I stood in the Harry Potter line.  Well, not quite.  My friend and I went over to Borders at Santana Row just before 9:00PM last night to check out the action for the newest Harry Potter novel.  We were surprised to see no lines other than the short line to confirm reservation for the book and get a wristband for the midnight madness.  The first floor had the normal amount of traffic that you would expect for a Friday night, with people crowding around the magazine racks and teenagers sitting on the floor in the magna department.  Masking tape on the floor outlined the line to cash register, starting at the romance paperbacks, running around the aisles of horror, science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and the last mile was loaded with Harry Potter merchandise and candy.

The upstairs seem normal enough as we made our counter-clockwise prowl of the floor.  The children department had way too many young schoolgirls to be hanging out for that time of night.  When we got into the nook and crannies of the computer department where young couples hide out to make out, did we find witches, wizards and more schoolgirls. There was a line outside when we left.  I was glad to be out of there before someone mistaken me for Rubeus Hagrid because of my long beard.  The last thing I needed was a bunch of schoolgirls chasing me down the street.

We drove briefly by the Barnes & Noble on Steven Creek Boulevard to check out the Harry Potter line over there.  No line but one heck of a Harry Potter party for the kids inside the children department.  The last time we drove by this location was when Bill Clinton was signing his memoirs in June 2004.  As it happened, traffic was a mess with the Secret Service vehicles and the Clinton limo trying to get out of the parking lot that night; Bill and Hillary stepped out to wave to everyone for five minutes before the traffic jam was cleared up.  We were three cars away from the former first couple.  The closest I ever got to another president was a quarter-mile from George H.W. Bush in San Francisco when my Dad and I drove home from our construction jobs in the city just hours before the Loma Prieta earthquake.

I never got caught up in the Harry Potter craze enough to read the books.  I saw the movies, including Order of The Phoenix last week, that I thought they were all entertaining even if I didn't understand some of the details.  I been reading too many other books series in recent years, including Stephen King's The Dark Tower (seven books), Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (eight books), Kim Harrison's Hollows (four books), E.E. Knight's Vampire Earth (four books), Karen Traviss's Wess'har Wars (five books), and various re-readings of fantasy classics from David Eddings (16 books) and Terry Brooks (six books).  A rare joy to find a book that isn't part of a series these days.  Now that the last Harry Potter book is out, I'll wait until the paperback set of all seven books come out for Christmas (hint, hint) before I start reading that series.

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The last several weeks—or maybe the last month—of midterm madness is finally over.  My sleeping pattern is returning to normal.  The extra weight from eating food at odd hours of the night is burning off.  My head doesn't feel like an exploding zombie headshot in Planet Terror.  What brought me back to normalcy was reading "One L" by Scott Turow, his semi-autobiographical story of being a first year law student at Harvard Law School that's a lot more insaner than my accumulated ten years of college (1990-1994 / 2002-2007).  My graduation petition has been accepted by the school, and, if I successfully pass my programming classes, I can pick up my diploma in late August.

My programming instructor returned a 3.5" floppy disk that I submitted to him in my first programming class in Spring 2002.  Now that's spooky.  None of my computers today have a floppy drive installed.  I still have a few floppy drive units in storage after I rebuilt my computers a while back, and a USB floppy drive for those rare occasions when I do need to access a floppy.  Five years ago we used to turn in our source code and executable files on floppies.  These days it's just print outs and/or emailing the source code.  For a directed study project, I turned in the completed project with source code, executable, data, and documentation files on a CD.  I heard some schools require assignments to be turned in on a USB memory stick.

The Data Structures (CIS 055) class is getting hard.  I've always relied on the instructor's lesson and reading the source code to understand the material without having to read the textbook itself.  The assigned textbook for this class dribbles out the source code in bits and pieces, and then buries the completed source code in overwritten comments that make a bad science fiction novel enjoyable.  My superficial understanding of the C++ language doesn't help either.  Looks like I'm going to have to work for a grade in this class instead of cruising through my final semester.

On a related note, I got my midterm worksheet back in Ceramics I (Arts 46A) with an "A" and a comment from the instructor that I have excellent focus and control of my work.  That's being put to the test with the larger-than-life self-portrait bust that will probably weigh 30 pounds in clay when I get done.  It's the biggest piece in class as I have the biggest head.  This week I'll be carving in the details, getting back a glazed statuette and the other statuette will be ready for glazing.  Project four is stacking three or four separate pieces into one object.  My design will be based on a tall Japanese water vase that I saw in a ceramics book.  The bottom bowl, sprout and collar will be done on the kick wheel, coil building will be used for the middle to combine the other pieces, and using nylon rope to impress a spiral design on the outside.  After working in the studio for six hours straight, I just come home on Saturday afternoons to collapse in bed since I'm so exhausted from all that focus and control.

I been playing Age of Mythology lately, an old game that's been sitting on my hard drive since the game was released.  My interest in the single-player campaign died on the very first mission that laid out the story elements back then, and it happened again when I replayed it.  I never did played the single-player campaign mode in the previous games in the series, Age of Empires and Age of Kings.  I was more interested in the single-player random maps where you need to get your economy and military up and running in 15 minutes flat if you want to avoid losing the game after the first 20 minutes.  This game is tiding me over until I can finished some additional hardware upgrades for my game machine before I can get Supreme Commander in June when I'm safely done with school.

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