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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snooze now.

What's the best way to receive bad news?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words for similar but distinct concepts, that are not themselves similar. The ELF standard for object and executable files contains two concepts which are similar enough to confuse, but different enough that it's normally important not to confuse them, and they're called ‘section’ and ‘segment’. I often wish they'd been called by more obviously different names: ‘section’ and ‘kangaroo’, or something. And I was just reminded this morning of another similar case: ‘project manager’ and ‘product manager’ as distinct corporate roles.

If two concepts are similar but distinct, the words for them should not reflect this by also being similar but distinct! They should be as different as possible.

Moral versus probabilistic ‘expect’. This might fall into the same general category as yesterday's moral vs tactical ‘should’, though I'm not sure whether ‘probabilistic’ and ‘tactical’ are similar enough for it to count. But even if so, it's a particularly noticeable sub-case of it and worth mentioning in its own right.

Imagine a parent saying to a child, before going to visit someone for the day, ‘Now I expect you to be on your best behaviour’; and then, when the child has left the room to get ready, they turn to their co-parent and say ruefully ‘I expect him to throw a huge screaming tantrum, so we'd better be ready to leave in a hurry’. Two clearly distinct words for ‘expect’, please!

Failing to draw a distinction between any worthwhile things. There's a particular way in which a concept – a noun or adjective, or a philosophical term of art – can fail to be practically useful: by being defined in such a way that nothing, or nothing interesting, satisfies its definition. Or else nothing (interesting) doesn't satisfy its definition. As soon as you notice you're talking about a concept which encompasses either everything or nothing, you're usually wasting your time (except in the rare cases where you really intended to be talking about either everything or nothing), and should instead be looking for some alternative concept (or a less absolutist interpretation of the same concept) which manages to draw a dividing line such that at least one interesting thing falls on each side of it.

I want a word for that particular form of uselessness, so that I can much more economically point out when somebody (certainly including me) has perpetrated it, and it doesn't take me a whole paragraph just to explain why I'm giving up and trying a different approach.

Moral versus tactical ‘should’. It keeps striking me as an unfortunate property of English that the word ‘should’, and many of its synonyms and related words, are sometimes used to indicate moral obligation and sometimes used to indicate the tactically (or strategically) optimal course of action. Usually it's obvious from context which sense is meant in any given case, but not always, and I've seen just a couple too many arguments flare up from somebody misconstruing a ‘should’ as moral when it was intended tactically, or (more rarely) vice versa. It's a pain to keep tacking on disambiguating parentheses such as ‘(I'm speaking in the tactical sense here)’, so I want two clearly different words that can be used in place of the ambiguous ‘should’, at least in sensitive circumstances and perhaps more widely too.

In other news, the car hassle now seems to be mostly sorted out. I've got a new (well, second-hand, but new to me) Polo to replace my defunct Clio; my insurance company have paid me a settlement that looked relatively plausible in terms of my own perusal of online price guides; I've given back the temporary hire car; all that's left now is for the insurers to sort out getting paid back by the other insurers, for which they don't need my help as far as I know. Phew.

Though I've been musing in the past few days that my methodology for choosing a car is wrong. (If you think it seems foolish to think about this just after I buy one, I wouldn't disagree, but better that than not thinking about it at all!) In the past my approach has been to think up a list of models that meet my basic requirements for size and price range and suchlike, then go and test-drive all of them; on some of the test drives I get a strong sense of wrongness, when it just doesn't behave the way I instinctively feel a car should, and then I go ‘warrgh!’ and decide not to buy that one.

The thing is, I got that same sense of wrongness the first time I got into the hire car, and actually it turned out I adjusted to that fine over a fortnight or so, to the point where the Polo now feels less right to me than it did in the test drive. I'm sure I'll readjust fine to the Polo, of course, but that's precisely my point: if that feeling of culture shock at an unfamiliar car is a basically transient issue, I shouldn't be basing buying decisions on it. What I want to be able to do is to distinguish the annoyances which are merely unfamiliarity from the ones that are genuinely annoying and will still be irritating me after a month, and I'm not sure if I can do that on a short test drive.

Or perhaps I should assume that any immediate annoyance is something I'll get used to eventually, and make my buying decisions solely on objectively measurable properties such as that model's statistical reliability, fuel consumption, likely TCO, and tedious things like that.

