Shift from regular practice

When I started off this blog, I had vowed that it would be a storage house for my abstract ideas. Since none have been forthcoming in the past few months, I have decided to start using this as a notes section. This is the first section - a beginning ... Sunday 23rd January, 2005 : I finally bought the iBook. It has been on my mind for some months now. The 12 in display was a little scary in the beginning, but I guess I am used to it now. Its been almost a week with my iBook and "I'm loving it!" Monday 24th January : The car is gone...sold! Buying and selling cars is kind of a difficult thing....when you buy you have all kinds of nagging worries - did I pay too much for it? does it have any problems that I do not know of? etc...but over a period of time you get aquainted with it and slowly start adapting to its performance, the small noices and the niggles that worried you initially, now act as a guarantee that everything is now OK with the car. Anyways, enough said on this. Some notes: This cannot be a diary...I hate writing diaries...they need you to be meticulous - about dates, about facts and details and I just cannot do that! So I will just write about things that came to my attention: Tibetan Sky Burial :http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~pamlogan/skybury.htm This was one of the hardest things for me to stomach. I had read of the Parsi funeral ritual where they allow the vultures to devour the flesh of their dead...but the Tibetan ritual is more systematic and rigorous. They actually make sure the body is completely disposed off using natural means.Foriegn witnesses are not allowed normally to such rituals, but exceptions are made now and then. Chess: Moving to a more "modern world" topic....I was reading up on some of the famous openings in chess. These chess players are really hard-working. I read somewhere that a Grandmaster's preparation for a tournament consists of devouring hundreds of chess books (mainly game logs of famous past games), discussion sessions with his "helpers" (who, themselves are International Masters in their own right) and massages!!! Tylenol, anyone? I will close this pathetic section here..seems like a decent start...will need to see how the follow up goes...