Song of the Day : “Summer Breeze” by Solar Cycle, from his album Sunlight. Appropriately named, I guess - it’s quite upbeat stuff, and I like it. I’ve had the bass riff from 2:03 onwards stuck in my head all day today. Other mentions: “Feel Alive”, and the cough-cough song (you’ll know what I mean if you listen to the album!)

I should do this more often, since I like to raise awareness of Magnatune whenever I get the chance. At my last house party, I played some laid-back music in my room on loop - The White Sail by Chris Harvey, and three or four people came asking what it was. And to the same end, I’ve ordered some of the new Magnatune promotion cards, and I’ll see who I can palm them off onto.

Wow, I’ve just checked the little calendar on the front page of my own weblog, and it looks like I don’t actually post here half as often as I think I do. But seeing as payday (tomorrow!) comes round remarkably quickly too, I guess I’ve just got a general not-keeping-track-of-things problem. Oh well.

But I am really busy, both at work and during the rest of the time, so there’s not much lazing around or trying to find something to pass the time. At the moment, in amongst everything else I do, I’m trying to upgrade the version of Wordpress that this blog runs on. To do so, I’ve decided to write my own theme module for the new version, instead of just hacking my way through the code to make this version look like it does. Hopefully it’ll make it easier to upgrade next time - my cavalier approach means I have no idea what code I changed originally.

My hand is being forced by the return of the stupid spammers. Currently the spam comments are all being moderated, but I’m getting fed up deleting them twice a day. Hopefully the upgrade will sort it all out.

Wow. What a boring post. Still, you get what you pay for…

I think Ed has bugged our flat, or that there’s only one good topic of conversation at the moment. Petrol buying.

Last night I called it a “Nash Economics” thing, which sounds better than Ed’s “game theory” label, is certainly more pretenious, and almost definitely wide of the mark. But it reminds me of the theory bit in “A Beautiful Mind”, so as far as I’m concerned, it is “Nash Economics”. Accuracy be damned.

Panic buying can be rationally justified as the following:

1. If there’s no more petrol left, I’ll be screwed
2. If there’s going to be no more petrol, I need to make sure I have plenty
3. There’ll be no more petrol if everyone else panic buys
4. Everyone is going to panic buy
5. I’d better get some petrol, quick

Of course, if there’s no supply interruptions, 3 doesn’t hold. And you can argue that this whole thing is caused by the media, since they have almost certainly caused 4. But I do find it a beautiful scenario, since every individual acting rationally actually causes the problem they’re all trying to avoid.