A rich industrialist with a vision creates a safari park on a secluded island for tourists, where the main attraction will be dinosaurs brought back to life through advanced DNA sequencing.
What I Liked
It’s a bit hard to read the book without comparing it to the successful movie franchise that was built on the book. But the imagination to not only conceive of a dinosaur park for tourists and to conceive of a realistic way to make the science sound feasible even in 1990 (pulling dinosaur DNA from a long-dead mosquito trapped in amber) was simply fabulous to see.
Not surprisingly, the book is different from the movie (or more accurately, the movie diverges from the book), but a lot of the core elements are the same. An underappreciated computer nerd, a worried security chief, the storm that turns the island into a death trap, etc.
What I Didn’t Like
Overall, I didn’t feel any sense of wonder in the book. In the movie, for example, you could see the sense of “OMG these are dinosaurs” and the characters are wowed out of their socks. In the book, it is more like, “Cool, but let’s talk about using night-vision goggles to see them, that’s really interesting.” I didn’t feel the wonder of any of them.
In addition, some parts were a bit odd — Grant is a loner bachelor but loves children (hates them in the movie, a better choice); Grant and the kids drift on the river with nothing much happening and tend to get back way too safely; the kids have Wesley-Crusher-syndrome and are able to get the computers working again; Hammond is almost a buffoon more than a visionary; and the ending is more about strange relations with Costa Rica, and a “final solution” than getting away from the raptors. Overall, I saw lots of edits that were done to the story from the book in order to put it on screen, and most of what they cut were good edits. I didn’t feel like the book was so much “more” than the movie, perhaps even a bit less.
The Bottom Line
Great book but some of the movie edits made the story better
The year is 1968, the location is Russia. Alexander’s father defies the state and the KGB kill him. He and his mother must escape, and they have to choose between a ship going to the UK or one going to America.
What I Liked
The plot uses the same plot structure as Sliding Doors, the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow (this is sometimes called the “A/B” plot device). If you know the movie, you know there is always a scene at the start where the main character has to make a choice (A or B). In Sliding Doors, Gwyneth tries to board a subway — and the story divides into two parallel tales, one based on whether she makes the train and one where she doesn’t. In a recent TV show, Ordinary Joe, there were three storylines.
For this book, a coin toss is used to decide Alex and his mother’s fate. The stories are told in parallel, bopping back and forth between them over time. In one timeline, Alexander becomes “Alex” in New York, a street trader and military guy vs. “Sasha” in London who is the academic. Both get involved in bigger issues, etc.
What I Didn’t Like
A recurring problem with the fast pace of Archer’s books is that it often reads almost like a fairy-tale life — event A springboards him into event B which springboards him into events C, D, E, F, and then next thing you know, he’s deputy only to God himself. It does read unrealistically at times, as every character goes on to something big in politics (like President or PM, etc.). In addition, the twist at the end as they wrap stuff up leaves one of the storylines very disappointing, all things being equal.
The Bottom Line
Great story, cute twist ending, but one storyline doesn’t pay off.
I mentioned I was going to try to learn GIMP, and I have a large set of tutorials to work through. Saving sounds like a pretty basic element to a photo editor, amiright? Yet the tutorial file I have for saving is 19 pages long. Wait, what?
Oh, riiiiight. It isn’t about simply saving. It’s about saving in the right formats and size optimization for different uses (websites, emails, graphic buttons, etc.). Okay, that makes more sense. 🙂 For now, I’ll stick to the basics and worry about optimization next time.
SAVE vs. SAVE AS
The first big “hint” is the importance of using SAVE AS rather than SAVE so that you don’t mess up your original picture. Instead, you can have multiple incremental versions as you go in case you need to go back (GRADUATION becomes GRADUATION-COPY, for example, or GRADUATION-ORIGINAL vs. GRADUATION-COPY 1, 2, 3). It keeps the original safe. This is a big issue with smaller editor programs that frequently save right back over the original without even a warning in some applications. You mean you DIDN’T want to erase that one and only copy of your wife, son and mother on her last birthday before she passed? Oops, sorry about that.
While it CAN be devastating to the uninitiated, I’m not sure that’s as big an issue for me. I’m more anal retentive and I tend to keep originals in a separate folder and copy everything I’m working on somewhere else. That way if I need to blow everything off and start fresh, I can simply delete a folder of working files and grab another copy of the originals. The only downside for me is to remember to save incremental versions at key steps. I’ve done previous editing of astro photos where I did a whole bunch of edits and then saved, before I realized that I liked steps 1-3 in the way that I did them, but maybe step 4 should have had a slightly different tweak to the settings before I did step 5, 6, and 7. If I saved sequential versions of the file (rather than just continuing to save over even my working copy), I could just delete everything after step 3 and jump back into my process. In an editor like GIMP, some of that is avoided as many “tweaks” or “changes” are actually done in layers. If you don’t like what you did on layer 3, fix it, and then go back to layer 7.
