Its a bit hard to describe what Google Wave is because it has so many features and it dabbles in so many areas. Let me address some of the key features that I think really make Google Wave a serious game changer on the web today.

1) Robot, meet human.

For those who haven’t watched the video – Wave allows you to build robots that can parse what you type and basically write text back (its a bit more complex than that – you’ll have to look at how they structure messaging).
With Wave robots, you have a framework for the real semantic web – humans communicating to robots (and vice versa). The goal of the semantic web was for each element of the web to contain some metadata on it for software to parse and make additional meaning out of. The real problem is with the current web structure – how does the robot receive the information? (you can’t just scrape every website). Because of this, robots are currently hard to build, hard to communicate to and from, and not part of everyday life. Google wave will change that.

2) Human, meet human.

Real time, instant keystroke by keystroke updates.
Google Wave takes away the lag time between conversations, resulting in something that feels like you’re talking. Etherpad did this, but not in such a large scale and without the multimedia element. This restores some more of the human element of socializing that has been lost through text – very important. It makes Google Wave almost compete in the social sphere. Almost. We’ll see what Robots and Gadgets come out.

3) Work Collaboration and Group Productivity.

Wave implements version control on all documents – called playback.
Collaboration is one area that Google Wave dominates almost instantly. Seeing and making changes real time in a versioned environment cuts out the collection process and speeds up group workflow tremendously. Expand version control from coding to everything other document that you make, and you’ve just hit the Wave.

4) Embedding Wave will take over comment systems.

You can embed Wave elements on any external site, and it will include all the wave user functionality (like instant keystroke transmission).
No matter where you are on the web, you can socialize with others using Wave in a way that can provide instant feedback and real time discussions (which is much better than comment systems of today). Or, just use wave like one of the existing comment systems of today.

5) Robots. Oh so many robots.
There are so many custom robots that you can think of to make your personal data accessible to you from the web. Create a robot sitting on your machine that acts like an SSH command line (pm that robot script/generate model and have it reply to you the output). Create a robot can give you every document you have on your computer in Gadget-formatted text. Create a robot to message you whenever something happens to your webservers. It reminds me of the old IRC bots, only much better. So many possibilities that make Google Wave a great protocol for Web based browser applications.

6) Extensability and Openness.

What more do I say? Open source, and specifically open sourcing Wave rocks.

7) Messaging.
Ok, so sure, it does messaging differently too. It merges threads, version control, and instant messaging together in a way that is interesting, to say the least. Its more convenient than email, but nothing I couldn’t live without (We’ll see once I try it). I doubt its an email killer – unless you count the human to human interaction part.

In short, Google Wave is much more than just email – its fundamentally changing the way we interact – with people, software, data, and more.

I’m excited to try it out and to build something with it, and I think that every developer needs to consider a Wave world and what that means.

Wrote a paper recently on what resources the US has in order to combat global warming. Here it is.

The ending is a bit weak, but overall I think it has solid content and describes pretty accurately the state of our energy sources.

global-warming

Tables and pure CSS are not the only choices for layout management.

Grid based css libraries have the benefits of rapid design, an easy learning curve, good consistency and minimal markup. They also come with a reset.css (clears default styles), free you from working in pixels and promote thinking about structure, proportions, white space, and scalability.

As an introduction, we’ll look at how to create a 3 column layout in blueprint. Lets get started.

Download blueprint.css from http://www.blueprintcss.org/ (zip next to the logo). extract it and put the blueprint folder into your css folder.

• Create an index.html file and link it up to blueprint.css:

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"><![endif]-->
<style>
.g {background-color:green;}
.b {background-color:blue;}
//g and b to visualize what we're doing and can be removed at any time.
</style>
</head>


• Add a container to the body:

<body>
<div class="container showgrid"> <!--the class showgrid is for debugging and can be removed at any time -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/> <!-- all further code goes in this container!!! -->
</div>
</body>


just a normal blueprint grid.

This is our grid. You can see 24 columns, some space in between each column, and some rows corresponding to the breaks that we’ve put in.

