Too optimistic, perhaps…

And so a day after writing that I get optical effects but no headaches, I got a headache (though it didn’t match the classical description of a migraine headache). Oh, well. Maybe I should write that I don’t win the Lottery and see if that turns out false, too!

It’s been a busy, but mostly unpublishable week. I did finally get around to making an appointment for a physical — which the doctor’s office conveniently scheduled for June (good thing I’m not in any hurry!), and to calling the Saab dealer to schedule an oil change and display replacement (which they can do on Monday — I expected them to schedule me into June!). And I registered for WWW2002 (I have to be there, I’m a track co-chair) just in time to beat the Early Bird deadline and got a decent price on my flights and an upgrade (there goes another 30,000 miles…better than spending money, though).

I’m having problems with upstreaming with Radio Userland; it looks like Norton Personal Firewall gets in the way, but not all of the time. *sigh* If I can ever get that fixed, I’ll probably move my activity to Radio Defenestration Corner, since EditThisPage isn’t always up when I want to write.

Book of the Day

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about the books I’m reading; I want to get back into the habit. Today’s book is War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. It’s a fantasy, set in and around Minneapolis, about what happens when reality and Faerie collide. I’m about halfway through the book, and it’s excellent — I had to tear myself away from it last night to go to bed, and I grabbed it again early this morning to continue; I hope to finish it tonight. I’m somewhat amazed that I like the book, because I usually don’t like fantasy, other than comic fantasy like the Discworld series — but it’s wonderfully written and evocative. Strongly recommended.

Shabbat Shalom!

A migraine, but no headache

It’s Over

On July 26, 2000, I announced the official availability of the IBM Weblog server. But for some reason, weblogs never took off inside IBM, and I had better things to do with the machine hosting them, so I
turned off the server last Friday. It was a noble experiment, if not overwhelmingly successful.

Book? What book?

While I was looking through the archives of this weblog to figure out when I started the weblog server, I reread the pages I wrote about the fourth Harry Potter book. And that made me wonder if there was any news about the fifth Harry Potter book, so I thought I’d check the http://www.harrypotter.com site.

Silly me. Once upon a time, that site was about the books, but now it’s an immediate redirect to the Warner Brothers site about the Harry Potter movie, complete with a countdown till the North American video release. As far as I can tell, there’s not a single word about the book on the site (except on the discussion groups). And why should there be? Warner Brothers doesn’t own the book! And, more to the point, Warner Brothers doesn’t make money from the book!

http://www.jkrowling.com works better, giving pointers to the publishers’ sites all around the world, and when I looked on the Bloomsbury Publishing site (the British publisher), I found that they’re still hoping for July, 2002
for the fifth book
.

I’m ready when they are.