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.

I had a wonderfully silly idea yesterday.

So, half my MP3 quest is now concluded. I have fed every CD in my collection (a total of 136, I believe) through my computer in the last week, and I now have MP3s of the whole lot. Except for the ninety-one four-second blank tracks on ‘broken’ by NiN, of course.

This is a great relief in itself. The endless swapping of CDs in and out of the machine was taking over my every spare moment; I'd get up, change the CD, shower, eat breakfast, and change the CD again before going out to work, I'd change the CD when popping back home for three minutes to drop off shopping, change the CD before going to bed, change it when getting up in the middle of the night if I wasn't too asleep to forget to, and of course I couldn't slouch on the sofa doing anything for more than twenty minutes without the computer going blip and me getting up to change the wretched CD. So just being free of that is a major plus point. And, of course, the fact that I can now listen to music in the study at the touch of a button without even having to go and grub around my physical CD collection is a minor bonus too.

Unfortunately (there had to be a downside), the main point of the exercise has yet to be fulfilled. The plan was to buy a Dension DH102 car stereo, which is an MP3 player with an internal 20Gb hard disk (which my entire collection will less than half-fill). This would mean that at the same time I'd have my whole music collection in the car instead of the small fraction on Minidiscs currently overflowing my glove compartment, and my glove compartment wouldn't be overflowing. And better still, I'd be able to choose an album just by pressing buttons, which means that on long journeys I wouldn't have to carefully choose a few Minidiscs and lay them out ready on the passenger seat. And also I could get it to random-play tracks from my entire collection in a ‘Radio Simon’ sort of fashion, which would save me from terminal indecision and would also constantly remind me of cool stuff I hadn't listened to for ages long.

I ordered this wonder of modern technology on Wednesday. On Thursday I got mail saying it had been shipped; so I took Friday off work in order to (a) be in when it arrived, and (b) finish up the MP3ing process ready for it. And at lunchtime on Friday, a very apologetic guy from Car Audio Direct rang me to say there wouldn't be any DH102s available in the UK until about the end of the month!

It transpires that the email saying ‘we've shipped it’ in fact meant ‘we have done everything we need to do to get it shipped’, and in the case of this particular item CAD don't ship it themselves but instead get the manufacturer to ship it to me directly. And Dension are apparently in the process of moving their production line between countries (to the UK, in fact) which means they aren't producing anything until that's all sorted out. Sounds iffy to me, but I rang another retailer who phoned around and told me exactly the same story, so I suppose I have to believe it for now. But I really must stop taking days off work for deliveries, because every time I do it the wretched delivery finds some reason not to take place…

So, yes. I now hope to find space in my life to do something (anything!) not directly connected with MP3s, which should mean I will stop going on about it to everyone I talk to.

As anyone who's talked to me in the last week will know, I've finally got round to joining the MP3 generation, and since last Thursday I've been determinedly feeding my entire CD collection through my computer and uploading the contents to my hard disk. This has involved quite a lot of effort, some hardware upgrades, three or four separate computer problems, and other fun stuff, which is why it's been the only thing I've been able to talk about for a week.

(I started doing it on Thursday because I reckoned changing a CD every twenty minutes was easy and undemanding enough to be a productive use of two sick days. Of course then the hardware troubles started to bite and I found it had become rather more stressful than I'd bargained for…)

One of my CDs, an electronic instrumental rock album by Bjorn Lynne, started giving read errors on the last track a few days ago, which was extremely annoying. I tried various moderately silly approaches to get round this problem and obtain an MP3 of the track, and had several other even sillier ones lined up to try next; but Jon S suggested that since the artist is a nice guy and a real approachable human being, I could simply mail him and ask if he could send me an MP3 of it as a favour! So I tried this today, and it did indeed work. Let it be known far and wide that Bjorn Lynne [www.lynnemusic.com] is a thoroughly wonderful chap. (I promised him I'd say that. :-)

Over the weekend I have managed to have about three separate problems with my computer.

So, yes. I stayed off work for both Thursday and Friday, and didn't really start to feel properly better until some time on Saturday. This was probably not helped by me breaking my computer on Friday evening and staying up until 1:30 trying to fix it again. (This serves me right for thinking I'd found something useful but utterly undemanding which I could do even while ill…)

Saturday was a bit hectic; Mum dropped in to say hi in the morning, and then Dad took me and Sophie to the pub for lunch, and then fanf had a barbecue in the afternoon, and just when the barbecue was gradually turning into a party I bailed out to go to Chris and Yasmin's house-cooling pancake do. This turned out to be a move of questionable sanity, since about a third of the lovely people at Chris and Yasmin's had already gone by the time I got there, another third were on the way out, and that left two or three remaining. Next time I should turn up on time, perhaps… Still, what was left was still enjoyable, so that was all right.

Last night I slept better than I have in days; I suspect this is because I finally twigged that it had got quite chilly at nights and switched to my winter quilt. Of course it's typical that when I finally get a good night's sleep I have to cut it short to get up for work :-/

Uuurgh. Not feeling so good today; several people recently seem to have complained of a lurg of some sort, and I wonder if this might be it. I shall stay at home until I feel better :-(

Mmm, that was a good Bank Holiday weekend. Definitely. Yes.

