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Krikkit
I thought the best thing to do to relieve myself of this Harry Potter fever would be to go read (or, as I prefer, listen to) some other gluing book. I knew I had the audiobook for The Fountainhead lying around on my computer. Tried it, got threw a few hours, found it to be not gluing enough and settled on the Hitchhiker's Guide series of novels, one of the important advantages of which is that it is a series, and, I thought, by the end of it, I would perhaps be more free of the Harry Potter mania.

Unfortunately, the Hitchhiker's series has ludicrously tiny books (at least compared to the longer ones that I've become accustomed to listening to) and I'm already done listening to three out of five of the series, averaging about one book a day. The impractical downshot of reading these books has been that this morning I awoke rather frustrated, having spent a good six hours of the night in a very disturbed sleep having been chased around senseless (and wandless) by a bunch of extremely scary, white Krikkit robots (that rather resembled stormtroopers) who, I can only assume, were attempting to murder. As the dream would have it, I was Harry, Ron and Hermoine - all at once. And our wands had apparently been left on board our spaceship, which we were trying to get away to. As anyone who's dreamt ought to know, the good part is always calculated to happen precisely half a minute before you wake up, which is the sort of dastardly n-1 thing that makes waking up so ruddy difficult, as if there's some infernal 'greater plan' to infuriate the hell out of you. So, after six hours of being chased around - senseless and wandless - we (that is, I) reached our (that is, my) spaceship, found wands and... woke up.

And all I've got to listen to now is The Fountainhead because I only synced Life, the Universe and Everything when I left for work.

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3 comments
  • Really liked your writing style in recent posts.
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 31, 2007 1:38 PM   
  • Haha. You're lucky to be able to recall your dreams. In my case, when the 'greater plan' infuriates the hell out of me and I wake up, the dream starts slipping out of my mind like water. Then the 'even greater plan' infuriates whatever was left inside because I end up getting angry that I don't remember what I was angry for in the first place!
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 31, 2007 8:12 PM   
  • @Aditya: Thanks. :-)

    @Rungta: Well, I usually don't remember them (and try not too) but, in this dream's case, I guess it was just so adrenaline-filled, and I had been just so afraid for my life just before it ended, that it was easier to recall than most.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 8:18 PM   

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Zune
Last Thursday, Microsoft had its once-in-a-while Product Fairs which are exciting events and opportunities to get lots of utterly useless free goodies and participate in raffles in which you have no chance of winning so much as a handkerchief. Of course, it's also an opportunity to get to hear and see Steve Ballmer give a public, erm, performance. Yes, let's use the word 'performance'. I had heard that he, uh, liked developers. Now I know it's true.

Moving on, if you haven't seen these brilliant and impressive videos of the Microsoft Surface Computing initiative, I suggest you go and watch some of them before continuing to read. Come now, go and watch the videos first. No point in me blabbering on about them if you haven't the foggiest what I'm talking about. The point I'm trying to make here is that you're about to be very, very jealous of me. Take a guess. No? Why you're an uncooperative little git today. (Notice the genius of how this unilateral style of writing lets me assume your responses.) So, anyway, the point, indeed, or the lack thereof, is that I got to use one of those computers. In fact, I didn't stop using it – ignoring the crowds swarming behind me trying to do the same – for a good ten minutes, and eventually had to be dragged off by a couple of beefy security guards (I just had the impulse to write 'security trolls' instead. I'm obsessed.) Also, the last bit about security trolls guards might or might not be true. Now, in order that my inclusion of this Product Fair narrative in this entry make sense, I'm going to lie and say that I got a free Zune at this event.

In truth, it was a completely different event that I got a free Zune at. But, that's not important. Not much is, really, when you come to think about it. Except, perhaps, Harry Potter. And Maggi Masala noodles. I would say Douglas Adams was important too, but, sadly, he is dead. The great thing about dead people is that they can't sue you for libel, or slander, or, in fact, anything at all. It seems I'm having a difficult time sticking to topics today. I'm living a very unreal life these days. It is happy. It has Quiznos' delicious sandwiches, Maggi Masala noodles, lots of audiobooks, the middle of my internship and my finally being satisfied with the kind of code I'm writing.

Zune
I'm hoping that that subheading will make me better concentrate on the topic. All right, so, in brief, had I paid my own money for it, I would be a really annoyed person missing a very real 250 dollars (plus tax). Thankfully, I didn't pay for it, so I am merely miffed.

The long story now commences.

The box was actually better done than most non-Apple products I've opened and was stylish in its own right. The Zune department seems to have this fixation with "Welcome to the social", which I have never understoof (sic) and so I mostly ignore it spare my brain the bother. When I first set my eyes upon the Zune, my immediate reaction was that pictures didn't do it justice. No, in fact, most of the pictures of the Zune look rather better than the device itself. "First words" are important when it comes to getting the general impression of something new. The first word that jumped to my mind upon seeing the Zune was "brick". If you've ever noticed, for most of the things you buy that are 'fancy', like digital cameras and cell phones, you regard them as extremely delicate and valuable objects and take really good care of them for about a month. After that, they start to become a regular part of your life and seem less striking than they were originally. With the Zune, it seems to be more of the opposite. On Day Four of ownership, I suddenly looked at it and realized that it had a sleekness that I had never noticed before and that I couldn't satisfactorily put my finger at. Odd, I thought, and continued munching my delicious Italian Caprese.

As far as installation goes, I followed the instructions as precisely as possible. I didn't want to be blamed for badly written code if it wasn't my badly written code. And badly written code is almost precisely what comes with the CD inside the box that also contains a Zune. The first computer I tried to get my Zune cooperating with was my work computer. This is a reasonably fast machine with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.66GHz and has 4GB of memory to boot (I've never been able to use more than 63% of it). It was all going rather smoothly while I was repeatedly clicking Next and going on with the initial "Express" setup (don't show me "Custom"). Then, it dumped me into the actual software that interacts with the Zune, which is also creatively named "Zune". This leads to a lot of ugly dialog boxes because any time that it has to refer to the device itself, it has to disambiguate and called it "Zune device" and where the developers have forgotten this clever addition, they have made a rather lot of people very unhappy. Still, I thought the software looked rather pretty, and it had started copying my music, videos and pictures to the Zune. The trouble arose when I tried to use the software. I clicked on the "all music" button thingy in the sidebar and it froze up. To cut two hours and six crashes of frustration into one sentence, I was annoyed. Apparently, the Zune (software), like iTunes, is not yet very friendly with Vista. And not at all friendly with 64-bit processors. When I repeated this experiment on my home machine which ran Windows XP on a 32-bit processor, everything seemed fine and the software has only crashed twice.

