John Grisham does In a League of Their Own crossed with The Wiggles

I finished my latest book the other day (Andy Mcnab’s - Crisis Four), which ended dissappointingly I’m sad to say, but we’ll get back to that later, and my housemate handed me a book by the famous author, John Grisham. Not that I’ve read any of his wares, apart from about an hour spent trying to get into The Firm, but a world famous author with such titles (and Hollywood movies) as The Pelican Brief, The Rain Maker, The Firm and The Innocent Man I was expecting a top notch crime thriller.

The books title is Playing for Pizza, and this is it’s blurb:

“Rick Dockery was a quarterback for one of America’s most famous football teams when he gave arguably the worst performance in his league’s history.  Overnight Rich became a laughing stock and unemployable in his own country.

But somehow RIck’s agent finds him a job.  He is guaranteed a starting position and a salary.  The only problem is that the team that wants him is in Parma, Italy.  The American footabll league in Italy is tiny and unlike RIck, the Italian players only get paid in free meals.

Rick has never been to Italy, so it’s no surprise that the country has a few surprises for him.  What follows is a delightful, heart-warming storay of an innocent abroad.”

Now, I’m not one to judge.  I’m not a critic, and my experience with reading books for pleasure only goes back about 9 months, but could you think of a more boring (nor ridculous sounding) synopsis for a book?  It’s like every 80’s American sports movie (… You know the ones, underdogs fight hard to win all season, then drama, then the team wins in overtime), crossed with the likes of Home and Away (an Australian soap opera).  

I honestly thought I was being had, and the cover was indeed a satircal ploy to get you sucked into a book with all kinds of death and debauchery, but on inspection, its a real book, by a real author, and a good autor at that.  The top of the book even claims it to be, “The International Number One Bestseller”, though I’ll garuntee that has nothing to do with this particular title.

As I said though, who am I to judge?!? The quagmire of life experiences undertaken in the story surely leave my solid reading history of crime thrillers for dead, and put the reader at a new level of enlightenment.  At least I hope this is the case.  I’ll read it though, it sounds interesting enough, and I’m intrigued to find out if there’s something I’m missing like the short for a movie that tells you nothing at all about the movie in general.

Time for me to get started, and report back as soon as possible.

What a movie!

The Growing List

Since I started reading again I’ve notched up fair few titles on the literaty bed post, whatever that means, and I’m loving it so far.  I’ll be looking at branching out a bit and trying some new genre’s too.  Any suggestions?

The list so far, in the last 12 months:

• I Hope They Server Beer In Hell - Tucker Max
• The Alphabet of Manliness - Maddox
• Gun’s Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond

• Playing for Pizza - John Grisham (I’m looking forward to it now!)
• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (Sitting here waiting to be read)
• Freakonomics - Steven Levitt
• Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
• The rest of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child
• The rest of the Nick Stone series by Andy McNab
• The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll
• Kite Runner
• One of Peter Hamilton’s Trilogies
• More Harlen Coben
• Try John Grisham’s more serious titles
• One of Len Deighton’s Non Fiction books (a recommendation)

I’m always open to suggestion though, so post any replies, please!  I’m turned off by girlie stories (Danielle Steel), middle earth Scifi (like Lord of the Rings, I’m not sure why) and Mills and Boon (If I wanted porno, i’d download it).

Afterthoughts

I said at the top of this post that I’d get back to why I found the end of Crisis Four (the third book in Andy McNab’s Nick Stone series), and it won’t mean much without having read the book, but I just thought it was too transparent.  I could see the outcome of the story after about the first 15 - 20% of the book, and it just ended so abruptly.  

I’d say this is a really good reason to space out these series I’ve been reading as I guess like anything else thats done repeatedly you get to know the author, and how his/her writing works, and can quickly weed out plot lines if they’re similar to previous titles.  Not only this, I found a dissapointing book a bit of a kick in the guts from what is so far such an awesome series, I’d imagine its better to space out the pleasure of the other books as long as possible.

It’s not quite as catchy a title as Enter the Dragon, nor does it pack the one-inch-punch shown off by Bruce Lee, as shown in the movie, but my new toy can take a fantastic looking picture.

It’s my new Nikon D40, an entry-level Digital SLR camera that’s small, light and packs a load of features that I couldn’t list, nor describe off the top of my head.  I’ve had what you might call a keen interest in hobby photography for a while now without good equipment or any real knowledge of what I should actually be doing.  Basically this has meant keeping my phone or our Sony Point&Shoot camera in my pocket and pointing it at anything (everything).

