I got distracted from the whole Harry Potter reading / blogging thing thanks to watching the Tour de France. That’s finally over and it’s time to get back to the non July routine.

I bought a nook. I finally got in on the whole e-Reader thing, and it’s not as bad as I was expecting. I think I actually enjoy reading regular books on it more than paper. The only drawback is that eBooks are really expensive. They’re rarely more than a dollar or two cheaper than the paper version, so it’s kind of hard to make that decision versus getting something physical to hold, keep around on a shelf, and lend to people. One of the first things I did was load up a programming book. The nook decides to shrink pictures down to fit the screen if they’re too big. So far this hasn’t been a problem, but I can imagine a time when the picture will be unreadable and I’ll have to go look at it on a PC. Other than that it’s great.

We’re introduced here to Harry’s life with his aunt and uncle. They were gracious enough to take care of him for 10 years and let him live under their stairs. I know this chapter is supposed to paint them as mean and cruel, but as an adult (or at least I pretend to be so my cat listens to me) I can’t help thinking it’s not all that bad. At least they don’t beat and rape him. I know it’s a kid’s book and she couldn’t exactly have anything too bad going on, but really his life wasn’t all that bad. I mean, sure they’re dumb and mean, but a lot of people are. After all, George W. Bush got elected president once.

It’s Harry’s cousin’s brithday and due to a crazy cat lady’s cancellation they have to take Harry along to the zoo with him. At one point Dudley complains about his knickerbocker glory being too short and Harry got to have it. I have no idea what that is. I’ll have to assume it’s perverted since it’s English. Harry later makes a glass disappear and gets sent to bed early. Not really all that interesting, but it was interspersed with crude mentions of random probably magical things that happened.

I think I’m getting used to the crudeness of the the writing style. It’s a children’s novel so she can’t exactly be very subtle. I think that’s why it appeals to so many adults too. In my first attempt at reading the series I was coming off reading Matthew Stover and George RR Martin novels, so jumping to this was a huge let down. Maybe I can get used to it. If not, I can always laugh about all the knickerbocker glories.

I’m reading Jen’s fancy British version of the first Harry Potter book. You may notice it’s a Philosopher’s stone and not a Sorcerer’s stone like the American version. That’s due to American’s lack of understanding of what a Philosophizer is. Being an American, I can only assume it has something to do with porn. Researching it has only given me a list of Harry Potter related sites and now I have Philosopher Porn in my search history. I fully expect everyone to constantly be ordering fish and chips and calling each other Govenah.

The first chapter starts off with what I can only describe as a description of a typical adventure averse hobbit. We find out it’s Mr. Dursley, Harry’s uncle. He has a typical adventure averse wife and spoiled whiney son (which I can only assume is an analogy for a republican). I was then presented with one of the most boring descriptions of his day imaginable interspersed with crudely placed mentions of weird people with cloaks hanging about. Eventually everyone went to sleep and Gandalf showed up (umm.. I mean Dumbledore) to vomit out backstory in a conversation with some lady that was disguised as a cat. There’s a version of Morgoth (aka Voldemort) that tried to kill Harry’s parent’s and now they leave him with Harry’s normal relatives to grow up a normal child even though he’s secretly special and has some sort of really important destiny. Woo woo! All aboard the originality train!

Ok, so that was pretty painful. Still, I don’t lose hope that it might get better. First I’m going to give up on any of it being original. That’s not what it’s supposed to be. This is one of the most unoriginal series imaginable. I know I mentioned it a few times before but I just wanted to get that out of my system. From now on I’m not going to point out any blatant copying from other fantasy stories. A story doesn’t have to be original to be good. Shakespeare never wrote an original play in his life and he did pretty well. Execution is what really matters. Even though the first chapter read like elementary school fan fiction, I’ll let that go since it’s hard to get a story going sometimes and first chapters are particularly challenging. It’s not like I’m Dostoevsky here. I just hope she pulls it together soon before I lose interest again.

A long time ago I embarked upon the quest of reading through all the Harry Potter books to see what all the fuss was about. I got about halfway through the third book. I remember finding the characters all extremely shallow and the plot was so derivative and generic I was cringing at least once per chapter. I was told to keep going because they got better after that but I was already 2.5 books and that’s more than I give most series to capture my interest.

