Deception Point - Book Review

I finished this epic 738 page book in less than 2 and half days which is probably the least time i took to complete a book, except one of the Robert Ludlum's books that i read, during my 10+2.
In short, Deception Point - is story about NASA's discovery of a meteorite in the Arctic ice shelf, which has a fossil of ET life and how the incumbent government uses this discovery to boost its image before an impending presidential election and how other secret US agencies have their own ambitions and vested interests.

Even though the pace of the book was very fast like a Hollywood motion picture, there are lots of illogical stuff in the book which is irritating because you can feel that author has researched a lot on the sciences or technology that is involved in the book like - meteors, ice, ocean creatures, special ops forces technology etc. A couple of examples would be - presidential contender debating a president's senior staff on CNN, daughter of presidential contender agreeing to brief the white house staff - the reason why she was brought in to do it and president himself requesting her to do that -is totally crap. Dan Brown could have done a lot better.
Well, it is no wonder all his previous novels were discovered only after he wrote "The Da Vinci Code" , otherwise probably no body would have really cared for his novels.

Dan Brown's next novel, "The Lost Symbol" is being released this September, 2009 - six years after he wrote da vinci code, hopefully he won't disappoint his readers.

Rating 2.5/5.0

A good "Monetize" idea

I was just browsing around reading NYT article on travel to NovaScotia and PEI and tumbled across this very innovative website which contains listings of accomodations in Canadian Universities during offseason which anybody can afford for accomodation or meeting purposes for a small fee.
Here's the website - http://www.connectoncampus.ca/resources.html
That's a very good use of existing infrastructure, which just lies around idle during the summer months when there is little to no activity. These kind of resources would be a boon to budget consious travelers or solo travelers or backpackers, who can take a break in clean place.
It would be really good, if some schools or colleges did the same in India, where in summer months there's absolutely no activity in schools - and backpackers to india would like to stay in a dorm/ room in these places than in a dingy room of a filthy hotel, in some shady neighbourhood.

An even more interesting (but i am pretty sure, not always) way to find cheaper temporary accomodation is this great idea called "crash on my couch" - http://www.couchsurfing.org/
In this website, people who have some spare space - couch or bed offers it to a traveler who needs a place to crash. Check the number of people offering a couch, all over the world! That's some amazing and ingenious idea.