Changi Part Deux

And I'm back at the Changi airport, where I have a nine hour stopover. Had a refreshing shower, now look forward to meandering aimlessly among the shops and restaurants.

Movies watched on the flight: Elf, I Heart Huckabees and Cellular.

Return

Muahahaha! I return tonight!

Movie watched in San Jose: Jesus Christ Superstar.

Best in Translation

I'm sorry for poor , but I haven't been able to stop laughing after reading this.

Hotel, California

Right. Uneventful flight, slept a bit. Now all I need is to sit back and wait for sleep to hit.

My boss's boss wants me to meet him for breakfast tomorrow at 700am. Hope they don't serve waffles here, har har.

Movies watched on the flight: A Shark Tale and Love, Actually (sopping and melodramatic, but sentimental fool that I am, I liked it)

At Hong Kong now

Update from the airport at Hong Kong: it's 9 o'clock and all is well. Miss Sindha and Rachu like crazy, though.

Movies watched: we don't live here anymore, a third of Malena and another third of A Shark Tale (tripe)

After noon

It's almost 3pm now and I've slept well, had lunch and spent quality time with a good friend. What more can one want?

My flight leaves in another couple of hours. I plan to stroll across to the Cofee Bean and have the highly recommended espresso. Maybe read a bit of Chricton's State of Fear, though I fear it will suck.

Movies that I copied over to my laptop but haven't watched yet: Malena, High Fidelity, Yojimbo and The Dreamers.

Movie that I saw on the earlier flight from Bangalore: The Motorcycle Diaries.

Changil ninnum

So here I am at the Changi airport in Singapore. The time is now 4am. The transit hotel will not give me a room till 5, so I have about an hour to kill. There is a security guard with a machine gun standing behind me, asking me for my passport and boarding pass. He quickly scans my documents and gives me a onceover. I pass muster, thankfully.

The internet kiosk offers free internet for just 15 minutes: my time is almost up.

Talk about Live journal. Sheesh.

Raincoat

Tired reworking of Gift of the Magi. Pretentious twaddle.

Shaun of the Dead

Brilliantly made. Doesn't quite fit the spoof category; it stands on its own as a movie.

Chathikaatha Chanthu

Unfunny. Not even close to funny. Not even in the same continent as funny.

Blogging as usual

After a few weeks of being blase about blogging, we are back to our regular programming.

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I leave for San Jose on Sunday night. Will be passing through sunny Singapore, where I have a day to kill and a date to kill for. Will be back in Bangalore on the 31st.

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Had a good laugh watching Ju-On the other night. Sorry, ! I guess I'm too old for all this now.

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Dean Koontz once wrote a book called 'How to Write Bestselling Fiction'. While I don't rate Koontz very high as a writer, I thought he made a few good points. One that stuck with me was that a good book should always immerse the reader in the story so much that the reader shouldn't realize he is reading a book at all.

Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla starts off by dragging you deep into the story. Obviously inspired by Seven Samurai and other such epics, it does a fairly decent job of keeping the reader occupied. Occupied and happy till the last couple of pages, when King slaps you twice across the cheeks, pours cold water on you and jolts you awake, yelling "Hey, wake up, dummy! You are reading a book! Muahahahaha!". Jackass.

I'm not looking forward to reading Song of Susannah now, though I know I must. Ka.

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The office serves free lunch on Fridays, usually ordered from a nearby restaurant. The food is a mix of non-vegetarian and grass-roots fare and is almost always yummy. A co-worker brought his own lunch today, though. He told me it was to protest against the Benny Hinn event in Bangalore. No, seriously. He felt that he would be supporting the show if he ate the food at work, so he stuck to puliyogare and curd rice.

I think I'll pack up and go home now.

Movie star pose. 

Evening at Lalbagh 

Everytime we say goodbye

It's tough having your heart broken every day. It's tougher when you are just a year and a half, trying to understand why your father drops you off at a strange place each day. You know you can't do anything about it, you know your parents need to get to work on time, you know it, it happens every day.

So you don't create a fuss, you don't yell and scream, you don't puke all over the vehicle like your father did when he was three times your age and dragged to school. You just gather up all the courage in your tiny little heart and wish your father goodbye. You can't stop the downturned lips and the look in your eyes, though. And you just cannot stop the break in your voice each time you say goodbye.

Cooling our heels. 

Chintavishta. 

Twisting by the pool 

At Shivanasamudram 

Let there be light

And thus the photo blog was born.

Another tech question

I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive, maybe about 80GB in size. Read somewhere that a clever option would be to buy a USB case which can take an internal disk drive. This would not only be cheaper, but also gives me the option of plugging in a dvd writer or other devices into the case later on.

What do you think? Suggestions? Brands?

This journal is fast turning into a classified ads section

2004 lists

Books Read in 2004:

1. Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
2. Fat ollie's Book - Ed McBain
3. Nobody's Perfect - Anthony Lane
4. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
5. Pather Panchali - Bhibutibushan Banerjee
6. And Now Let Me Sleep - PK Balakrishnan
7. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
8. The Simoqin Prophecies - Samit Basu
9. The Saint Goes On - Leslie Charteris
10. Sadie When She Died - Ed McBain
11. India Unbound - Gurcharan Das
12. Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
13. Disgrace - JM Coetzee
14. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (re-read)
15. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
16. Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk
17. Different Seasons - Stephen King (re-read)
18. Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss
19. Tricks - Ed McBain (re-read)
20. Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here - Ed McBain (re-read)
21. Peter Pan - JM Barrie
22. Ten Plus One - Ed McBain (re-read)
23. Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code - Eoin Colfer
24. Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett
25. Hogfather - Terry Pratchett
26. The Truth - Terry Pratchett
27. Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando
28. Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel - Scott Adams
29. Sleepers - Lorenzo Carcaterra
30. Christine - Stephen King (re-read)
31. Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett
32. On Writing: A memoir of the craft - Stephen King (re-read)
33. The Frumious Bandersnatch - Ed McBain


And the best of the lot: Disgrace - JM Coetzee.


Movies watched in 2004:

1. Gangs of New York
2. Munnabhai MBBS
3. Ek Hasina Thi
4. Adaptation
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
6. Election
7. Khakee
8. Maqbool
9. Minority Report
10. Airplane! (re-view)
11. No Man's Land
12. Sethuramaiyer CBI
13. Nandanam
14. Soothradharan
15. Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon
16. Y Tu Mama Tambien
17. Pi
18. Mitr-my friend
19. Pirates of the Caribbean
20. The Italian Job
21. Hulk
22. Main Hoon Na
23. Thoovanathumbikal (re-view)
24. Aayitha Ezhuthu
25. Almost Famous
26. Silent Movie (re-view)
27. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
28. Lakshya
29. The African Queen
30. Pattanathil Sundaran
31. Kal Ho Na Ho
32. Caged Heat
33. My Cousin Vinny (re-view)
34. Spider-man 2
35. Fahrenheit 9/11
36. Peeping Tom
37. Stepford Wives
38. Where's Poppa
39. Kill Bill Vol. 2
40. The Village
41. Dodgeball
42. Troy
43. Terminal
44. A Time To Kill
45. Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
46. A Shot in the Dark
47. Collateral
48. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
49. Ricordati di me
50. Swades
51. Hulchul
52. Battle Royale
53. Ju-On


Best of the lot: Peeping Tom.

LJ to be sold?

Read this on 's journal. Six Apart to buy LiveJournal!

Happy New Year

Keep smiling. That's all. Just keep on smiling.