Everything, Everything

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb (the first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy), but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and a number of people had worked on, and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been developed that was remotely practical for home use. Edison's eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical. Who remembers Davy for inventing the lightbulb? Who remembers Edison's name?

The success brought Thomas Edison to new heights of fame and wealth, as electricity spread around the world. His various electric companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought together to form Edison General Electric. When Edison General Electric merged with its leading competitor Thompson-Houston in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the company became simply General Electric.

With Cadbury's Mint flavoured Dairy Milk cone. It has a silly looking dome on the top to protect the swirly tip.

I'm listening to the last U2 album, my dad says it's pretty good, and I think I might have to agree (so far).

After reading something in the paper today, about a man fed up of spam, I decided to check how much I get. I can't remember how many he said he had, but mine works out (I think) as a spam every 20 minutes.

I just noticed my DivX Fusion codec had run out (again), and it looks like DivX 6 is offically out. At first I thought this would be a bad thing, and I was scared to see two bundles for download, but they've done DivX Pro with a 6 month trial (presumably to try and get everyone using the new divx container?) so it's not all bad. I still have issues with XviD - it might be a superior encoder, but DivX support is far better on standalone players.

I had to prune a few dead leaves off Alice today, I suspect my plants need a bit more water now that it's getting hot and sunny. I'm not quite as good at looking after them as I was at uni.

I can't believe how warm it is today, and how hot and sunny it's been all weekend. I'm barely comfortable wearing a t-shirt (it must be even worse for really fat people hehehe).

Apparently Royksopp have a new album out (I just bought their last one) and it's meant to be just as good, but with a much dancier sound.

Okay, so it's a bit quick and dirty (although they are XHTML 1.1 Strict compliant pages, so it can't have been too dirty), but I've made the 2005 diary pages fit the 'new look' design of the site (how many months has the index page looked like this?!?) and tweaked a bit of code behind the scenes.

I'm also listening to a few old albums, one from the loft (which was boiling hot, due to the lovely sunny weather today) and a few that I recently purchased.

They voted off Richard in the first round! He used to play the instruments on Whose Line... so maybe that's why.

I thought to myself, great idea, install a newer service pack on Windows 2000 and see if it contains the driver for the soundcard. It turns out it didn't, but it also broke the driver for my network card! Grrr! Now I remember why I love XP so much - although it does require activation.

... I also bought a dozen CDs online, hopefully half will arrive today. And a little while ago I moved the Python code into the new BitTorrent 4.1.2 Beta - I'm getting quite good at doing it now. I still think Ruth's pretty (and I'm sober now hehe). I think I'll have a nice relaxing day at work today. I love my job.

I don't know why, but this morning I woke up with "Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking" stuck in my head, and it took me about 10 minutes just to work out where it was from (Snow Patrol's latest album). They still remind me of an old band from the '90s called The Warm Jets.

Trish invited me to the pub tonight, and I bumped into Ruth. I used to go to school with her, and it was great to catch up. She looked really pretty.

... often wave at cats, or is it just me?

Slowly getting to grips with the programming language Python, as I modify the BitTorrent client. I've managed to move my additional bits from the 4.0.1 code into the new 4.1.1 Beta (I decided to skip the 4.0.2 version)and it seems incredibly stable. Obviously they must have fixed most of the bugs that were in the 4.0.1 code, but I've also managed to make my code better (fewer operations performed, and some error handling). I was thinking about changing the queue system a bit more, so you can add torrents to the queue but not have them run until you say they can - but I've decided it's not very easy to code and it's not actually of much use (all the seeds might be gone by the time you start it, depending on what you're grabbing).

I think I need to buy some more CDs to listen to. Despite buying loads a few weeks back, I need more! I also need some brown tape so I can post a few things. Batteries might be nice too. And a new pair of beige jeans.

Is going to be great!