Category: observation

Dan Brown plagerises Dan Brown

This week: Sydney / Lake Maquarie / Sydney / Auckland / Sydney.

Finished my third Dan Brown book, Deception Point. What is the Dan Brown Code? Simple:

  1. Slighly off-centre, strange yet handsome/beautiful primary character gets thrown into a “situation”.
  2. The “situation” has an echo in modern culture conspiracy theories or edge-case science fact
  3. The antagonist is the person closest to the primary character, or primary character’s new love-interest
  4. Cut chapters just short and leave the characters hanging. Forces the reader to “read on” and not put the book down
  5. Weave in some science fiction or myth as the central theme
  6. Obviously, the story ends with the primary character “winning” (happy ending) and scoring with their love-interest on the last page.

As a reader of Ludlum, Clancy and other thrillers, Dan Brown is missing some their “meat”. Maybe this is the nature of modern, post cold-war thrillers where the Soviets/China are no longer the central enemy?

Change the Regal Regime

Prince Charles, Australia’s next King is coming to lord over part of his future realm this week. Meanwhile former Australian, Princess Mary and her new husband Price Frederik of Denmark are in Sydney (Princess Mary on Sydney Harbour). Royalty seems to be a major event for Australia, but the Danish royal couple are scooping the newspaper column centimetres and grabs on TV.

Why don’t we trade in the old, rusted Battenburg-Windsor hegemony for the young Danes? Being an Anglo-saxon country, many of our ancestors came from Danish soil in the 5th and 6th centuries. Surely we get a vote in this? Oh, that’s right – our feudal overlords are not chosen in a democratic way. Shame.

Spacenerdery

OK, now I am getting a little space-nerdy. During the 1970’s, the Russians successfully launched and landed probes to Venus. The corrected images captured are here. Images of Venus. Compared to what we are seeing from Mars in the 21st century, its amazing what the Russian technology could do.

Ricky Gervais: Humor

Quote from Ricky Gervais, at the Golden Globes: “We’re not from these parts. We’re from a little place called England. You know, the place that used to run the world before you guys.” I don’t know what was funnier: the quote, or the lack of reaction from the stiff audience. The best humor is the truth…

Richard Dawkins on the evolutionary aspects of the birth of the Mac: Apple of my eye

Creative Suite Roadshows

Wow! We’ve just been through the Creative Suite Roadshow demos. There’s going to be a little bit of fun sprinkled into a whole lotta content. Each application has so much new “stuff” it is becoming difficult to filter out what we are going to show. Roll on Canberra on Thursday.

A great article on removing digital noise in digital camera images. For some Photoshop plugins Noise Reduction Tools Comparison.