This guy wants to Switch Back. :-) Its a pity, because of MS office being the most popular office software suite people are locked in to a not-so-good OS.

Finished reading Ring for Jeeves. I have reading a lot of Jeeves and Wooster books lately, this was a change. There was Jeeves in the book alright but they goofy bertie wooster was missing and it was a refreshing change.

Many people have complained that Wodehouse tends to repeat a lot of things in his stories. I do agree with that, he does repeat some incidents exactly in the same manner in many of his stories because he is reffering to the same incident. Also, in many cases its just his style that make his stories seem very similar and of couse in some cases a couple of phrases and analogies are copied as they are.

In Ring for Jeeves, I didn't find many such repeatation because the whole case was new (except Jeeves of course and a few references to Bertie). One of the paragraphs that I have read earlier is here :


Widowed owing to Clifton Bessemer trying to drive his car one night through a truck instead of round it, and two years later meeting in Paris and marrying the millionaire sportsman and big game hunter, A. B. Spottsworth, she was almost immediately widowed again.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had cause A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought that lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.


I liked the "confusion of ideas" stuff a lot..

I have been spending a lot of time reading
Macintosh Stories and Apple Videos..

VERY interesting stuff.. The 1984 macintosh launch video and advertise ments are just superb..

Fundoo predictions

Does this guy get extra salary from M$? John Leyden

I don't like word verification and I don't like spam. But I chose the lesser of the two evils and I have been using word verification for a couple of weeks now. What I fail to understand is 'why' blogger asks 'me' to verify a word on 'my' blog. I would think I can do all sort of automated spams in POSTS and why would I bother to do the same in comments. But blogger seems to think I would be interested in spamming my own blog and thus asks me to go through the despicable excercise of entering the random word.

Are you listening blogger developers? Puhhleeeze don't ask me for word verification when I want to reply to comments on my blog.

I spent the weekend in Lonavala and Khandala with Ninja and Machine. We started on saturday early evening. The original plan was to start in afternoon or morning (not early morning though) but I managed to put that off by cribbing about rain. After initial hiccups in finding Pune-Mumbai Highway we finally got there (on the highway that is). Only to regret coming out of our sweet home first. It was raining heavily and the roads were muddy. My last statement was false, we would later find out that the rains were not at all heavy, heavier rains were waiting for us in Lonavala, and when I say roads were muddy, I am not putting the picture clearly, there was mud all over, we just believed that there was any road there.

We reached lonavala and Machine wanted to get refueled, he is almost always running low on fuel, so we bought a couple of big packets of chips Update: a couple of big packets of chips and a small one; as ninja pointed out they were finished in fifty femtoseconds. As suggested by ninja again I need to take care when I write about the consultant's consistent contribution to chip companies! End Update. We thought that there were so many resorts and lodges it would very easy to locate on for overnight stay so we decided to explore. In the meanwhile we also bought some chikki and fudge. Lonavala is famous for chikki and one brand that is really famous is maganlal chikki, now there is a catch there. Nobody knows (atleast not the tourists) which one is the original, old & best maganlal chikki shop, because more than 50% chikki shops are maganlal chikki shops and all of them claim to be original and first branch. The ones who decided not to name there shops after this famous brand are also selling maganlal brand chikki so it hardly makes any difference.

I need not say Lonavala is a beautiful place. That has been said too many times by whoever has been there. It really has some breathtakingly beautiful scenery. Clouds resting on mountains is a very common sight in monsoon season. Uncountable number of waterfalls scattered all over the place make it all the more better to loaf around.

After a nearly two hour resort/lodge hopping spree we managed to see all sorts of accomodation from 500Rs. a night to 5000Rs. a night. The later one had complimentry discotheque and swimming pool. We finally took a 800Rs. A/C Deluxe Room.

Sunset point at Khandala was the first destination point in morning. Amazing place. The passing train gels beautifully with scenery at that point. We moved to Monkey Point and did some photography of fast moving clouds and stunning waterfalls. Bhushee (what's the correct spelling / pronunciation) Dam was our next destination. I have been to the Dam a couple of times earlier, I had a hard time going up because my knee was hurting and after reaching the top I gave up and didn't got further towards waterfalls. A soft roasted bhutta and lot of photographs concluded the visit :-)

Waiting to repeat this trip.

Finished reading the fyenman book, an interesting read. I have bought The Inscrutable Americans and The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. So HBP will have to wait more. Next book I am reading is Catch-22.

I don't understand it !

New JEE, I don't understand why this change is being made. And I don't like it..

Watched Salaam Namaste and Sleepless in Seattle, I am almost angry at myself for wasting my time, I could have read the Fyenman Book in the meanwhile..

First half of SN was 'superb'.. second half was painful.. last quarter was daaaayaa. I like Meg Ryan and most of her romantic comedies.. but sleepless in seattle was way too mushy for my liking..

If you have not seen SN.. go watch it, but make sure you walk out at interval..

Finished reading Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker. The book is written in a manner that is bound to disturb hindus. Some parts are inaccurate, a few inconsistencies.. but again I was forewarned. If it was not Ramayana, it might not have been a successful fantasy novel. But again, inspite of all this I am going to buy the next two parts.

Off to start "Surley you're joking Mr. Feynman!". Planning to buy HBP(I don't know what ET would want to say after reading this), Catch-22 and Inscrutable Americans next..