• Lets create a header. In the container after the breaks add this div:
  

<div class="span-24 last g">This is a header.</div>


span-24 means this div spans 24 columns. last means its the last one in that row, and is used to let blueprint know when to go to the next row.

a simple header to our simple website

• Lets create a 3 column layout. Since we have 24 columns, lets try 6/12/6 proportions.

<div class="span-6 g">column1</div>
<div class="span-12 b">column2</div>
<div class="span-6 last g">column3</div>

3 column layout, without many hacks, tables, or difficulties.

• Now add a footer:

<div class="span-24 last b">footer</div>


And the layout is finished.

There. The layout is done, but we still have to use css to stylize things, add in content, etc. I’ll show that in a bit, but that’s really all you need to know in order to dive into blueprint.

Before you go off playing around with it, you should look into blueprint/src, and read each of the css files, especially grid.css – they’re tremendously helpful in telling you what blueprint can do for you. Make sure you try out the push, pull, append, prepend, box, border, colborder, and hr classes, as they’re used often. Feel free to add in your own classes – I like to keep my colors as classes so that I don’t get tempted to go color picking for an hour or two.

Do note that blueprint may break if you try to stylize in the same div that you do layouts with. So, don’t do:

<div class="span-10" style="border 1px solid black;"> some content</div>

and instead do:

<div class="span-10"><div style="border 1px solid black;">some content</div></div>

an extra layer, but overall still nothing as bad as tables.

I’ll leave you with a somewhat stylized form of what we had previously. Blueprint has great samples and test pages that show you exactly what it can do for you, so you should check that out. Their sample page shows just how trivially easy it is to nest columns within columns, creating as complex a layout as you want.

Final look: I added in a simple list on the left, a table on the right, a box class for the header, some hr’s, and some lorem ipsum.

Final look of the site! Simple stuff, really...


<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="css/blueprint/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"><![endif]-->
<style>
.g {background-color:green;}
.b {background-color:blue;}
#g and b to visualize what we're doing.

</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="span-24"><h2 class="box">This is a header.</h2></div>
<hr>
<div class="span-6"><ul style="text-align:right;">
<li><a href="#">This</a></li>
<li><a href="#">is</a></li>
<li><a href="#">my</a></li>
<li><a href="#">friendly</a></li>
<li><a href="#">navigation</a></li>
<li><a href="#">bar.</a></li>
</ul></div>
<div class="span-12"><div style="padding:20px;border:1px solid #d6d6d6;"><p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse est justo, tincidunt eu, ornare ornare, vehicula id, augue. Proin eu elit. Curabitur dignissim blandit augue. Nam dui nisi, convallis ac, hendrerit at, commodo et, dui. Maecenas consequat, felis eleifend gravida pellentesque, neque purus venenatis tellus, a rhoncus tortor lectus non nisi. Proin sodales, ante faucibus tempor tincidunt, risus leo iaculis velit, sed aliquet sem lacus eget purus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Donec vestibulum turpis ac neque. Maecenas suscipit orci non nibh. Donec tristique. Donec nec diam ut odio fermentum auctor. Nullam molestie sapien.
</p><p>
Nullam vel quam nec nisi luctus bibendum. Praesent lobortis dui eu augue. Phasellus consectetur, erat a condimentum hendrerit, sem massa elementum neque, sit amet elementum justo ligula vitae nunc. Cras rhoncus libero id purus. Aenean nulla enim, placerat nec, tincidunt id, gravida sit amet, erat. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nullam eleifend dolor. Integer massa magna, dignissim ut, semper sit amet, laoreet id, magna. Cras convallis ligula sit amet sapien. Mauris blandit elit sit amet leo.</p> </div></div>
<div class="span-6 last">
<table>
<tr><td><a href="#">This</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="#">is</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="#">Navigation</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="#">Done</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="#">in</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="#">Tables</a></td></tr>
</table>
<div class="box">This is an advertisement!!!<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="span-24 last"><div style="text-align:right" class="large">and finally a footer. (c) 2009 by... wait this took less than 15 minutes.</div></div>
</div>

I have been using notepad++ for rails for about a month now, and I’m loving it. See original post for my setup.

