www.nickhodge.com

Wow! We’ve just been through the Cre­at­ive Suite Road­show demos. There’s going to be a little bit of fun sprinkled into a whole lotta con­tent. Each applic­a­tion has so much new “stuff” it is becom­ing dif­fi­cult to fil­ter out what we are going to show. Roll on Can­berra on Thursday.

A great art­icle on remov­ing digital noise in digital cam­era images. For some Pho­toshop plu­gins Noise Reduc­tion Tools Com­par­ison.

Bomb blasts near the Gate­way of India — I was stand­ing at this pos­i­tion in Septem­ber 2002. Along with two Indian col­leagues, we ate at the Taj Mahal hotel right across from this landmark.

Night shot of the Gate­way to India

Hotel Taj Mahal in the rear of the photo

A crazy week in the US later, and home again. Some­where in the last week, this site reached 200000 page views. Back to work tomorrow.

All sorts of cool tech­nical Adobe stuff

Five days. Can­berra, Sydney, Mel­bourne, Adelaide, Perth. Tired.

Arrived home Sat­urday. Fly to Bris­bane Sunday for 4 days.

I miss my fam­ily. And my MINI. In that order. 14 hours in eco­nomy from LAX to SYD, and accord­ing to Qantas last night — the flight is at 100% capa­city. Oh joy oh bliss.

The Taj Mahal. Not an easy place for a tour­ist to get to, but worth the trip.

Murphy’s Law. The part of the Mel­bourne Qantas Club that has good sig­nal strength for Skynet­g­lobal is the part without power.

Now in Sydney, watch­ing the sun rise over the CBD. Thanks to Qantas, got a late-stage upgrade to busi­ness class. Watched A Beau­ti­ful Mind, and slept for about 10 hours on the flight. In Sydney for all of three hours, then off to Auck­land, New Zealand.

Now in cool, win­tery Auck­land, New Zea­l­and. Some 30 hours after leav­ing San Jose, California

As my host­ing pro­vider is adding some level of Java sup­port soon, and its a lan­guage that is becom­ing increas­ingly “hip” at Adobe, I’ve installed Tom­cat 4.0 ready to rock and roll. The last time I ser­i­ously touched Java was back in my Apple days with WebOb­jects 4.0. It feels like get­ting back into a pair of com­fort­able shoes.

Another day, another flight. The plan: 2 hours at San Jose “inter­na­tional” air­port. 1 hour flight San Jose to LAX. 5 hours lay­over. 14 hours LAX to Sydney. 3 hours lay­over. 3 hours Sydney to Auck­land. Total = 29 hours “on the road”. Yes, sports fans, jet­set­ting is a glam­or­ous life­style of the rich and fam­ous. And what makes it worse: I have about 467,000 Qantas Freaky Flyer points — and its impossible to do any­thing with them.

For those in New Zea­l­and, I’ll see you at Print­tech 2002. You will find me at the Fuji-Xerox stand doing mini-training courses on InDes­ign 2.0.

I love vis­it­ing New Zea­l­and. It has to be the most beau­ti­ful place in the world. Thank­fully, I get to visit as a part of my job. When I told my friends at Adobe US I “was off to NZ” after this visit to the US, they were all amazed… Kia Kaha!

Ok, this is cool­ness. Sit­ting in the ter­minal @ San Jose Inter­na­tional Air­port — wire­lessly online and able to send emails. Alan Rosen­feld and I are now so sick of the musak we’ve got our head­phones on and are doing work. Alan is listen­ing to African music wish­ing he was still on hol­i­day. I am listen­ing to Neil Finn — to get into a NZ mood. Sat­urday in San Jose, Monday in Auckland.