We can has Heroes, just for one day

Was the net slow for you yesterday? My transatlantic connection was completely throttled. It’s a wild guess, but it may have been the 140260 people torrenting the Season 2 premiere of Heroes combined with the 113347 breaking the law for Prison Break S3x02. And that’s just counting the ones listed on eztv.

I remember (cue string quartet) when you’d get pistol whipped for
including a 50 kb attachment and extradited for allowing HTML mail. And I’d be the one dishing out the punishments. Now
I’m hoovering a couple of Gigabytes per day and nobody bats an eyelid, least of all myself.

Are torrents clogging up our pipes? They may be, but that’s probably not the reason why CRIA (Canadian recording industry association) shut down the popular Demonoid tracker today.

I tried but couldn’t find any links to support the theory. I do remember reading reports some years back about bittorrents killing bandwidth.

Lex van Rossen, R.I.P.

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Lex is dead. I knew he was ill, but it’s still a shock. Lex shot the cover photo of my book. I’ve always been disappointed with the way the print came out and I have been meaning to fix that in the pdf version I’ve been working on, on and off. To give that image the full page it deserves. I knew Lex from going to concerts in the 80s and 90s. He was always in my way (for the first three songs) and we’d laugh about it – he wasn’t the tallest himself. He was a fantastic photographer, a real craftsman and one of my photography heroes. He must be taking pictures of angels now.

Here is some of his work. You may know it.
Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World
Bono vs De Kuip
More pictures

The Da Vinci Code, glorified fanfic

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The Da Vinci Code is one of the most annoying books movie pitches I have ever read. The (stupendously flat) characters bore each other, themselves and the poor unfortunate readers to death with their endless expositioning. It’s a sweet ‘n’ lo version of Foucault’s Pendulum.

Dan Brown’s writing reminds me of PG-13 fanfic and children’s literature. The hero of the story, a poor man’s Indiana Jones, is supposed to be a Harvard professor. He quotes from a copy of ‘My First Symbology’ with the depth of Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and runs around Paris with his very own Mary-Sue-type heroine encountering comic book villains left and right.

Whodunnit? By the end of the story I couldn’t care less. Dan, seriously, if you want to write fanfic, at least make it a hard R and let your heroes shag already.

That’ll teach me picking up a book with a cover that says “The Number One New York Times Bestseller”.