Virus in my hotmail

Yesterday (when I was probably out jogging), something entered my hotmail account and sent mail to I guess some or maybe all the people in my address book. The subject of the mail is "please do this" and it asks you to click on the link in the mail and that will get me and the recepient both a t-shirt. Well, ofcourse there is no t-shirt to get. I apologize (though its clearly not my fault at all) if you got that mail and wasted time in going to that link. Just a note of caution for future, I do not send such e-mails, and if I ever send, I do not send them without a personal note from which you can be sure that I have sent it myself.
nyways, this whole spamming thing atleast helped me get in touch with a couple of old friends who I had not mailed for long as they had also not mailed me for long which in-turn they probably did not do as I had not mailed them for long. (Did that just sound like something from HHGG??)

Job hunting days

My job hunting days are back. Its so hard to find that one perfect job, especially when u do not know what perfect is. Guess everything just gets boring after sometime. Maybe software itself is boring. Sometimes I wonder if I should have done something else, like being reporter, singer, dancer, voyager, pilot, or something more exciting than just sitting at the same computer everyday and blogging.

Italian movie weekend

Last weekend was Italian movie weekend, I watched 2 of them, "Life is Beautiful' and "The last kiss". Life is beautiful is pretty famous I guess, though I did not find too much great in it, except the story may have been heart touching if I was not concentrating so hard on trying to understand what people are speaking without reading the sub-titles. And guess what, I did understand parts of it, it was great. Italian is very similar to Spanish, most words are similar, conjugations are little different. Infact in the beginning of the movie when I did not know that its in Italian, I was wondering if I have forgotten my Spanish and cannot understand or it is Italian. Anyways, it was nice, maybe learning Italian would not be too much effort then.

What am I blogging

Well, today is the blogging day. I just wrote the reviews to two of my favourite book series at our site http://bookreviewsbyus.blogspot.com/ and now I am writing here. No, I am not jobless, umm, actually I am, but I have work. It was just that today I was doing some ego surfing earlier in the day, (for those who do not know, I was searching for Tulika Agrawal on google) and I found out that my blog does not even show up anywhere. So much for a great search engine. You will find all sorts of things I posted on mailing lists, even years ago, but not my blog. If you have any suggestion on how can I make google show my blog under my name, please leave a comment.

Harry Potter Series - J. K. Rowling

Today is the review day, since I just wrote review to HHGG, its also time to write long pending review to one of our (yes, rahul and I) all time favourite books. These are few books in which you get so much involved that its hard to put it down without reading untill the last page. Some people would say that these are for kids (also from the fact that in the library you get them in the Teen section), but those 'adults' are just denying themselves the pleasure of a ride into the fascinating world of Witches and Wizards. (!poor muggles!), rest you can find after reading the books.

A MUST MUST read.

The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Today I was going through this site and realized that I still have not written the review to one of the most interesting books I have ever read, The HitchHiker's Guide!! Not that its been very long since I have read the books, but I have been its fan since I first read the first few pages of the first book in the series, and that was back in India, in late 2001, when the book used to be available free to read online. I never found the online edition again. But thanks to the public library, I can read all the five books once again. For those of you who have not heard about the books, let me tell you that HHGG is of course sci-fi, one of the most creative sci-fi, it is so creative that it actaully sits at the border of being creative and being insane, bizarre. While reading the book, if at any point you start feeling that you have understood what's happening, my advice would be - read again, u probably misread something. If still you think that you understood the book, you are a creative genius.

Literally speaking, Douglas Adams is a great satirist (did i get that right?). You will see him mocking everything from current face of Sci-Fi to different cultures on earth. But everything is said in such a funny way that you cannot help laughing out loud even in a crowded bus. (ya that's where i did most of my reading)

A MUST read.

Vitamin C

My recent project is to research vitamin C. It seems to be the culprit behind my never ending cold (though it does not look like, suddenly after moving to SFO I got vitamin C deficiency!!). Anyway I am hoping that its this, rather than allergy as most people think that it is. What can I possibly have allergy from, SFO air?? Pollution, yah right, after spending years in Delhi and Pune, I get allergy from pollution in San Francisco. Maybe its fog, that is something new, except these days its exceptionally clear in san francisco. so....

August 24, 2004

Another boring day in office gone. I cannot imagine how people spend years here like this, maybe they work. Only bright thing in the day was visit to the farmer's market at fisherman's wharf. Its quite a place and the best part is that you can try out so many things, like different cheese, peaches and almost everything. First time I know that there are different types of cheese and they taste different and they are all very expensive. I tried some different type of hummas also today, they are the closest thing to chutney I can think of.

August 12, 2004

This is another of those saturdays I am spending on office by choice, doing nothing. Though I am not sure why. In the morning I was sitting in my rajai, all nice and cozy, not a thing to do in the world and reading Hitch Hiker's Guide and also contemplating if I should go back to sleep. What a dream weekend, then suddenly it struck me, why not go to office and them gym which is near my office. And here I am, after 1 hr of smelly bus journey, sitting in office, reading my 100 useless mails at orkut, yeah they still do not have a select all and delete button, someone knock some sense in those people.

