Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I just returned home from an evening out with Andrew celebrating the end of another successful academic year, brilliant grades, and his first paying job (working in the organic chemistry lab) making and researching quantum dots. In fact, today was his first successful batch of quantum dots!

Alan and I got him a nifty little digital sound recorder with a rather nice built in camera. He wanted one so he could capture his summer session organic chemistry professor's lectures and then save them to files on his PC.

We decided to complete the celebration by watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on IMAX. So we met at the cinema near Lincoln Center and after buying tickets strolled up Broadway to a restaurant. A pleasant dinner, good food and good talk. Then back to the cinema for the much awaited Harry Potter 3 film.

I'm still thinking about it and deciding how I liked it as well as how much I liked it. It's not a simple decision as the first 2 films were. They were ace, they were brilliant, they were the book and the fantasy come to life. This one is different. I wouldn't bother seeing it on IMAX if you have a proper widescreen cinema.

I'll post my critque of the film later. Right now it's coffee and a cigarette time.

AMUSING vs IDIOTIC

There is a serious problem on the internet with perspective. So many people seem to have lost the line between what is amusing and what is just idiotic.Here's my personal list:

AMUSING IDIOTIC

Witty Roleplaying Elf princesses, Forsooth speak
Pirates of the Carribean Pireate Queens, Pirate Talk
Sapphire G&T Drunk
Witty flirting Cybersex, Porn, Adultery

What a week this has been.

My hair.
It's long and getting longer and I like that. I changed the colour and I really like that. It's back to my own dark reddish brown and I love it.

vs

The miserable world.
A week of almost endless cold drizzle that stops just long enough for me to leave the house and starts just as I've gone slightly past the mid-way point of wherever I was going so I can walk back wet and chilled.

The US Mail.
My important letters have gone astray - 2 checks sent out 5 days ago.
Our postman delivers the mail at 4pm; the post office claims they rotate the route but it's over a year and I haven't seen us chamge from last delivery position to first yet.
The mail carriers are lazy, arrogant, often just don't deliver and there's an attitude problem.
I think there's a direct relationship between the sort of people working for the USPS and the sort of people working for the US Army in Iraq who recreationally torture people.

Crappy software
AOL - bloatware, controlware supreme
RealPlayer -spyware, controlware - AOL forced insall
ViewMgr/mediaplayer - (starts to sound familiar) spyware, controlware, - AOL forced install

Basically I got tired of my computer which used to be a clean quick responsive and stable machine turning into the digital experience fro hell. So I uninstalled AOL and all the programs they forced me to install that I never wanted in the first place. Ran spybot to make sure everythng was gone and cleaned up.

Voila! My computer is back to its normal pleasant to use stable state again.

Wait a minute! It's stopped raining! (to quote Alan Sherman)

I'm outta here! The sunshine is calling me....