Ennovy.org

Note: all links below contain spoilers for the 7th Harry Potter book. Please proceed carefully.

• Potterdammerung is a short version and a parody of the book – it’s hilarious!
• Non-magic T-shirt – an even shorter summary that fits onto a T-shirt. Would people really wear that?
• J.K. Rowling reveals what happens after the end of the book. It says she might write an encyclopedia on all the stuff that didn’t make into the books – I’d love to read that.
• Dan Radcliffe talks about what he thinks of the book.

I finished the book. I finished the series! I loved it. What a great ending!

Now I’m going to read it again.

The book has arrived! In a nifty box, too:

I think I might be the only Harry Potter fan who hasn’t gotten the last Harry Potter book yet. Well, I don’t know if I am, because I am staying away from a lot of sites so I don’t get spoiled.

For the last book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I pre-ordered online from Indigo.ca and chose the normal shipping instead of express shipping. However, they sent the book to me on the first day anyways. This time, I pre-ordered again, but from Amazon.ca, and got normal shipping. I assumed it would arrive today, but I forgot I ordered from a different vendor last time. Oh well. It has been shipped out, it just hasn’t arrived yet.

Tomorrow I want to go watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in the movie theatre. I really, really hope I won’t hear someone yelling out a spoiler or anything like that.

Right now the EllisLab site is down for updates. Is it routine updates or some new secret project? I’m hoping it’s some new project!

I just went to the Google Blog Search to search for something. I got some results, and clicked on a link to sort by Date instead of by relevance. I then clicked on the next page of results to get a 403 forbidden error with this message:

We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

What??

The normal Google search works with no problems though.

Edit: Hmmm, this seems to be quite common...

The other week I got a scanner in the house. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a scanner to play with (except back at school, a long time ago) and I am so ecstatic.

I had to scan in this postcard I have to set as my desktop wallpaper:

(click on the image for the full scan)

On the back of the postcard it says the photographer is F. Stuart Westmorland. Isn’t it cute?

I’m thinking of scanning in all of my Absolut ads but that’ll take forever.

I have several people on my MSN contacts list who continually send email forwards to my Hotmail account. They are almost always forwards sent to him/her by someone, and someone else forwarded it to them, and so on.

Here’s a screenshot of all the popup windows I had to open to view the original attachment:

Crazy huh?

Oh, and I like Windows Live Mail. It’s quite fast and I noticed that they give out 2GB of space.

(click to see full image)

I was reading the above Calvin and Hobbes comic strip this morning, from Revenge of the Babysat. I noticed that there was a grammatical error on the last pane. Strange I’d never noticed it before! I tried searching online to see if someone else had, but I couldn’t find anything.

Also, someone typed up by hand all of the text from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. They’re organized by date. This is soooo useful when looking for a quote from the comic. There are no images available on the site, but you can easily search for the images elsewhere once you have the date.

I visited a site the other day where someone had posted a hotlinked image. The owner of the site hosting the image had replaced the image with another one – this is one of the common ways to let people know about hotlinked images. In this case, it was really easy to tell that the image was hotlinked, because the replaced image was around 3000px long! There was a long horizontal scrollbar on the page, and the text in the image explained what hotlinking was, and how it was bad.

I thought that was a really good idea, and I should get around to doing this myself.

A lot of Web 2.0 sites have domain names without the letter ‘e’ in them. For example, Flickr. Blogr. Zoomr. Splashr. Wishlistr. Grupthink (well, this one is without the ‘o’). Stocktickr. Delivr. Snipplr. It’s a trend I don’t quite get.

Now there’s a new site called Twttr which I’m guessing is “twitter” with the vowels taken out. It’s a service where you can keep track of your friends using text messaging. I think the domain name looks horrible! Note: I haven’t really looked around the site yet, I’m not saying that the service itself is horrible. It looks interesting!

But hey – it is to do with text messaging – and people don’t type up full words on text messages all the time – so perhaps the domain name is appropriate.

I somehow got into the the Yahoo Mail Beta. The new interface is completely different from the normal Yahoo mail, using a lot of Ajax. You can get more detailed reviews elsewhere, but here are my thoughts. I will start with the good things.

Ajax Goodness

No more refreshing! It looks and acts like a desktop application. You can move emails around by selecting them and dragging them into another folder. You can easily sort messages. There are tabs – when you double click to read an email, the email opens in its own tab. You don’t have to view, say 50 emails at a time and then click next to go to the next 50 emais.

RSS Feeds

You can read RSS feeds from within Yahoo mail. It displays the feeds that are on my My Yahoo page, which was nice. I find it more useful than Gmail’s Web Clips, which shows items from RSS feeds one at a time. If you select an item on an RSS feed, you can choose to post it to your Yahoo 360 blog or your MyWeb account. However I use del.icio.us, another Yahoo service – they should add that as an option too!

Now for the bad things.

Speed

I’m used to seeing this image a lot.

The soccer guy is animated and it’s kind of cute, given that the World Cup is being held right now. I don’t want to watch him though, I want to read my mail!

Once I actually get logged in, sometimes everything runs sluggish, and sometimes it runs fine.

Huge Ads

There are big banner ads that take up a large part of the screen. People with a small resolution (say 800×600) wouldn’t like that very much. Plus, every time I click to read an email, or go to compose a new email, or click on a folder, the ad frame on the right refreshes – it’s very distracting.

Overall, I do like the new Yahoo Mail. It’s pretty neat once you get past the huge ads and can deal with it being slow sometimes. (Hello, Adblock!)

Today I went shopping and stopped by The Body Shop. I got a huge shock when I saw that they were selling this Strawberry Body Polish. I loooovvveee this stuff! I first used this about 10 years ago – it was called Strawberry Exfoliating Body Wash. They discontinued it in 2000-2001 or so. Anyway, I opened up the tester in the store and smelled it – it smelled exactly like the old product! The salesperson said a lot of people were requesting it.

I bought it immediately of course. I’m so ecstatic. Just the smell of it brings back memories. It made my day.

There’s a matching Strawberry body butter, lotion, and shower gel. The salesperson tried to get me to buy 3 – because there’s a promotion – but I declined. I love the smell but if I used 3 of them all at once it would be a bit much, wouldn’t it?

As seen on LiveJournal, generated by Publicons.de.

Over at Gizmodo I read about the Anima Causa Feel Seating System. It consists of 120 balls wrapped in elastic fabric. You can rearrange it easily to any kind of structure – a chair, a bench, a sofa, etc, as you can see from the photo below.

(pic is from Gizmodo)

Doesn’t this remind you of a giant caterpillar? The black thingys look like little caterpillar legs. That could start moving once you sit or lie on it. In the bottom left photo, it looks like the person is being swallowed up. (If you look at the animation of the product website – it shows a person being completely covered, with only her feet sticking out – it looks hilarious.) Also, it looks like it’d be lumpy and not very comfortable.