Old Blog, New Subject

This blog is now my official homepage as a requirement of Principles of Management, which I am taking in Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

Mariner 1 and the DO Loop

I stumbled upon this interesting fact about the Mariner 1 spacecraft while browsing Wikipedia today (I was researching about loops in programming):

The Fortran DO loop caused an orbit computation error in a Mercury flight, and was long suspected to have caused the crash of the Mariner 1 space rocket on 22 July 1962 .

Mariner 1 was supposed to explore Venus but was destroyed shortly after takeoff. Its backup, Mariner 2, was successfully launched however.

my Fave Mac Ad

This Apple Mac ad, which took a jab at PCs and Vista upgrade, is one of my favorites. It was so good that Bill Gates hated the whole thing.

Tragedy

This video shows tragedy in so many ways.

Is Harry Potter the Last Horcrux?

I've read in the news today that J.K. Rowlings has unveiled the title of the last book of the Harry Potter series. The seventh installment of the adventures of a bespectacled wizard is called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Of course fans of the books began to speculate about the final outcome of the story (I've read all the six previous books and watched all the movies, and listened to the audio books as well, to give you an idea of how I liked the series).

One thing that struck me as the reports is the connection of the "hallows" in the title to horcruxes, which contain pieces of a wizard's soul. In the story, Harry Potter's nemesis, Voldemort, supposedly broke his sould into seven pieces and hid them in horcruxes. As horcruxes can be not just inanimate objects, I had this crazy idea that Harry Potter himself might be the final horcrux. This would fit very well on the rumors that Harry will eventually die at the end (if he had to destroy the final horcrux, which I think is himself...). Another evidence is something Dumbledore said about Voldemort leaving something on Harry after he tried to kill him (Dumbledore said Voldemort transfered some of his powers to Harry in the process of killing him).

I wouldn't be surprised if the final horcrux is Harry's lightning bolt scar.

The title of the seventh book is revealed at Rowling's site by solving a puzzle.

Cheat codes Instructions on how to solve the puzzle can be found here.

Fan sites of Harry Potter can be found here and here.

The Beach

Trailer of The Beach. The movie basically mirrors my quest for finding paradise.

Blog Hits

This cartoon epitomizes the sentiments of bloggers everywhere. Really funny.