Reminds me of iodine patches used to treat a wound/scab - popular when I was a kid. Every kid and her sister had one sometime or other back in primary school.

Have been spending my time experimenting with Adobe After Effects 7.0. Inspired, thanks to Fredo Viola's Sad Song Video. [via dooce] Tinkering with new software is a great way to generate ideas for various means of presentation. And I love how an entire afternoon can be spent figuring stuff out. There's nothing sad about the song.

The free video tutorials over at Creative Cow have been totally helpful for that. It's amazing how little need there is to stick one's arse into one of those 10-session courses and pay for them these days, when everything's up online at one's convenience. I owe you many, Cows.

Still, nothing crowds out Snapeology. This was such a lovely character study it made me think of Literature class back in Secondary 4...

All right. Let's do the character study of Farmer Boldwood today. We'll start from the girl at the back corner, and work our way down the back row, all the way to the front. Chopchop! Run with me!

That was Ms C. I'm missing her, all of a sudden. Last I heard, she's the principal of some primary school in Singapore. Not one to go for class reunions, I am.

So. My mom excitedly informed me, over Skype, that while she and my dad were at Costco last Saturday, they saw this huge-ass stack of Harry Potter books (published by Scholastic), with nary a crowd around it. Nonchalantly, she picked one up and headed for the checkout counter. How strange is that? Potter-mania strikes in mysterious ways. She hasn't even touched any of the previous six, and here she is, devouring DH! Proud of ya, ma! :) And I hope the jargon and nuances don't get lost on you.

Perhaps, seeing as they are in Taiwan, there would have been more hype had it been the Chinese translation of DH.