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.

I had the most realistic dream last night that I can remember having in ages.

I write an account of an accident causing part of my hair to go AWOL, and only several hours later does it occur to me that I should have found an excuse to use the phrase ‘I need that like I need a hole in my head’.

Clearly I need to stop and give careful consideration to the pun opportunities the next time I have an accident. If nothing else it might stop me getting quite so annoyed with it…

Oh dear. I think people are going to point and laugh at me for a couple of weeks.

Ever since I got my hair cut short three months ago, I've been maintaining it myself with clippers. This has already paid for itself in barber charges, I reckon, and is generally very convenient.

Unfortunately, it does mean I have to keep my mind on the job. To pick an example purely at random: if you cut most of the hair, take the comb thing off the clippers to tidy up the edges, then notice there's a bit at the top you missed, you need to be awake enough to remember to put the comb back on before you go over that bit again.

As a result I now have a small bald spot on one side of my head, which will take a week or two to grow back to a sensible length. Until then I will be forced to look extremely silly, and short of wearing a hat all the time there's nothing I can do about it. :-/

Phew. For a moment there I thought I was going to get through a whole week of holiday without managing one single refreshing lie-in. I've slept appallingly badly for the whole week up until today, for no terribly obvious reason (though I suspect I haven't yet adapted to the chillier weather).

Fortunately, I managed a good 'un this morning, so now I feel much better. At least temporarily.

Also managed some work on PuTTY yesterday, which was again the first time I'd had the energy in the whole week. Looks as if I really needed the actual rest… Sadly, despite the feeling of wellbeing and satisfaction that always comes from having done a decent piece of work on something that really matters to me, I felt unaccountably mopey when I went to ejde's party in the evening. Perhaps I was just tired. One or two people, notably lnr, made valiant efforts to cheer me up, which seemed to work quite well at the time, but as soon as I left to go and get some sleep my mood crashed again. Feel pretty much OK today, though, so I suspect it was just tiredness.

Oh, and I've been buying gadgets again; now I've got all these MP3s, I've acquired a SliMP3 (www.slimp3uk.com) to play them through the big speakers in my lounge. This allows me to put music on while I'm lounging on the sofa, without having to get up every forty minutes to physically change the CD; it also allows me to queue several albums in advance and then just sit and vegetate while they play through; and at some point I shall get round to setting up a Radio Indecisive mode in which it plays random stuff constantly. I rather like it :-)

Phew. End of a long period of work.

I've got this week off, not for anything particularly specific but simply because I haven't had any holiday (other than the odd day to run errands) since April, because I've been hiding from the hot weather in my air-conditioned office. This has felt for days as if it should be a great relief, but in fact yesterday evening I had a headache and felt generally grotty (one too many pints of Legend in the Carlton the previous night are probably to blame :-) so I wasn't in a fit state to appreciate it.

WoC have given me a new disk, on to which I've begun re-ripping all my CDs, this time taking backup precautions as I go along. Therefore, when I got up in the middle of the night just now I took the opportunity to change the CD and run a backup, and apparently this woke me up to the point where I couldn't get back to sleep again; so I'm writing this before 8am, and have been irrevocably awake for somewhere over an hour already. Perhaps I should resist the temptation to change the CD at every possible opportunity, or I'll never get anything else done, like sleeping.

I've just had my first ever PuTTY support call.

That is to say, a literal support call; someone followed the link to my personal web page, noticed that I worked for ARM, looked up the ARM reception phone number, rang it and asked to be put through to me, and after some very nervous attempts to triple-check she was talking to the right person, opened the batting with the traditional line ‘I use PuTTY, and it doesn't work’.

In retrospect that doesn't sound unlikely at all, come to think of it; it's not hard to get in touch with ARM employees, so anyone who really wants to contact me by phone during working hours shouldn't have trouble doing so. (In fact CERT managed it easily enough last year.) So actually I now feel quite surprised that this is the first time that's happened!

I probably need to think of a way to discourage more people from doing this without actually being rude to them. This one was easy enough because she was following up an email query, and in fact Owen had replied to her email half an hour before she rang (so it's sort of fair enough that she hadn't happened to see it yet).

I'm a bit scared, though. It seems PuTTY hasn't run out of ways to take over my life…

Ho hum. World of Computers has furnished me with a replacement hard disk, but were sadly unable to recover any of my data from the old one (not actually surprisingly), so now I get to start the CD-ripping process all over again. What joy, what fun, what an absolute pain in the wossnames.

