There are two waste receptacles in what might I occasionally choose to call my "Home office", usually it's "the computer room" but I like to use "office" if I feel the need to convince anybody including myself that I'm not whizzing my life away in some 21st century electro-magnetic field filled prison of my own making.

Anyhow, one of these waste receptacles is for paper mostly but recycling in general. Bin number two is loosely designated as "other". For the last couple of months, that other seems largely to have been snack packets as you can see.

What may not be so clear from that image is that we're not talking about a collection of muesli bars and dried fruit, mostly it's chocolate. Now I'm not becoming some health food fascist, far from it and we're not talking about a weeks’ worth of snacks here I've not bothered to empty that bin (because it wasn't full) for several months. Leaving aside the matter of my tardy bin emptying schedule, I contend with a lack of odour that capacity is the primary criteria for evaluating the need to empty it, you might not think that it seems excessive for several months consumption. This is, however, the tip of a larger snack mountain as packets only partially consumed in the "office" are often disposed of in other bins around the house which doesn't lessen their caloric impact.

As someone who likes to base conclusions on solid evidence, I collated the data from the packets and created a pie chart. It seems I have a preference for Minstrels. Galaxy Minstrels are definitely not a health food. While calories aren't the only consideration, for the purpose of simple evaluation I then plotted the calorific content per packet.

So on the face of it, from this selection, I should stick to Maltesers. But when you dig a little deeper the pack weight is actually one of the lowest and the calories per gram relatively high so it's the fact that the product is light that makes the calorie count of the bag lower.

The outliers in the bin were Roasted Peanut Puffs, which I can often be found munching although not usually while coding and Wasabi peas that I'll happily chow down on until I lose all sensation in my throat. Possibly peas are the way to go because from this list at least they’re the highest in protein and lowest in fat (discounting the 0 fat of the Skittles which are ostensibly sugar).

So my new “official” coding snack food is the Wasabi Pea, until I find a healthier option. Nothing obviously isn’t an option, as we all know ruminating on a coding conundrum requires both liquid and snacks.

Despite this country not yet completely sinking into an Orwellian nightmare, stay vigilant people because *they* want it to happen, I personally still put people on lists.

These lists are stored mentally of course, mostly because it minimises their upkeep. Currently the lists are titled : “Unknown, actively hostile or antipathy”, “ambivalence to neutrality”, “positive to actively engage”. In truth I’m not so unrelentingly anal as to have given these virtual lists names but on consideration I think these are good approximations of the groups in my head.

This is all really preamble to an apology, or an excuse or potentially if I’m completely wrong then a total waste of electrons and fretting on my behalf.

I was out in town today, simultaneously enjoying the low winter sun and being partly blinded by its glare hence my wearing of sunglasses. I was pondering a coding problem I’d had earlier in the day, I’m still making too many silly mistakes in Objective-C which take wholly too long for me to debug for me to be satisfied with my performance in that area. Swirling a merry dance in my mind amongst the square brackets was the Danny Baker radio show courtesy of the BBC 5 Live podcast feed and my iPod.

I was in what I like to think of as collision avoidance mode. Not taking much account of my surroundings save for avoiding bumping into people or things. I’d already seen two people that I recognised, one I bumped figuratively into while walking; we chatted for a while, the other drove past and waved. It wasn’t therefore wholly unreasonable I might be prodded by my subconscious that it had recognised a face. The idea that walking towards me might be someone I knew began to coalesce in my mind, along with the distinct impression that this might be someone I’d categorise positively.

Then alarm bells began ringing. If it was someone I felt positively towards, then I cared how they perceived me. There was a very real possibility I’d managed a rather feeble “Hello” and then have nothing to follow-up with after all this was a Saturday afternoon and I was very much of the mind that I’d left my brain at home on a shelf. Every fibre of my being wanted to throw myself over the nearest wall in the hopes that the approaching person, who I’ll call “J”, hadn’t yet seen me and I could avoid making a calamitous idiot of myself.

I peered through my sunglasses and tried to make a definitive identification of the person, but I simply couldn’t as the sun was utterly in the wrong place and even with tinted lenses I was squinting. So as me and the figure haloed in the golden glow of the low winter sun approached the point where surely accurate recognition would be achieved I fixed my eyes on the pavement. At the time I didn’t know why I’d do that, but I suppose it saved me the certainty of knowing if this person was who I thought they were.

That way I guess one of three things could happen:

They’d ignore me, which I would completely understand and I’d save them from having to talk to someone they didn’t want to.

They’d not recognise me, and therefore be blissfully unaware that we passed in the street.

Or they’d both recognise me and choose to engage with me. All things being equal I was both keen and slightly unnerved that it might be this one.

Nothing happened. We passed. I began to breathe again, only just aware I’d been holding my breath. I kept walking and eventually reasoned I should turn around and look again if nothing else to quiet my uncertainty. But even in this I’d made the mistake of waiting too long and the source of my cerebral tumult was too far away.

Intellectually I know the correct response in this situation is to say “Hi!” if you think you recognise someone, even if it turns out to be a misidentification. Worse case you’ve exchanged pleasantries with a stranger which shouldn’t be the end of the world, though my berating myself for the mistake for weeks might be a little irksome. So if I was being quizzed on it, I have the right answer, it’s just the practical test I’d have failed.

