We are all familiar with Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb — though it might be more accurate to say that he “finished” inventing the lightbulb: much of the preparatory work had been done by others before him. We quote him every time we say that genius is “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.

Less well known, however, is his one time employee, Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was from Croatian Krajina, then part of the Austrian Empire but now part of Croatia. Like Edison, he was a genius inventor, and he worked in the field of electrical engineering. His list of inventions of inventions is impressive, and he is credited with having invented the radio.

Tesla and Edison did not get on, and Tesla left Edison’s employment to form his own company. One of my favourite quotes is from Tesla. While tenacity and determination are vital, these are traits that can so easily become unnecessary stubbornness. I find myself agreeing with Tesla in that cleverness and forethought can save time and energy:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

Nikola Tesla

This is a wordpress plugin that I have just made. When 2.7 came out I was delighted, but then disappointed to see that there was colour coding for comment spam status, which I didn’t think fitted with the colour scheme, so this plugin makes them all better.

Download the .zip at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/admin-spam-colour-changer/. Or install it from your admin panel if you’ve got 2.7!

There is a readme with all the instructions :)

A while ago I took down all the photos I had on this site. This was due to having no way of organising them all properly. One of the sad losses was the departure of the Blurry Dog Hat Series.

Verily, Internet, you were grieved.

So I have restored them! They are excellent, whimsical, and delightful. Check them out today. The link is at the top of the page.

Forlorn but graceful

I really enjoy having a blog, it’s one of the funniest things ever.

I seem to post at random times, about random things. I’m sorry for the unpredictable schedule and output, but then again I’m not the New York Times, so I don’t really care.

[Here's something interesting, why didn't I use a British newspaper as an example?]

I’m not the Times so I don’t eralyl catre. Realyl casr. Really care, even. Typing!

Anyway, my favourite thing is the comments. I have total control over the content of the posts. I can put whatever I want online. But I have no control over the comments, or who reads the blog, or how they got here. I kind of want my blog to be famous, like dooce.com or something like that, but it seems that most people get to my site after googling “Carol Vorderman”. Not quite the readership I was expecting, but there you go. This is what comes of posting so sporadically.

Now, as many of you will know, I have a biuvula. This means that the little fleshy punchbag thing at the back of my throat is split into two. It seems that I am not alone in this, as I fairly regularly get comments on the post I made about this. Again, this is not something I was expecting when I started out this blog. I thought people would come to read about my worldview, my thoughts on things like Truth, Beauty, Goodness. But then I am not the Dalai Lama. Alas, no, they come to gaze at the little deformity that hangs at the back of my mouth. Maybe I should give it a name. Or maybe I should give each separate part a different name. One’s called Dalai, the other Lama. But then I’d have a Buddhist biuvula, and who would want that?

But anyway, I like having a blog. Mainly because, I think, I enjoy typing so much. It’s a nice way to think. Quicker, and less messy than writing. If you want to write about something confidential, you can (password protect disk images on the Mac OS). Also, your handwriting is always so lovely! I have great handwriting anyway, but there’s something about fonts that makes reading what you’ve written seem so … noble.

Anyway, this post is something of a comeback post. Ha ha! How many times have I written that here. I want to get back in the habit of posting regularly on this blog. I miss writing. I find it so therapeautic. Therapeutic. Look at that, my spelling is going already. (This is something I have noticed of late, incidentally. Quite disturbing.)

So anyway, welcome back to my blog. Keep coming back :)

At work I have to access a hard disk that is on the network — it sits in a totally different part of the building. For the past A MILLION YEARS I have been trying to access files on it because Windows is being a jerk and not letting me access the stupid thing. It says the user name is not found.

Well today I found how to clear the details that Windows had saved so that I can login again with the right details.

Go to the Control Panel. Open then User Accounts applet. Go to the advanced tab, then click the Manage passwords button. (I made an image).

A list will appear with all the things you have stored passwords. Simply click on the one you are having problems and remove it. Praises be to God.

I was eating cake yesterday, and as I ate the icing, something occurred to me. It was buttercream icing, and I thought how it was made up of two ingredients: fat and sugar. This is like the two unhealthiest things in food joining forces to become one delicious cake covering of evil. Imagine. It both clogs your arteries and rots your teeth. It doesn’t just want to make you fat, it also wants to make you hyper. If you only ate buttercream, you would get obesity and diabetes.

Why settle for gingevitis, when you can get hypertension thrown in for free!

What is most amazing about buttercream is that you’d never eat the two ingredients separately. No-one gets a pat of butter and eats it with a teaspoon, and no-one grabs a packet of sugar and pours it into their mouth. You just wouldn’t do it. But when you make buttercream, the biggest temptation is to take it into your living room, sit down, and just start eating it. Isn’t that right? Surely it can’t just be me …

All this thinking led me, naturally, to the consideration of 20th Century history. I got to thinking about what could have happened if Hitler and Stalin had made friends and joined forces. And I have to confess, I think what would have resulted would not have been a worse record in human rights abuses. Or at least, not so overt as those two regimes exhibited. No, I think what would have happened — and here I’m following the same logic as the buttercream example — would have been much more subtle.

I submit it to you today that if those two regimes had become one, we would have ended up with something a lot like Disney land. Now this is scary stuff. Now bear in mind that my proof is found in this buttercream logic. It’s up to you as to whether you agree that this is valid, but I put my idea forward to a famous historian* and he cried at the beauty of my thinking. So this idea carries a lot of weight and authority**.

So there it is folks. Just gonna let this idea settle and make its way throughout the internet. Comments are welcome.

* No I didn’t.

** No it doesn’t.