Only Love - Erich Segal

Finally there is a story which is not nostalgic, not overly modern and futuristic. This book resembels a regular hindi movie story, love, passion, betrayal etc. etc. Its a nice bed time reading. Nothing thrilling or chilling about the book, no surprises, you can almost guess the story. But what makes this book good is the author, the way he presents such a normal story that it looks interesting and refreshing. According to me (like most other Erich Segal books) this is a worth reading.

Timeline - Michael Crichton

One of the classical sci-fi books about time travel (ooops, there is nothing like 'timetravel'). It does not take a IQ of 100 to guess that this book talks about people going back in time, visiting history. You will learn a lot (a lot, more than you would care to) about history of france, england, while you can also revise your fundas of quantum computing, relativity and some other modern things. Its a typical thriller, no mystery, but people fighting againt a deadline. Worth a look I would say. If history bores you, then it would be enough to just read first few chapters, before people actually go back and last few chapters.

August 4th, 2004

Its already August, and there are still 5 more moths I need to spend here, and then guess back on the roads. San Francisco is showing its true colours, its been drizzling, drizzling, foggy, cloud rain, cloudy and all that for more than a week now. Only on sunday did we get a little darshan of sun. I wonder how its going to be in winter. How can people spend their lifes in such climate, this is what I call gloomy (believe me, I do not think that Seattle is at all gloomy), when its cloudy, drizzly and extremely windy all the time, and on top of that the city is so crowded, that u have to literally look straight up to see any sky.

The Best Laid Plans - Sidney Sheldon

This book is somewhat a disappointment. I would have expected something more subtle and intelligent from Sidney Sheldon. I just kept waiting for that one moment in the book when u go, "wow! that's brilliant", especially since the title of the book itself talks about best laid plan. There does not seem to be any plan in the book and even after finishing the book, I could not decide who the main character in the book is. There are surprises, but they surprise you in a stupid way, its just too obvious. I would say if you want exciting, suspense novel, then do not waste your time on this one.

The Long Road Home - Danielle Steel

This is definately not a happy book to read, full of tragedies which even sound real. Makes you think a lot of things about life (atleast made me think). Made me somewhat gloomy too. Like most of her novels, this is also well written, no fancy stuff, its easy to get involve in the book. Still I would not say that its the kind of book you cannot put down before finishing.

Sewing machine and cold weekend

This weekend was I guess more full of activities then any I had spent in SF. I got the cold at the right moment, eod Friday, so Saturday I was down with that cold and remained in my rajai almost whole day, convincing myself that this is the best thing for me, and reading book. It was nice in a way. Sunday was little better, so I dared to go all the way to library and got a bunch of books. Came home and my land lady was struggling with her sewing machine. She asked me, do you know anything about sewing machines. Well, do I know anything, not really except seeing my mom making dresses for me every summer. But anyway, I wanted to help her, we looked at her machine, and I ended up spending 4 hours cleaning, trying to make it work, recleaning and retrying. We used all funds of mechanics to understand why it was not working. And what do I say, these complicated machinery of present day!! All we had to do was press a button, and boom! there you go :D

Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov

This is the 4th book in foundation series. This book is filled with even more bizzare concepts than the first three, and there are few things which are just beyond understanding or explaination. If you try to understand the book and why some things happen they way they do, you have to really stretch your imagination to the point where it can break and everything look like a hallucination. For the prople who loved the first three foundations books, I would say that if you have not read this one, you are surely missing something. If you want to start the foundation series with this book, then I would say, give it a second thought. Whatever the author says, according to me, to fully appreciate the book, you need the background. (unless ofcourse you have a out of the world imagination :))

Friday 23/7/04

End of another week in San Francisco. Nothing exciting happening this weekend, planning to sit in the public library and look at some spanish stuff. Recently I have been planning to get something new done with my hair, maybe a new style. That might also materialize this weekend, although according to me, summer is not at all the right time to change your hairstyle as you cannot hide behind a scarf. Still I think I'll give it a shot, at present there does not seem to be anything to loose ;)

The Foundation Triology - Isaac Asimov

This series of three books consists of Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. I am writing the review for all the three together as its hard to see these books separately. The official claim (which is I guess true) is that each book is complete in itself and you do not have to read the earlier ones to understand the later ones. But for me, I would say that it was hard to be satisfied with reading just one. I actually started the series with Foundation and Empire, but halfway through the book, I realized that I want to read the first book first. So I went to Foundation and then read all the three in order. These are one of the best Sci-fi books I have read. The books are written well, author gives you enough time to grasp all the concepts of space settlements, millions of world, gazillions of people, space travel, hyper-jump and what not. Though I was surprised by the absense of robots in these books, but maybe that was because I had been reading only the robot books of Asimov earlier. I would say that this is a must read for anyone interested in spreading humanity on other planets.

Mt Hood camping trip

I have written a account of our camping trip to Mt. Hood, columbia river gorge in Oregon this long weekend (july 4, 2004) at http://rahulandtulika.blogspot.com/
I still have to figurout how to upload the photos.

Tell Me Your Dreams - Sidney Sheldon

Just finished this one. An interesting reading, plot not very original, but there are definately surprises in the book. The main character suffers from multiple personality disorder, you can guess that after reading first few pages, though the author wanted it to come as a surprise at the end of first part. There is little dramatization which feels very unreal. In all a nice reading.