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.

During the first intermission, I called my Mom and got the result of the RPI-Princeton game; RPI won, 6-0, and advances to the ECAC Final Five next weekend in Lake Placid.

The Sharks game was fun, though I wish I knew hockey better — Jeffrey and I will be going again next week with the Shir Hadash Men’s Club. And if time permits, I’m going to try to listen to next week’s RPI games on WRPI.

A new record!

I just checked my work e-mail account; there were 51 new messages waiting for me. 43 were clearly spam just from the subject line (more than half of those were in an Asian character set!) — unless, of course, the IRS is really trying to get in touch with me by e-mail. Of the other 8 messages, one was a (funny) joke from my Mom, one was a bogus and content-free virus warning, one was from a mailing list which I actually subscribe to, and the other four were generated by various automated processes inside IBM.

I remember when e-mail was the killer app. Now, it’s more of a time-killing app.