A while ago someone asked me: “How many books do you read till now?” and my answer was: a lot. So last year I decided to start counting the no of books I read by keeping a list of all the books I read starting on 26th Nov 2007.
Now one year later the book count is: 304 books read. (This doesn’t include the books that I started to read and then stopped. Though there aren’t a lot of them). I wanted to cross 365 but… I guess that’s a goal for next year.
If I wanted to calculate the aprox no of books I have read so far, I can do it. I started reading novels in 4th class and by the 5th I was going through the school library and the local library like crazy. Lets say that the year I started reading was 1991. That means that I have been reading for aprox 17 years. (Its a bit more but lets use this as the start because that was when I started reading regularly)
17*304 =5408
Its very likely that I have read more books than that because there have been months where I have read multiple books each day. (These were mostly during the school vacations.)
Thought I should share that with you… How many books do you read each year?
- Suramya
This week was interesting. Had a couple of deliveries at work (software. Not pregnancy related) so had to put in some long hours. The projects I am working on are really interesting and I am having a lot of fun. For obvious reasons I won’t be talking about the specifics of the projects but they are fun 
Over the weekend I watched a lot of movies. Some were good, a few I didn’t like that much. Quantum of Solace is a movie that falls into the second category. It felt like the movie had a lot of plot holes and it didn’t feel like a bond movie. The title song was really good and some of the fight scenes were decent but it wasn’t up to the usual bond movie mark esp. Casino Royale.
In addition I also saw the following:
1. Death Race: Loved the movie. Its a total switch your brain off action movie with lots of explosions/crashes and I loved it.
2. Mostly Ghostly” Its a kids movie by the Author of the Goosebumps series (R. L. Stine) about this kid who is trying to perfect a magic act and finds a piece of paper that has a catchy rhyme so he starts using it as a chant for his show. What he didn’t know was this chant was part of an actual magic incantation. He then meets the ghosts of two kids who help him wth his show in return of his help in getting rid of an evil ghoul.
3. Madagascar Escape 2 Africa: Its a good movie. A fun watch.
Other than this the week was pretty uneventful. Busy but uneventful.
- Suramya
Just realized that I haven’t uploaded new pics/stuff to my site since Jan. Ouch.
I blame it on lazyness and a new job. Plus having lots of good books to read
I do have a lot of pics that I want to upload but… I wish someone would go through the 7.2 GB of photos I have and update the photogallery on the site.
I also want to update the layout of the site. I think its about time I changed the theme of the site…
Lets see when I get the chance to update the site.
- Suramya
Feel pretty cheated right now… In all the sci-fi and fantasy books if a person falls sick suddenly and stays down for a week then when they get better they usually end up with some sort of power like super strength, physic powers etc… So far I haven’t found any new powers after the fever…
Telekinesis : Nope. Either the pen is stuck to the desk or I don’t have telekinesis… 
Mind reading : Nope. Unless no one around me thinks at all (A definite possibility given the way people
drive here)
Ability to fly : Nope. Don’t think if jumping off the bed didn’t work that I should try the roof
Super speed : Nope. Did manage to walk into the door when trying to super speed….
Magic : Nope. Unless my magic power is to sleep a lot…
Super Brains : Not sure… I mean I am smart enough already, how would I know if I got smarter :p
Invisibility : Nope. Though I am not going to try walking around naked anytime soon.
Ah well. Maybe the powers are still developing. Going to keep testing for other super powers. Will let you know if I find anything (maybe… )
- Suramya
As I posted earlier this weekend was a very hectic weekend. I have caught a viral infection (I think) with the associated high fever and complete body ache. I have been functioning by taking a Paracetamol every 8-12 hours to get rid of the fever.
On Sunday it was Tarini’s birthday but she was celebrating it on Saturday so I drove to Gurgoan. I left here at about 7:15 pm and it took me almost 2 hours to get there. So much for there being less traffic over the weekends. Was there till about almost 2 am and got home at 3:30 am. It was a very fun evening. Caught up with friends and basically just hung out.
The drive there and back was painful and if we weren’t such close friends I would have canceled without any doubt.
Sunday I spent working after taking regular doses of paracetamol. Lets hope tomorrow will be better.
My Back hurts, my eye hurts, my feet hurt. Actually let me put it this way, pretty much every muscle in my body is hurting right now and I feel feverish. This had to happen just before the weekend. *groan*. Taking a hot shower followed by paracetamol helped.
To top it all I get to work tomorrow so that we get two days off for diwali instead of one day which is great. But working over the weekend is painful.
My wireless card is still not working but the IT guy is supposed to come today to take a look at the laptop and increase the RAM on the system.
I got my new desk at home and am very happy with it. It looks nice and is very comfortable to work on.
well this is all for now. Will post more later.
- Suramya
I think I am cursed this year in regards to laptops.
In the past 6 months I have gone through 4 laptops. 1st was my old laptop then I used my Dad’s laptop for a while till I switched jobs and my company gave me a really cool laptop. It then turned out that it wasn’t powerful enough for my job so I got another laptop.
This one was one of the special edition laptops with a ‘designer’ cover (To me it looked like the cover was scratched) Other than the looks the laptop was really nice and it worked great. However a couple of weeks ago the cooling fan developed an issue and started making a lot of noise. At first it wasn’t that bad but in the last few days it got to the point that it sounded like a cement grinder working overtime.
