Here I am, minding my own business, digging into Struts 2.0, when an owl from Amazon.com delivered a package on my doorstep on Saturday.
To be honest, it wasn’t completely unexpected. I stopped reading the Harry Potter series after book 5, because I really didn’t like the extended scenes of cruelty and nastiness, not to mention the fact that it took over 500 pages before Harry started to fight back successfully. Still, Ginger read book 6 and we pre-ordered book 7 when it first became available.
The release of book 7 coincided with the release of the fifth movie. I was reluctant to go see it, for the same reasons, but I figured I’d give it a try. Besides, Xander was away at camp and Ginger really wanted to go.
I really liked the movie. They downplayed the torture aspects (almost too much, may Dolores Umbridge rot in hell for all eternity — yes, I know it’s fiction, but nevertheless) and did a great job on the rest of the action and character development. That meant I had to dig into book 6, knowing that book 7 was coming on Saturday.
Book 6 was really good. I finished it Saturday afternoon and started book 7 that evening, resigned to the fact that nothing productive was going to happen in my life until that book was finished.
I finally finished last night. All I can say is, wow. That was fun, and amazing, and all that. I have no idea how they’ll make a movie out of it; it felt like there was material for at least three of them.
That lead me to the Wikipedia pages on the book, which were already quite complete and answered a few questions I had about horcruxes, hallows, and certain character biographies. Be sure to avoid the whole section until you’ve read the book.
I know this is a rather odd blog posting for my company site, but if anyone has tried to reach me and found me unavailable for the last few days, well, now you know.
As long as I’m off-topic, a couple of quick asides:
1. What I wouldn’t give for portkeys, or the floo network, or frankly anything to help me avoid the airlines, which are clearly in the service of the Dark Lord.
2. MyEclipse 6.0 should be out any day now. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been using the M1 release for almost a month, but I don’t want to get too heavily invested in it before the GA release comes out.
3. Now that the Yankees are in the midst of about 1000 games against bad teams, it’s a good thing the Red Sox picked now to go on a five-game winning streak. And who knew that Julio Lugo was a hitting machine? I hope that lasts a bit longer.
4. Xander is clearly having more fun this summer than I did at age 15. He spent a week and a half with my parents, then a couple days at home, followed by a week at camp as a counselor, a week with a friend’s family at their vacation house in Rhode Island, then overnight with friends last weekend, a party on Sunday, a sleep-over last night, and he’s got another week in camp next week. Not to mention that his end of semester grades were good enough (barely) to keep his new guitar. Yeah, he’s really got it tough.
5. Soon I’ll have to write a post about my new part-time job scoring minor league baseball games for Baseball Info Solutions. I’ve got a CT Defenders game tonight and tomorrow, though, so that will have to wait.
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