2 great plugins I would recommend: Explorer and html tags. Explorer provides a file structure on the left hand side, with all the features you would expect from a file navigation. Html tags provides a nice functionality, select tag and all content in tag. I tend to use this alot.

The new notepad++ only supports unicode plugins, so I can’t use a lot of the other plugins out there. One more plugin that I use that is unofficial is the colorpicker plugin – its not unicode, but someone did a quick hack to make it unicode. The unicode version is here if you want to try it out.

Now, the hospital that admitted arch in for intensive care had no idea what to do with him. Who could blame them; dried off and arch merely looked like a kid with chicken pox, only unconscious and barely breathing. Intensive care was confused over his status – normally, his concussion, bee stings, and partial drowning weren’t life threatening by themselves, but put together and they had no idea what it would cause.
It turns out, of course, that he was in no danger of passing on. What a sorry book this would be if he did. The doctors took no chances, though – they put a breather on him, did an MRI scan, filled him up with antitoxins, and set him on a feeding tube. They also gave him a sticker – he was, after all, just a kid.

Arch woke up with the painful realization that he was still alive. He was fine with that – he enjoyed being alive – but it felt as if every nerve on his body was on fire. He nudged his hand upward, felt the pain shoot up his arm, and decided he was better off not moving. He opened his eyes to a well lit hospital room; sun shone through the window, highlighting a flower vase on the sill, and in the far corner, a doctor was looking at a clipboard, back turned talking quietly to a couple sitting next him. The couple looked to be in their mid 40’s – probably the family that rescued me, Arch thought.

“I must have been hit by a truck or something,” Arch mumbled as he acknowledged his consciousness.
The doctor turned to look at him, and the couple stood up.
“Not quite, Arch.” the doctor said. “You’ve suffered a concussion, 15 bee stings, partial drowning and a sprained ankle. You have a slight fever right now, but nothing serious. Give it a week or two and you should be back to normal.”
“Arch, do you feel ok?” the woman asked.
“Just hurting. What am I drugged up on?” Arch asked.
The doctor flipped a page up and scanned his clipboard. “Just an IV. We’ll get you on painkillers shortly if you’re hurting a lot.”
“Please do.” Arch stared blankly into the ceiling. He tried to recall the events that caused his current state, but nothing came up. He looked at the couple in the corner.
“Oh. You’re my parents, right?” he asked. His father and mother stared at him incredulously.
“Doc, I think I have some memory loss – all of it actually. Also, can I get something to eat? I’m really hungry.”

This is my eclipse color scheme:

one for ruby and one for rails.

download: (rename it ruby.xml and erb.col)

ruby_xml

erb_col

After it is downloaded, goto (in eclipse) Window->preferences, Ruby, Editor, Syntax color, import, Aptana, edit, erb, colors, import. Read the top, and click on Text Editors, and change the background to black.

Enjoy.

If you haven’t dabbled in git, ssh, or the command line much, getting Heroku to be deployed locally on Windows can be a real pain. Here are the steps that I did to make that magic happen.

The software you need:

rails, of course.

msysgit – git for Windows

Putty (use this installer)

Step 1: Install heroku gem

open up your command line and type “gem install heroku“

Step 2: create your public and private rsa keys

This is part you may have to google random errors that you find – follow the directions and you should be (mostly) fine.

Open puttygen (from Putty)

Click generate.

Generate some randomness as per instructions.

Add a passphrase.

Click “Save private key” and save it as “heroku_key.ppk“

now, create a new file called C:\documents and settings\(username)\.ssh\id_rsa.pub

open that new file in Notepad (or some other text editor)

paste the contents of the greyed out box (under public key for pasting…) into id_rsa.pub

save and close it.

Now, open pageagent.exe in PuTTY

add a key and browse to heroku_key.ppk.

type in your password.

You’re almost done.

Finally, right click on My Computer, and goto properties, advanced, environmental variables.

Click “new” in system variables.

Add this in:

Variable name: GIT_SSH

Variable value: “C:Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe”

Phew. Step 2 complete.