Nikon D40 - My new baby

I’ve had my eyes opened though, not just with the quality of the photos or beauty of the camera (yes, its awesome looking), but I’ve very quickly started to understand all the photographic terms and tools in a way that I’ve never been able to before.  Having full control (SLR helps.. a lot) over manual settings and seeing the result has helped to immediately see some of the places I’m going wrong and how to improve on these.

I can remember from a very young age my father (an avid photographer hobbyist from way back) explaining in super technical terms what exposure, aperture, ISO speed and shutter speed were, or what a light meter, polarising filter or macro lens does.  I felt I knew the basics, but it didn’t really help to understand when to use a high aperture, or change ISO speeds (an old Canon Powershot I own allowed manual controls over such things).

I’ve had a whirlwind introduction to the basics and I’m starting to understand how differing ISO speeds affect the shot in different situations (low light, speed/motion blur, etc), and how changing the aperture or f number (ooooh techy!) can give a different depth of field.  The main thing is though, just how good the photos come out as a finished product.  WIthout any post editing (though most still need it, I’m in no way perfect) or cropping here are some examples of a few shots:

Temple at top of Acropolis, Athens

Late Afternoon in Santorini

Dusk in Paros

The main thing I’ve noticed is the colour and clarity, (I know, I sound like a diamond salesman), in the photos, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The detail that comes out from a closeup portrait is nothing less than amazing, and this is all from the basic entry level Digital SLR with the standard kit lens (18-55mm) taking 6.1 megapixel photos.  And crazy enough, the resulting JPEG image is smaller than our previous camera, the lower resolution and MUCH, MUCH lower quality Sony Cybershot.

So much to learn, but I’ve found the main thing I’ll have to master first is how to compose each shot, as I found from almost 900 photos taken over the week in Greece at least 90% of them are either completely wrong (out of focus, wiped out exposure), or are just taken incorrectly with the wrong amount of information in (or out) of the photo.  Learning exactly what to photograph in a way that actually looks good is the first hurdle.

It’s going to be an expensive hobby though, as upgrading the lens (to a much higher zoom such as the 18-200mm) costs almost three times as much as the camera did to start with!

Check out Ken Rockwells site for some D40 lovin: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40.htm

I’ve been lazy recently, and haven’t really posted for the better part of a month.  This is not my usual style and I’d like to get back to my normal routine of posting crap and nonsensical tales.

But I’m going to Greece next week to tour the islands, so it’ll have to wait.  Enjoy

Ah! Paradise

A few things to part with the boredom:

• Damn Interesting is back after a long recess (while they prepared/published their book), with two new articles,
• Coding Horror’s author Jeff Atwood has finally finished his side project, Stack Overflow, a digg-like tech FAQ system.  This was unfortunately at the expense of his usually regular blog posts.
• Photoshop.com’s Flex based gallery/photo storage app has been released and gives you full drag & drop access between other common Photo storage apps (Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket).  All that with a fairly nifty online photo editor under the name of Photoshop Express (a plus version with Photoshop filters and advanced editing exists too).

An exciting new app was bought to my attention recently, and it goes by the name of Tagggit.  Tagggit is a social networking application where you add friends and build communities, and then tag locations with photographs to share with the public or those within your communities.

The interesting part comes when you add it as a mobile application (avaiable as a Symbian application), using the inbuilt location finder (GPS, Wifi), geotagging your current activity is as easy as pressing a button.  From here, your friends, family, and the public around you can see where you’re currently located, or the event/location/highlight you’ve just tagged, depending on your desired privacy level.

Some obvious uses for this are listed on the site, such as:

• Tagging points of interest around a city (Streets on the Monopoly Board anyone?)
• Tagging a location for a party/dinner with photo/directions on how to get there
• Telling your friends which pub you’re at for after work drinks

I was thinking some other idea’s could be:

• A digg-styled tag system where users can Vote Up/Vote Down other tags
• Location finding game where small snapshots are taken around a city and have to be located by other players (like naming a movie or product from a small cut-out of a bill board or poster).
• Non vandalistic Graffiti?!  Maybe not.

Clearly the best thing is the Symbian application which works perfectly on my phone (yes, the same Nokia N95), and is a welcome addition to the growing library of apps I’m using on a daily basis.

Tagggit is in private beta release stage at the moment, but is soon to be available to the public, so stay tuned.