Regarding the Zune itself, I like it. Sure, it's a brick, and feels like one when I hold it in my hand (especially because what I'm used to is an iPod nano), but it does play videos (I have tested this but not used it a lot). As soon as I stumbled upon the option to change the wallpaper, I choose Rungta's Rangoli instead of the default and I must say it looks rather elegant now. The best things about the Zune are its large and crisp screen, its very logical and friendly menus, its devotion of the best part of the screen to Album Art when you're playing a song (looks rather spiffy), its ability to play videos, and how it neatly lets you change the Shuffle and Repeat settings without having to navigate all the way to the Settings menu in the same way that an iPod does not.

The worst part about it is that it is a brick that no one's put much heart into. It is also a version 1.0 product that was merely meant to feel out the market and not to actually make a dent in it. So, here's what you're missing out on: audiobook support, any kind of non-English language support, terrible client-side software, horrible syncing (due to the software I suppose), any kind of Wireless support that is not painfully crippled, ability to play the same video formats as the iPod, Mac support, and the lack of a general feeling of unease which makes one feel that no one really wanted to make this thing, but that some people were rather forced to. I'm hoping that Zune 2.0 remedies all or most of these complaints and that they offer a free software update for all the unfortunate Zune 1.0's so that they might be put to some better use than paper weights.

I hope I wasn't too negative about the Zune. It's really not all that bad, you know. I personally feel that the logo is really fetching.

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5 comments
  • hahahaha, Steve Ballmer. did you see him throwing chairs?
    By Blogger James, at July 31, 2007 8:30 AM   
  • Rate the iPod's and Zune's interface out of 5. Which wins?

    The Zune software which is available for download even for those who don't own the Zune player is so bad, it crashes more often than Safari 3 Beta for Windows does.

    Microsoft is doing a big mistake by not promoting the Zune in places where the iPod is not dominating the portable audio segment.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 31, 2007 9:23 AM   
  • *Which one wins?
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 31, 2007 10:51 AM   
  • Presently, it's quite obvious that the iPod wins. I can tell because it's the one I'm using.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 11:25 AM   
  • I had forgotten to mention one of the things I really liked about the Zune, so I've added it to the end of the list of things I like about it: "...how it neatly lets you change the Shuffle and Repeat settings without having to navigate all the way to the Settings menu in the same way that an iPod does not."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 12:15 PM   

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The Deathly Hallows
Wow, what a book! I've enjoyed spending time with this book so much that I'm seriously considering proposing to it. Both times that I've finished it and have had to "let it go", I've felt a sad emptiness, not quite unlike that which you get when you do generic programming using void*.

The Deathly Hallows was everything I expected from the grand finale of the Harry Potter series, and then, it was much more. For instance, I would have guessed that most of the book would have been consumed in finishing up all the little threads that had been spawned in books one through six. I would never have expected anywhere near as much new material as this book provided. The book was also gratifying in how quite a few of my predictions came out to be true. Yes, I know McGonagall ended up not being a Death Eater, but still, Snape was revealed as a good guy (you'd be surprised at how many people - my suitemate included - didn't have any idea this was coming) and Harry was a Horcrux. I was also surprised to find out that a lot of facts that I had already taken for granted since Book Five (such as the Hog's Head's barkeep being Aberforth) had never been explicitly mentioned and came as new information to some.

After the extremely heart-wrenching endings of the last two books, I had come to look upon Rowling as this evil, sadistic woman who wanted to harness the power of children's tears as a fuel for some sort of weapon she was making to take over the world. That was the part of me that loved Dumbledore so dearly that I didn't want to believe that I would never hear (all right, read) his voice in Book Seven. And so wrong was I.

The bloodbath that wasn't
Yes, Hedwig was a low blow. But, Fred's departure wasn't really a huge surprise, was it? I'm not saying it wasn't sad, but, by the law of probability, if all of the Weasleys had survived the book, it would been remarkable indeed. Mad-Eye? Well, I never really got attached to him, so his death was not a big deal for me. Tonks and Lupin died together and their son would be raised by his grandmother – so that didn't really strike me as too sad either (if only one of them had died though, it would have been a lot more sad). Dobby's death, I must say, was the most painful.

The Dursleys Departing
All in all, I think Rowling was really kind in writing this book. It was a very pleasant parting between Harry and his reluctant relatives. I was very touched that Dudley realized, after seventeen years, that Harry, was, in fact, not a waste of space. When I first read the chapter, I was sad that we didn't get to find out more about Petunia, but that was remedied before long. I like how Book Seven, as it is wont to be, being the final in a heptology, links back to so much stuff in the previous books. For example, the "we have corresponded" line in Book Six, when Dumbledore comes to take Harry from the Dursleys, and its reference, not to the Howler as one might have assumed back then, but to the letters exchanged by Petunia and Dumbledore when she wrote to him requesting to be admitted to Hogwarts.

Hallows and Horcruxes
I find it hard to believe that Rowling had this whole thing about Hallows and Horcruxes worked out ever since she started writing Book One. I mean, if she did, she must really be brilliant because that's a lot of information to keep in mind while writing those end-of-book Dumbledore narratives throughout the series (except Book Six). I was really impressed by how the Hallows came into the story and how they linked together with Horcruxes and even Harry's Invisibility Cloak. Still, it was left to the reader's imagination as to whether anything special would happen when these three objects were brought together. Also, honestly, I think that the Invisibility Cloak was rather a lame Hallow. The cloak itself is immune to magic, sure, but wearing it doesn't make you immune. Now that would be dead useful.

Wandlore
I thought we'd found out everything that we'd ever find out about wands back in Book Four with Priori Incantatum and all that. Again Book Seven surprised by presenting a great deal of new and wildly interesting information about wands and their ownership. Arguably, it was one of the most interesting parts of the entire book, right up there with information about the Hallows and Horcruxes.

Severus Snape
There is no doubt in my mind that "The Prince's Tale" was, by far, the most absorbing chapter in the entire book. And, in my opinion, it took a surprisingly short time to explain all of it (an almost disappointingly short time). Nothing demonstrates Rowling's genius better than her picking of the perfect set of memories from Snape's mind that, in short, explained everything. Somehow, I had never envisaged a scenario in which I would be able to forgive six books' worth of Snape's complete gittiness.

Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure
You've just got to love the little tidbits of magical knowledge that are sprinkled throughout the book. I drank it all down – Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, the power of House-Elf apparition, Taboos, the entrance question for Ravenclaw tower – and relished it.

Dumbledore
If there was one thing I could have been sure of before having read the book, it would have been that Dumbledore was to have little to no part to play in it. I was, yet again, woefully mistaken. And pleasantly surprised, might I add. There was nary a chapter that was not chock full of Dumbledore. Personally, I was most interested in what part his portrait hanging in Snape's office would have to play. And yet again I was surprised to find out that it was a most significant role indeed. Paintings in the world of Harry Potter have always intrigued me because of how much power they have. I mean, did it really matter if Dumbledore died if he was there, talking, thinking, plotting, generating new ideas and ordering Snape around? As far as I can tell, the only significant thing the portrait-Dumbledore couldn't do was to cast spells. Also, it seems that Rowling is just as big a fan of end-of-the-book talks with Dumbledore as I am, because she managed to put that in the book regardless of the fact that, well, Dumbledore was a tad dead. I'm not complaining though. It was like having Dumbledore alive again – my favourite person in the entire series. What was the significance of the ugly, moaning baby at King's Cross? I'm afraid I don't know even after having read the book twice. My first instinct was to think it was Snape but it just didn't make any sense.

Aberforth
That little conversation with Aberforth was really important. It introduced Dumbledore not from Harry's limited perspective, not from Elphias Doge's sidekick perspective, not from Rita Skeeter's malicious perspective, but from a truer and purer perspective by far – that of his own brother. It was very illuminating to say in the least.

Oh well, that's all I could think of. Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book (page numbers are from the American edition, spellings from the British):
  • "I don't think you're a waste of space." - Dudley, p. 40
  • "Pathetic! With the whole wide world of ear-related humour before you, you go for holey?" - Fred, p. 75
  • "Perhaps just one more, Master Harry, for luck?" - Kreacher, p. 221
  • "Rack your brains, Ron, that should only take a couple of seconds–" - Hermoine, p. 381
  • "So he can sneak up on people. Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking..." - Ron, p. 408, regarding Death's possession of an Invisibility Cloak
  • "But the fact remains he can move faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo when he wants to" - Fred, or George, p. 444
  • "We teachers are rather good at magic, you know" - McGonagall, p. 595
  • "Oh, don't mind me... I'll just lie here and crumble...." - Gargoyle, p. 620
  • "Of course it is happening in your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, p. 723
Gosh, I already want to read it again.

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12 comments
  • An excellent review of an excellent book. The scale of Dumbledore's role was indeed a wonderful surprise. I'm really really glad that we had the end-of-the-book talk with Dumbledore because I for one was almost sure we would be missing it in the final book.

    By the way, I think wearing Harry's invisibility cloak does make you immune.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 28, 2007 7:46 AM   
  • Prateek, I am pretty sure it does not make you immune. Remember the freezing charm Dumbledore put on Harry when he had the cloak on, at the end of book six?

    The way Harry and co. somehow managed to find and destroy all the horcruxes was something special I think.

    Karan, nice collection of those quotes. Oh the review was ofcourse brilliant. Though I disagree with the cloak being 'lame', in fact IMHO the ring was 'lamer'
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 28, 2007 8:27 AM   
  • Aditya, the cloak's supposed to make you immune from death, not all magic.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 29, 2007 12:13 AM   
  • Yup! nice review!
    I still have to read the book for the second time - there were some things I didn't quite get - but I still loved it.
    In the fourth book, voldemort had taken the body of an ugly baby-thing before he got his proper (that is to say, the one he had before he tried to kill Harry) body back - could there be some relation between that and the baby at King's Cross?

    Oh, and what made you think that the Hog's Head barman was Aberforth? [I certainly didn't expect it]

    And yeah, I was surprised that there were people who didn't think Snape was a good guy ... actually that might have made those revelations (in book 7) a lot more interesting :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at July 29, 2007 3:09 AM   
  • I hate it when I write long comments and blogger screws it up.

    The Invisibility Cloak was rather a lame Hallow. The cloak itself is immune to magic, sure, but wearing it doesn't make you immune.

    @ Prateek: Oh drat, I thought Karan meant that by immunity he meant 'magical immunity' to the wearer as he was talking about the cloak being immune to magic.

    I don't even think that he Cloak made you immune from death. That would be like crazy. Dumbledore for one would have known about it. He would have told Harry and James about it too.

    The cloak was supposed to be of help in the quest for immunity from Death, not make you immune per se. It simple 'Point and shoot' funda, you don't know where to shoot if you can't point at it innit?
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 29, 2007 3:11 AM   
  • Aditya, after reading your 'point and shoot' funda, I think you're right.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 29, 2007 8:34 AM   
  • Damn those grammar mistakes :p
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 29, 2007 11:20 AM   
  • Yup i completely agree wid Aditya's 'point and shoot' funda. I was thinking the same thing when i was reading Karan saying about the lameness of the cloak. I mean being invisible is quite an advantage.

    What was the significance of the ugly, moaning baby at King's Cross?

    i have read the book only once so may be i'm wrong. But when Voldemort and Harry was having dat little pre-combat convo, Harry says something like "I've seen what has become of you". Does that link to the baby??
    By Blogger Rohit Nag, at July 29, 2007 10:19 PM   
  • You might be right, Rohit, it could be Voldemort-related.

    p. 706
    "He recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises... form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath."

    p. 741
    "It's your one last chance, it's all you've got left... I've seen what you'll be otherwise... Be a man... try... Try for some remorse."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 5:21 AM   
  • @sahil, regarding Aberforth:

    From Book Five, regarding the pub and its owner:

    "It was not at all like the Three Broomsticks... the Hog's Head bar... that smelled strongly of something that smelled that might have been goats."

    "...great deal of long grey hair and beard. He was tall and thin and looked vaguely familiar to Harry."