Step 3: testing GIT

Open git_bash first, and goto your rails application folder

type “git init“ to initialize a git repo (its just standard procedure)

type heroku create <throwawaytestapp>

heroku will give you a git link

type git clone <link> — it will be something like git@heroku.com:appname.git

IF you get errors:

Error 1) fatal: can not fork (or something like that)

open up git gui and try to add a new repository (URL= link, directory= your rails directory)

if that fails, you need to tweak your system variables. Try lots of things; try adding the putty directory to the PATH variable, or try adding GIT_SSH to your username variables

git gui to test until it works

2) It leads you to a page where you have to type y/n and you can’t TYPE!!!

Don’t panic. open up a console and type “plink git@heroku.com“

enter y

retry it in the git bash.

if all works well, you’re connected to heroku on windows! pat yourself on the back.

beginning

chapter 2

Now, there may be someone out there that would like to compete for the title of “coldest girl alive”. However, there is no contest. That fiery competitive spirit issues in automatic disqualification, so yes, there really is no contest. And even if there were some way to have the two compete, no judge could tell the difference; humans really can’t tell the temperature past -50 or -60 degrees, and its all just freezing and miserable at that point.

So, before you even start to wonder why she didn’t help a poor naked boy tripping over some underbrush and falling into the lake headfirst with a bunch of vicious looking bees flying around him, just remember that she’s really, really, cold. She has an excuse not to help, too. She was busy reading a book.

—

“If anyone deserves a tiny little break, that would be me,” thought Mrs. <NAME> as she sped down the road with her husband back to their summer home. By the time her trip to buy fresh fruit at the local market ended, she had tallied up 8 comments on her daughter not being there and 12 sighs of relief. Even her husband, who usually ignored matters concerning their daughter (“more like leaving it up to me,” thought Mrs <NAME>), commented on how peaceful it was to have a normal shopping trip. It appeared as if the whole day would be uneventful, as they turned the corner and saw their daughter calmly reading a book next to the lake. “Nothing seems to be going wrong yet,” thought both the parents in unison as they pulled up to their summer home, got out, and leisurely started putting the groceries inside.

The mother felt it first. It was a sense of foreboding that always gave her the urge to check on her daughter to make sure nothing was going wrong. Last time it happened, she had barely managed to prevent a boy from electrocuting himself, while her own daughter looked on without a care in the world. The nerve of her! And I had to apologize to the boy and his mother for her while she sat there looking dumb! If only she would be a bit normal sometimes, she sighed.

She left the task of putting the groceries away to her husband and started walking down the cobblestones to the lake. She breathed relief when she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Hey honey, did anything happen-” she said, and then stopped to look at a minor disruption in the normally smooth lake surface. She peered closer; it appeared to be insects flying over something in the water. Was it a log? Or a dead animal? She shivered at the thought, and then gasped as the thing’s hand shot up weakly to swipe at the insects, before collapsing into the water again.

And that was when her Dad felt it – it was a sense of foreboding that usually meant Mrs <NAME> was overly anxious or irritated, and it usually meant him sleeping on the couch that night over some petty argument that she was worried about. “I’d better go see what’s up – probably an animal that ate the petunias,” he sighed. The last time that happened, he foolishly tried to calm her by saying “it doesn’t matter that much,” and ended up on the couch for a week.

chapter 1

Arch’s luck was truly bad, and it didn’t matter that Arch refused to admit luck’s existence. First, the lake happened to be surrounded by summer homes; it was summer.

Second, diving into the water wasn’t smart. Arch, breathing heavily from running, immediately shot to the surface and gasped for breadth, leaving him quite vulnerable to stings. That, coupled with his inability to swim, the nasty tasting mud he kicked up, and the general swamp-grime in his hair, nose and mouth, made it one of the worst experiences he ever lived through.

And third, he just happened to dive next to the coldest girl alive.

—

Well, while waiting for Arch to drown, we should cover a bit of history on Arch’s publishing career. It takes quite some time for him to drown anyways because the girl isn’t going to help him out.

