still, I should get the car back today, so that'll make life easier. (The bus may have been a lot more convenient than I'd feared, but it still doubled my normal travel time.)

Also I got a failed-parcel-delivery note yesterday. I can't think of anything I'm currently expecting apart from the Dension MP3-based car stereo I've been waiting for for a month and a half, so with any luck it'll be that at last! Which would be nice, since I was just on the point of ringing up again and demanding a revised estimate of when it might turn up. I hope to pick it up tomorrow (bah, delivery companies) and find out for sure…

Whew. Well, at least now I'm home, if not with as many cars as I left with this morning.

The breakdown guy had a portable jump-start power pack which seemed to do a much better job than my colleague's attempt, and got poor old Arthur started with no difficulty. What to do next was the problem, since I needed a new battery and nowhere that would sell me one was still open; I could have driven home and sorted it all out tomorrow, but that would have meant calling someone out again to get the car to a purveyor of batteries, and that would have been far more expensive since my hastily-reinstated breakdown cover doesn't cover me when I'm actually at home (never quite worked that one out).

Eventually we drove the car round to the garage where I usually get it serviced (or rather, said garage's new premises, which aren't where they were last time I went there), found an all-night security officer, and my breakdown guy persuaded him to open the gate so we could put the car inside the compound where it might be halfway safe overnight. So tomorrow I have to ring the garage and explain that my car needs fixing: ‘Certainly, sir, just bring it round and we'll – ’ ‘Um, actually, you've already got it.’ Which should be good for a few laughs, for values of ‘laugh’ which are probably closer to ‘annoying bureaucratic obstacle caused by not doing things the expected way’.

Now I'm back at home, but unfortunately I have no food because I'd planned to hit Sainsburys on my way home. I think a takeaway pizza is very much in order, followed by intensive sofa therapy. *flop*

And it had been such a good week up until now.

Just as I was planning to skive off work half an hour early, pick up something unnecessarily luxurious for dinner on the way home, and spend as much as possible of the evening on my sofa … I get out to the car park, unlock my car, turn the key in the ignition, and nothing whatsoever happens.

Some rapid faffing with jump leads courtesy of a colleague doesn't help (or at least doesn't help enough), so I phone the Direct Line breakdown service which I'm registered with. Only to find, it transpires, that I'm not registered with them, because my cover lapsed, they didn't bother telling me about this as far as I can recall, and I haven't been renewing it along with my regular insurance as I had thought.

Sorted that out, and I'm now back in the office, spodding while I wait for someone to come out from a local garage. Which they say will happen within the hour, but I've no idea what that really means.

*sigh*. And *grrr*. And things like that.

It occurred to me yesterday to wonder if a very young hitch-hiker would suck their Electronic Thumb :-)

In other news, I actually slept properly last night. Woo! And this followed an excellent evening too, in which I cooked dinner for Becky and in return she dragged me out to a CTS pubmeet in which I (*gasp*) chatted to people I hadn't spoken to before. Doesn't happen nearly often enough. Good fun.

Bah. I've been sleeping really badly for about two weeks now. It's getting to the point where I'm about to start randomly altering environmental conditions in my bedroom, one by one, until one of them has an effect. I'll start with temperature, I think, move on to humidity, then try to figure out how to do pressure. I just hope I get a result before I get all the way down the list to atmospheric custard concentration.

On the way to work this morning, a van passed me with ‘OLYMPIC Fire Prevention’ written on the side.

I had a lovely vision of it showing up at the next Games in a hurry and throwing a bucket of water over the Olympic flame :-)

For a long time I've known that I have something of a knack for seeing other people's points of view. I've occasionally been accused of being a good teacher, or good at explaining things; every so often I manage to explain to two people how they're at cross purposes when neither of them have been able to work it out; I'm frequently unwilling to condemn people for doing apparently bad things because I can see why it seemed reasonable to them (though this isn't universal!). I wouldn't call myself world-class at it by any means – I certainly have my share of failures; but I think it would be fair to say I'm better than average at intuitively understanding (some) other people's viewpoints.

I've recently noticed that this can actually cause problems in communication. The thing that caused me to notice this was someone mailing the PuTTY team the other day, asking if we'd be willing to cover our web pages in links to his site in return for quite a lot of money. Now I was fairly sure that I was extremely unwilling to do this; but every time I tried to compose a reply to him, I found it was very difficult to say no to him. The more I tried to write a response, the more my words came out as if he was making a very reasonable offer which I was turning down out of perversity. Yet this is by no means how I actually feel.

It's taken me a few days to pin down just why I was having trouble with this fairly simple piece of communication, and I think the answer is this: when I start writing a message to a particular person, I automatically begin to shift part of my brain towards that person's viewpoint, or at least what I guess their viewpoint to be.

I think this is precisely the habit which makes me (sometimes) good at explaining and teaching: if I correctly guess my audience's state of mind, I can explain things in a way they can immediately grasp and understand, rather than them having to somehow reach towards my state of mind before they can understand my explanation. Of course sometimes I guess wrong, and it doesn't work; but I think I get a lot of mileage from the fact that it's an absolutely unthinking and automatic reflex for me to at least try.

Yet this same habit, I think, was precisely what was causing me trouble saying no to my prospective advertiser. As I tried to write a response to him, my mind shifted towards the viewpoint of someone who doesn't see anything inherently irritating in adverts on web pages, and who has no concept of whether someone deserves a high Google ranking or not, but who sees the proposition solely as something which would benefit both me and him. And the more I shifted towards this mindset for ease of communication, the more I found it harder and harder to articulate my essential objections to his proposition without coming across as simply perverse.

After a while I decided it was worthless arguing with him anyway, because in my experience if you reply personally to people like that they tend to see it as an invitation to try harder to persuade you, which (given my above difficulties) wasn't somewhere I wanted to be even if I thought I wasn't in danger of actually succumbing. So I stopped trying to frame a reply to him, and instead started to write a FAQ entry for the benefit of any future people with similar ideas, and then I suddenly found it very easy to say what I felt.

It's interesting that something I do precisely to make my communication effective can sometimes work precisely against effective communication. I suppose I'd better watch out for that in future.