Minority report

Hello again readers (if indeed there are any). I do not have much to lament about this week, as I spent the weekend at home for once. I thoroughly enjoyed not having anything to do, but since my sleep schedule is so messed up I went to sleep at the my usual times, which meant that I would be running down to the kitchen in the dead of night to find something to eat. I spent most of the two nights chatting online and listening to somafm.com. Somafm.com serves up on of the best chillout streams there is to be had on the internet. The mood it puts you into is almost surreal and I usually find myself feeling mellow, lonely, uplifted and floating at the same time. I’ve always been a sucker for complicate melodies. Anyway, last night I happened to catch the news conference held by the major English program broadcasters of sri lanka, not including the government owned ones. It was to protest the 150k an hour levy for English programming that they government is going to impose. They had some pretty strong arguments and I’m all for it. This government it seems has a knack for suppressing minorities, and it need not be limited to just ethnicity. English program viewers are one too and at this point I’m unable to identify their (government) motives. It may be for one of two things:

1. Mahinda needs more moneys to suppress the minority so this is just an additional (and effective, if it comes into effective) pipeline into the government’s war fund


2. Or, on the advice of the reds we’re going completely left and soon we’ll be like north korea.

Which ever it is, it’s going to mess this country up even more than it already is effective cut us off from the outside world. I mean who is to say that this will stop at television broadcasts? Next up might be radio, and then the internet. Don’t scoff, because you know you wouldn’t put anything past this government. I don’t know how many of you, or if any at all, watched the conference last night, but it’s a real eye opener and I call upon all of you to take a stand if and when it is required of us, because this is very real and it will affect each and everyone of you. Remember, a cancer starts off as just a small white lump and then spreads. And that is exactly what his government is to this country, it’s a cancer to us all and eventually we’ll all be consumed by it because those who are bothered to do anything about it can’t, and those who can are living in their pseudo elitist utopias oblivious to what is happening outside of their social circle. Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I bid all of you bon nuit.

Personal Reflection

This post starts off with a reality check; that being the fact that the civil war has returned and happy days are back again. On a more personal note, it seems that my social life has picked up a little too, since I basically spent every Saturday night of the last month out doing something, nothing as glamorous as clubbing at places with 500 buck entrance fees and 3k worth bottles of booze, but just hanging out with friends at their pads.

The latest episode was last Saturday when I was invited to a birthday party. The party kicked off the moment I parked the van, because unbeknownst to me, I had parked adjacent to large and disused pond and I opened the door and *kerplash*, I’d taken my weekly bath a day earlier than anticipated. We chatted for about a half hour or so and then began the boozing. And what boozing it was! OR was flowing freely for the better part of 6 hours, we must’ve polished off over 10 bottles (this was among 15 or so guy mind), and I took fancy to a bottle of wine I came across being served to ladies (yes a few were present), which tasted like alcoholic ribena. By this time the barbecue was in full swing too, so I must’ve hoarded an entire chicken and curled up in my corner nursing the bottle of wine. I was so wasted, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it was about 4:30 when I got home, but even then I stayed up a little while chatting on IRC before I actually went to sleep at around 6 or so.

It’s time for personal reflection now, and I guess this months topic is how even the smallest things we do sometimes have the biggest impact in our lives. Sometimes it’s as simple as refraining from doing anything at all. But I’m thankful to God that he’s shown me my mistakes before I came to the point where I would have been totally powerless to change things around. This point hit home with me a few years ago, but recently it was reinforced once more; case-in-point, I came across one of my school buddies from my Stafford days recently through Miss Judy. We were in the same class in school and got along rather well, I remember even inviting him once for a birthday treat with just two other guys who were close friends at the time, and we used to hang often at one of those guys’, Ali, house. But then came O/Ls and I left Stafford for Gateway for my A/Ls and we eventually drifted apart. I guess that’s one my extreme weaknesses, not keeping in touch with friends. I still do that. Anyway, we found each other a few years ago on ICQ but then that didn’t last long either, and then I’ve run into him at the odd times in Bamba about 3 years or so ago.

