Nicked it off Emily's weblog.

Top 30 List of "You Know You're a Harry Potter Fanatic When...."

1. You refer to other people as "Muggles."
2. You search your garden for gnomes.
3. You take your broom outside and say "UP!" until you get tired.
4. You go to King's Cross-station on Sept. 1 and watch for Hogwarts students.
5. You break both arms trying to get to platform 9 3/4.
6. You know more about Quidditch than any actual, real-life sport.
   I'm not into competitive activities in general, so that's pretty much accurate.
7. You talk about Harry Potter so much that your friends are either sick of hearing about it or they finally read they books and become Harry Potter fans as well.
   I can spectacularly geek out on both the IT/PC Enthusiast/CS and HP fronts. Some people can tolerate one mode, a couple can withstand both for very brief periods of time, but most are very scared from either.
8. You read the books out loud to yourself in a British accent.
   "Oh, come one, it's so fun!" - Exactly.
9. You spend 10 hours a day writing e-mails and such for Harry Potter message boards and RPGs.
   I used to, back on the HPC.
10. You go into withdrawal if you haven't visited something Harry Potter related in the past 1 hour.
    I can last 24 hours without any symptoms and am very proud at this accomplishment.
11. You go to a movie you don't really want to see just for the H.P. trailer.
    Can't afford it and don't particularly like the AOL-TW rendition anyway.
12. Every time your computer says, "You've got mail" you run outside, looking for owls.
13. Every little thing reminds you of something in Harry Potter.
    Or gives me outrageous plot bunnies. Yesss.
14. You can recite passages from the books by heart.
    "Can't everyone?" - Exactly
15. You frequently dare people: "Come on, quiz me, quiz me on HP!"
16. You KNOW the title of the seventh book.
17. You've been arrested (more than once) for breaking into Mrs. Rowlings' house and searching for the last paragraph of HP 7. (She says it would be a disaster if it were published. I wonder what it contains?)
18. You say a password before entering your house.
19. You say "Lumos" before you turn on the lights.
20. Whenever someone uses the phrase "you-know-who," you instinctively think "Voldemort."
    I catch myself doing that at times.
21. You have a cat named Crookshanks, a rat named Scabbers or Wormtail, a lizard named Norbert, and a dog named Fluffy, Snuffles, or Padfoot.
    I would have, have I had a pet.
22. You go to the zoo and try to speak to the boa constrictor.
23. You made Butterbeer and served it to your friends
24. You tried to make Pumpkin Juice.
25. You've taken a pencil, pointed it to the television remote, & shouted: "Accio Remote," becoming disapointed when it wouldn't come.
26. You seriously think about which Harry Potter character you could play in the movie, and memorize all their lines.
27. You're an American and you start using Britishn slang terms like "git," "bloody," "nutters," and "prat."
    Man oh man. When I'm not watching myself, I have the weirdest accent and vocabulary you can imagine. Worse.
28. Your first question to every new person you meet is, "Have you read the Harry Potter series?" If they have, you'd just made a new best friend & if not, your opinion of them falls drastically.
29. You've stayed up all night reading HP FanFics.
    I have skipped my entire senior year of high school reading fanfic.
30. You think the next 23 days are going to be the longest in your life!!

If I am so dull that no one seems to care it is fine - I know I'm not as eloquent or as funny as most people who keep online journals, but that also means this verbiage is in fact a waste of bandwidth, a thing I am rather zealous about.

I think one day when I am able to better deal with it, I will want to contemplate and discuss the interaction between philosophy and theism. Card confuses me, and truth be said - so does Tolkien. This stuff is too big, and yet - if i am not in peace with my feelings about it, the rest is by definition meaningless. And I can't exactly settle on "42" either. *frustrated noises*

I wonder if the ring was Mellie's idea.

The Matrix Reloaded non-review

What's up with the MTV-esque raving niggers/steamy lovemaking clip?

I didn't get the philosophy crap; have to see it again to make up my mind about it.

Arse kixing was satisfactory.

In conclusion: Not the same "wow" feeling I had after seeing the first movie.

Edit, almost four years later: as far as I'm concerned, there was only one Matrix movie, and it didn't have any sequels.

I have discovered that with code, just as with prose, you absolutely need editors and rewrites, because although computer languages grammar parsers are far superior to human language "grammar checkers" (because, after all, computer languages have much simpler and stricter grammars), they are still utterly incapable of following the logic behind what you write.

Lessons learned:

• Planning your design ahead of implementation is crucial.
• Your first attempt will most likely fail, but unless you try really hard in it too, so will your second one.
• As complete as possible testing of the lower levels is a requirement for building higher levels.
• Writing down your test cases and going over them with a partner is always a Good Idea.
• While reading the requirements, take notes.
• Never trust anything with "Micro$oft" in its name to keep your code safe.
• Nothing makes sense on your 30-something hour of the day, a.k.a. "I am not as young as I used to be".
• "Online reference" is searched with Google, because otherwise it sux.
• Computer screen resolution and refresh rate is much more important than what you had for breakfast (or whether you had anything at all, for that matter).

Will try to go see The Matrix Reloaded as soon as I can to compensate slightly for the sheer exhaustion (and slight terror) of this passed week.

to Team Manager, Instructor Nir, Corporal

Step Five begins tomorrow. We shall ascend it with dignity.

Oracle Procedure Builder (v8.x) sucks hairy donkey balls. A geek with my level of social graces should be termed "nerd", which is very, very sad. Lack of sleep is a wicked thing that catches unawares you when you least expect it (superflous?), sort of like the Spanish Inquisition.

Good people are a treasure.

Ah.

The fireworks are better this year.

Some people don't take the time to check all the facts before deciding. Like, whether the tagged youngling is a cadet holding a disabled gun for purposes of guarding an electric candle (on Memorial Day) or a soldier, with a general issue Uzi, who is about to replace such cadet. Happy Birthday, Israel!

"She was small, sitting on a stool, leaning against a holographic wall. She was not beautiful. Not ugly, either. Her face had character. Her eyes were haunting, innocent, sad. Her mouth delicate, about to smile, about to weep. Her clothing seemed veil-like, insubstantial, and yet instead of being provocative, it revealed a sort of innocence, a girlish, small-breasted body, the hands clasped lightly in her lap, her legs childishly parted with the toes pointing inward. She could have been sitting on a teeter-totter in a playground. Or on the edge of her lover's bed." Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 2 - Speaker For The Dead Fanart?