The Old Man And The Sea

I've been worrying about too many things recently so I decided I should take my mind off things by doing some light reading. So I borrowed the Old Man and the Sea from a friend and it looked like a very small and easy book. IT WAS ANYTHING BUT EASY AND LIGHT. I really wonder whether I was in the right mindset to appreciate the whole book, but I did like it and learned some interesting things. Like for example

'Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.'
'I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland'
'Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago'

I realise now how close I was to fearing the Reds and the White Sox.

The Internet

The Internet is a truly amazing and powerful place. One cannot imagine doing any literature survey without google scholar (yeah! I love google) or Citeseer nowadays, at least in computer 'science' (I'll tell a story about it sometime). I thought that the Internet reached a new high with Wikipedia, with thousands of articles in various languages. The concept of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit is a very revolutionary idea, and according to Nature magazine the accuracy of Wikipedia is comparable to that of Britannica. But I realised the true power of the Internet when I chanced upon the Uncyclopedia! Why thousands of people from all over the world would bother to create a parody of the Wikipedia, where the only rule is that the articles have to be funny, is beyond me. I guess the real power of the Internet is, like they say about Democracy, with the people, and it is actually true in this case.

As an example, here is what the two have to say about Democracy:
Wikipedia
Uncyclopedia

Google

I am really impressed by Google's services and features, especially its user interface. I wrote this post in google docs and the features like spell check, fonts styles, revision control, auto-saving and collaborative editing are really amazing. It even has a dictionary for adding new words to the spell checker. Even Blogger-Beta is pretty cool, sure it goes down sometimes but the features are really nice. And all this with one gmail account! I have been trying to get people to use these by sending invitations to gmail, but they all say, "So what! Its just another FREE email service". But they don't know! Gmail has almost unlimited storage, at least for how much ever you will be needing, in-browser chat, and lots of other cool features. I am slowly shifting all my Yahoo! services like photo album, groups and mail to their google equivalent like picasaweb, google groups and gmail.

A low trick

I was given A Game of Thrones as a gift by my friend and I feel that it was a very low and dastardly thing he did. I mean, this humongous (around 800 pages), un-put-down-able, compelling fantasy fiction is just part 1 of a 4 part series, and now that I've finished reading it (now I have all of last week's work to be completed), I just have to have the rest. The best thing I liked about the book is that it is strangely a story about men and not about elves and orcs and the rest, like the usual fantasy fiction.

In other news, a new bookstore has been started in campus and now I don't have to go outside campus anymore. Guess given a couple more years, I won't even be able to find my way back from Adyar.

One more thing, if you have time to read all this, then you should definitely read this. It is one of the funniest blogs I've come across.