A little place of calm

This last week i've been enjoying watching A Very Potter Musical on youtube. It's a most hilarious Harry Potter parody with fantastic acting and delightfully catchy songs!

The star of the show has to be Lauren Lopez who plays Draco Malfoy and spends most of the time rolling around seductively on the floor/bench/harry/hermione! Lauren's sense of comic timing is incredible, and the voice and facial expressions are just adorable!

Voldemort and Quirrel are beautifully played with some very touching moments together. Snape is hilarious, like all the characters, much exaggerated!

I think the best songs are near the end. "Not Alone" (Act 2 Scene 5) is a beautifully composed piece of music, and "Voldemort Is Goin' Down" (Act 2 Scene 8) is magnificently performed by the cast.

I've enjoyed it so much that i'm making myself a dvd to take to show friends and family. I love it that the whole thing is freely available. By the fans, for the fans, and yep, the fans are loving it!

I also love how linux gives me free tools to be able to create a dvd. This morning i did not know how to do it, but using todisc and tovid i've been able to combine all the scenes into a sequence, with a menu. I used mplayer to extract the audio of one song, and audacity to split out the song that i wanted to use as an introduction when the menu is shown. I used kino to look at the frames one by one and export a frame to use as the background for the menu. I used the gimp to darken the image and reduce the contrast.

The menu for my dvd is hopefully going to look something like this:

I'll update again if it works! Currently it is encoding each of the scenes into dvd format, which seems to take a very long time … and creates files 5 times bigger than the originals!

Update: it worked!! From youtube to my television!!

Thank you to StarKidPotter, youtube, keepvid.com and to free open source software and the ubuntu community! Now i can take A Very Potter Musical with me to show anyone who has a dvd player! :D

My CouchDB series is being syndicated at planet.couchdb.com, along with other people who write about the Couch. Well worth following for all the exciting developments!

I've just been on the IRC channel (my first time in my life in an IRC!) and had a friendly chat with some of the people in there.

Now i must remember not to tag this with 'couchdb' otherwise it will get syndicated over there and i will create a self-referential digital black hole and probably cause the Internet to implode.

In other news, JKRowling won that court case. I wouldn't say i'm 'pleased' exactly, but i did think it was a bit cheeky of the RDR Books to think they could get away with it.

Married life suits me well. In some ways everything feels pretty much exactly the same. We've lived together for 4 years, after all. But in my heart i just *know* something is different, and i like it a lot. We're not just friends who live together anymore; there is something more to it. Something that everyone can know and recognise and celebrate!

But at the moment my beloved it at a geography conference, and i'm at home for another boring night with meaningless Twittering and blog posting! I do apologise!

I had a very good day at work. I got a few tricky things done in the morning, and lots of little easy things done in the afternoon. So it was a productive day, and i was complimented on a few things i've done lately, which always makes me feel very good indeed!

Tonight i have become a 'beta' reader for a Harry Potter fanfic. I've never done this before, but i loved the start of the story and it's nice to get a sneak preview of the next chapters! My job is particularly to translate the dialogue into British English where necessary! This is fun and easy for me to do, because Americanisms in Harry Potter fanfics always stand out for me like numbers on a colour-blind test.

The author send me a Microsoft Word document with 'Track Changes' enabled. I was delighted to find that OpenOffice knows all about tracking changes. What's more, when i sent it back, my author was able to open it in MS Word again and see what i had changed. I love it when technology works! I was half expecting Word to throw all the toys out of the pram because i'd dared to look at it in a rival word processing application!

By the way, what colours do you see in the bubbles above? I see a 57, which is normal. Some people see a 35 instead. I used to love these tests whenever i went to the opticians when i was little! I thought they were so clever! I always got them right so there was no point in testing, but i thought it was such a fun game! :)

PS here is a very sweet video montage from my favourite film, "Beautiful Thing". I can see Ste saying "I'm gonna stink of mint!" The Body Shop still make Peppermint Foot Lotion; i got some as a free sample the other day! :)

No, the title isn't in reference to the current freaky weather we are having (though there have been many surprise storms this week!) but it is the title of a picture that has been drawn … for me! :)

I do like the twoseekers community on LiveJournal, dedicated to Harry and Cedric, my one true HP pairing! :) On Tuesday last week rotary phones posted, saying,

As a big thank you to everyone who made last month the Month of Harry and Cedric (TM), I'm making an offer: free art! That's right. Make a request, and I'll do my best to set my artistic talents to the task.

I was the lucky first to get my request in:

Oooohh! That is a wonderful offer, and i have just the perfect scene that i've always wanted a picture of.

You know in book 3, chapter 9, the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff match … thunderstorm, everyone drenched to the skin … and the Dementors … Harry fell 50 feet and Cedric caught the snitch. Well, i know that's what happened in the book, but i've read a lot of fan fiction where Cedric actually caught Harry, and in my mind that's almost become canon now, heheh!

