Back again

Well... that was fun.
A week spent in Melbourne was quite fun, although it took down to the last day to find ways to get servers to rebuild. On one server it was enough to pull the fibre channel adapters, on the others we had to be careful to not load all the drivers (seemed to cause the server to go nuts detecting everything when it was rebuilt).

Anyway, while we were there we went to see "Sin City". Abso-fscking-lutely fabulous. Gritty and dark. Full of violence and humour. Buckets of blood in some scenes.

I took three books with me to Melbourne to read in taxis, between jobs, on breaks... They were Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, The Dark Tower by Stephen King, and Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling.

I hadn't read the final installment of the Dark Tower series before, and thought it finished the tale of Roland well. I had a few issues with the ending (and no doubt many others have as well). I gave it some thought of what other ending there could have been, and really can't see a better one -- without giving the ending away, there is a hope of redemption.

The Half Blood Prince... First off, the hype was pathetic. Sure, lots of people were going to buy the next story in the tale of Harry. It was a given. But have television show excited people (most of them young) lining up outside a city bookstore to give a false frenzy... Sad. If you were one of those who had to run out and buy a copy at the "Special" price of $AUD 45, well.. I bought mine the same day for $AUD 22 at Big W. They had PALLETS of the thing. They'll be giving them away with socks or something.
Onto the book. It was great, liked it a lot. If anything, I was disappointed by something Harry does at the end of the story, when he goes all "noble" and self-sacrificing. I know WHY he does it (to protect someone he cares for) but since he does care for them, and others already know it, it isn't going to make much of a difference. Plus it's quite a different Harry to the defiant young wizard of Order of the Phoenix.

Okay, so I ran out of books.