Today I stumbled upon JK Rowling’s Harvard talk on TED:

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

She’s not nearly the drooling idiot with a copy and paste function that I thought she was. In fact she seemed somewhat interesting and intelligent. I thought about giving her another chance. So, In the style of TOR’s book re-reads I’m going to blog about it at the same time. Only I’m going to not be as lengthy as TOR because often times those are boring and I just scroll past them. Imagine that but written by someone with ADD. At least that’s my goal.

Jen and I drove through the route I mentioned in my last post and it looked pretty promising. There were even a few nice hills in there. I tried it out early last Saturday morning. I got about halfway through and realized that my left cleat was about to come off. I’m extremely lucky I noticed it when I did and not when i was trying to unclip at a traffic light to find out that my foot won’t come out as I fall over and the person in the car beside me laughs and I walk to the nearest place out of the way with my shoe still attached to the bike and call for help. Unfortunately I had to cut the ride short and only got in about 24 miles. It seems like a nice enough route. Maybe one day I’ll get to do the whole thing. Now to just get good enough to ride with a group again.

Probably my favorite hobby outside of programming is cycling. I haven’t been in Dallas very long but one thing that’s annoying is that it’s not all that easy to just go out and start cycling. In Shreveport there were lots of open roads with very little traffic and I knew where they were. Here I feel like I can’t go 10 miles on the road without getting run over. There are a few trail options but trails are extremely annoying due to having to dodge slow people and families with their herds of dogs every few feet. Most of the routes I’ve found have gone through roads that were busy enough that I wouldn’t want to go down them by myself so someone can be there to laugh at me and eventually call someone when I get hit by a lady on her cell phone. Maybe there are a lot of secret routes I haven’t found yet. I’m going out later today to drive through a promising route I found online. Maybe it’ll work out better than the previous attempts.

I was planning on letting my domain expire, but I apparently didn’t cancel my WordPress hosting and it auto renewed, so I decided to just renewed the domain too. Maybe the money will inspire me to write more. I’ll keep this short since I hate posting about not posting.

Wow, nearly a month. That’s a lot longer than I want to let not posting go. Oh well, I’m still up on my current record. Luckily not a lot has happened since this month has mostly been spent watching the Tour de France. I have to say it’s been a little boring this year. Alberto Contador and Astana are just so overwhelmingly good that there was very little excitement. Hopefully next year will be a little more interesting once that team splits up.

I finally got around to updating the things on the side of the page. I put up the picture of Darwin and I posing like Phillip K Dick.  I’m going to try to start adding more technical things. Most of the things on which I’m working at work are technically not very interesting and the amount of programming I’ve been doing at home lately is almost nothing. That should be changing soon though. Expect a post on Mercurial soon.

I really need to get into a pattern of writing on more than just Sundays. After the last Sunday post I sent in a support ticket on the Das Keyboard web site. They got back with me on Monday and it turns out it’s not supposed to type in random characters occasionally and shut down your computer. Unfortunately since I didn’t buy it from them I’d have to take it back to Micro Center in Dallas. The few problems I’ve had with it aren’t worth the drive there.

After I got back from Dallas last weekend Jen and I watched Dream Riders on the travel channel. It’s the story of the most annoying man in the world trying to connect to his emotionally distant son on the absolute slowest bike trip possible across the country. I often found myself wishing one of them would push the other one over as they were riding beside each other. The one I wished to be on the receiving end of the pushing alternated throughout the movie. Occasionally it was both of them. Don’t go into this thinking you’re going to be watching a movie about biking. The main focus of the movie is the father and son connecting with each other. I have to say that if you’re just expecting that it’s really a pretty good movie.

We’ve also recently seen Bicycle Dreams. It’s practically the completely opposite movie of Dream Riders. It’s about the Race Across America, the toughest bicycle race in the world. Riders have to go 3000 miles in 12 days. The winners usually make it in around 8 to 9. The race is currently going through a lot of controversy over the unfair treatment of its four time winner Jure Robic this year, but this movie followed 8 riders through last year’s RAAM. I recommend it to anyone that’s into cycling or any endurance sport in general.

I’ve sort of solved the keyboard shutting down mystery. I was suffering from the Vista problem mentioned on the Das Keyboard support page. In addition to installing that I had to go to the Power Settings in Vista and change the power button to do nothing instead of shutting down. Apparently my keyboard sends the same signal as shutdown when I press ctrl+shift. It does the same thing on my netbook with Windows 7. Another odd thing is that it types +} when I type +. I have to say that the way it feels typing is worth the small annoyances. I’m going to send in a support ticket on the manufacturer’s web site and see what they say.