on to book five

I finished Harry Potter book four last night and I started book five. Try as I might, I could not pull myself away to read something else. Okay, I didn't really try at all. I'm on this train until it arrives at the end of book seven. It is such a good series! Every book is better than the last.

Thank goodness for vacation next week. I'll finally have some time for reading, as well as all the other things that need my attention.

Stardust is an excellent movie

I saw the movie Stardust with my friend Esin last night. We both loved it; it's an amazingly cool movie. I think I'm going by Borders on the way home tonight to pick up the book by Neil Gaiman.

And I'm going to look at The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman as well. I saw the trailer for the forthcoming movie, and it looks excellent as well.

New music: Over the Rhine and Eisley

I got two new albums last week: Eisley's Combinations and Over the Rhine's The Trumpet Child. I listened to both of them for the first time Sunday night.

OtR's Trumpet Child is a work of art. Absolutely beautiful. It meets the high bar they set with all their previous recordings.

Eisley's Combinations. Hmm. I t5hink I need to listen to it a bit more. It seems to be missing that "something special" that the rest of their body of work has -- something akin to magic. Maybe it's more maintream than their previous stuff. I'll listen again soon and see if I can figure it out.

iTunes and iPhone sync workaround

When I upgraded to iTunes 7.3.2 a short while back, something changed such that my iPhone no longer sync'd calendar our contacts to Outlook. I uninstalled and re-installed 7.3.1, but the problem didn't go away. Seems more like a Microsoft-type problem than an Apple problem. I Googled about the problem, but didn't find anything.

Anyway, I Googled based on the error message today, and I found something. Even though I use Thunderbird and not Outlook as my default email client (and I don't sync email on my iPhone), I must make Outlook my default client when I sync my iPhone.

Lame. But at least my iPhone can once again sync. Whew. Oh, and the settings change is quick and easy. Hey, it's Windows; it's not unusual for such things to require a reboot.

Transformers is an awesome movie

I saw Transformers the movie tonight. It blew me away; totally awesome. Highly recommended.

the iPhone update rules...

Sure, the expected and necessary security updates are there.

But they enhanced something very important: they added support for imap nested folders. Now I can see all my email folders in my primary imap account.

So darn cool.