Update, Books and more

Been a long time coming, I know. But life has been madness and with no proper computer to get onto the net (and now no net connection either) its been tough!

My laptop is as good as dead. Backlight of the screen has gone phut, the battery has been dead for months and now the place where the power adapter plugs into the computer is loose, so if you jog the computer a bit, poof, it goes off. After one such incident, I guess some data on the hard disk got messed up, so it refuses to boot up, I get an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” and a blue screen from Windows. So there you have it. Luckily I have a Knoppix CD, so I hook it up to the network at college and copy stuff off it slowly. Then I can go ahead and wipe the disk and begin the slow process or reinstalling everything again just the way I like it.

In other not so bad news, I went home to Bangalore for a three week vacation. Did nothing but sleep a lot and eat home-cooked food! Yum! I also picked up a number of second hand books.

House of Sand and Fog is a beautiful movie starring Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly and Shohreh Aghdashloo. I had seen it last summer and I found a copy of the book written by Andre Dubuis III. It’s brilliantly written in the first person for both protagonists. A really good read.

Next on the list, Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir, a well written memoir of his years in Africa studying baboons.

I also finally got my hands on Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I’ve read other books by Sacks’ and quite liked them, especially An Anthropologist on Mars, so this was a good find.

There were more books, but maybe I’ll leave that for another blog post!

More news, I finally moved out to a place of my own in Bombay. For the first time in my life (and none too soon, I might add) I’m living entirely on my own. It’s been just three days, so nothing exciting happening yet! 😉 But I’m facing a number of problems, like what furniture should I get? Where am I going to keep all my books? And dammit this city is dusty! And oh yes the water problems in the neighbourhood which means I have no water at home today and have to go to a friends’ home to take a shower! 🙁 But I’m hoping these are small wrinkles that will iron themselves out.

Yes, pictures on Flickr will be put up as soon as I get a decent link and a computer to transfer pictures from camera to computer. I’m planning a before and after set for the apartment! 😉