In the past few weeks, mostly due to sorting out my car hassle, I've had to do a few things (e.g. making a particular phone call) which I knew in advance would be stressful.

I've noticed during the process that there's a certain length of time beyond which I don't seem to worry much about the stress of doing the thing. It's fairly reliably seemed to be about two days: if I plan to do such a thing well in advance, I don't feel stressed about it until about two days before it, and then I start to worry, and to curse my former self for having committed me to doing it. Whereas if I plan to do it within two days, I'm much more prone to let the visceral dislike of the idea affect my decision to do it at all.

Of course this is all perfectly normal human nature and in either case my clear duty is to ignore the feeling of stress and just get on and do it anyway. But it's been striking me as interesting that the time horizon seems so consistent. It's as if the ‘me’ more than two days in the future is someone I don't quite see as myself, and hence I can foist unpleasant jobs on him with relative equanimity; but the nearer-future me is really me, so that jobs I foist on him are ones I know I'm going to have to do…

In the past two days I have made more phone calls than I typically make in three months. I've been sorting out buying a car, and trying to get it independently inspected before I do so; for various reasons involving last-minute schedule changes and people not having vital bits of information so that I have to call someone else to get them and call back to pass them on, this has involved an absolutely frantic couple of days of telephoning all sorts of people repeatedly. I expect everyone involved is sick of the sound of my voice by now – I certainly am – and since this is an open-plan office I also expect my colleagues have concluded that I haven't done anything this week but call up car-related people on the phone and get cross with them.

It wouldn't have been so bad if every call I needed to make had gone right the first time. Instead, nearly every attempted call I've made today or yesterday has involved being unable to get through to the person I want, calling back later and/or being promised a callback, and usually taking about three or four calls to get anywhere. This has tended to make me feel as if every time I pick the phone up I'm engaging in a battle of wills rather than (as I should be) simply requesting or providing information, and it's now got to the point where I feel a strong sense of something I can only describe as ‘telephone fatigue’ every time I realise I'm going to have to pick the thing up again.

Bonus points on the battle-of-wills score go to the RAC vehicle inspections line, which when all the lines are busy does not place your call in a queue but instead automatically puts it through to a support division who can't actually do anything to help you except promise a callback that may or may not materialise. Another bonus point goes to the person I tried to phone twice, was promised a callback by a receptionist both times, he finally did call back just when I'd left my desk alone for two minutes and I got back to the phone just as it went to voicemail, and then I immediately called him back and he promptly put me on hold.

If I never so much as look at another telephone for the rest of my life, it'll be half an hour too soon. I'd quite like to put a tea cosy over mine for the rest of the week, so it doesn't loom in the corner of my vision and annoy me merely by existing.

Direct Line rang me up yesterday, told me my car was a write-off, and let me know what paperwork would have to go where as a result.

Today I rang them back to ask them the one question I hadn't remembered to ask at the time, which is how long I get to keep the hire car they supplied me with. The woman I just spoke to had managed (or, more likely, her computer system had managed) to lose all my details, but said that the usual procedure is that I have to give the hire car back five days after receiving the settlement cheque.

That doesn't seem very long! I had guessed they'd at least let me keep it for a few weeks while I sorted out finding and buying a new car. I can of course start that process in advance of receiving the cheque – but I could easily imagine that not everybody would have the spare money to do that. So I'm less impressed with DL this week than I was last week.

On the plus side, my neck is definitely getting better. Can't credit DL with that one, though!

When I bought a house a few years back, I was initially very scared of all the complicated and and arcane procedure that I'd heard was involved, and I wondered in particular how I (or anyone else without experience) could possibly get through it without getting something wrong. I found out (of course) that the answer is your solicitor: in addition to their nominal role of handling the legal aspects of property transfer, they also perform the vital secondary role of experienced guide: the person who understands the whole procedure, tells you what you need to do when, lets you know when you have to make decisions and expresses them in terms that make sense, and makes sure nothing gets left out.

After my car accident last week, I had a similar feeling of ‘help, this is surely all too complicated for me’, and was relieved to find out that in such situations your own insurance company performs a similar secondary role, even when they're confident it's going to be the other lot paying. At least, mine is doing that, and doing it very efficiently; rumour has it that some insurers will basically let you fend for yourself in the post-accident clearup process. So I'm currently in a good mood with Direct Line.

