Harry Pothead Seven

Yep, I buckled down and went to Powell's tonight for a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Strolled up to the line at 11pm, no wristbands required. There were actually not as many poeople dressed up as HP characters (yes, that's aimed at Mr. and Ms. 42) as I had thought there might be. Still, there were enough weirdos (non HP weirdos, that is) to make it a rather entertaining experience. I particularly enjoyed the kids racing each other with shopping carts they'd stolen from the adjacent Fred Meyer, the man with the 8' dunce cap screaming "I'M A NERD!!!!", and a bunch of youngsters who'd actually shown up with nearly perfect (compared to the movie, anyway) costumes.

I spent the hour in line listening to the nerdy girl (and the guy she'd brought with him) chatting about flood-fill algorithms, and how they'd implement them in Ruby, scheme, and RealBASIC. For some reason, they wanted to implement the entire thing using a gigantic recursive algorithm, only they were (surprise!) discovering that deep recursion causes stack overflows? <shrug> I'd be more interested in trying to implement flood fill by calculating contour gradients and going from there, but apparently being a Linux kernel hacker doesn't qualify me for discussing graphical apps. Or so was the impression that I got from the two of them.

Does having my book stamped "Procured at Powell's Books, Midnight 21 July 2007" make my book worth less?