Feed"William Shakespeare and His Dramatic Acts" is a book written by Andrew Donkin in the "Dead Famous" series. It is a great little book that is very well-researched and packed with loads of interesting nuggets about Elizabethan England.
News Archive for 2005
[2005-11-07] "William Shakespeare and His Dramatic Acts"
[2005-11-07] Ooty
Anusha and I are back from our vacation to Ooty, the highest (~2,250m above MSL) hill-station on the Nilgiris range of mountains. It is also known as Ootacamund, Udhagamandalam or Udhagai.
[2005-09-29] "Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince"
The sixth book in the Harry Potter series also manages to keep one interested throughout. It has a rather sad ending though and, unlike the previous books, doesn't achieve "closure" (in my opinion, also shared by Ananth) - one longs to read the seventh book to find out what happens to Harry after the terrible tragedy. Be that as it may, I would still highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read this volume yet.
[2005-08-15] Shivanasamudram
Anusha and I have just come back from a conducted tour by K.S.T.D.C. of the waterfalls in Shivanasamudram.
[2005-07-31] Progress
In recent times, I have been quite impressed by the progress shown by some of the government units in making the lives of the people much simpler.
[2005-07-15] "Foucault's Pendulum"
Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" is another of the books recommended to me by Yumpee. Any novel that features a complete program in BASIC for generating all the permutations of the letters of God's name in Hebrew ("Yahveh") has to be interesting.
[2005-07-15] "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"
Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a delightful read about using punctuation correctly in English sentences.
[2005-07-15] Bhopal
I have come back to Bangalore after a two-week vacation in Bhopal. It is the city where I grew up and where I stayed till I went to college. I was visiting Bhopal after a gap of nearly 4 years.
[2005-06-21] "A Heap of Broken Images"
We watched this play by Girish Karnad in Ranga Shankara today. Arundhati
Raja plays her part to near perfection and the way the story unfolds
is really nice. It has been a while since I saw a good play. Heartily
recommended. A nice bonus was that Srikanth got to talk to and shake
hands with Tamil superstar Rajnikanth and Anusha got to talk to Arundhati
Raja.
[2005-06-07] "Holy Blood Holy Grail"
"Holy Blood Holy Grail" (HBHG) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, was published in 1982 and contains a lot of the interesting hypotheses that appear in "The Da Vinci Code" (TDVC), down to the breaking of Sangraal to either read "Holy Grail" or "Royal Blood". I think I would not have been so gripped by TDVC had I read HBHG before.
[2005-05-15] "How to Solve it"
"How to Solve it" is the classic book on problem-solving by G. Polya that shows how to approach and attack problems in a way that you are ultimately able to solve them as well as verify your solutions. Polya provides heuristics for mathematical problems but I think the approach applies quite well to problems in other domains as well.
[2005-04-22] "The Rule of Four"
"The Rule of Four" is a novel written by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason that revolves around cracking the code in the 500 year old obscure book "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili".
[2005-04-22] DataOne
I now have a 256Kbps broadband connection with BSNL's DataOne. It's a bit
erratic in connecting, but is good when connected. Detailed
comments from me on this service can be found elsewhere.
[2005-03-27] "Myst IV: Revelation"
Anusha and I have finished playing "Myst IV: Revelation", the latest in the Myst series of games. The game is heavy on gorgeously beautiful content and lots of in-game action by live actors and it shows - it comes on 2 DVDs and you need a minimum of 3.5GB of free disc space to install the game and around 8GB for a full installation!
[2005-02-13] Aero India 2005
Yesterday we went to see the Aero India show, a biannual show and trade fair held in Bangalore for aircrafts and related technologies, inviting participation from some of the bigwigs of the global aviation industry. The drive was painful and unduly long and the Air Force Station in Yelahanka was windy and quite dusty, but was it all worth it!
[2005-01-26] Goa
To celebrate our first anniversary, Anusha and I went to Goa for a short trip.
[2005-01-08] "Angels and Demons"
"Angels and Demons" was written by Dan Brown before he wrote his bestseller novel "The Da Vinci Code". As such it shares the same protagonist Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a plot revolving around medieval Christian mysteries. The story is about an ancient brotherhood named Illuminati and its alleged attempt to blow up Vatican City using antimatter.
