Category: Life

A few points about the Harry Potter craziness at the moment (people banning/burning/bitching about the books):

• If you’re up in arms about the contents of the Harry Potter books, why weren’t you out marching years back when the first Potter book found its way onto school library shelves, rather than now, after the Coca-Cola deals are being signed?
• Would anyone really sit and *watch* a game like Quidditch? Did JK Rowling really think the scoring system through? A single ‘goal’ – completely unrelated to the main activity of the game – could effectively end the entire match after 5 minutes, or 5 weeks. If you have two evenly-matched sides playing each other, the closest possible outcome is 150-nil. It’s the equivalent of holding a chess match and awarding the prize based on the competitors’ fashion sense. Not since the French mangled the tennis scoring systems have we had to cope with such a strange new world of maths.

For more info; the old Harry Potter Home Page is a nice-looking site for the movie.
P.S.: Quote of the week from Caleb; on hearing the controversy about the Harry Potter books and discussing the pros and cons:
“C’mon; it’s just a book. Oh – and a movie.”

In the interests of everyone’s sanity, I’ve taken away one of the BONWAG ‘news’ listings; it made little sense to maintain both of them, and even less sense to read them. I am sorry. I have seen the error of my ways. Bat on.

By popular demand – from a guy calling himself ‘Ryan’ in ‘China’ – there are more Dead Useful Things To Say In Latin

Anyone with an email address has seen the picture of the guy on top of the World Trade Centers which was doctored to look like there was a plane heading for it on September 11. TouristGuy.com reckons they’ve found the person, and they have some other photos to prove it. See what you think.

Just last week, I was talking to someone about the wonderful (non-Disney) short films that Pixar studios have done over the years (before there was Toy Story and Monsters, Inc.) Here they all are!

Humph. We decided to go with the short, balding lawyer, rather than the large, jolly scholar, then? Oh well. Majority rules. At least I can complain about government policy, unlike a lot of others out there. I’m mightily miffed that an organisation that can produce election stunts like Political Big Brother won’t be let loose on the trade deficit. The election at least cleaned out a lot of the dross, most of it in Queensland. Nice to have a little spring clean every now and again. I’m just disappointed that our nation gets to have as its representative a man that looks like he’d rather be at home with a model railway than sending our troops in to battle on the world stage.
Whine, whine, whine. OK, that’s enough. Let’s get back on with the important job of keeping those nasty refugees out.

While you’re waiting for me to get around to documenting the exploits of my now-not-so-recent trip to Ireland, you might want to brush up in preparation: I found this guide to speaking with an Irish accent which is targetted toward Americans, but still holds some truth today, to be sure.

While doing some study, I cam across this page: ‘Did God Create the Universe?‘. Which is ‘under construction’. I think that’s true irony.

More Geek News: I’ve only just learned of the ‘death’ of MS-DOS, the operating system which led the PC into the 21st Century; most known for its signature welcome; “C:\>”. This Obituary is done tongue in cheek, but it’s a significant milestone in computing. Whether it’s a mercy killing or a brutal murder, depends onm the success of Windows XP; and that’s up for discussion right now…

I was reminded of the two myths of buying software today: a) you get what you pay for and b) you have to have the latest version with all the latest features.
I’ve been threatening to write some software for my Palm handheld to help me in my struggle against the aisle layouts at our local Action supermarket. I’m always backtracking and mising stuff: I could be through there in 10 minutes if I had my act together!
I remembered a friend of mine who’d researched the layout of his local store and produced a paper printout he’d developed which conveniently listed all the week’s needed items in a nice report. I envied that, but had to go one better. I found ShopList, which is pretty neat, for two reasons. 1. It’s cheap. (It’s Free). 2. It works well. It doesn’t try to do everything, just what I needed. Most impressive, is that it seems to be bug free after its second revision, and hasn’t been updated since early 1998. I wish I could write code like that. It has pride of place at the BONWAG Palm Software List.