After a weekend of generally bad sleep, I managed to outdo myself last night with what felt like an all-night-long extended dream which made no sense at all. It involved plots, intrigue, a murder mystery, a lot of driving the wrong way along traffic ramps, at least two parallel universes, and a whole section of the night sky that nobody but me could see (at least partly because it was kept in a cupboard, but even when I opened the cupboard other people denied seeing anything inside it). I was almost disappointed when I woke up, because I wanted to know what would have happened in the end! Silly subconscious.

I feel restless and annoyed, for no obvious reason.

Yesterday was terribly busy; I spent most of it painstakingly constructing a cardboard Julius Caesar costume for the_alchemist's Shakespeare-themed birthday party. So I got up early, went into town to buy raw materials, came back, had a nap, and started making the costume at about 3pm with the aim of having it ready for the 7pm-ish start of the party.

At least, that was the plan; it rather fell flat when several people interrupted my nap (not their faults, of course) and then Ian dropped round and spent an hour or two trying to help me fix my recalcitrant computer (with as little success as I'd had myself). This rather disrupted my schedule, and it was more like 8ish by the time I made it to Catriona's with a completed costume (and both thumbs covered in superglue). This left me barely enough time to say hello to yvesilena in particular before she departed to catch a convenient lift to the station, which was a shame; perhaps next time I'll leave twice as much time for costume construction just in case of the unexpected :-/

Still, apart from that it was an enjoyable party; particularly nice was finally having a chance to talk to taimatsu, who I'd met at several other parties but circumstances had never quite allowed a real conversation. And I got a lift home, which sounds a bit lazy for a 15-minute walking distance but meant I didn't have to carry my rather fragile costume back home through the streets, so I still have it and can post photos at some point. (I'm rather pleased with the way it came out.)

This morning I feel restless, as if there are six things I should be doing rather than lazing about in my pyjamas, and somewhat peeved, as if something really unpleasant happened to me last night (which it didn't). I can only assume it's left-over tension from the part of yesterday I spent frantically supergluing stuff with one eye on the clock, plus left-over lack of sleep due to said tension, or something. I hate feeling annoyed without an obvious reason. It, well, annoys me.

Grrr. So, no luck on the ‘finish doing stuff with MP3s and hence stop talking about it’ front then.

The new hard disk on which I stored all the MP3s I've just spent a week collecting has failed. Catastrophically. I'm going to take it back to World of Computers at lunchtime and they'll try to copy off as much of the data as they can save for me, but frankly I don't hold out much hope of avoiding another week of shuffling CDs in and out of the machine all over again.

Words cannot describe how appalled and angry and frustrated I'm feeling right now. It doesn't help that I found out there was a problem at about midnight last night when I got home from playing board games at the Gallery, so I slept rather badly due to worrying about it, which probably isn't improving my mood; but mostly I'm just speechless at the sheer bad timing of the wretched piece of hardware, holding on for just long enough that I thought I'd finished the hard work and then blowing it all up in one go. If it were going to fail immediately, I'd have preferred if it had failed immediately.

There aren't many things that make me as upset as a large amount of effort getting wasted, whether it's my effort or someone else's. It's odd, that; I'm sure there are lots of things that are worse in absolute terms. But completely wasting a load of effort is one of the few kinds of disaster that can reliably bring me close to tears.

As most people reading this will be all too aware, there's a very prolific email virus doing the rounds at the moment, which forges its sender address. Therefore, I'm currently getting a lot of bounce messages from systems which have received viruses purporting to be from me. This is mostly extremely irritating, of course, but now and then it's puzzling and entertaining, simply because of the weird email addresses whose existence is brought to my attention when they send me bounces.

One slightly surreal one a couple of weeks ago was ‘Star Trek Privacy’. This turned out to be an email address for managing the privacy policy at www.startrek.com. Presumably the real reason startrek.com needs a privacy policy is because they have some sort of web discussion board that people type their names into (I haven't actually looked); but I couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps all sorts of respectable office workers might lose their jobs in disgrace if it were to become known that they spoke fluent Klingon. Or that they sympathised more with (say) the Cardassians than with the Federation. Or, as Gareth suggested, perhaps it contains sensitive personal information such as ear measurements for alien head masks…

The other silly one that caught my eye today, and I can't even think up a coherent joke reason for this one, is ‘Panda Perimeter Scan’. Hmmm.