Project I am working on at the moment tends to require me to be on conference calls from 7:00 or 7:30 am most mornings. Next Monday will be worse as I will be starting at 06:00! The project is a complicated one from politicial and requirements perspective and is absorbing a lot more time and energy than first expected... Good thing is that it is a short engagement and should be done before the end of the month. Upside is that the manager of the team I am working on (as it is not a Radia project!) now may want me engaged on a year long process re-engineering project!

Apart from that we went to a book signing by Charlaine Harris at Murder by the Book (just down the road from us). Attendees were 95% middle age women and the atmosphere was a lot more vocal and at times screamy than the Jim Butcher one was. Charlaine also talked for a lot less time, so we were able to get out relatively quickly (also helped that I had an insider who helped bump me up the queue to get the book signed!)

Added to all that is Capoeira. You may remember some previous posts about "Mr Dip" from a while back...

Last night I managed to go to the book signing for Jim Butcher which was held just down the road at Murder by the Book. Miss Anne was very nice and she reserved me a seat, and gave me a number to get my books signed since I thought I had lost my one. Turns out that I had not lost it, just forgot had forgotten to bring the latest book that I wanted signed. Good thing was that we are close enough for me to run back to get the book after getting two of my hardback editions signed.

Jim is a fun guy and was very approachable and was always happy to answer almost any question, except those that would give spoilers to the future books. He did say that the Codex Alera series will be 6 books long, and Dresden will likely be around 20 case books (like the ones out now) and he will polish it off with an Apocalyptic Trilogy. In future he will be writing a sci-fi series (which he has already started) and at some point will write an epic fantasy epic.

If you have not read these books, you should. They are fun books... and they are a reflection of the authors attitude and personality.

So we finally got a cold front come through, leaving us with near freezing temperatures overnight this weekend. The result was a really nice cool weekend.

I had planned on playing golf at Hermann Park, which is an easier, shorter course, which you can easily walk. Unfortunately, when I called a friend to confirm if we were going to play, I did not get anyone to pick up, but did get an email saying... '38F windchill of 32F... brrr I think I'll stay in my warm bed.. ;-)'

Damn thin blooded Dane's... can't take a little cool weather! Oh well, it allowed me the time to finish the latest Jim Butcher book, which I would highly recommend!

So I just finished reading the final Potter book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it took me a while, but I do have to work, and we spent a lot of the weekend either on the road to and from Austin or moving furniture out of Chelsea.

All in all I think it is a fitting end to the series. The character all grew throughout the series, and although several key ones were lost along the way (no I won't say who or when or how!), the book wraps the series up nicely.

I think the biggest thing for me is how the author seems to have grown in her writing from book one. I will be interested to see if she writes anything else, and if so, if it is as well thought through as this series seems to have been... She certainly did not drag it out like some authors I know of!

Ok... so a while back I ranted a little (at least I think I did) about this book. It is a handy little guide with some helpful tips for keeping costs down in the whole wedding planning process. The issue I had with the book is that it seems to be written for the bride and the bride only. Some of the comments in the book are really pretty insulting, and certainly dismissive of the role the groom may play in the planning process (except for opening up the ol' wallet to pay for stuff).

I had put the book aside for a while, but started reading it again yesterday and I decided to email the author and let her know what I thought about how the book was written. Interstingly, I got an almost immediate response from her, and it seems that it was not her who wrote it that way, but it was her publishers who decided to edit the book as they felt the main audience was women... She will probably actually pass my message onto them to show that it is not only brides who read the book... and as a thank you, she is sending me two other of her books, one the Groom's Guide and one other for Angel... all in all a very satisfying interaction!!

If you look at the books I am reading at the moment you will see that I am in fact reading three at once. Well, not quite, but close. Two of them you can understand as one is ficiton and one is tips and tricks about wedding bargains (which is really written towards women, it really does act like men would never read the book!). The reason for the two fiction books, and by the same author is that I started to read Seduced by Moonlight but 100 pages in I realised that there were huge gaps in the story. Well, not huge, but large enough that I was puzzled what the hell was going on. End result is that I was in fact reading book three and not book two... so book three goes back on the shelf and I get to dive into book two! Luckily I don't think I missed that much... not like a load of characters were killed off, so probably more sex and politics!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6320733.stm

Final installment in the Harry Potter series, named Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Will be released on 21st July (of this year I think!!). In the final book, two characters will take the big plunge (no, not marriage... they will eat 6 foot worth of dirt). The big question is... will one of them be Harry Potter himself? Guess you will have to wait (anxiously maybe) until July 21st to find out.

In other Potter news, the fifth movie in the series Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be released this summer (July 13th in the UK... not sure about final date in the US)

So I read a lot. that is nothing new. I also receive a number of emails from publishers as I have somehow ended up on their distribution list. No big deal there as it shows me some new books that I might not have otherwise found. Recently I received an email that included an invite to join Booked for Breakfast. The underlying premise is that every morning (or sometime the evening before) you receive an email with a sample from a book that is about to be released or has just been released. Each week the book is different and each day follows on from the last one. Result is that you get to read the first 20 or so pages of a book before buying it, and without standing (or sitting) in a bookstore! First couple of books seem interesting, and I might actually go out and get them (maybe that is... seeing how long my to read list already is!!!)