I'd really like a picture of Cedric swooping in at the last moment and catching Harry. If you would like to oblige i would be most exceedingly thankful! :)

And here it is, a truly beautiful picture; the bold colour style reminds me of the covers of the French Harry Potter books …

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I feel quite upset by this ongoing court battle. It's awful that it has come to legal action at all. It is quite clear to me that RDR Books are the villains here, not Steve Vander Ark or Ms Rowling. The Harry Potter Lexicon was and is fine as a website, where no profit is made. It has even been praised by JK Rowling. It was RDR Books who got the idea of publishing, even though Steve Vander Ark had reservations, thinking it might breach copyright. RDR Books have insisted on going ahead anyway, even after being asked not to.

The trouble is, i feel as if this whole thing is hinged on JK Rowling's personal opinion: "I don't really want you to publish this". RDR Books think that they are perfectly entitled to do so, under fair use law, and i have to say their argument is pretty convincing. I really don't know how this will turn out. I'm sure Steve Vander Ark would happily walk away from the whole thing so as not to cause any more upset, but RDR Books are not going to drop it. I can see this getting even nastier before it gets resolved.

I am very excited to learn that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released in two parts. This is excellent news. The big difference about Deathly Hallows from the other books is it that virtually everything is essential to the plot of the books. No little subplots that you can easily take out or work around.

For me it means extending the magic of Harry Potter a little longer, and having another three movies to look forward to until Summer 2011. That is a very good thing, in my opinion, and i disagree with all the cynics who say WB are only doing it for the money. I am hoping that, with 2 movies to work with, they will really do an excellent job and do a great justice to the entire series.

The rest of this post is full of spoilers; my speculation of where they might split the two parts.

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So apparently this is the new movie poster:

I really hope this is a fake! That is way too dull to be a Harry Potter poster! What a lame tagline: "I'm safe with you, Harry" – no way. That cannot seriously be the poster. Someone's having a chuckle!

[Update] in fact, i can prove it is fake: they missed out the dash in Half-Blood.

I am continuing to enjoy the Wizard Rock music i have found! I discovered that i really like Ministry of Magic which, as a band, is much more dance oriented, and have a few funny covers of well-known songs.

My favourite would be Here In Your Car, a parody of Here In Your Arms, because it strokes the Harry/Ron slashy bunny in me! ;)

You are the one, the one who flies next to me
Whispers, "I'm scared!"
"Look out! It's a willow tree!"
You're my best friend, my best friend so suddenly,
That there's no place else, I could be but here in your car

Haha, genius! :O There's a great fan video for the song too! :D Although watching that video just reminds me how cringeworthy some parts of the movie were. Did they really need to have Harry fall out of the car, hanging on by one hand, and almost get crushed by the Hogwarts Express?! It's like in the 3rd movie where Aunt Marge flies away and into the night! There is such a thing as over-kill.

Oh wow, i really loved Torchwood tonight! I am totally going to love this season! Say hey for the Glorified Bisexual Agenda!!! :D

My precious computer (that i built myself) stopped working yesterday. It was fine in the morning, but when we came home in the evening it just wouldn't turn on. Boohoo. We had a few power blips the previous night so i wonder if there was another one that blew the power supply. Tonight i have taken it all apart, cleaned it up, plugged it all back together again … still no luck. I guess i'm going to have to buy a new power supply unit.

I am currently on the 'spare' laptop … on Windows 2000. I think i'll probably have to fix it up with a dual boot when my partner's not looking! ;)

It is a shame not to have my computer, because i had done a lot of work on MyChores and i hope i don't lose it. Hopefully i can get it back up and running again very soon.

Today i was looking around for an alternative source of music to listen to when at work, with Pandora being switched off for the UK tomorrow (i will miss it a lot). I discovered imeem.com which is kind of like youtube for audio. You can find particular music, or you can listen to someone else's playlists (Can i say Mixtape 3.0 ??) or you can even search a genre and play a completely random selection of music. Which is nice.

Anyway, one thing (i can't quite remember what) led to another … and before i knew it i was listening to Wizard Rock! I've heard of this genre but never listened to any of it before. It was actually quite nice … i like the obviously-home-made element of it, and the fact that it is all entirely inspired by Harry Potter! I listened to some tracks that took me right back to books 1 and 2 … it was quite an emotional discovery!

I also discovered someone has uploaded the ENTIRE book 7 audio book read by Stephen Fry. I listened to a bit of it … it's a completely different experience to hear it read rather than reading it myself. Most interestingly, it made me realise how many words i just glaze over and don't take in! I guess i just blank out words that i don't know … or i imagine they are a different word … or i make up a meaning for the word …? I'm not sure exactly, but i'll just say it was interesting to hear Stephen Fry read the book.

I found a Rubik's Cube of my partner's and immediately decided that i must learn to solve it! I found some great video tutorials on youtube and was doing great until the cube just fell apart in my hands! Which made me feel bad obviously because it is my partner's, but also because i was determined to learn it to impress people!

So tomorrow i will have to buy a new Rubik's Cube, and until then i have been using an online version! :) I just solved one in fact! YAY! :D

JK Rowling is on ITV1 at 7pm … looking forward to that, although i have seen a preview clip and i do not believe that was the very moment that Jo finished Book 7. It was just like, "Oh, there we go, i've finished!" No way! That was surely not how it happened.