At age six, Arch successfully argued for the reinstitution of baked potatoes in the kindergarten menu. Unknowingly the debate was recorded and published, and is now commonly quoted across the country particularly against human rights infringements.  At age 7, Arch wrote a small article for his local newspaper, which was filled with such humor about neighborly love (or the lack of it) that it earned him a monthly column near the front page. Arch collected and organized a year’s worth of these columns and submitted “The idiot’s guide to neighborhood discontent” to a local publisher. It appeared on shelves as “What your neighbors think about you”, and because of the success of that book alone, that local publisher expanded four times and now sells books internationally. Arch didn’t get a lot of money from it; he had submitted it under a pseudonym and did not guarantee his cut from the profit of the book (back then he was still kind of innocent when it came to money). This, however, lead to a very big interest in money until his dad beat some sense into him.

At age 9 Arch wrote “The kid’s guide to the adult world”, a book that explains why adults search for happiness in so many perplexing ways while kids have fun in the sand boxes. Arch’s peers didn’t fully comprehend the book, but it has become a popular book among college campuses, and has even spawned several fake spin-off titles, like “The kid’s guide to the galaxy”. At age 10 Arch didn’t publish anything. It was mostly because Arch broke his hand and lost his notebook. And that he discovered the stock market. When his publisher called after six months to inquire about the circumstances, Arch blamed it on writer’s block and sold 300 shares of Infel right before it dropped suddenly due to profit reports.

Arch didn’t write anything until he turned 11. His mother described his renewed interest in writing as “a loud yell upstairs followed by some head banging, and a sudden flood of typing and ill-flavored cursing”. For two weeks, the only things heard from his room were the sounds of muffled typing, muttering, and the occasional object-hitting-wall. Upon its completion, Arch quickly titled the book “What the Meaning of Life isn’t” before sending it off to his editor and collapsing on his bed. It wasn’t published until Arch woke up 3 days later, went to the editor’s office, and pushed it through the bureaucracy (and objection) of the company. The editor pleaded with Arch several times not to publish the work, saying things like “this may ruin your career,” or “revenge isn’t worth it.” Finally, the editor tacked on the summary of the book and sent it to the press: “This newest release from Arch Cole stresses the worthlessness of having a lot of money and attacks quite bitterly losses due to inside trading in the stock market. A very interesting read.”

At age 12, Arch published “This book will not bring you luck”, a self help that stresses action over opportunity and gives some very practical tips about investing (especially in the stock market). His editor asked if writing this book was “to redeem himself from the last one,” to which Arch replied, “Why would I need to redeem myself?” Both books have done surprisingly well.

He started writing his newest book, “What the meaning of life is”, at age 13, and wrote a couple of pages before he realized that the question was a bit harder to answer than he first thought. After writing 45 pages of dodging the question, Arch realized that he needed some experience in life to answer it. From his dad’s perspective; “Arch just suddenly started asking about the meaning of it all, and then asked for some camping gear. When I said he could join the boy scouts, he just opened the door and walked out. We haven’t seen him since.”

So for 15 months, only his publisher received any word from Arch. Starting from his small county near the west coast, Arch traveled across the country until he arrived at New England. He relied on public transportation when available, cheap truck stops (where many revelations were made concerning the meaning of life), cheap motels and local libraries. Carrying at least one book at all times, he oftentimes forgot which library he had borrowed the book from; Miami public library now has Buffalo’s “Gulliver’s travels”, which by the way did not help Arch at all in his own travels. Presently, Arch just happened to be carrying his own book, “This book will not bring you luck”, borrowed from a library in North Dakota. Apparently, it really didn’t bring him luck.

So we come back to Arch Cole in the present; he is drowning, getting stung by bees, and all around suffering and having the worst moment in his life. This happens for a bit longer, so go and make some coffee to get the full effect.

—

chapter 3a

It was a five second pause that made Arch Cole hit the water naked.

What delayed him was his right ear; a phantom fly had been buzzing around it all afternoon, and he took five seconds out of his life to scratch out that feeling. Nature was never the one proving its own existence, Arch thought as he swatted the empty air for the sixth time that day. Arch looked back and noticed the puddles from the last rainfall; in the light, one could make out dancing specs of brown hovering above the water. Maybe there really is a fly, Arch thought as turned forward and took a step. It was the worst step he had ever taken; during that moment, a tree fell on him.