So, sorry if you think you saw me in the street and I didn’t say “Hello”. I wanted to, really I did, but my brain completely tripped me up by over thinking the situation... it has developed a habit of doing that, again, sorry.

The obvious solution would be to dress like a cigarette girl from the 1940’s. I think I could really rock the little hat, the short skirt probably not so much and the thought of the stockings is I think probably a sartorial adventure too far. But what really interests me about this particular outfit is the tray. I could dispense with its tobacco cargo and replace it with a keyboard.

What I’m trying to say, in a somewhat roundabout manner, is that I’ve found myself recently having a lot of blog entry ideas whilst on the move. I can make short notes on my iPod while walking, but I’m entirely disinclined to try writing entire entries on small onscreen keyboard. Quite why these notes haven’t become full blown entries is I suspect the lack of immediacy. Most of the stuff you read here tumbles straight out of my head, but with the amount of walking I’ve been doing recently I seem to be spending less time behind a keyboard. I am very much in two minds as to whether this is a foible that needs fixing or an improvement to be encouraged. But whatever the answer is to that question, I do feel like my mental plumbing could do with a little plunging and so despite other things getting in the way I ought to return to making some time for typing because despite my fanciful thoughts portable keyboards just aren’t going to cut it for me.

I was using NaNoWriMo as an excuse really, I’d got a half-written story that I really wanted to finish. November proved a little busier than I’d expected which didn’t help, but what really put pay to my authorial good intentions was the corpse. I wanted to put the body of one character into the drain of another, but credibly getting a body into a domestic sewer system is pretty difficult. In the end I’ll probably have to make do with a piece of a body rather than a whole one, but then I have the difficulty of explaining the disconnection of one piece of corpse from the rest. I’m hoping I can use the force of water to explain the separation, but I doubt this will be feasible without some degree of decomposition which my timeline doesn’t allow.

So my latest potential best seller is sadly stalled until I can resolve my cadaver complexities and quite frankly I’m wholly disinclined to Google my way out because the search history that would entail just feels like one that’ll end up being read out in court. Perhaps Mythbusters will finally do the “Realistically using corpses in fiction” episode we’re all hoping for.

Today was “Relative Tech Support Day”. Now I’d like to be able to tell a story of amusing geriatric IT incompetence, but on this occasion it was mostly the vendor that was at fault. The website of a notable high-street catalogue emporium has a perfectly serviceable online reservation service but, somewhat absurdly, no way to alter that reservation online. Now granted there was a user error which caused the wrong item to be reserved, but without the ability to resolve the issue online rectifying it took a phone call to customer services only to be told that the problem should be addressed when the goods were picked up. So the company are actually creating work for themselves by not providing functionality for the customer to fix their own errors. They also run the risk that incorrect reservations mean stock is unavailable to other customers so sales could be lost as a result of product being “locked” for hours, whereas if errors could be immediately reversed that scenario is much less likely to occur.

Personally I’d have solved the whole problem by not shopping there in the first place.

While doodling today, I found myself designing a door knocker. The door bell currently works perfectly well, so this wasn’t from the point of necessity. I suppose I’m really just trying to find something interesting enough that it prompts me to produce a pattern and actually cast the damn thing. So far I’ve only cast ingots and random puddles in sand. But on reflection I’m not sure percussive door hardware is the direction to take because at present the front door has a glazed panel when you’d normally put a knocker. So what I’m really designing is less a door knocker, and more a glass breaking device that would not so much prompt the door to be opened as it would smash an opening for you. What I really need then is a new door, but I’m not seriously going to try casting than from aluminium am I? Even if like many of my ideas this is hypothetical, I’m pretty sure the hypothetic me isn’t completely mad.

I’m not sure I like my television imploring me to tweet. More and more programmes are displaying hash tags and it all feels a little needy. Used to create some sort of dialogue with the audience it makes sense, but without that it’s just a rather unvarnished attempt to generate interest.

The BBC do at least seem to be engaging with twitter insofar as at least some of their output have twitter accounts that do interact with other users and even retweet some of those using hash tags. Other channels would do well to take note of this, but I think that televisions engagement with twitter which at the moment is very much the social media frontrunner in this context is still very far from finding its feet. It strikes me that it’s being used because someone somewhere thinks it is what they should be doing, but haven’t yet worked out how it is useful.

Does a dilution of the one-to-many relationship we’ve had with television over the years bring any benefit to the viewer or the broadcaster? It is certainly true to say there is a communal viewing experience produced by twitter as though we’re all stood around the water cooler while the programme is actually airing. I suppose for most media outlets that rely on advertising revenue anything which makes “live” viewing a more compelling option means there will be more eyeballs for their advertisers.

I wonder how much analysis of tweets are done by programme producers? Though I like the idea that I could in theory provide feedback, I dread to think of the programme that would be produced as an amalgam of the twitter hive-mind. Democracy in life is great, but in the arts and media democracy is a route to mediocrity, compromise, and blandness.

So perhaps the current level of twitter engagement is just right; we users are implored by the programme makers to talk about them and they discretely ignore us.