I Love Magic...

... especially when you get a Tardis-like tent and free long distance airtravel for free....

What's he on about? Has he lost his marbles?

Nope - just watching Harry Potter - The Goblet of Fire. In HD DVD, courtesy of the add on drive for the XBOX 360. I have to say, at the price point of £120 for it (incl. remote and King Kong) it is a very decent product. I like the features the disk offers and finally can make the most of the telly I got. Good stuff.

Question is - how long will it take to decide the "format war" with Sony's BluRay? Technology wise everything so far points to HDDVD, except the promise of a higher capacity disks in a future BluRay spec. Well, 30 GB seems to do just fine for the 3 films I have so far.

What else has been going on? Work has been frantic and some of the recent findings on processes just beggar belief! The lack of proper process e.g. surrounding payment of invoices resulted in one of my vendors not having been paid since July, meaning an outstanding balance of over $1m. Not that I had visibility of it until I tried to get in an urgent order and had to untie this gordian knot before being able to proceed.

Another item that is hard to beliee is a government proposal I had to read today on gathering data on all airline, train and ferry passengers (and crew) to enter or exit the UK. This is very Big Brother, and with a legislation planned to be finalised this year, I am worried.... What may happen is that when you try to go on a short skiing trip to France, you may be stopped before embarking and asked to pay off your parking tickets before you may board. Unbelievable... until I actually spoke to a German expat colleague of mine who had exactly that happen to her in Germany. She was stopped on entering Germany and had to pay off a DM25 parking ticket that was 5 years old to the tune of EUR300...

Sort of took the wind out of the sail of my "this would never happen in Germany" - what happened to civil liberties?! And how would they gather the information if you travelled by port-key????

I shall return my attention to the Defense against Dark Arts lesson before Prof Moody turns me into a toad for typing on my laptop.

Happy travelling,
'Nash