I confess I’m not a giant fan of GIMP’s interface for saving. My preference is almost always to simply give me the Windows File Explorer-type interface rather than something “unique”, but GIMP’s is a bit closer to other graphical interfaces that want to give you certain types of folders first to help you stick to a better photo-processing process and avoid glitches. However, in doing so, it makes it harder to just easily browse amongst your traditional folders. They do have a “recently used” option though, and that works well enough most of the time.
SAVE vs. EXPORT
Another part that doesn’t really excite me is that like many of the editors out there, GIMP assumes that when you are “saving” the file, you want to save it as a project file and, well, ONLY a project file. If you’re doing something really simple like cropping, you may not even need to save the project file, you can just make the edits and save it as a PICTURE.
However, the point of using an editor like GIMP is the power to do more complex stuff, and this is often accomplished using layers. In a project file, you might have three different “layers” in the image — a background layer, some image, and perhaps some text over top. When you SAVE it as a project file, it saves the file with all three layers kept separate within the file so if you want to edit later, you can just open it up, select a layer, and edit away (such as changing the text). If you save in JPEG, which doesn’t handle layers i.e., it is all just “one layer”, then when you open it up, you can’t edit a piece and regenerate, it’s already all merged. Put differently, the “picture” that was behind the text is GONE from the image, just the text shows up…the background overwritten by the image is also GONE from the file. If you went in and edited one piece, it would be like moving a jigsaw puzzle piece, there would be a gap after you moved it.
In other words, the layers in a project file are used to GENERATE an image, rather than being the actual image itself. Sort of like a recipe card for all the pieces you have, and if you tell it to MAKE A PICTURE, so to speak, it will. This makes sense, that’s the point of using a graphics editor with the power of GIMP or PhotoShop rather than something simplistic.
Yet you may not always want to save in project format. In any other application, say WORD, sure, you want to save in WORD format 95% of the time. But if you want to switch to saving a PDF, you just do a normal SAVE AS, change the file format, and bob’s your uncle, one new file format handled.
More sophisticated graphic editors want you to clearly understand these are really two totally different functions, not just one with a slightly different file format. So they separate PROJECT saving from IMAGE saving. As such, project files use SAVE / SAVE AS; image files require you to use EXPORT.
I find it interesting that the tutorial I have seems to suggest that SAVE AS will let me do both SAVE or EXPORT with a single interface, and that if I choose something that doesn’t support layers, it will prompt me to EXPORT instead of SAVE. I’m using a newer version of GIMP than the tutorial did, and that is NOT what is shown on my screen, they are clearly separate now. Too bad, as I’d prefer that flex. However, as I said, it IS a developer philosophy question, there’s no perfect right answer, and separating them DOES ensure you won’t lose all your work saving it in the wrong format. If you save it as the default project file, you can always generate the graphic file later; if you accidentally saved it as a graphic file, you couldn’t easily recreate the project file from it.
GIMP uses XCF as its default extension for a GIMP project file aka the photo you’re working on, although I’ll have to look to see if there are other project formats to save to, perhaps ones that would import better into other editors (like PhotoShop). That might be more of a script plugin, I don’t see it by default. It won’t matter much for me, other than in the opposite direction. There are some examples out there where people tell you how to accomplish something in PHOTOSHOP for example and provide a sample file to work with, but I might want to try to import it into GIMP instead. It’s unlikely I’ll go in the opposite direction since I don’t have PhotoShop and I’m unwilling to pay their subscription model.
Which is why I’m using GIMP in the first place. 🙂
What I learned today
I learned how to work GIMP’s file manager interface and to differentiate between SAVE for project files and EXPORT for all the graphical/image formats. Being able to process regular and astro photos seems a very long way away.
As some of you know, I’m into astronomy. Although if you base it on how often I have gone out in the last two years, it seems like I’m an equipment hoarder more than an amateur astronomer.
And built within some of that work is a light interest in astrophotography with my smartphone at the scope more so than using a full WebCam or DSLR. I’m willing to play with both to get them to work, mostly to understand it all, but I want “less equipment” not more, and some of the hard-core astrophotographers have scopes, mounts, tripods, cameras, eyepieces, filters, tables, chairs, laptops, cables out the wazoo, power cords, storage devices, shields so the light from the laptops don’t bother other astronomers, etc. etc. etc.
But even with Smartphone Astrophotography, you do still need some options to process your images. Lots of stuff happens with video converters or stacking software, that’s a whole stage in and of itself, but once you get to the “image”, you frequently need to manipulate it. The people with deep pockets or someone else paying use PhotoShop. Some buy PixInsight, I splurged on a copy of Nebulosity at one point. Many of the processing programs are free.
