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…

Oh, I give up. My sleep state is now officially Unpredictable. Night before last, slept seven hours instead of the eight I'd hoped for, felt grotty and lethargic all day at work. Last night, slept six hours, woke up bright and breezy at 7ish which was too early even to fill in the time by going for a run, and now feel alert and even semi-intelligent. It may be time to start treating my sleep patterns like the weather (pack umbrella and sunblock, cross your fingers and hope for the best) rather than trying to work with it on any kind of rational basis.

Finished ‘King Rat’ this morning (China Mieville's first novel, not the James Clavell of the same name). I know everyone says Perdido Street Station was his masterpiece, but I'm not sure I didn't enjoy King Rat at least as much. Very Gaimanesque somehow: put me in mind of both Neverwhere and American Gods, but with a definite Mieville slant as well. Put like that, what's not to like?

And last night I watched Pirates of the Caribbean. Phrases like ‘very silly’, ‘great fun’ and ‘Arrrr!’ had abounded in other people's reviews of this, and indeed they all seemed entirely justified. lark_ascending seems to have had one or two misgivings about the degree of self-reference, and I suppose that's a fair point, but I think that basically any film in which someone performs a handbrake turn in a ship under full sail gets my vote. :-)

Bah, minor ailments.

So far this summer I've been doing very well at avoiding insect bites, but one seems to have managed to get past my defences at some point yesterday. If I find it I will bite it back.

This hayfever is really starting to irritate me; somehow it seems worse because it's waited until August to strike rather than hitting in May or June like most people's. I spent two months thinking ‘ooh, hayfever season has clearly started but I still feel fine, perhaps I'm going to get away without it this year’, and then my hopes were cruelly dashed.

And perhaps most irritating of all, I played Metroid Prime for an hour last night while waiting for the house to air out after getting back from the Gallery (the GameCube has actually come in very handy in this circumstance – it's nice to have something I can do while the house airs out at night that doesn't require me to turn the lights on and attract insects!), and an hour of fighting a particularly unpleasant boss creature has given me a blister on my trigger thumb. I suppose I can't really claim I didn't ask for that, but it's annoying nonetheless. I'm just thankful that the ball of my thumb is unused when typing…

You know, I'm not sure it was helpful for me to read about hyponatraemia in the paper the other week. I suppose the health warning (that depleting your salt levels is just as harmful a consequence of perspiring as dehydration is) was well-meant, but what it's actually given me is a faintly hypochondriac desire to eat crisps (‘just in case’) whenever I've been out in the blazing sun. Since this happens every lunchtime at the moment, I'm far from convinced that this is having a net positive effect on my health.

In other news, while walking to Tesco this lunchtime I saw a tiny little kid walking down the street, carrying a home-made foam rubber banana about a metre and a half long. The thing about reading surreal web comics[1] is that I'm never entirely sure I've remembered to return to the real world when I come out again…

[1] http://www.ozyandmillie.org/; blame Ben.

In other news, it seems to have become hot again. What I need is a robot servant who I can leave at home to guard the house, so that the windows can safely be left open when I'm out. Or chilled ceilings, perhaps (the obvious counterpart to the Romans' under-floor heating).

So, Emily has now moved into the Gallery in place of Mary, and brought her cat Woody with her.

It's funny; based on my experience of previous cat-owning households, not least my own six-month cat-co-ownership in mid-2001, I had formed a strong opinion that if a house had a cat in it it made a major difference to the, well, personality of the house and would be one of the first things you noticed on setting foot through the door. But the Gallery, as far as I could tell when I visited it yesterday, seems to have largely taken the change in its stride.

This is probably partly due to the cat himself, who is very much the way I always saw cats before trying to keep one myself. He seems largely indifferent to the humans around the place, with the slight but not excessive exception of Emily; he isn't a timid cat who will hide in another room to avoid social gatherings, or a sociable cat who will deliberately come and say hello to people, he's an unconcerned cat who will not let the presence of people stop him from wandering into the room in the pursuit of doing his own thing, but if he does he will pay them no attention and wander off again when he feels like it. As such he has rather less impact on the normal social processes than I'd have expected.

My social life seems to be spinning out of control. I seem to have managed a week in which I've averaged more than one social event per day.

Chris and Yasmin are partly to blame, I suppose, but at least they're unlikely to get married more than once :-) Good reception on Friday, though, with giant Jenga and giant Connect 4 and giant darts and a few other giant games. Then home from their reception to receive visitors from Impropriety, who I'd invited round for DVD-watching after discovering that crazyscot had managed not to see Galaxy Quest before. So that was my Cosmic Wrong set right for the week. To Prue's on Saturday afternoon, for a barbecue in honour of two other friends of hers leaving ARM (neither of whom I know terribly well, so I'm not sure which one invited me!), and then on to Kirsten's birthday do, which was a reasonably normal party until most of it dived into the paddling pool at about half past eleven at night. Reasoning that I'd been doing well on hugs up to that point but most of the people I might hug were now soggy, I bailed out and got what turned out to be an excellent night's sleep.

Today Who, tomorrow pizza, Tuesday the Calling; previously there had been pub on Thursday, and on Wednesday I'd first visited Impropriety and then gone on to Chris's ‘stag evening’ (actually an ‘oops I forgot to do a stag thing well let's at least go to the pub’ evening). That makes seven days with a total of ten things in. I'm a little scared by that.

