TV Slave reborn

Had a productive weekend. Started by buying myself a TV on Saturday. It is my first flat LCD TV and its kinda neat standing there close to the wall with a relativly big screen yeat not having a gigantic tube causing it to take up a lot of space.

Harry Potter

Also bought the latest Harry Potter book, which I completed Sunday morning. Ended taking the train out of Barcelona with Wingo on Sunday to check out a the beaches a little further away from downtown Barcelona. Ended up lending my Harry Potter book to Andy which he SMS’ed having completed around 21.00-22.00 in the evening. Guess the publishing house is unhappy about there not being any DRM system hindering two people in reading the same book in this way :)

Anyway, and I warn for some spoilers here, I am not to impressed with this latest installment of the Harry Potter series. First of all all the earlier books have resolved around its title in a rather significant way. The story of who the half-blod prince is is close to being completely inrelevant and when done with the book it felt like the whole half-blod prince thing had been put in as a page filler. In fact after reading the book it felt like most of the storyline leading up to the conclusion was irrelevant and meant mostly to fill a lot of pages.

The whole Ron/Hermione relationship/romance feels like it is something Rowling decided should happen, yet she has failed to ‘sell it’, it feels construed and artifical currently. The Harry and Ginny relationship felt a bit better developed and you could belive it, although it ended in a giga cliche ‘we can’t be together cause it will put you in danger’, yeah right, like the damage isn’t already done.

And I have to admit being tired of the unbeatable Quidich team. Personally I would love to not have to read any more about Quidich in the books, but if Rowling insists on spending more time on the topic, could at least the Griffindor team not win for once?

There where also a couple of cheap storytelling effects in the book, like Hermione having cheated another character out of a place on the Quidich team in order for Ron to get a place. In order to make the main characters not look bad from that this character was then shown to be an asshole later on in the book. Please, if you want to make your characters do something which could be said to be a bit immoral or lacking in character, stand up for it, don’t try to justify their actions.

Anyway I do realize that I am not in the target demographic of Harry Potter at all, and it could be that the story have a much better appeal to the younger audience it is actually written for. Anyway, I wish George R.R. Martin would hurry up with A Feast of Crows as that is definetly targeted at my demographic and probably the book I am looking the most forward too atm.

Edward goes famous

Edward (bilboed) got his claim to fame as the LUGRadio teams interviews him in their most recent show about the Pitivi video editor. The show also hints at Jono getting very close and personal with GStreamer.

When even the pure become tainted

I complained some time ago about even free software people not releasing their stuff in free formats. Today it was pointed out on IRC that even Debian who usually presents themself as the distribution most concerned with being free and open uses mpeg for their debconf videos. I guess the purity of Debian is mostly lip service :(