    And, in Book Four, Dumbledore says: "My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms on a goat."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 8:52 AM   
  • oh yes, i remembered the goat charms part, but i didn't notice that goat-smell :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at July 30, 2007 9:34 AM   
  • Definitive answer from Rowling herself concerning Voldemort:
    "No, he is not a ghost. He is forced to exist in the stunted form we witnessed in King’s Cross."
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 1, 2007 1:58 AM   

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Sold
I've been shedding computers for the last two months. When I left for this internship, I gave back the PowerBook G4 that I had taken from Residential Computing and which I had hardly ever used except for playing multiplayer Tetris. Then, I got my 12" PowerBook back from my dad whom I returned his MacBook Pro. And now, that 12" PowerBook is also gone. Sold, in fact. So, finally, I'm down to one computer. After years of synchronizing data and music libraries, etc., it's kind-of a relief to be back to a single-computer setup. No more worrying about where what is and all that.

Meanwhile, tech news is bugging me a lot these days. All the previously-Mac blogs have now become iPhone blogs. I am completely fed up of it. It's ridiculous that more than half of the stories on tuaw.com, macuser.com, etc. are now about the iPhone. They need to spin-off their own iPhone counterparts because it's driving me up a wall.

Also, having acquired the audiobook for The Deathly Hallows, I am now a good way into my second run-through of the book and am now noticing all the finer points that I had missed in my first read. There are points in the book where I get lost in the words and can't tell who's saying a particular line and that's really confusing, not to mention annoying. And I remember at least one line in the book that was so obfuscated that I had to read it five times before I could figure out what exactly it was trying to say. However, listening to the extremely well-performed Jim Dale version of the audiobook is a real treat. His voice acting is superb and there's never any confusion about who's saying what because he has distinctive voices for each of the characters. Only once I'm done listening to it will I write up a definitive (well, I'll try) analysis of the book. Anything less won't do it justice.

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4 comments
  • I wish I had the audiobook too. Hearing the book with the expressions is a difference experience in itself and Jim Dale does an excellent job with it!

    Which computer are you using then?
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 24, 2007 5:38 AM   
  • It's really sickening. Apple's website hasn't been updated since the release.

    Even the four thumbnail links are all iPhone related. I guess Apple is trying to show the difference in it's name(Apple Inc.) by doing all this.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 24, 2007 8:22 AM   
  • Did I tell you about the Gateway machine my brother sent me last year because he wasn't using it? I'm using that.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 24, 2007 11:10 AM   
  • You might've mentioned it.
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 1, 2007 3:34 AM   

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राष्ट्रपति?
Cheers!
Pratibha Patil is to become India's first woman president after winning a comprehensive election victory, Indian officials say. Mrs Patil, 72, won nearly two-thirds of votes cast in state assemblies and in India's parliament, they said. (BBC News)
Pratibha trounces Shekhawat, becomes first woman President (The Times of India)
Patil to be Rashtrapati or Rashtrapramukh? (The Hindustan Times)

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Banned?
This devilry is precisely the sort of thing that Harry Potter books most rail against. What utter non-sense.
This Sunday, though, the nation's No. 1 best-seller won't be at the top of the nation's No. 1 best-seller list. Neither will the second, third and fourth. Americans young, and not so young, may be in the grip of Potterphilia, but "Goblet of Fire" and the others will not be in their rightful slots. In the first revamping of its lists in 16 years -- a change that casts a cool light on the hot war of competing best-seller estimates, both in print and online -- the Book Review has created a new children's list and consigned the Harry books to it. Instead, this week's list has a truly mature book at the top: "The House on Hope Street," the latest potboiler by Danielle Steel.

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free()
I am not a person who has the gift of dreamless sleep. In fact, it's most remarkable for me if I wake up from a night's rest fresh and without any lingering thoughts. However, that is, unfortunately, not how I awoke today (or, technically, yesterday). I heard the sounds of faint knocking at my door – my brain informs me that there were eight knocks on the door although I don't have any recollection of this exact number. When I heard the knocks, I had no idea whether they were in my dream (which, to my annoyance, politely modified its storyline such that the inclusion of eight knocks seemed entirely natural) or whether they were real.

However, having gone to sleep with the thought of waking up to a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I thought it was worth getting up from bed to verify whether the knocks had been real or not, because, if they had, the reward would be well worth it. So, I get up from bed, snatch my glasses, sink my feet into an extremely comfortable pair of slippers (a birthday present, in fact) and walk as fast as I can towards the main door. When, I see no one standing in front of me with a copy of the book I so dearly desired to read (devour might be a better word), I thought the mailman might be walking back to his truck, so I rushed out of the house hoping to spot a retreating back dressed in USPS uniform, but there was nothing. At this point, I also realized that the slippers I was wearing were not supposed to be worn outside the house. So, disappointed, I started walking back towards the door thinking what a waste it had all been – waking up and blasphemizing my most comfortable pair of slippers. However – and I'm sure you've been expecting this – just as I was about to walk back inside my apartment, my still-bleary eyes noticed a white-and-red box next to the door. A slightly closer inspection determined the following words printed upon its immediately visible side, "Attention Muggles: Do not deliver or open before July 21". (It was in all capital letters but I'll spare that eye-sore here. It would look dreadful in Georgia.)

Anyway, at 10.10am (the 'right' time, so to speak), I began reading. Of course, I am not a very gifted reader and it was a little before 5.30pm when I finished the first 389 pages. I was waiting for the situation in the story to stabilize a bit before I could 'safely' leave the trio and go grab some food because I was hungry beyond words. I finally finished reading the book at 1.33am.

Yes, it is a most astoundingly good piece of literature and if it is really only just a children's book, then I'm proud to be a child who is in love with it. It added a brilliantly woven storyline to the series, answered every question I could throw at it in the most cunning fashion, and had a happy ending to boot. In fact, this happy of an ending, I confess, I wasn't expecting. The geek in me will generously reveal itself now when I say that it feels like the end of a very long C program with a lot of memory being freed at last. Above all, after reading this book, I am satisfied and relieved, and that is not something I can say about most of the books I've read. In essence, what I'm trying to say is that is not a book that you can shake a stick at.

Of course I'll re-read it. I reckon I'll be listening to it since I already have it on audio, but there is simply nothing that compares to a first-read.

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1 comments
  • Oh yes!! The first read, is nothing compared to the second, the third or the subsequent ones. The first read is hurried, there is tension in the air, a kind of uncertainty as to what happens. The other times, you know the story, you're simply reading to analyse it, or refresh your memory about the minute details.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 24, 2007 2:05 AM   

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好不
No one knows better than I how much I love browsing through my Chinese dictionary – Wenlin – in search of new words and characters. This is one of the quirkier words I found, and, I hope you can appreciate precisely why.