But it was only last week that our paths crossed again through Her Lady’s assistance, and I found myself wondering where exactly I had gone wrong in my life for us to have been so much the same 10 years ago and so different now, and it dawned on me that it was not any single action that caused this but the accumulation of many; lack of direction and purpose mainly. And I think now whether if indeed God is offering me a second chance at becoming something at the ripe old age of 26, or if he’s through giving me chances and just waiting for me to fail again. By second chance I mean that I have once again resumed my degree, which I have mentioned in my earlier posts, and I’m working at a place I don’t completely hate just yet and the work I do is rather interesting, if a little monotonous at times, but then beggars can’t be choosers I always say. But I digress; the point I was coming up to was that as much as I want to speak to him, I’m ashamed to because of what I have become. I mean all you have to do is read his blog to realize that he’s living “The life” where as I’m just trying to survive. One thing I know is that luck has nothing to do with it. It’s all in you and how committed you are to wanting to something and the lengths (within sane limits) you would go to, to get it. Anyway I guess I should sign off now, and I hope anybody coming across this post would leave their thoughts in the form of a comment.
Peace.

Effusions a plenty

Greetings earthlings. I bring… well not much really. The weeks after my exams have been pretty droll, filled only with the monotony of work followed by a sleep cycle. I’ll be starting the second semester come this weekend, prepared myself for that by going to a friend’s place last Saturday and getting completely wasted. It’ll be good to be doing something during the weekend instead of stagnating at home. I’m taking a day off from work today because my intestines seems to have developed the mentality that it can just return any food that I ingest back up the way it came in. Awful stuff really, been drinking rehydrating salts for most of the day. Oh I have a question for you lot; any of you know whether if Hutch really does have a package where we’re able to prevent our number from appearing on the other person’s caller ID? Any info ya’ll may have would be greatly appreciated. That’s all from me for now. Peace.

Merry meet dear people. It’s time for another update. I logged into my Hi5 account after a few aeons and I was surprised to see the account was still active. More surprising is the fact that almost every sri lankan with some sort of internet access has a profile there. I only have one person in the friends list (pathetic I know) but through that I was able to browse her network of friends and it was very enlightening indeed to see so many lankans online. It must be part of the new blogging fad I suppose, since most people are “upscale” and “hip”. I have never been either, being an uber geek and all wearing mismatched clothes with an ancient pair of Bata sandals. Another discover I made on that site was that there are a *lot* of single females, although since all the data included in the profiles is anecdotal I wonder how legitimate those claims are. I mean when was the last time you saw a good looking single chick who *wasn’t* on the rebound? Aye, exactly. Mind I have no point to make about this, I’m just merely making an observation. Today is a sad day for me, and I’m sure for most of you out there who use BitTorrent as I’m sure you’ve heard by now that thepiratebay.org’s servers were seized and three of it’s operators arrested. This is going to be a major blow to the BT community and I bet most of the other BT sites are rather nervous right now. More news on this can be found at Slashdot.org and you can still go to www.piratebay.org and the cover page explains the goings on. The bureaucratic wing of TPB, piratbyran also had their servers seized since they were hosted by the same ISP. They have a temporary blog up on blogger which is following the happenings of the case, but for now it’s only in Swedish although English updates are expected to follow since there is a smaller post on the same blog in English. There are stories stating that TPB had influential political backing which them invulnerable to copyright attacks made by various bodies and institutions and they even faked a closure of the site last year, so I’m wondering exactly how this happened so suddenly with no news leaking prior to them being taken down. My guess is that they probably had received word before hand that they were going to be raided; a site that managed to survive the maelstrom of closures and lawsuits suddenly going down is just not normal. Well that’s about it for now, I can’t think of anything else to rant about right now since I’m on hold (and will be for the next 30 minutes or so). Well that finished sooner that expected, so I’m going to carry on with my work for now and add more as I see fit. Ok so me back again, after about 3 hours or so. I don’t think my co-worker likes me much, but then I don’t blame her, no one likes me much. I like to think myself somewhat akin to Dr. House only more cynical. He owns. I need to push myself to study for my exam on Sunday but I just can’t seem to find the motivation anymore. I feel like I’m still in my self-defeating rut. It’s a curse, it really is. I mean I thought I was lazy, but it feels like more than that. I can’t seem to stir myself up to do anything; I’ve been sleeping for longer hours, like 6 or 7 where as before I was content with 4, and I feel extremely lethargic. It takes a massive mental effort for me to do something, and it’s not just limited to icky things like studying, I feel the same way about my hobbies too. I think I’ve finally grown old or something. Tomorrow I’m going to stick needles in my head and force myself to finish studying because I really need to make at least a half assed attempt at trying to get through this exam. The worst part is that I already know most of this shit, it’s just that I can’t apply it all in the context it’s put down on in the question paper. That’s always been a problem for me, applying things to the proper context. Anyway I think I’ve reached my banter limit for today so I shall sign out and bid everyone bon nuit.
Peace.