Yet if you are looking for a photo editor that is pretty powerful, you’ll likely be a bit surprised to find that there is one that is totally free.
Enter the GNU Image Manipulation Program – GIMP
So, yes, GIMP is free. Ignore the Linux naming convention, it works on almost any platform imaginable, including Windows, and it has power that some feel rivals even Photoshop at times. All the great things for image manipulation AND it has abilities to do layers, so what’s not to love?
Well, the part that is not to love is that it is NOT the most wide-used program on the market and while there may be 1000s of training videos out there on how to do anything and everything in PhotoShop, so much so that Photoshop crossed over into being a verb long ago, GIMP is not as popular. I have found a few free books out there, some basic tutorials, the original tutorials that go with the software, and some tips and tricks here and there.
But I know it can do AP work — one of our local astronomy club experts teaches a course on image processing, and because it is free, last time he showed everyone how to do it in GIMP. Sweet. And, I’m not just interested for AP, I do take regular photos too that I want to occasionally tweak. I have a couple of photos that I’ve accumulated in the last 10 years where it’s a great photo, if say the shirt didn’t have a big stain on it. Lots of people know how to use image editors to remove that type of error. GIMP, for example, will do that too.
I just have to find a way to learn it. Enter an online producer of GIMP tutorials.
God Save The Queen
A British woman apparently has taught courses in using GIMP to regular photographers, and since I need to know how to use GIMP generally before I dig into the lessons/approaches for astrophotography, she seemed like a good starting point. For $18 Canadian, or 10 pounds UK, I downloaded her complete set of GIMP tutorials. More than 250 of them, in fact. They are all about 9-15 pages each in PDF format, along with a raw photo to work on, and to work through the technique. Once downloaded, they aren’t necessarily set in a specific “course” order, they are in the order from her training courses…it seems like when she needed to show X or Y, she created a new handout for it, and they are sequentially numbered by her need, not by a learning order.
She has them classified into 5 different levels, so I spent some time tonight sorting them after extracting them from three ZIP files. I’ll probably need to sort them even further at some point, but for now, it’s a start.
Beginners: Ten tutorials in total, with three dealing with optimizing and saving images, colour models, and inverting colours, each of which sounds easy enough. There’s also one for a Cubism Filter and another for a Posterised Distressed Image. Yeah, I have no clue about those. I found five hiding in a sub-folder, so there are also ones about launching GIMP, patterns (2), understanding resolution, and even the rule of thirds.
Beginners Plus: Well that escalated quickly — there are 116! Adding borders, applying filters, playing with colours, distorting images, etc. The filters will likely be VERY similar across the board, although with different tips for each one about how / when to use it I suppose.
Intermediate: There are eighty-four at this level, with some cloning, cutting, custom brushes, a bit of blending or colour adjustments, and then a huge number of tutorials about different types of text patterns that you can do.
Intermediate Plus: There are forty-six of these ones, and most of them seem like “PhotoShop” as a verb — adding things, tweaking granular items like textures and blemishes or red eyes, etc. A bit more “creativity” is added as opposed to simply processing what was already there. I know, I’m a purist, and so while many people might not blink twice about adding falling snow to a winterscape, I would hesitate as it would never be real to me after that — if it wasn’t snowing when I took a photo, I’m not looking to “invent” artifacts to add.
Advanced: The final level only has eight tutorials, and I’m not sure I would classify them as advanced so much as specialized effects. There are some animated options for example, and even how to take a large photo to frame it as a triptych for printing and hanging. And one for creating a graduated navigation button which isn’t something I need on my website.
I am not totally sure this is the best way to learn GIMP, but it appears to at least be a viable way. So I’m going with it. We’ll see what I learn as I go…
A private investigator in L.A. investigates the death of her uncle, an old stand-up comic.
What I Liked
The main character, Mary Cooper, is an unfiltered voice in a world of serious investigators. Every line out of her mouth is practically a one-liner, and while that SHOULD grate on the nerves, it doesn’t. Just about everyone in the book is a comic, and the lines come fast and furious at different points. Once you buy into the premise, it’s quite enjoyable. I originally tripped over this story when it was shared online in a newsgroup, and I had no way of knowing at the time it was actually a nom de plume for Dan Ames.
What I Didn’t Like
There is a scene right in the middle where a bunch of guys basically go to rape Mary while wearing masks. Except their identity is relatively obvious to everyone except Mary, before and after the attempt, and the reason for their behaviour doesn’t even make any sense, at least not towards Mary. No to mention some stupid interactions with a police sergeant that keeps escalating, even though the cop is really ambitious and it’s going to blow up in her face, more Keystone Kops than by the book.
