Monthly Archives: May 2006
Da Vinci Code Google game
Apparently I was a third prize winner in the Australian version of the Da Vinci Code Quest that Google ran recently. I arrived home today to find a large-ish black bag with rope handles – like a cheap version of the type you get in swanky stores – stuffed into our letterbox. Upon opening it I found a copy of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ book, and a number of other bits and pieces all with Da Vinci Code logos on them, as you can see in this photo:
From left to right, back to front (and with the bag it came in behind them) they are:
- a leather folio/organiser type of thing – like a purse for a man
- a combination luggae padlock
- a little notebook in a metal casing
- a copy of the Da Vinci Code novel
- a little keyring flashlight with batteries
- a globe-shaped puzzle (called, interestingly enough, a global puzzle)
- a Da Vinci Code-branded disposable camera
Now, I’m mildly interested in reading the book, since I’ve never read it before, and the puzzle is kind of interesting – but it’s all really a bit tacky. I couldn’t decide at first if I had really won something or whether they just sent this to everyone who completed the Google competition puzzles, since there was no letter or explanation with the package. After a bit of Googling (how ironic) I found some references that said that in Australia there would be 30 third prize Da Vinci Code travel packs – so it looks like I’ve won one of those. I’m not sure what to do with it all now – give it away, keep it, sell it on eBay.
Any suggestions?
Sharing interesting things when you don’t have time to write
I find nearly everything interesting.
It’s one of those things about me that I can become interested in all sorts of different things and I like to know a bit about everything. At some level I just want to know everything, but that’s a pretty unrealistic goal. I’ve had conversations recently along the lines that the ability to find something interesting in anything is kind of a geeky trait – or maybe just a mark of intelligence – but it’s a trait that I relish in myself. it also goes some way to explaining why, particularly in this Internet age, I’ve become a bit of a news junkie.
It’s great and it’s terrible; a blessing and curse. It’s great because I can satiate my thirst for knowledge and read breaking news, opinion, commentary and all sorts of tidbits just about whenever I want. I’ve got quick links on both home and work computers to sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald, digg (a great newer find), Slashdot, Whirlpool, Wikipedia and a few other news and reference services.
One of the things I tend to do from time to time is email links to interesting articles to Tegan or to other friends, and from time to time I quite enjoyed sharing them on this site and writing up some thoughts about them, for example in this post: http://www.johnsons.id.au/?p=32. However, I also don’t really like doing it. I feel that not many people really read this site, and those who do do so because they are friends or family, and less because they want to know what I’m interested in.
Enter del.icio.us
I got started with this service a little while ago, mainly as a way of bookmarking things at work and then being able to easily access them at home – in the past I used to send myself emails at home with links to pages I wanted to look into more or bookmark. Now with this service, I can easily bookmark them online, easily find them again and, thanks to a Quicksilver plugin on the Mac, they’re nicely integrated and searchable on my main home computer.
Another advantage is that they are easy to share with others. By visiting ‘my’ del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/mistertim, you can see any pages I’ve bookmarked. Tegan has started looking this up occasionally to find interesting things I’ve found, and I could even add an RSS feed of my bookmarks into Safari or Firefox for live updating, or I could add a feed of them to the sidebar on this site so that, say, the last 10 sites I’d bookmarked in del.icio.us would show up there.
My links are, obviously, heavily skewed towards my interests – politics, public service, good eating, technology, gadgets and religion. If you’re interested, have a look from time to time or subscribe to the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/mistertim. You might even find the service useful yourself.
It’s about time
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html
 The original, unaltered Star Wars Trilogy coming to DVD. Sounds almost too good to be true.