Stefan Hayden

Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series will be turned in a miniseries. Each book will be it’s own miniseries which if closely follows the books will never end.

The 10 book series (the last books has yet to come out) has been a large focus on my reading over the past couple of years. What started out as a strong series quickly degraded in to repetitive generic fantasy with way too much political commentary about freewill instead of plot.

If I wasn’t already 9 books in I would not bother with the last book. I think around 6 or 7 is when I started to feel disappointed and looking back to book 4 you can see the problems start. The main story arch is the only things that keeps me coming back. If you removed all the cruff you could cram all 10 books in to about 6.

Hopefully if the miniseries is done well it will trim down the books in to what was originally so great about them.

I went to the Harry and the Potters show looking forward to seeing the opener Draco and the Malfoys. If you listed to CDs from both bands Draco clearly stand out as a better band. They have song that are about the Harry Potter books while Harry and the Potters often sound like they are just reading out of the books.

Draco and the Malfoys were great. With just 2 guitars they played the drum track off their laptop but that did not stop them from having a great energy.

I was blown away by Harry and the Potters. While they don't sound that great on a CD they are amazing live. Their songs are great for singing along to and the audience was on their feet jumping around for the whole set. I can't really explain the energy they had so instead take a look at the video.

If you ever get the chance and you have any interest in Harry Potter I greatly recommend stopping by a show.

Google and AOL will make their chat services interoperable in the future. I can’t wait to drop AIM in favor of the sleek google talk. It’s even starting to have some interesting features come about.

I’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction out of keeping track of the books I’ve been reading. I only wish I’ve always had a list of what I have been reading and when. Now I want to take more control of the books I intend to read. So far I’m not sure if I like the system I have going but I don’t think I’m that far off.

Nothing makes me more sad then when a bad article get popular. SEOmoz has an article called “5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should)” a title that would get about any article bookmarked. But it’s a very disingenuous title.

SEOmoz suggests using the <address> tag with no mention of the hCard microformat. In this day and age after even Bill Gates is talking about microformats it’s a topic that should not be ignored.

They think you should use the <q> tag for quotes though it has no support in IE. How is this helpful at all? Sure it’s sad that IE doesn’t support it but it’s hard to then tell me I should always be using that tag.

And I would argue that <acronym> and <abbr> are fairly wide used. I maybe biased since I read mostly web designer blogs but I see these all the time.

With del.icio.us and digg and so many other link aggregators around there is currently way too much focus on coming up with a good post title first and then writing any crap article afterwards.

I’m coming to the point where I dread clicking on any article with top 10 this or 5 of this other thing you should use. When will the insanity stop?