Arch had very good odds against that tree. Normally, a falling tree is noticeable by its shadow or by its movement, and falls slowly enough for one to move out of the way. Arch just did not notice it. Also, an average tree wouldn’t fall by itself in the first place, and only tornado-like winds or tsunami-like waves could uproot a tree. It just happened to fall anyways. The probability of death by tree clubbing is about 1 out of 400 million, and the people who do get clubbed by trees are almost always lumberjacks. This tree just had very good luck.

Arch had some luck as well in this incident. The tree skimmed the back of his skull, saving him from being crushed to death but sending him headfirst him into the ground. However Arch at the moment didn’t believe in luck. In fact, he had published a book about the psychology of luck two years ago, at age 12. The tree falling, he reasoned, must be a case where the probability of it is so small that it has to happen or it doesn’t exist at all. And it was after that thought that Arch Cole, a recognized genius at age 4, an accomplished (and best-selling) writer and speaker, a cunning strategist and a brilliant problem solver, realized that he could not think straight for the first time in his life.

That happened to be just the thing Arch was looking for. On April 24^th of the previous year, Arch walked out of his house, left town and took off in search of the final experience that would allow him to finish his next book on the meaning of life. Arch left without anything more than a backpack, his clothes, and his watch and and set out to travel the country.

But Arch had no time to reflect on the past. He took out his notebook from his backpack and wrote down his jumbled thoughts with godly speed. He had hoped the experience to fall into his head during his travels, but having it fall on his head was rather unexpected and quite a painful way to find it. It did make the last 15 months worthwhile, though, Arch mused.

That was when Arch noticed the ants crawling over his body. He had felt a tickling sensation in his right leg, but assumed it was just blood rushing from the brain; a closer inspection revealed his right foot to be 6 inches underground and his whole leg covered with ants.

It took Arch a while to realize that not moving wasn’t going to solve the problem. Abandoning his shoe in the ant hole, Arch took off his sock and tried to shake off the ants from his foot. His head hurt from the excess movement, and it felt like the number of ants on him were multiplying. Already some ants had climbed up to his chest and arms, and he even felt a familiar tickle on his right ear. Arch took off shirt to slap them off; however, many were still under his remaining clothing. He looked around. The forest was quiet and empty, but removing his clothes in the middle of the forest wasn’t the best idea. Arch’s hesitation left him when he felt several sharp bites in places best left untouched.

He had no mercy with the remaining ants on him. Slapping them viciously, Arch didn’t notice the red marks he left on his own skin, or that he had gone from pants to no pants in two seconds. He thoroughly checked himself from front to back one last time before realizing that he was, in fact, naked on a path in the woods.

Now, when you are naked on a path in the woods as Arch was, there are three things that you do not want to see. The first is a wild animal or anything ferocious, since you cannot run into town without clothes. The second is any form of flying insect, since you can be bitten easily without clothes. And the third is, of course, a girl, since you are without clothes.

Arch saw all three.

The bear was easiest to spot. As Arch looked at the path ahead, there it was, in the middle of the road, sniffing the ground and walking towards him. If Arch had been thinking, he would have noticed the bees, but for now, all Arch could do was to scramble to the tree and hide behind it. It still was no use. The bear was coming towards the tree, and speeding up as well. As Arch prepared his escape, his hand touched something that gave him a very sharp and painful sting.

That was when he noticed the hive.

It must have been a delicious meal for the bear; the hive was split open by the fall of the tree and all the bees were gone chasing Arch as he sped across the forest. It took Arch an exceptionally long time to reorient himself, and when he finally did he realized that he was running into town, something not to do when naked. Arch circled around with the bees still on his trail, looking for a place with some relief.

Arch finally found a lake. In his normal state, he would not have chosen this place. Something is not right, he thought to himself as he weaved through the forest floor and towards the lake. I should know that something is wrong, he mused as he sped up, jumped into the bushes and flew out of the undergrowth to perform a clumsy dive into the water.

And that was when he saw the girl.

chapter 2