I just got home after an evening helping Vlad to teach English as a foreign language. It was great! The students are completely different to the ones in the classes I normally see. They actually _want_ to learn the subject. It makes all the difference.

I’m looking forward to doing it again next week. It’s good to be doing three lots of teaching per week. I should actually pass my course. 😀

I got back from football and took a quick shower. Then I put a load of laundry on and ate some pizza. I watched an episode of Quantum Leap that I’d Sky+’d the other day, and I played on Eternal Lands for a bit while eating Roses chocolates left over from Christmas.

When Quantum Leap ended I moved a dismantled table into the shed so it’s not in the way in the house an more. Now I’m sitting down and playing Eternal Lands and listening to random good music on the music channels we’ve got.

Does life get any better than having your own place and doing what you want at the beginning of a weekend? Well, yes it does, but not by very much! 😀

I’m sitting at the library reception desk at the moment, trying to look a bit busy. It’s weird being taken out of your regular workplace and left on your own to do things you’ve only dnoe a couple of times. I don’t mind it at all though. 🙂 It’s good to do different things.

I scanned in my old school photo from 2000. I’ll be stitching it together in a minute. It’s huge because it’s the entirety of my year packed into the sports hall. The photo even features Mr. Taylor.

I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room with my laptop wirelessly connected to my new super-fast Internet connection. I was downloading at 1500kb/s a little while ago. 😀 That’s incredibly fast.

I finished putting my bin bag hot air balloon together at work tonight. I filled it with air from the hand dryer, but in an enclosed space, so it wasn’t that good. Then I filled it with air from the air conditioner (hot air comes out on one side) and it filled quite nicely. 🙂 I’ll be filling it with a hair dryer tomorrow, if Robert remembers his. Hopefully that’ll make a bit of difference. Then I can look into giving it a proper heat source. Not sure what it’ll be able to manage so far though. :\

I was just reading “the Wikipedia article about the Project for the New American Century”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_American_Century and I found the following quote from the co-founder, “Robert Kagan”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan:

“Contrary to the exploitative purposes of the British, the American intentions of spreading democracy and individual rights are incompatible with the notion of an empire.”

That kind of annoyed me a little bit. I imagine he is probably talking about Britain in the fairly distant past, but still, that’s a bit of a bad thing to say. Then I read the following and realised that he’s obviously just a stupid moron whose opinions I shouldn’t value in the least:

“The genius of American power is expressed in the movie The Godfather II …”

What a dickhead.

I’m really bored of waiting for my course already… I hope it goes quickly tonight. I just want to get home and chill out. Tomorrow should be quite easy at work because it’s Friday. I’ll be playing football afterwards for the first time in a while. that’ll be good. Then it’s the weekend! 😀

I _love_ weekends!

I just read “an article”:http://www.news.com/A-tenfold-improvement-in-battery-life/2100-1041_3-6226196.html?tag=nefd.pop that says there’s been a discovery, or breakthrough in the field of batteries meaning that laptop batteries over the next few years should last up to 10 times longer! 😀

It’s about fricking time! I’ve said for a long time that the problem with laptops is that their batteries run out far too early, and the only way you can really be wireless is by either having excellent battery power capacity, or by having some sort of wireless power (not very feasible, short of sticking a solar panel, or windmill on your laptop (and I won’t even go into how ineffective they’d be)). It’s done by changing the material that an “anode”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anode is made from graphite to silicon. Silicon was thought of a long time ago, but there were a lot of problems with it fracturing because the size of the silicon expands when it’s charging, and then shrinks when it’s being used.

Anyway, that’s my cool story for the day. I look forward to having a decent battery life in my laptop in about 5 years. 🙂

Lizz and I have moved into a lovely 2-bedroom semi-detached house on Beresford Street. We got the keys on Saturday at about 12:30 and we’ve been busy with stuff since then.

The house was advertised as part-furnished, but contained a million things when we got here. More than we could have hoped for, indeed, more than we want. We’ve asked for the landlord to come and collect some stuff because we need the room for our own things. It’s nice that there was a bed here, but I spent a fair bit of money on my own bed, and it’s bigger. I’d much rather sleep in my own bed than another.

I had a BT engineer out today to sort out the telephone line at the side of the house. All 4 (yes, FOUR!) sockets in the house had been disconnected, including the NTL one. The aerial on top of the house has been cut. The copper water pipe to the boiler had been cut, but has since been replaced. The BT engineer initially told me he’d have to charge me something like £140 to sort out the cable. I only called them to report it yesterday, and he turned up at 9 this morning, so I was kind of expecting it. After a bit of chatting and me making him a cup of tea he decided to waive the charge on a made up reason, and I was very pleased.

I sorted out gas, electricity, water, and council tax in addition to the BT report yesterday. The gas card arrived in the post today, so I stuck £40 on it. It’ll be good to see how long it lasts so we can budget the right amount of money each month.

We’re getting Sky+ fitted tomorrow between 11 and 1. That’ll be pretty nice. I’ve not had proper digital TV for quite a long time. I’ve never had a DVR before. 🙂 They sent me the wireless modem/router in the post today too. I’ve just got to wait 10-15 business days before it becomes active. That’s a bit of a pain because I’m sure they just flick a switch, or press a button on a computer, but oh well. I’ll keep checking in case it goes faster.

Everything’s coming together quite nicely at the moment. In a couple of weeks the whole house should really be in order. It feels good to have a proper place now. I’m sure Lizz feels the same! 😀

Housewarming soon! 😉

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the peak of Mt. Everest, died today. It’s set me off thinking about what firsts are left on Earth. The highest mountain’s been climbed, the poles have been reached, plenty of people have left Earth’s orbit, people have gone deep down in the ocean (admittedly not to the lowest point). So what’s left for people to do? What should we be aiming for?

Robert, who I work with, was telling me of a man who had a theory that light pollution was partially to blame for the international lack of inspiration because it prevents us from seeing the stars, which means we don’t have sight of what to aim for. I suppose it’s probably not as simple as that, but it makes sense. People need something to aim for, and it certainly seems that most things have been done.

There’s a lot of stuff to be achieved outside the Earth, but I, along with most people, can’t see myself going up into space any time in the near future. It’s reserved for astronauts and millionaires. 🙁

I suppose there is the possibility of being the person who cured cancer, the common cold, bird flu or whatever. Those things are reserved for highly specialised scientists though. There’s not a great deal that the common person can aspire to any more. Sir Edmund Hillary was just an average person born in New Zealand with a father who was a beekeeper, and he went and climbed Everest before anyone else was even sure it was definitely possible. Now that achievement’s gone.

What’s left?

Hello!

I’ll be moving house tomorrow and I can’t wait now. I haven’t seemed very enthusiastic about it so far, apparently, but I’m really looking forward to having some proper space. Plus, as about 5 people have mentioned/enquired about HOUSEWARMING PARTY! 😀

So yeah, last day at work for the week too. Life is good right now.