Now, you would think that only the Chinese would be weird enough to stuff two completely contradictory meanings into one relatively tiny two-syllable word. Even if it were possible to distinguish the meanings in context, you'd question whether all the effort was really worth it at all.

"Oh, those chinks", you'd say in a deeply satisfied manner, reminding everyone in your presence how you always thought they were a bunch of no-good communists, who, at one time wanted to take over India (probably still do, come to think of it). After a couple of minutes of your reveling in this superiority complex, someone would tap you on the shoulder and remind you that the word कल (kal) in Hindi meant both 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', and, subsequently, your ego would proceed to deflate quite like a balloon does when it comes a tad too close to a sharp, not-quite-blunt object.

Not to let anyone feel left out, English is, of course, no exception. The word 'run' has so many different meanings in so many different contexts that, at font size 12, it takes ten sheets of (Letter-sized) paper to print out its definition from the Oxford English Dictionary. I know this from personal experience because an inadvertent mistake has recently caused my pile of scratch paper to grow by ten innocent sheets of paper which didn't know what was coming for them.

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7 comments
  • hmmm, interesting, i don't think i've ever encountered it with the 2nd definition before.

    how's hp7? =)
    By Blogger James, at July 21, 2007 10:36 AM   
  • How do you show the "new entries since last visit" message?
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 21, 2007 10:40 AM   
  • Using cookies, of course!
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 21, 2007 11:28 PM   
  • Abhishek is right. It's a bit of JavaScript I added a couple of days ago. It took a lot more work than I expected, to tell the truth, because of an unfortunate invention of mankind known as "time zones" and an even more dreadful invention known as "daylight saving time".
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 22, 2007 2:23 AM   
  • Hehe, have you try this Chinese dictionary with examples and calligraphy?
    By Blogger Bob, at July 22, 2007 5:59 AM   
  • Hahaha
    Nice work it is.
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 22, 2007 9:18 AM   
  • No, I hadn't seen that one before, Bob. Is there anything special about it?
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 1:20 AM   

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Disconnecting
All right, with the first spoilers beginning to show up in status messages, it's time for me to disconnect from the Internet and not come back until I'm done reading the book. Spoilers in status messages are just the height of mean-spirited dickery.

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Heptology
My favourite spoiler from Book Seven:
"Harry is decapitated by Ron who turns out to be Voldemort's robot son." - John Oliver

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Resistance
Oh, I thought I was showing tremendous moral fibre yesterday when I boldly decided not to read the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that was lying on my computer as seven hundred and ninety-four badly taken photographs. However, only now am I truly tempted because of a complete transcription of the book which has showed up thanks to due to the efforts of some very dedicated Potter fans fanatics who would stop at nothing less.

Anyway, I am still resisting. However, I am also not deleting the file from my computer. Keeping it not to be used in any but the darkest of hours, the greatest of needs – basically, if my copy of the Deathly Hallows doesn't show its pretty face by Saturday evening.

Rowling seems a bit upset by the leaks though, and, of course, urges people not to ruin "Harry's story" for its readers.

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2 comments
  • wow, you're updating a whole lot these days. haha, moral fibre... you know what I think you should do? I think you should stop resisting.
    By Blogger James, at July 20, 2007 12:26 AM   
  • Never!


    ...or, well... not yet at least.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 20, 2007 12:29 AM   

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Floods
The Internet is such an echo chamber. With the number of torrents carrying PDFs of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows floating around, it would seem that there has been some sort of massive leak. However, the fact of the matter is that it is the same data that has been passing around from person to person and website to website being processed and reprocessed. It started a couple of days ago when some raving lunatic posted badly taken, low-quality photographs (although legible) of the entire Book and posted them online. And now, the same content has been posted and reposted several times as different torrents all over the place, and one person has even read aloud the first ten chapters and recorded them which some people have mistakenly thought to be the Stephen Fry version of the audiobook.

In these times, a restrained person avoids giving into temptation and downloading any of these files. However, I am not such a person. I took the liberty of downloading a couple of these torrents and verifying whether they were real or not. There are so many people downloading these that they came down at a whopping 1 MB/s. Well, ladies and gentlemen, they are real. Am I going to read any of them? No. I read the first page and I'm very excited about the whole thing but I have a couple of reasons for not doing this. First of all, I want to be able to comfortably sit in my bed and enjoy hours and hours of reading without any interruptions and without having to squint at low-resolution images to figure out what a word is... every two seconds. I want to experience the feel of book-in-hand again. Secondly, I have two more workdays left and there are certain goals I need to achieve regarding programming and it will be a magnificent error on my part if I get all into Harry Potter now and don't feel like writing a single line of code tomorrow because that is what will happen if I start reading now. I won't be able to concentrate on anything else for the next two days! This is probably why the publishers have wisely chosen a Saturday for the unveiling in the first place. It makes for a good first-read experience.

So, go download it if you are eager... or jobless... or both... but I would recommend against it. Don't spoil it for yourself.

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5 comments
  • Can I post spoilers as comments? Please? Pretty please?

    She damn right kills everybody. Damn. I feel uber pissed off.
    By Blogger Manas, at July 19, 2007 4:34 AM   
  • It's really surprising they had to kill so many people. It's really a bloodbath.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 19, 2007 9:28 AM   
  • Now now people, please no spoilers. Let's not ruin the fun for everybody.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 19, 2007 10:02 AM   
  • *in a creepy, seductive voice*: give in to your desires skar....you know you want it... =)
    By Blogger James, at July 19, 2007 10:20 AM   
  • The only way I'm going to read those crappy versions from the Internet is if I don't receive my hard-cover copy by 7pm on Saturday.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 19, 2007 5:50 PM   

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Chapter Titles
This is splitting my head like a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster right now. Oh how I wish I hadn't been shown this. Arrrrrgh!

UPDATE: The list got removed from HPANA but it is available on Wikipedia now, on their Deathly Hallows page.

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1 comments
  • whoa! I didn't know that! thanks!
    By Blogger Kimberly, at July 19, 2007 9:19 PM   

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Funny Place
This internship is turning out to be quite interesting. Microsoft, I've come to conclude, is a funny place. A funny place with a lot of dual-monitors. And KVM switches. One fine day, I told my manager that the CRT that was my secondary monitor wasn't floating my boat. The next day an LCD monitor walks into my room. And now I've got one of those dual-monitor setups too.

