Harry Potter and the Tidbits of Technology

So, Okay, I haven't blogged anything for a while. But, you know, I'm really not the sort to stress myself out about that kind of thing. I guess I just post when I post. :-)

Why the lengthy gap this particular time? Well, mostly because I've been a bit obsessed with ... well, ... looks cautiously over shoulder ... um .. well ... *cough*harrypotter*cough*.

It all started as the release date for the third Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Azkaban, approached. In preparation, I started re-reading the third book, and checking out the news on some of the popular Harry Potter web sites, like "The Leaky Cauldron", "Mugglenet" and even "JK Rowling Official Site".

Then I, my husband and my five-and-a-half year old son went and saw it on opening night - what a blast, and a totally awesome movie. So what if it wasn't exactly "faithful" to every single nuance and action in the book? It was faithful to the theme of the book over all, and so, so, so different from how the first two were done. The best explanation I've seen touching on the difference is thus:

<quote who="Cleolinda Jones" where="Daily Digest Movie News">

"The best way I can describe the difference between Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuarón as directors is that it's like dancing. You're dancing with this one guy, and he knows all the steps, but you can tell it was a lot of work for him to memorize them, and you keep hearing him mutter, "One-two-three, one-two-three..." the whole time. Then you're dancing with this other guy, and he's so good at what he does that you're not conscious of anything else but music and motion.

"Alfonso Cuarón is that second guy."

</quote>

(If you are also a Harry Potter fan (closet or otherwise) and are willing to go through the motions of signing up for a free LiveJournal account and joining Cleolinda's Movies in 15 Minutes community, you have to check out her parody "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 minutes". Warning - although based on a kids' movie, this parody does contain "mature content")

After the movie, I started re-reading the other books in more or less random order - started the fourth book as a follow on to the third, then picked up the first book to read aloud to my son at bedtime, and am now about half way through book five, with plans to pick up book two when that's done. As the obsession was still running high I poked around the net some more and eventually stubmled onto a awesome though seriously high-bandwidth Yahoo! group called Harry Potter for Grownups, and I've almost never looked back!

Now then, moving along... despite my current obsession with the Wizarding World I did still managed to stumble across the following Tidbits of Technology:

DRM and MSFT: a product no customer wants (Transcript of a talk given on the Microsoft Redmond Campus) - Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2004

"Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

"I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM."

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War - Joel Spolsky; Sunday, June 13, 2004

"Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet."

Someday, You'll Own a Tablet PC - by David Coursey, June 18, 2004

"Opinion: With tablet support likely becoming a standard part of the Longhorn OS, every Windows-based business notebook will double as a Tablet PC.

"There's been a lot of talk around eWEEK.com about the future of the Tablet PC, so I've decided to add my two cents' worth. My prediction? Someday every business notebook that uses a Microsoft operating system will be a Tablet PC. And most of them will even have tablet features!"