Happy New Year 2013

Happy New Year 2013

Happy New Year 2013
Wishing you and your family a Happy New Year
Open a new book today.
Forget all your worries and welcome 2013!
A new year has come with
New Expectations,
New Opportunities,
New Challenges,
and a whole new way of delighting people related with you

Have a happy life ahead!

Mayan Doomsday Prophecies: A Hoax

Mayan Prophecy (Image via Social Network Asia)

21.12.2012 MAYAN PROPHECIES A HOAX !!! Though the Mayans were very advanced and made solid astronomical observations, there was never any doomsday prophecy made. This has been confirmed by genuine Mayan scholars. The Mayan calendar (like all calendars) had to end somewhere. Not only does it end, but it begins again in a new cycle, just as your calendar ends on December 31 and begins again on January 1.

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Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium Mac Review

Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium
Mac (Image via Amazon aStore)

If you're serious about production and design for the web, then the Adobe products are pretty much where you can expect to spend your life. Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium is a good balance of capabilities for the price, including Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, InDesign and more. Thanks to Amazon's absolutely fantastic pricing, I was able to get off the month-by-month rental Adobe offers, and take ownership of my own copy.

The software is quite large and needs a fairly heavy-duty machine to work best. My 27" iMac with a 3.4Ghz quad-core i7 processor, 1TB solid-state drive and 16GB of memory is blindingly fast with most apps, but only "okay" with some of the more complex PhotoShop filters. Some of the blur and sharpen algorithms can take 15-20 seconds on my system. I do a lot of serious photography, and driving my Epson R3000 with PhotoShop seems to produce (very) slightly better looking prints than any other app I've used, including older versions of PhotoShop - I guess this makes all the resources worth it.

I tend to use PhotoShop and Dreamweaver more than the other apps, and the CS6 upgrade was a major difference for me and definitely worth the upgrade from CS5. I admit to having a bit of a "love/hate" relationship with PhotoShop - I know what it can do, but I tend to spend way too much time searching for just the right tool and outcome I want. No different from previous versions of PhotoShop, for all the power of these products, Adobe certainly could use a few lessons in user-experience design.

There's a whole community of add-on apps for PhotoShop, and I'm happy to report that most of the ones I tried, especially the Nik Software ones, worked flawlessly with CS6. To me, this would have been a deal-breaker, so I'm glad things just seemed to work.

To be clear, while these are some of the industry's most powerful apps for web design, they aren't really best for the casual user. It can take months to master each of the capabilities in this suite, and unless you're willing to put in the time, you'll probably find yourself overwhelmed. Adobe has a very good trial program where you can try before you buy - definitely take advantage of it if you're not sure what you're getting into.

Still, with the right commitment, the rewards can be stunning, world-class web sites, beautiful photographs, compelling documents and so forth...


Article Source:
http://www.amazon.com/review

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Review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

The Casual Vacancy
(Image via Amazon aStore)

I think plot details have been reviewed pretty well by this time, so I'd like to comment on the characters.

What I have always loved about Rowling's writing is her ability to create characters that seem real. She knows her characters,she knows what to do with them, and she isn't afraid to let bad things happen to them. In this novel, she has dozens of characters to work with, and oftentimes background information has to be supplied and the actual plot suspended so that the reader can keep up with everyone. I personally don't mind because I find these characters absolutely fascinating, but the lack of action isn't going to appeal to everyone.

With many books it is very clear who the reader should be "rooting" for, since one character seems to stand above the rest morally or in talent. If you are expecting the same formula in this book you will be disappointed, because each character is deeply flawed, each with his or her own ugliness. My point is that there is no hero, unless you count the deceased Barry Fairbrother, and I even wonder about him. Again, I find this refreshing. It makes me irrationally annoyed to see so many bestsellers about a klutzy, yet otherwise completely endearing protagonist attracting all men within a ten mile radius. You will not find that here. Thank God.

The counterpoint to this is that each character is also endearing or relatable in his or her own way. With each shifting viewpoint (and there are many), new insights are revealed that make it easier to understand each character. It is a style that makes it hard to put the book down, since she never gives you all you want to know at once.

Other points: I'm a fast reader, and ordinarily I'd have knocked this out in a night, but I decided to stretch it out over a couple of days. I really think this helps for understanding the characters and their connections better -- if you don't get those, you won't understand the plot.

Also, many people are commenting on the use of strong language, sexuality, and rape. Personally, I think if you are going to write about problems in a small town and the people in it, these things almost beg to be addressed. That Rowling did not avoid them speaks to her strength as a character writer; it doesn't mean, for example, that she's using four letter words just because she can't think of a better one.


Article Source:
http://www.amazon.com/review

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