I'm in the middle of the fifth week of this internship and I've barely written a hundred lines of code. All I've been doing is taking existing stuff and refactoring it into new pretty little bundles that do interesting things, and apparently everyone's impressed that I can just manage that. Every time I've started doing a new project here, I've thought to myself, "Ah, finally, this must be the real stuff". But I'm still waiting. I'm always waiting. Waiting and eating Maggi noodles.

Also, it looks like I'll be going to watch a lot of IMAX movies because today they handed me what they call a Microsoft Premium card and it lets me watch IMAX movies for $3 instead of $15, which is a lot cheaper than even standard cinema. So no reason not to indulge.

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The Waiting
I was just reading this article about Jim Dale and his having finished recording Book Seven a couple of months ago, and, it made me realize that, this is the End. The proverbial 'it', if I may. The last chance for us Harry Potter fans to experience the excitement of not knowing how "it ends", of waiting outside a bookstore at 12.01am to buy the new book and then to not put it down for the next 24 hours, reading it quickly once and then rereading it again slowly to absorb the genius of Rowling's writing.

Sigh... well, at least, according to Jim Dale, "It’s a surprise ending". Gee, thanks.

On a lighter note, the Links are finally the way they were supposed to be - sorted by how recently the blog has been updated and... <drumroll> live! All thanks to Rungta's ingenious LinkedList JavaScript recipe.

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White Space
I do hope you noticed the slight change in the Journal's template (that's the new one on the left). I took out a bit of the blue that had been there for about three years and had been bothering me for quite a while; in its place, I added some more white, which, in my opinion, is, in itself, a very pleasing blend of colours. In all, designing the new template from scratch (this is the first time in my life that I've done so) took only five hours mainly because it's not a very complicated piece of web design. Refining and bug fixing took another couple of hours (thank you very much, Internet Explorer), and porting the last hundred or so entries over to it (sans comments – somehow, comments always get left out in major transitions) took another five hours.

Kòngbái (空白) is what the Chinese call White Space or Empty Space and I've always been a huge proponent. It might not look as good on news websites or the websites of big corporations, but I've always found it to have added a bit of class to personal websites. One of the main reasons I chose this design was that the old one looked fairly cluttered. I'd also become tired of seeing Trebuchet MS everyday. Also, I really wanted that bird in the sidebar to snuff it (reminds me of JLS). The new design centres on the most important substance in this Journal – the text. Archives and Links aren't crucial, and so, they need not be visible as soon as the site opens. However, I realize that clicking on them and waiting for another page to load is also quite a pain; so, they're just 'hidden' using CSS and are unhidden when you click Archives or Links using a tiny bit of JavaScript.

As for the older posts, I have copied over all the posts since last July into this new Journal, and, at the least, I expect to go back and copy over the remaining posts from 2006. However, it was also one of my aims with this new design to get rid of some of the old that has been bothering me for some while. There is a lot of blogging I did back when I was in high school that, quite frankly, embarrasses me. It was a different person who wrote on the Journal back then and it would be unfair of me to modify his entries. But, I also no longer associate myself with that person; which is why I'm just going to rope off those old posts and leave them intact along with the old template. This way, I can go back and experience pure nostalgia whenever I go back and read them without also having to experience a pang of discomfort about the fact that anyone else could also do the same.

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7 comments
  • I love the new design. Looks brilliant!
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 16, 2007 5:05 AM   
  • Beauty.
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 16, 2007 5:42 AM   
  • The white looks great. Noticed the change as soon as I saw the Skaran missing in ().

    Ajax Search is all that's left.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 16, 2007 6:20 AM   
  • whoa whoa whoa, new design. i like it- minimalistic with nice fonts. my only complaint is that because my screen resolution is so unbelievably high, the body appears as a rather skinny line of text flanked by two huge areas of white. not only is this slightly aesthetically unpleasing, it also forces me to scroll a lot more. can't you make the width of the body a percentage of the browser window instead of having it be fixed?
    By Blogger James, at July 16, 2007 6:53 PM   
  • Yeah, you often feel ashamed when you read how much of an idiot you were in the past entries.
    But you wouldn't want to alter it. It was you, after all.
    EVen I have contemplated deleting my entires of the initial 2 years, but it'll be like wiping out a part of myself from the blog.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 17, 2007 5:07 AM   
  • The new design looks brilliant, no doubt. Though I really loved the original design, which I think was exceptional.
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 17, 2007 5:34 AM   
  • It wasn't so much that the original design was terribly bad, but that it had been around for a very long time. Change is good. And I really wanted to make it look cleaner.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 17, 2007 10:14 AM   

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The Order of the Phoenix
Unfortunately, the IMAX theatre was completely sold out for what seemed to be the foreseeable future, and the earliest tickets I could've gotten were for next weekend because I can't go to see the film on a weekday. But I couldn't have seen it next weekend either because that's Deathly Hallows weekend and nothing in the world is going to be able to distract me from that - not even another Harry Potter related thing. Yes, compared to Book Seven, Movie Five just barely qualifies as a "Harry Potter related thing". Anyway, it had to be today. Plus I had to bike down 12 miles to attend a LAN party anyway, so I found a theatre on my way.

And you know what, the movie wasn't bad. Not bad at all. Compared to most of the Harry Potter movies, this is actually paying it quite a complement. As usual, it's very hard to compress a book as large as the Order of the Phoenix into a 150-minute movie, but they did it alright. They got help in the form of the first one-third of the book being completely devoid of story and thus being, for the most part, completely ignored in the movie.

