chuma.org

I haven’t had lunch yet, only an extremely spicy instant Korean noodle cup. Yesterday I picked up some sushi – three salmon sashimi, one tuna sashimi, six california rolls (they were kinda small), a bowl of miso soup and all the fixings for $8 plus tax ($9.20). Kinda expensive for lunch, but it was good, and it wasn’t Subway, which I have been frequenting WAY too much. And my usual hot dog guy hasn’t been around the past few weeks – probably on vacation, and he’s the only one that I know is fresh, because he doesn’t stay open 24 hours. Hot dog carts that don’t move are sketchy as hell. There’s always lots of them around my building because we’re right in front of the SkyDome – sporting even crowds, you know.

SNUG 9th Anniversary Meeting. Wow, SNUG has got to be the longest continuously-running Newton User Group by far.

Newton-related idea of the day: turn the dev.newtontalk.net frontpage into a clearinghouse for Newton development information.

Home Despot – Shop. Destroy. Rule. ’nuff said.

Reading Stupid White Men is really making my blood boil. I’m 3/4 of the way through.

Even though I hate commuting, it does give me time for one activity that I’m not usually able to do: reading. On the GO train, there’s not much else to do anyways. I just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this morning. There are some things that I like and some things that I dislike about all of the HP books to date (keeping in mind, of course, that they are primarially aimed at readers younger than me).

I’m enjoying the story across all the books immensely. The fourth book was a real turning point, which makes sense if there will be seven books in total. Three at the beginning, dealing mainly with character origins and building Harry’s character, one in the middle, the turning point, and three at the end, to sort out all the evil. There’s tons of good stuff that didn’t make it into the movies, and I have no freakin’ clue how they will ever make movies out of Prisoner of Azkaban or Goblef of Fire. They’re long.

What I don’t particularly enjoy about the books is how the story progresses within each book. Especially with Chamber of Secrets, when you finally get near the end of the book when all of the good stuff happens, you realize that you just read a whole lot of pages for nothing, because what the characters were thinking and doing was completely and utterly contrary to what was actually happening. I would expect them to get at least something right some of the time. Having a twist ending for every book does make for some great reading, but you have to go through a ton of stuff to get to it.

Rowling’s writing has improved a lot since the first book though, which is nice to see. Right after I finished Goblet of Fire, I started Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.

That’s the sound of me importing all of my old site postings since June 2000. Well, more like the sound of MT importing them all. I kinda messed them up still, but frankly I don’t really care too much – what kind of wacko’s actually going to look at them?

In other news, today my boss told me he was reading my site archives…

In other other news, the Zwan album comes out tomorrow. In case you don’t know, Zwan is a new band formed by Billy Corgan and the ex-guitarist from Smashing Pumpkins (I can’t remember his name). The video for the first single, Honestly, has been playing for a few weeks now on MuchMusic. Sandy is unsettled by it because Billy Corgan smiles too much. Not having been a huge Pumpkins fan like her, I don’t really get it, but compared to the Pumpkins videos I have seen, yeah, he looks scary smiling. It’s like you expect the smile to turn into an evil grin, and his clothes to suddenly change into black robes.