What I need to do today:-

1) Get envelopes for dispatching stuff. Jay, am sorry, someone booknapped AG, I got it back yesterday. Rulinian, you will get your stuff sometime this week, too.

2) Dispatch stuff.

3) Get plane tickets to Guwahati for myself and Psasi.

4) Apply for the PAN card.

5) Go and check if Daredevil:Yellow has finally arrived.

6) Send a crossed-cheque to my sister. (Now what on earth is a crossed cheque?)

Plus coding and Perf tests. Man……………

So there was this Cowboy Junkies track playing on Radio Paradiso yesterday morning, and it was so good that I couldn’t resist myself and went ahead and bought the Trinity Session album by the Junkies. And since there was a sale on, I got to pick another CD, and it was Sarah McLachlan’s Freedom Sessions. Not bad, eh? The Junkies album was recorded in a church, it seems, and it contains some haunting numbers, which sound awesome not just because of Margo Timmins ( What. A. Voice) but the…ambience, yeah I think that’s it, the songs have this ambient, laidback gospel-countryish touch to them. Haven’t listened to Sarah McLachlan much, but the songs are promising. Especially Plenty, a song that’s only vocals layered over one another.

Lara Croft:Cradle of Life sucked bigtime.

I couldn’t go to sleep last night, and I got tired of playing the same mission in GTA:Vice City over and over again – yacht racing’s just too tough, boss – so I decided to go clean the toilet. Which was beginning to resemble a…er….garden, with mineral deposits and all. Oodles of enthusiasm and much hard work later, I dropped off to sleep, It was 3:20 AM. The commode and basin weren’t exactly gleaming, but it was clean! Come by and tell me how you like it. ;-)

Woke up at 11:30, with absolutely no interruptions!!!! A modern-day miracle! Rishi made me breakfast at 12, as a token of gratitude. Possibly for not waking him up to indulge in my nocturnal enterprises.

Did the word “Frig” originate from Frigga, the Norse goddess of Love and Fertility ?

Waking up at eight in the morning, when you have promised yourself that under no circumstances you will do so before noon, is definitely not good cricket. (Good Cricket. Hah. Oxymoron!) Not on a Saturday. And I have this weird thing about sounds – I can sleep when there’s loud music playing – AC/DC, Sepultura, anything goes. Maybe I tend to wake up for a second if the music changes, you know, like when the Fleetwood Mac album just ended and Audioslave came up. but I cannot sleep when an alarm bell rings. Or my cellphone. Or the doorbell. Oh, yeah, those cars that play monophonic beeps of Fur Elise or Vaseegara when they are backing up.

Nothing much happened this week. Translated, this means – no, I didn’t buy anything, I didn’t make any major finds, I was working hard. Unless, you count GTA:Vice City, which has been keeping me awake until 2 AM every night. The only interesting thing that happened at work was the NFS tournament on the office LAN yesterday. I had insisted on a Q3 competition, but it seems racing attracts more participants. C’est la vie, and all that. I didn’t play. Was too busy configuring the pirated copy of NFS3 on the machines.

I seriously love my LJ-friends’ page. It’s like getting mails in my mailbox every morning, only the other person won’t stop mailing me if I don’t mail back. It’s kind of a selfish way of looking at blogs, I know, but what can I say? You guys give me my daily fix. Neil Gaiman chips in. So does Wired Magazine, with it’s daily RIAA-bashing.

Realisation of the week: Historical Fiction is so much better than Biographies. I never trust biographers. It’s usually somebody recounting the life-story of a person based on research and findings. OK, so if the person is somebody contemporary, the writer might actually go and talk to him and come to all kinds of conclusions that make him write a book about his conclusions. So eventually, the biography turns out to be not “an account of a person’s life”, as is the dictionary explanation, but a collection of conclusions based on available facts. That is, if the writer is a good writer.

Autobiographies are slightly better. You at least know, right, this is where the guy is fudging things a little to make himself look better, or – this is where he is in preachy-mode…..the problem with autobiographies start when you have a byline in the title. Something like “Why I am God” by Lucifer with Mephistopheles. You know what this makes me feel like? Conversations like –

M: Ok, so tell me something about your childhood.
L: Umm, well…..I ….umm…nothing too much..I remember school…a little bit of it….i was a good student…..er….I loved my parents….and….umm…..yeah, that’s about it.
M: (scribbles furiously) Rebel at school. Anti-Establishment. Problem with authority. Add Anecdotes.