So, here's what I liked about the movie:
  • Umbridge: They changed her character slightly in the movie but this was a necessary measure I believe, because, you know what, they didn't have five hundred freaking pages to build up her character. Her relationship with McGonagall and Dumbledore was a lot sharper and obvious but I liked it because subtlety here would have made the movie seem bland. As for her nastiness, it was really really well-done and highly entertaining.
  • Dumbledore's Army: I truly enjoyed the DA lessons in the movie. In my opinion, the Room of Requirement was well-adapted to film and I immensely enjoyed the Patronus Charm lesson. After two years, they've finally got the hang of what a Patronus is supposed to look like, and I'm glad because they were absolutely fantastic. A really good bit of animation there.
  • Ginny: She didn't have a huge part in this movie but they did slip in a couple of hints for Movie Six. Ginny looked back at Harry proceeding towards Cho while leaving the pre-Christmas DA lesson and it was done with admirable subtlety, so I congratulate the Director on that. Also, all her spell work was shown to be amazingly powerful which of course becomes a characteristic of Ginny's starting in Book Five and continuing in Book Six. I do hope she gets a bigger role in Book Seven because I love her spells.
  • Luna Lovegood: Charmed. Just absolutely charmed. I loved her character in the Book and in the Movie. It's probably harsh of me to say that they probably made Luna prettier than she ought to have been. In the scene towards the end when Harry tries to offer to help Luna find her lost things, I almost got the impression that he was hitting on her.
  • Cho Chang: Well acted. I believe making her the sneak instead of her friend Marietta (whom we weren't introduced to) was a brilliant idea because it simplified the story considerably and cleanly avoided the whole Hermoine-jealousy topic giving Harry an iron-clad reason to dump her in the movie. One of my clever friends pointed out that it was mentioned in the movie that Veritaserum had been used on Cho, which basically makes Harry a jackass for dumping her. Now, if only they'd picked an actress who was as pretty as she's supposed to be in the books. Sigh. But, that has been a complaint of mine since I saw Movie Four.
  • The Ministry of Magic: I loved it both when they showed it in the beginning for the Trial and in the end when they went into the Hall of Prophecies. In fact, I think that, barring the fact that Bellatrix Lestrange fell down and cowered in front of Harry all because of his feeble Cruciatus curse, the entire sequence was very well executed, and no, I'm not going to pluck any crows about the fact that Death Eaters moved in black blurs and Order of the Phoenix members moved in white blurs because I rather enjoyed those special effects.
  • Floo Powder: The whole head-in-the-grate thing was done dreadfully in Movie Four and it has been dramatically improved in Movie Five although I still don't see it as I imagined it in my head.
  • Occlumency: It's good that they kept those lessons short and sweet; and, instead of making Harry take a trip inside the Pensieve again (which takes up way too much time), they simplified matters by having Harry find out what a git his dad was when he repelled Snape's Legilimens with his Protego.
Things they got disastrously wrong:
  • Dumbledore: Maybe I'm just in love with Dumbledore but ever since Movie Three, when they changed the actor, he's been going doing hill. He was barely bearable in Movie Three, atrocious in Movie Four and I just have no words for what he is in Movie Five. There's no help for it. He has no subtlety; they've completely ruined his character. And half the time in the movie (okay, so on two incidences), Harry kept shouting after him and he didn't turn back to look at Harry. No subtlety at all.
  • Snape: I don't see the nearly the amount of hatred in the movie as I just saw in the book which I finished reading a couple of days ago. He's simply not being the big git he's supposed to be. I mean, it makes the movie a lot more 'pleasant' but it's not an accurate portrayal of character.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange: Unimpressed.
  • Voldemort-Dumbledore Duel: Unimpressed.
  • Malfoy: He was completely MIA during the movie; I guess, like Quidditch, they just couldn't devote screen time to him any more. Oh yeah, there was no Quidditch, but that's not something that they did wrong. It was for the best. I don't think I could have tolerated the whole "Weasley is our king" thing.
For every Harry Potter movie I've seen, I've wished that I'd made it instead because there are just a lot of 'small' things in these movies that are so obviously wrong and completely unfaithful to the books that it makes me mad. I mean, the Firebolt looks like shit for example. They just don't understand! Still, that was a good 150 minutes of my life, except for when I really had to go to the bathroom towards the end and had to miss a couple of minutes of the movie. I broke my usual policy of not buying a soft drink and I've been swiftly reminded of why I made the policy in the first place. Never happening again.

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3 comments
  • Ah, well, I think they ruined it in this one.
    The direction was HORRIBLE. Certain characters were well chosen (Umbridge, Tonks and Luna, for example), but continuity-wise, the movie was as jerky as a K-soap.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 17, 2007 5:04 AM   
  • Movies Four and Five will unfortunately make sense only to those who have read the books beforehand.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 17, 2007 10:54 AM   
  • Well I finally went and saw the movie at IMAX today and I must agree with you, it was not bad. Not bad at all. I especially liked that they didn't rush the movie like the fourth one. As for Dumbledore, I've given up hope. The original actor - Richard Harris WAS Dumbledore. The new one just doesn't "get it". All in all, I'm happy that David Yates is returning to direct the sixth movie.
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 18, 2007 2:22 AM   

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Addict
My friends, who've seen me buy and sell more hardware in six months than they've ever owned in their entire lives will attest to the fact that I'm quite addicted to technology and gadgets. An addict, but not a hoarder. I love selling them too (and for a profit whenever I can). They say it's surprising that I don't get "attached" to my computers and things but I don't. In fact, I thought I was attached to the OS (Mac OS), but that, I see now, was also an inaccurate observation on my part, because after having worked at that "other company" for the last four weeks, I've discovered that I can get accustomed to Windows very easily (although after having used it for a month now, I still can't see myself purchasing a non-Apple computer in the near future because I don't think I can let go just yet).

Amongst my latest acquires are a new pair of headphones and a new monitor (which I'm currently staring at and believe to be dreadfully gorgeous). The first time I booted up my computer hooked up to it, I thought to myself, "Have icons always looked this good?" and I concluded that the answer was, "No, they haven't, because you, uh, didn't have your glasses on. But also, with the kinds of monitors you've been using for the past year, even a digital watch's display begins to feel spacious." Either way, I'm now the proud owner of a gorgeous 22" Samsung monitor which doubles as a TV (part of my aim, which I mentioned a few entries ago). I'm glad that I bought it now while I'm in Seattle because MacMall doesn't charge tax in Washington state and the prices for 22"-ers have dipped below the $400 mark and have thusly become affordable, now costing approximately the same as an "iPod with video", which, by the way, has a very poor screen size-to-price ratio now that I compare it to my new monitor. Hush, don't tell me my comparison wasn't a fair one. I'm not going to listen to a word of it... Nope, still not listening.

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Whacked
Googlewhacking is the pass-time of finding a query that returns one and only one search result on Google. As of July 11, 2007, if you search for 閔士睿, you get a single result on Google which is this Journal. Guess no one else has that Chinese name.

