Category: Current Events

Either it is one of the best marketing campaign or a big dent on the purported USD 20 million security that has been spent by Bloomsbury:- the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked to the Internet four days before it is supposed to go on sale on the 21st July 2007.

Someone has photographed (yes, photographed) all of the pages of the book and has posted ALL of them, not on the torrent networks, but on the World Wide Web! See here and here. Someone later downloaded all of them, divided them into chapters and started seeding them at PirateBay.org. That process took almost 3 hours but the effort produced a PDF file that contained all of the scanned images in the correct order and sequence.

The purported leak has also revealed the table of contents as shown below:-

One
The Dark Lord Ascending

Two
In Memorandum

Three
The Dursleys Departing

Four
The Seven Potters

Five
Fallen Warrior

Six
The Ghoul in Pajamas

Seven
The Will of Albus Dumbledore

Eight
The Wedding

Nine
A Place to Hide

Ten
Kreacher’s Tale

Eleven
The Bribe

Twelve
Magic is Might

Thirteen
The Muggle-born Registration Commission

Fourteen
The Thief

Fifteen
The Goblin’s Revenge

Sixteen
Godric’s Hollow

Seventeen
Bathilda’s Secret

Eighteen
The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore

Nineteen
The Silver Doe

Twenty
Xenophillius Lovegood

Twenty-One
The Tale of the Three Brothers

Twenty-Two
The Deathly Hallows

Twenty-Three
Malfoy Manor

Twenty-Four
The Wandmaker

Twenty-Five
Shell Cottage

Twenty-Six
Gringotts

Twenty-Seven
The Final Hiding Place

Twenty-Eight
The Missing Mirror

Twenty-Nine
The Lost Diadem

Thirty
The Sacking of Severus Snape

Thirty-One
The Battle of Hogwarts

Thirty-Two
The Elder Wand

Thirty-Three
The Prince’s Tale

Thirty-Four
The Forest Again

Thirty-Five
King’s Cross

Thirty-Six
The Flaw in the Plan

Epilogue

I’m going to strain my eyes to read this tonight!

Greetings from Apple Store New York! I’m now in the mecca of mac-dom and I’m just so excited that my bladder is going to relax uncontrollably….

Hehehe….Cheryl calls this flagship, glass enclassed store my temple. I am glad that she sees the light of old wise one, aka the “Job”ness…

Cheryl and I will be going to the US Embassy today for our US Visa application and interview. I must say that preparing for the application and interview is like mugging for an exam- there is a schedule that you need to keep, forms to fill, documents to dig out (especially if you are a guy), things to remember, etc.

According to the US Department of State website, all “aliens” have to prove that they do not intend to stay for an extended period of time and that they will return to their country of origin once they have completed their holidays, businesses or medical treatments in the United States.

I do hope that everything will go fine tomorrow- the tickets and travel arrangements are about to be confirmed, thanks to my employers who have graciously paid for the flight and accomodation, hahaha! Not too shaby a deal considering that I nearly missed the deadline in submitting my business plan for the Global SEED competition organized by Telenor. Being placed second is not too bad after they had agreed that I can convert my trip to the Maldives (why tropical beaches when Malaysia is full of them?) to the United States instead.

One more step and then US here we come!

Cheryl and I watched 300 over the weekend and it is has to be one of the best movie that we have seen in years. The visuals were stunning, to say the least, due to the movie being very faithful to Frank Miller’s comic reimagining of the Battle of Thermopylae.

Interestingly, I’ve read somewhere that Miller was inspired by another film in the sixties called “300 Spartans”. With the improvement in visual effects, scoring, editing, the director of this movie, Zack Synder, follows closely in the footsteps of George Lucas who pioneered a new form of movie making with minimal sets, spectacular special effects and word-of-mouth inducing viral web marketing  (the web featured documentaries of the movie a year before the movie was released). The difference is that while the Star Wars prequels are visually stunning and story-wise poor, 300 is a winner in both aspects.

One thing to note for Malaysian viewers is that the Malaysian Censors have been very liberal with the cuts in the movie. Most of the “R” rating stuff like gore and nudity is intact in the version shown here. The only noticable cut is the love scene between Leonidas and Queen Gorgo (what a name…).

Watch it.

View the trailer here.

I’ve gone into the equities market some weeks before Chinese New Year since it was quite bullish. Reading the Edge and Star Business, I was pretty confident of the market. It was pleasant surprise, waking up on the 4th day of Chinese New Year to discover that the KLCI was the highest since the Asian crash of 1997.

Think of the even greater surprise a week later when a massive global sell-off happened less than a week after the papers have hailed the record breaking feat in the local bourse. The cause of the massive sell off was attributed to a Chinese capital control rumor. The rumor caused panic sell-off in the Shanghai stock exchange and every market, including the Dow, suffered.

But it has now been a week since then and the sell-off is still high. Looking at the regional market, the bearish sentiment seems prevalent. Is the sell-off really caused by what analysts now call the “Shanghai Sneeze”? Or is it caused by the Yen carry trade?

According to Wikipedia:-

In the last couple of years, the yen has grown weaker and weaker against not only the dollar but against nearly all other important world currencies due to a de facto zero interest rate policy which has encouraged massive yen carry trades, where speculators borrow in yen and buy bonds and other assets in currencies that charge significant interest. This can be very profitable, but is a short position on the yen, which in the absence of other factors drives the yen’s value down

Whatever it is, I wished that I had bought that new flat panel LCD TV that I was eyeing at 🙂