Da Vinci Code Google game

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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

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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: https://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.

ANZAC Day

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It was ANZAC Day yesterday. Apart from being a good day off work, it was a chance to reflect on an interesting trend in Australia, namely that ANZAC Day now seems in the national ethos to be more Australia Day than Australia Day itself. This makes some sense – even C.E.W. Bean said that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born at Gallipoli – it was certainly a defining event for the nation. However, it seems that Australia takes ANZAC Day more seriously now than it ever has in my lifetime – it’s no longer just a day for diggers to march and get drunk, and we’ve come a long way from Alan Seymour’s ‘The One Day of the Year‘. Regardless, I find it quite interesting how much Australia gets behind its ANZAC and military tradition, even while there is such little support for our involvement in the war in Iraq.

Amongst other things, Tegan and I went and saw ‘Kokoda‘ at the movies yesterday. A lot of people have asked us what we thought about it, so here are my thoughts:

It was quite a decent film – I guess we enjoyed it, if you can say that you ‘enjoy’ a film such as that. It was certainly one of the better war films I’ve seen for some time. As did many other critics, I thought it owed a lot to “The Thin Red Line” – it had that same psychological aspect. However, where the narrative and psychology of The Thin Red Line was more about questioning why war was necessary, “what is it all for?”, that question was nowhere to be seen in Kokoda. In Kokoda, it’s explicit and obvious what they are fighting for – it’s about the defence of Australia. In Kokoda, the psychological aspect is more about mateship – quite fitting for an Aussie film.

Kokoda is certainly not going to go down in history as one of the best films of all time, not even one of the best war films. It was good, but it’s not Gallipoli or The Thin Red Line or Apocalypse Now. It was quite well made, but there were several aspects that showed it was made by more amateur film makers. Their influences show through obviously as well: they ascribe to the Hitchcock approach to suspense, that you’ll keep your audience in suspense longer by showing them exactly what’s going to happen, while the characters are in the dark, and thus leave them wondering how it’s going to play out. There are also a few moments of real shock and other parts that are quite emotionally moving – Tegan was certainly a bit teary by the end. I will say, also, that I thought it was far better than ‘Saving Private Ryan‘ – while the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan was amazing and epic (particularly in the cinemas), that movie overall came across to me as Spielberg trying to make an intelligent, thought-provoking film and failing miserably; instead producing (by the end) schmaltzy, American crap. Kokoda stays well above that level, even if it is an unashamedly Australian patriotic film.

In summary: well worth seeing.