And to think, there are more people with a single surname in China than all the people in America. So much so that, in China, distinguishing people is becoming a hassle for the government because there are hundreds of thousands of people with the exact first name and last name. So, they are going to make dual surnames legal; that is, if your name is Wang and your wife's name is Tang, then you can name your son Wang-Tang.

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Amazon's Promise
That email makes me even more impatient.

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29
Quizno's is awesome. For dinner tonight, I just had a sandwich there and even though they have only one choice of vegetarian sub, it was amazingly delicious. The only sad part was that I got the medium-sized one and immensely regretted not getting the large one. So, I guess I'll make it up when I go there next time.

But, in grander news, this happens to be the five hundred and twelfth entry on this Journal and that of course marks a very important milestone. Only yesterday did I go back to the very first entry I wrote a little less than four years ago and of course ended up finding some major grammatical blunders which made me blanch. After that, I read the next four months' worth of entries and got all nostalgic thinking about my life at school. Reading the old entries did make me think about what a prat I was for writing in such an immature and careless manner back then, and so I was instantly gripped with an urge to alter the entries left, right and centre. That of course prompted the question of whether I ought to make any changes to the old entries at all, because, they were, after all, records of my own history and altering them would mean that they would no longer be genuine. Then I thought about what genuine pain I would inflict upon anyone who would come to read them because, if the reader were anything like me, he would probably wish he were disemboweled by a misbehaving swimming pool rather than read entries that would give Vogon poetry a serious run for its money. So, I fixed any grammatical or seriously diction errors that I could find – I didn't know the difference between the words cheeky and cheesy back then, for example – and the couple of entries that were simply too embarrassing to be allowed, even by my standards, I regretfully marked as drafts. This allows me to go back and embarrass myself by reading them if I want to but prevents others (namely, you) from doing the same. I think I'm going to go on a campaign to fix all the broken links in those entries though as the websites I linked to back then have been moved and removed several times since 2003 (especially blogs), and I have a Monk-like reaction when I see a broken link and have to seriously restrain myself from not doing something to it. Hanging sounds like an idea...

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lol
It hurt me a great deal to put those three letters in that order up as the title of this post. I have seen far too many people fall into this disease of suffixing 'lol' to their online sentiments. It usually happens when I'm happily reading along a line of text, and, the moment I reach the end, this 'lol' jumps out at me, and in a nanosecond, completely undos the work of every single word that came before it. Once I read that 'lol', I get this urge to click the little X button and just get away from the nastiness. I just can't take anything seriously if it's followed by an 'lol', I just can't. It's like those people riding all over the place on Segways. I've seen policemen on those and if they ever stopped to tell me off for something, I just don't think I could take them seriously - I'd probably just laugh at them and subsequently get arrested. It's like,
Confucius said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." lol
See what that did? Those three characters appended to the end of that line just completely negated the effect of everything in it. It's like a line-deleter. And it makes me want to pierce my right ventricle with a sharp object to boot. The only bright side is that, when the universe finally collapses on itself, at least all the 'lol's will go with it.

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您试译

The font was just so purty, I couldn't resist.

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泰
First of all, I would start off by saying that, in the past two weeks, I have become sick, absolutely sick of hearing about you-know-what; reading every new story about it drives me up a virtual wall and unfortunately the stories are not going to stop coming. Everyone seems to be mega-impressed with the damn thing. Hell, even I biked up to a nearby you-know-where to check it out but honestly, although I can see what some of the fuss is about, I really can't see any justification for this much of it.

Anyway, having fumbled around with Windows Vista, Visual Studio and having drunk a laut of coffee, I've almost reached the end of three weeks in my eleven-week internship at you-know-where. The first two weeks were relatively easy; I was doing networking stuff and Winsock (the networking thingamajig which pretty much every Internet-using thing on Windows relies upon) is very decently documented. However, now I am heading into uncharted territories - APIs for which no one has ever written a client, and, unlike the stable, tried and tested Winsock API (which is more or less unchanged since Windows 95), when I encounter a bug from now on, I will never be a cent percent sure that it's a bug in my code, which, to put it shortly, will be a nightmare. Every day this week (save the fourth), files have been dumped on me to read – files whose documentation is still a work-in-progress might I add – I open them to find a thousand lines of code – just in the header file, mind – and the grinning co-worker who gave them to me says, "It's a bit long." I nervously grin back, muttering an indistinct "Yeah, a bit" while I sit to ponder how much deep the shit is in which I am now in.

But but, there are also funner things happening though. Apparently, there is this Thai place without having been to which an MS employee's experience remains incomplete. So, my boss's boss who's also kind-of my boss took us all out to lunch today in honor of my joining the team (yay!). I was very apprehensive that I'd yet again hate the food since I've had Thai twice and I've disliked it immensely mostly because they make the main course sweet. I ordered a Vegetable Curry with a Spice Rating of four stars out of five, which, I was told, was high with regard to the average American as they tend to stick to two or three. Of course, I am quite aware that, even though I am one of the least spice-loving Indians, the spiciest food I've had here has been just normal or slightly below. So, I would have ordered five but was deterred by the description "HOT!!! HOT!!! HOT!!!" and also I didn't want to foolishly order something that I subsequently couldn't eat. However, I was very pleasantly surprised when I ate the stuff because it was simply delicious. As far as I knew, this came out of nowhere - Thai food was supposed to be sweet and disgusting and I was supposed to hate it. Still, I'm not going to complain about a good thing. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I might just consider paying them another visit before I'm done here.

Other than that, biking around the area is immensely enjoyable. I still haven't been to main Seattle but I will most certainly do so this weekend. It will be a long bike ride (or, if I'm more pragmatic, a bus ride) and probably be the whole day's affair but I do have to visit the 中国城 (Chinatown) in Seattle and replenish my supplies of 纸 (calligraphy paper) and 墨 (ink) because I ran out a month ago and wasn't able to buy any before I left for here. I need to practice!

Apart from all that, I am, of course, terribly anxiously awaiting July the twenty-first when The Deathly Hallows is released. Like any sensible person I've pre-ordered a copy and Amazon.com says that if it doesn't reach me by 7pm on the very day, I will get the book for free. Isn't that generous of them? Thank the stars it's coming out on a Saturday, because otherwise I would have to skive off work. Also, The Order of the Phoenix comes out in a few days and I'm going to try to watch it on IMAX. I watched The Prisoner of Azkaban on IMAX and it was absolutely amazing. The screen is just so... big.

Oh, and I got a haircut

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