So DL arranged for a temporary hire car to be delivered to my office on Friday, and someone from a body shop showed up early this morning to pick up my own car for repair. (The chap who came out said it probably shouldn't take too long, but then actually looked at the dent and muttered ‘bloody hell’. So I'm not sure whether he stands by that estimate any more, but apparently they'll ring me at some point and let me know what the situation is.)

My neck is still a bit stiff, but the doctor reckoned it was nothing serious, and it's definitely feeling better than it was last week.

I had a car accident on the way home from work this evening. Pulled up at a roundabout and the car behind me didn't stop. Bang, rear-end shunt.

Fortunately a Highways Agency vehicle happened to pass by a minute or two later, and took charge smoothly. The other driver and I were both totally calm, but also totally dithering because we didn't really know what to do next. We knew we had to exchange details, but neither of us was quite sure what else if anything had to be done.

I think I'm personally OK, though I'll go to a doctor tomorrow to make sure. I'm less convinced that my car will recover…

Years ago, when I used to juggle a lot, I'd always notice that when I spent a whole evening juggling for the first time in a while (e.g. coming back to university at the start of term and attending the first meeting of the juggling society), my legs would hurt the next morning from all the crouching down to pick up dropped things.

I had completely forgotten this phenomenon, but I belatedly remembered it this morning, after james_r brought a bag of juggling kit to sonicdrift and mobbsy's party yesterday. I'm glad I'm down for spending most of today sitting in front of a computer!

Still, it was fun to dust off some old skills, although I had a little of the same problem as I had last year playing the violin at aiwendel's do. (Gosh, apparently that party was a year before this one to the day. 11th July is clearly my personal Resurrect An Old Skill Day.) I could remember what I used to be able to do, and although I gave a reasonable account of myself, I knew I was distressingly out of practice. Come to think of it, I had much the same problem as with the violin: the tricks I wanted to do were things I no longer had the skill for, but I improved later in the evening as I toned down my own expectations and moved over to doing simpler stuff that I could still manage.

It was also fun to see some novice jugglers having a go later on and to give them (hopefully) helpful advice. That was another thing we used to do all the time at the university juggling society, but I'd forgotten just how satisfying it could be to see somebody's skill visibly improve in a period of hours.

(I also got comically clonked on the head by an incoming club while attempting to pass with James, but I think that must have looked more painful than it actually was. I've had worse things happen to me recently!)

Bah. Twice in the past week I've been bitten by pieces of badly thought out syntax which look general but aren't. (Curiously, both have involved braces.)

In bash 3, the brace expansion syntax has been extended to permit numeric ranges separated by ‘..’, so that where you could previously have written ‘a{0,1,2}’ and had it expand to ‘a0 a1 a2’, you can now achieve the same thing by writing ‘a{0..2}’. However:

$ echo a{0..9}
a0 a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 a8 a9
$ echo a{A,B,C,D,E,F}
aA aB aC aD aE aF
$ echo a{0..9,A,B,C,D,E,F}
a0..9 aA aB aC aD aE aF

Bah! You can only get the two types of braced thing to combine by using a second pair of braces inside the first, which don't look as if they ought to be necessary, but they are:

$ echo a{{0..9},A,B,C,D,E,F}
a0 a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 a8 a9 aA aB aC aD aE aF

That was last week. Today's is in gnuplot, which lets you write a braced pair of numeric literals and interprets them as the real and imaginary parts of a complex number. This is easy to find out even without looking in the manual, because it uses the same syntax on output if you do something that has a complex result:

gnuplot> print {1,1}*{2,3}
{-1.0, 5.0}
gnuplot> print sqrt(-1)
{0.0, 1.0}

But what you might not have expected, having discovered that, is that it only applies to numeric literals. You can't, for instance, do this:

gnuplot> print {pi/2, 1.234}
               ^
         invalid complex constant

That would be too easy, of course. Instead you must do something much more ugly, like this:

gnuplot> print pi/2 + {0, 1.234}
{1.5707963267949, 1.234}

And if you wanted a non-constant imaginary component too, I can only assume you'd be forced to fall back to writing the expression for the imaginary part, multiplying explicitly by {0,1}, and adding it to the expression for the real part. Bah!