Inspiration comes in many forms. Today I took a little moment to watch this amazing video of JK Rowling:

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

It's an interesting speech, with jokes sprinkled throughout, - "Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion" - on the benefits of failure. This being something that I've been tackling recently, it really struck a chord. My favorite quotes?

I know I'm way later than I should be, but at long last I'm learning all sorts of useful command line stuff. For instance, if you've ssh'ed to a machine and you're running ubuntu over a virtual machine, do you know how to shutdown? You type shutdown! I know, why didn't I think of that. It's actually:

sudo shutdown -h now

I was so pleased with Half Blood Prince that I'm dying to see the last two installments of the Harry Potter franchise. This was leaked about a month ago, but has now supposedly been officially released:


What are your thoughts? It's not much so far, and I suspect that there may be parts from both Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2 (otherwise there really isn't much left for part 2). It's quite exciting. The image of a horrified Hermione looking at bloody hands (perhaps from Ron splinching) is very eerie. Also, thanks to Pottercast, my sister and I are convinced that the eyes belong to Bill Nighy as Scrimgeour (he has the exact same expression in Pirates of the Caribbean 3). Splitting the book into 2 movies may end up being not just a financially smart decision after all.

Another exciting tidbit is that Miranda Richardson will reprise her role as Rita Skeeter. Now all we need is for John Williams to confirm that he's back as composer and I can safely say we're in for a treat.

I wanted to make a short little note on my Gaucho's experience. A week or so ago, some friends and I made an impromptu decision to dine at Gaucho's Grill. This, unfortunately, was not an entirely satisfactory decision. While I have no complaints about the food (their Ye Ole Fish Sandwich, a fillet of snapper sandwich), the service left something to desire. There is no exageration in saying that we were first ignored before being seated, then we waited at least 5 minutes before demanding menus, and then after that waited a good half hour before being moved to another table. After another 20 minutes, our orders were finally taken and we were finally given some glasses of water. Needless to say, they were not tipped.

Now then, this rant is more a message for the management. You have a couple of options. You can (1) hire more waiters/waitresses, because when we first arrived there were none in sight, and we were told by the hostess that the reason for our interminable wait was that the waitresses were busy bringing out food for other tables. You could also (2) reduce the number of tables, since clearly you cannot handle the current capacity. It is unforgivable to have people waiting for an hour just to be served water and to give their orders. You should also retrain your hostess, because I am really in no mood to hear any sad and sorry tales about having to serve other tables who got there first. You see without this, you'll lose customers, because as much as I enjoyed your food and your manageable prices, I'm in no mood to plan to have to wait an extra hour just to place my order.

That's all.

Edit: Though this post was started while in Japan, and much of it written in Japan, I didn’t finish it till recently so have decided to move the publishing date. Originally this was going to be in multiple posts, but I decided to put my 4 days in Tokyo in one post – a tall order, I know! Hope you stick through to the end, sorry this is so delayed, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed all the experiences. =)
Being the geeks that we are, our first order of business in Tokyo was Akihabara, home of the electronic flea market.

This place had everything electronic you could think of. Really, everything.

If I weren’t a starving grad student, I’d have gone to town here. And of course where you find nerds you’ll find anime and manga fans, so….

I have a bit of puzzler. If there's a book I really think I'll enjoy,I generally read it before watching the movie/mini series. I have violated this recently, watching the miniseries of Desmond Deronda without reading the George Elliott novel, but to be fair I wasn't aware of the novel before watching the miniseries. I also watched Atonement and The English Patient without reading the novels. On the other hand, I recently finally read The Lord of the Rings, and feel pleased that I can watch the movies without a sense of guilt. So question: should I watch the much lauded mini series Little Dorrit, which just won 7 out 11 Emmy's and is available for free legally on http://video.pbs.org/? Or should I wait and read Little Dorrit, considering it's one of the few Charles Dickens novels I haven't read and Dickens is one of my favorite authors. It's such a dilemma. Any opinions?

Why? Why would anyone even think of ruining two wonderful foods like bacon and chocolate by combining them?

Edit: I don't think there's enough anger I can express about the thought of inventing bacon chocolate. The worst part is that the back of the chocolate bar said the woman had been trying to combine bacon chocolate since she was 5 years old. Why did growing up, getting a bachelor's degree and going to cooking school in France not stop her?

What's summer without movies? I don't tend to shell out money to see a movie in the theatres without being very motivated. I watched many movies that I rented/borrowed from the library - but that's for another post. This summer boasted two movies I was dying to see - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Star Trek - and two movies that I just happened to see - Up and District 9. How did they pan out? I'll list them, from my least favorite to the cream of the crop.

Purely for selfish reasons I'm compiling a list of programs I add when setting up a windows machine. I say selfish because this is the second time in a month or so that I've had to set one up from scratch and i don't want to have remember again. I have so many programs that I need to survive, and I figure others may be interested, so it may not be so selfish. Here is the list, in roughly the order of importance and order they should be installed in. In case you're wondering, I have a different list for setting up Mac's and Linux machines and will try to get out posts with those lists.