I've spent a fair amount of it round at the Gallery, doing the usual sorts of fun things and playing a lot of board games. Particularly good fun was playing Robo Rally after a long hiatus from it; it tends to take quite a lot of time and so in the usual Sunday-evening gaming slot we don't normally play it because some of us have to get up the next day – which made this Sunday perfect for it. Also to my astonishment I won it (or at least I was miles ahead by the time we all gave up); I attribute this to having gone a slightly silly way to the first checkpoint, thus getting me mostly out of the crowding and carnage.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And everyone else bashed into each other repeatedly on the other one and got in one another's way in a comedic manner,
And that has made all the difference.

Or something like that.

Also yesterday I invited post-pizza back to mine to play silly PS2 and GameCube games (this wouldn't have worked in a normal week, but half the world was away so post-pizza was reasonably small), and apart from general fun I also managed my best run ever through Ikaruga (while demonstrating it to people) by quite some distance; instead of one or two lives left at the end I had more like three or four credits. Must have been having an audience that did it; Gareth says he also managed his best run in similar circumstances.

And most importantly of all, I've recovered enough energy to be able to do half-decent PuTTY coding. After being constantly exhausted over the last couple of months (I blame the heat), it was a great relief to find that I can still spend four hours doing something useful, and that I'm not (for example) unwittingly bored out of my mind by the whole exercise, which was something I'd been vaguely worried might be the case. So as well as winning and doing well at various games, I've also managed to do a hefty chunk of actually useful stuff over the course of this weekend. Rock righteously on.

I almost got myself into confusing trouble last night; I offered lnr and teleute a lift to the Calling, and then lzz asked for a lift for her and drswirly, and I said yes to both (I can carry four passengers believably enough) and then found out that the former lot were planning to bring ewx as well. Fortunately, Gareth decided not to go and Liz found her own transport, which made life easy again. For a moment there I felt like a major airline, deliberately overbooking a flight and trusting that enough cancellations will happen to avoid serious trouble.

The Calling itself was, well. Um. It seemed like quite a good Calling as far as I could tell, but for some reason I managed to disappear into my own mind for most of it, and spent a while staring at walls trying to understand strangenesses going on inside my head. Then I went mopey because for a while everyone I tried to talk to seemed to have someone else they wanted to talk to more (probability theory predicts that this is bound to happen every so often simply by bad luck, but it's still no fun when it does), and so I spent rather too much time oscillating between states of trance-like self-insight and rather pathetic moping and not nearly enough having fun spending time with nice people. Thanks to LNR in particular for trying to cheer me up, with some success.

Today my digestion has apparently been having mood swings, alternating between ‘you're in the doghouse, mister’ and ‘feed me pork pies NOW’. I hope it sorts itself out by this evening…

Oddly, as soon as I decided to stop stressing about my sleep patterns, they suddenly became far more sensible! I may have managed only six hours on several of the nights of last week, but I then managed to lie in until 11am on both Saturday and Sunday, which is unheard of for my normally obsessively regular body clock. Mmmm.

Very relaxing weekend, anyway. Two rather good parties, a lot of sleep, a fair chunk of lying on the sofa playing Metroid Prime, and the usual Who on Sunday. All good stuff, although at some point I really must find the energy to do something useful with my spare time as well…

And I can now confidently predict that summer is over and the clouds will begin to come out. The reason being, ever since I got this haircut a month or two ago I've been trying to acquire a hat in case my scalp sunburns; having tried in town and found nothing that wasn't a horrible design or in a daft colour or very flimsy and made of straw, I then tried mail-ordering one, and after over a month of waiting I decided the first mail-order place I'd tried must have been defunct and tried a completely different one. On Saturday, an actual hat finally arrived at my door, so now I can walk around in the blazing sun without having to figure out a way to get sunblock past my hair to my scalp. Therefore, by Murphy's Law, this must be the moment at which the sun disappears completely and doesn't come back until next May. (Though, to be fair, that'd qualify as a pretty good result in any case, and I'd still have the hat for next year, so I won't be too upset if this actually happens.)

I appear to have psychic dinner guests.

I've recently been going through a spate of inviting people round to dinner, since this actually motivates me to cook interesting food (spending a lot of effort cooking for myself makes me feel as if I'm wasting a lot of my valuable time, but spending a lot of effort cooking for someone else makes me feel as if I'm working to make a friend happy).

Occasionally, something unexpected comes up and a guest is unfortunately forced to cancel. Bummer, but these things happen.

Occasionally, I commit one or more unexpected acts of complete incompetence in the kitchen and the meal comes out only barely edible.

So far, my dinner guests' cancellations have matched up 100% with me completely botching up the meal I'd intended to cook for them, so as yet I have never been forced to inflict the results of a miscook on a guest of mine. I'm a little disturbed by this…