Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Someone Please Explain Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
July 22, 2007

I will start this post by saying this: If you didn’t finish the book, come back later. Ok, now with that out of the way…

The Deathly Hallows was a pretty good book. I was satisfied by the story and thought it brought a decent close to the Harry Potter series. I particularly liked the descent into Gringotts, and the clever traps awaiting Harry in the Lastrange vault. I enjoyed the quest into the Ministry of Magic, too, imagining how the elevator scene would play out in movie format – something akin to a Keystone Cops flick. I suppose that I could generalize and say that the key stand-alone adventures in the book were all very satisfying.

The downside of the book has mostly to do with the book construction. The camping scenes were meant to seem long and solitary for the group of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but the book really drew out in those areas. I think some editing could have reduced those significantly. But my main gripe with the book is that the “fight scenes” were often not comprehensible. Here’s where I hope you other Harry Potter readers can help me out.

I think I may have finally figured out the end, after re-reading pages 742-743 five times.

On this day in 1999
July 17, 2007

On this day in 1999, we were sipping free champagne on a flight between Amsterdam and New Delhi to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

I was working at Kruse at the time, and our off-shore contractor wanted us to come visit and have some personal contact with the team. The ramp-up for the visit was quick - only two weeks, which was quite possible in the days before 9/11. When it was decided that I would be going on the trip and the date was picked, the question was essentially, “Got anything going on that week?” And my answer - “Just my first wedding anniversary.”

Blog Paid Content
July 12, 2007

Wow. The folks in this presentation are really naive in their perception of paid blogging. A major concern is that bloggers would take money to support a product that they might not otherwise say good things about. Or maybe they’d take money for advertising that would “junk up” their blogs. The weird thing is the double-standard they have about when you can take money.

If you’re a small site with no traffic, whether it’s because you haven’t been discovered or haven’t said anything that people want to read, it’s apparently ok to advertise on your piece of crap blog. But as soon as you start getting noticed, you are supposed to have “integrity”, and therefore you should be taking money for writing, not money for advertising.

School-Sanctioned Egg Chucking
July 09, 2007

In sixth grade, I had an interesting science teacher. After our late-year lesson on simple machines - levers, pulleys, screws, etc. - we were offered a challenge: Create a device that used a simple machine in some fashion to launch an egg as far as you possibly can. The boy and girl that flung their eggs the farthest would be treated to a nice dinner out with the teacher.

The game was on! I came up with a few crazy designs on paper, but basically stuck to the same principle - using compressed air. Yeah, ok, not much of a simple machine, but in the end there wasn’t much to the device beyond a simple lever.

Someone I don't Know
July 09, 2007

I’m haunted.

About 8 years ago, I signed up for this very strange service. It purported to send daily email of the latest buzz on the internet. It would use some algorithm to come up with what it considered the ebb and flow of the net and boil it down to ten words that linked to specific things. They delivered something other than what they advertised.