That’s about it. Ghost-writers make me feel like the writing is all a dressed-up parody.

Actually, I was reading two books this week – one being a biography of George Lucas by a guy named John Baxter, and the other was Valerio Manfredi’s Alexander: Sands of Ammon. I absolutely hated the first one, but I think I will read it anyhow, I need facts, boss, and when I need facts, I can ditch writing styles and concentrate on facts. This book reminds me of the godawful things I have read or tried to read – the Biography of Lata Mangeshkar by Raju Bharatan, I kind of remember falling into a mindless stupor after the first 4 pages, the bio page of AR Rahman on every other fan website, in particular, an essay by some Cine Blitz writer.

The Alexander Trilogy is ab-so-freakin-lutely White heat. Ok, so maybe I am a little hysterical about books I like. I enjoyed the first part, and even though this wasn’t as compelling as Child of a Dream, it managed to get me to stick around. Inspite of being a translation. No pretentiousness. That’s pop culture for me. I hope I get the third book soon.

I am listening to this Winamp3 Radio station called Radio Paradise that’s playing one good track after another. Somehow, my office firewall doesn’t seem to block it. Bands like Counting Crows, Mandalay, Placebo, African Rhythm Hunters, Chemical Brothers, with Mark Knopfler, Janis Joplin, Inda Eaton popping up from time to time. Or the other way around.

Oh man, the song that’s playing now was the original of the Viju Shah number Halle Halle from Aar Ya Paar.

sucks.

Worse than the three Music Worlds put together.

Overheard a conversation between the manager ( a Bong guy with a pseudo-accent) and some bigshot. “Oh, this is just the appetizer, wait till you see the Main course when we open an outlet at Begumpet.” Yeah, right. Heard of something called a First Impression, dum-dum?

A vcd of Roja is now selling for 88 rupees. Man!

Reasons:-

1) With a normal book, I find it very hard to sit in one place and keep reading. I sit on my cane armchair for a while, and after a while, I decide that my ass hurts very much, so I shift to the chair on the balcony. Which gets pretty boring after a while because my back hurts, so I go to the bed. Five pages before I decide I need some sleep, so the book gets shoved under the pillow, and….

With an eBook, I keep staring at the monitor. It gets interesting after a while, so I can’t move. I HAVE to stay put if I want to continue. Ah! Masochism at its best.

2) Mood music. I don’t have to keep putting the book down and changing a cd or a track if I don’t like it. Alt-tab and B does quite fine.

3) Ctrl-F is really cool if I lose a thread, or I want to check on a character’s history.

4) Yes, I do have a great collection on my eBook cds. I can read anything I want, anytime I want, without moaning about the other books in the series stacked in Guwahati.

I don’t think eBooks will ever replace the real stuff, though. But it’s nice to know it’s there, all the same.

Reads:
Laurell K Hamilton – Guilty Pleasures : The first Anita Blake, vampire Hunter book. Definitely not mind-elevating stuff, it’s a cross between a hard-boiled detective story and a kick-ass vampire novel. Gory as hell. I really have to get started on the rest of the series.
Clive Barker – The Thief of Always: Very good children’s book, with sudden chills. My interest in Mr Barker’s work remains constant.
Rick Cook – The Wizardry Cursed: Not as much fun as the rest of the series, maybe because I have lost touch with the first couple of books. Should have re-read them before starting on this.
Quentin Tarantino – Kill Bill – The draft screenplay.: Whoa. This was cool. Please Mr Tarantino don’t delay the release dates.
TH White – The Sword In The Stone :Very different from what I had expected. This was supposed to be the Arthurian saga retold as a children’s story, and it’s really that way. Funny and quirky at times, with the Tolkienish habit of characters breaking into song at inopportune moments. There is a hilarious parody of the traditional joust, a staple feature in Knight-books, and White writes this with such a tongue-in-cheek flavour. But it drags sometimes….

Please somebody get me the Matrix:RevolutionsScreenplay before I die of suspense or OD on alternate theories. Or before Joel Silver makes an official announcement to Time Magazine and spoils everything all over again.

Sunday already!