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, I had a momentary weakness and ordered a GameCube and several games, which all arrived on Friday; so that's also been taking up my time. In fact I'm writing this just after a session of blowing up black and white things in Ikaruga (now that's what I call a shoot-em-up) and am probably about to go and blow some more things up in Metroid Prime (a fun game with a thoroughly infuriating beginning: in the introductory level you get shedloads of weapons and equipment and cool stuff, and the game gives you a tutorial on how to use it, and just when it's all starting to become instinctive and you naturally use the right weapon for the right thing, it all malfunctions and the next level shoves you on to a planet with only the most piddly of weapons and no cool abilities, and now you know exactly what you're missing. Gah).

All in all, the chance of me getting anything useful done outside work in the near future seems remarkably low…

(The GameCube felt like a terrible indulgence, somehow. I think this might be because it's the first computing appliance I've ever owned which was solely for playing games on. Most machines I've had have been at least partly for programming and other useful stuff, and the games were an added bonus; even my PS2 was partly bought so I could install Linux on it and use it to write games, so that felt more like financing a creative urge than lazing about blowing things up. But with the GC, for the first time in my life, I have no excuse at all.)

*yawn* Perhaps I shouldn't have got up and gone running this morning. I wasn't actually having trouble sleeping, but some masochistic aspect of me had decided it quite enjoyed running and would actually like to do more of it. Unfortunately it used up time I might otherwise plausibly have spent asleep, so I'm now somewhat sleepy.

Also I've somehow nadgered the scissors on my Leatherman. The spring that forces them back open after each cut has either broken or has debris clogging it. I'm inclined to suspect the latter, since they broke during the process of cutting a Tubigrip to size and so I suspect bits of thread have got wedged in the thing somehow. I can't see any way to take it apart and clean it, unfortunately. Hmmm.

I seem to have accidentally caused the ARM software group's roving Thursday pub trip to visit the Carlton this evening, which means I'm likely to actually coincide with it for once. Apparently there was some difficulty in getting people to accept this choice of pub because someone thought it was in Arbury and therefore dangerous to go near. I boggle.

The peace in Hazard's Edge was coming to an end.

Everyone in the town knew it, but nobody could have told you quite how they knew. The crazed rumourmongers who had terrified the people during bad winters in the past were silent; this time the denizens of the Edge didn't need rumours to be sure something bad was coming. The instinct for approaching trouble was ingrained into their very bones, and they knew it without having to be told.

Everywhere you looked, you could see people preparing. The Demons hadn't haunted the nearby forests for years now, but the smiths were making stocks of shields and armour, in case they came raiding again. The owners of public buildings were beginning to leave their doors wedged open, to ensure that if one of the moons turned red then anyone caught in its burning light would have somewhere nearby to run to. Watchmen had been stationed on the cliff itself, to provide advance warning if something nasty rose out of the pit below. A volunteer crew were beginning to build a wall around the town, far enough out that at least some farming could continue inside it, and anyone whose normal routine took them out beyond the line of the wall was giving serious consideration to a change of occupation.

The old men in the inns had ceased their carping. Where once they had complained that the youngsters who had arrived since the peace began were somehow less than real men, and where the young men in turn had retorted that the oldsters should take life less seriously and enjoy the peace for what it was, now as if by magic there was truce between them. The youngsters looked to the veterans with respect, since they knew their experience would be invaluable in the times ahead; and the oldsters as one had stopped their griping, and now seemed confident that they could trust the young men to do what would need to be done.

The odd thing was that nobody really knew what the threat was going to be. Everybody took it for granted that there was one, that the time for complaining about the passing of the good old days was gone and the time to prepare for their return in earnest was here; but nobody could have told you exactly what form the coming troubles would take. Half the town was busily constructing defences and precautions against all the old dangers that had plagued Hazard's Edge in times past, but at the same time everybody was half expecting a completely new threat to emerge. In every knot of people talking in sombre tones on a street corner, there was always at least one person warily watching the skies for anything out of the ordinary, or sharpening a knife in case they suddenly needed it … or often just keeping an eye on the people passing by, against the possibility that the enemy was already inside the town and just biding its time to strike.

I took the morning off work today, because John Lewis said they were going to deliver me a bookcase at some point between 10:30 and 12:30.

At about 8:30 I heard some muffled thumping noises from downstairs, but thought nothing of it (you learn to ignore random noises quite quickly when living in a flat) and went back to sleep.

At about 10:30, Gareth and Jon showed up with the intention of playing board games with me while I waited for the bookcase. How nice of them. But when I answered the door, they pointed at the large bookcase-shaped package leaning against the wall by my front door and said ‘Did you know you've got one of these?’.

I'm triply annoyed by this. For a start, if John Lewis had seen fit to tell me they were going to deliver it at 8:30, I could have come in to work after the delivery and I wouldn't have had to waste half a day of holiday. Secondly, if they'd bothered to ring my doorbell when they did deliver it, I could have rapidly changed the plan, gone to work anyway, and cancelled the half-day. Thirdly, leaving a heavy item outside my door and running away is extremely unhelpful when I'm not strong enough to lift it on my own! I'm just lucky that Gareth and Jon did come round and could help me bring it indoors.

I feel a letter of complaint coming on. There is no point in having a service that gives a two-hour period in which the delivery will take place, when the delivery doesn't take place in that period. And too early is potentially just as bad as too late. Gah.

Still, I suppose it could have been worse; I got a lie-in, I got a couple of games of Puerto Rico, and Gareth and Jon helped me get the bookcase assembled in record time. Doesn't excuse John Lewis being incompetent in any way, but at least the half-day wasn't a complete waste…