So I gave it back to be fixed and I was given another laptop as getting it fixed would take time. Now this one is a great laptop with only a small problem. The wireless card doesn’t work… At home its not an issue because I prefer to be connected using the LAN but at work its a pain because I can’t walk around the office with the laptop when I need to show something to anyone. At first I thought that the issue was with a setting in Linux but then I had to boot into Windows to use GotoMeeting and I noticed that the card didn’t work over there also.
Now the guy is coming over tomorrow to look at the system. I hope he fixes it and that I won’t be given another new laptop. Its a pain to install/upgrade the OS again and then customize the look and feel.
Here’s to hoping for the best.
- Suramya
This weekend I flew down to Bangalore to fly a Microlight plane and celebrate Vinit’s birthday (but that’s another post). It was an awesome trip and I had a lot of fun.
On Friday I left the office at about 1 am and my flight was at 6:45am and I had to get there by latest 5:45 which meant that I had to leave home at 5am as the airport is about 45 mins from my place (depending on traffic). Obviously I hadn’t packed the night before so I had to get up at 4 to pack which meant I had about 2 1/2 hours of sleep. I flew Kingfisher so the flight was comfortable and the food was decent. I got there at 9:30 am and Surabhi and Vinit picked me up from the airport and we went straight to the airport for the flying lessons.
Vinit, Surabhi, Vinitha (The pilot) and me with our plane
Surabhi and Vinit had both already done one session of 1/2 hour each before I got there. When I first went up the weather had cleared so the instructor let us stay up there for an hour instead of 1/2 hour as initially planned. The visibility was very good and although the air was a bit turbulent it was good weather to fly.
The plane we were flying can stay up for ~3-4 hours and go to a max height of 10,000 feet. We only went up to 1,500 feet though and were traveling at 80 - 90 km/hr for the most part. The plane is very light as you can see in the photo below where the pilot (Vinitha) is pushing it out of the hanger to prepare for launch.
Vinitha pushing the plane out of the hanger to prepare for flying
I got to control the plane for a while and learnt how to turn the plane, go up/down etc. The control stick was super sensitive and most of the time we were moving the stick a couple of mm’s to control the direction. I even did 2 takeoff’s and one landing. The controls were very basic and minimalistic (see photo below)
Control Panel of the Microlight
After the hour of flying we went back to vinit’s place and I crashed for a few hours. Then we drove back to the airport for another round of flying. My flight was the last flight of the day as no flying is allowed after the sun sets. I got to see the sun set from an altitude of ~1000 ft. It was an amazing view. The best part was that this time we took out the doors of the plane (which were made of pexi-glass anyways) and so we were at ~1,000 - 1,500 feet with no door between me and a free fall back to earth. Then we did a couple of sharp turns and believe me when you are up there at a 60 degree angle looking at the earth below through an open door it gives you a thrill like few other things can. The view of Bangalore from up there was superb as you can see from the pic below.
Bangalore from the air
We finished our flying sessions with a last round of flying the next day. I was a bit worried that we would have to postpone the flight as it was raining earlier but by the time we got to the airport it had stopped. This time we flew through and above clouds which was also fun. Though I prefer to fly with a high visibility as its a lot more fun.
View of a Quarry from the air
I have about a gig of photos from the trip and I am in the process of sorting through them so expect to see some more pics in the photogallery sometime over the weekend.
This is all for now. Will post more later.
- Suramya
Three days ago one of my hard-drives decided it was time to stop working. The irony of the situation is that I was in the middle of backing up data off that drive when it stopped working. I was happily copying data from the disk to another system when I noticed that a couple of files weren’t copied because of read errors. At first I let the copy continue, then I thought let me run a disk check on the drive first and then I can copy data off. Bad Move.
Once I unmounted the drive none of the tools would recognize it and I couldn’t access any of the data on it anymore. I tried to make a disk image of the drive but even after letting the process run for 2 days it had only imaged 16 MB (The drive was 80 GB) so I cancelled it. If I had let the copy process run I guess I could have copied most of the data off it before it failed.
Now I can’t even get the system to identify the drive. I have a backup of most of the data so its not critical that I get access to the drive but its a good learning experience. So I am going to try freezing the drive and see if that will let me get the data off.
I will document my attempts and will share it over here over the next few days.
- Sur
This past month I have been purchasing a lot of new stuff and I am really happy with my purchases. The first major thing I bought is a new Phone, I am now the proud owner of a Nokia N95 8GB. I love the phone, it has a lot of cool features and there are a lot of applications that are available for it. Even the GPS is accurate and the built in maps also have Indian maps that are pretty accurate. I tried it while driving home from work and it showed my exact location on the map. The phone has a built in accelerometer that allows apps to get the orientation so after I installed a few apps it has most of the functionality of the iPhone (except the touch screen).
The second major purchase is a 1 Terabyte Harddrive (1024 GB). Now all my data is there on one drive that is mounted on my laptop using an external HardDisk enclosure.
Other than that I have finally bought a wireless router, mainly because Surabhi complained everytime she came over and because my phone has wireless and I wanted to play with it at home 
The last item was a fridge which just arrived today. I am really happy about this because the old one was ready to die.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
- Suramya