Hitherto shalt thou go and no further

Greetings bog people… blog people, I hope all is well with you. Is it true that the Da Vinci code is banned in Sri Lanka? It’s a humdinger really, our government tries to discourage thinking as much as possible. I read the book courtesy of lady Judy some months back and I loved it. It really got me thinking about religion and the impact it has on our society and politics and even financial institutions. The book has a lot of “what if?” questions and asks questions which have never been asked before and even provides (fictious) answers to a few. The problem is that the book created too much of a sensation because of the context in which JC and the two churches and the Opus Dei were portrayed. When people have been conditioned to view an object in one manner only, it takes them by surprise when their perception of the same is suddenly changed. This is what the Vatican was afraid of, and indeed what our government is afraid of. You may ask why the book wasn’t banned; the answer is simple, it is only words on print and by default people “simply don’t have the time to sit down and read a book” but have the time to watch the idiot box in their homes, offices and even cars now. It’s much easier for the feeble minded to comprehend moving pictures with the associated sounds than gather understanding from well structured sentences and paragraphs. Case in point, ask anyone in Sri Lanka if they have read the book, I will guarantee that less than 5 in 20 will actually have read the book. And the key to understanding the movie adaptation of any book is to actually read the book as well, e.g. Lord Of The Rings triology. How many people do you have read that? Not very many, I assure you. And even fewer I bet actually understood the movies. But this restriction on the movie does not apply to me since I have been blessed with broadband internet and therefore have access to BitTorrent, without which I would probably cease to function. So far I’ve only downloaded a documentary of the whole business behind the book and the movie, which contains an interview with Dan Brown too. I recommend that you download that because it *is* actually quite informative. I think I’ll rest my banter on that subject for now, I’ll resume once I see the movie, I’m sure I will like it since Tom Hanks is involved. He’s a brilliant actor and his productions have been quite good too; take a look at Band Of Brothers if you can still find all 10 parts on one DVD, which is what I have. I have some news concerning my ADSL router which the techies might find informative; I think I have gotten the whole port forwarding thing down pat. What you have to do basically is group all the forwarded ports together i.e. if you’re forwarding port 3889 for terminal services on UDP and TCP keep those two adjacent to each other instead of fragmenting the lines. I believe it was this fragmenting of lines which led the thingy to not work properly, because I was had grouped the FTP port forwarding together but the terminal services ports were all over the place and when I was testing, FTP worked fine. But this modem still has a problem whereby sometimes the web interface becomes inaccessible unless you carry out a power cycle. I hope this is of help for the more adventurous of you out there who are able to access their computers from their place of work or elsewhere where they have access to high speed internet. Just to remind you all, my modem is of the Conexant Hasbani variety; the name is shown on the upper left corner of the Internet Explorer window. These modem routers come under several brand names and shapes and sizes but their guts are basically the same since this implementation of ADSL modem architecture is basically located on a single chip, so it’s very very easy to mass package and market. This is reminiscent of the conexant modems which you may have seen the earlier part of this decade (and may well be around now, but I have always used an external modem since I like to be able to tweak my hardware) which also contain just one small chip smack dab in the middle of the card. Anyway I shall return to my idling now since the main internet connection in my company is out right now and I’m on the backup ADSL line, which has been dedicated to Customer Service, but I’m allowed to cheat a little cos I’m cool like ;). Peace.

I see fragged people...

Greetings people, it is I again, back once more to regale you with my adventures and what not. I have been paying less attention to life recently, even more so than usual, because I’ve got some important exams coming up and I really don’t want to fuck them up… eight years of loserdom has taught me a lot. The lady Judy and I spoke after a long abstinence, or I should say (and she did say) my ignorance of her existence for the past month or so. The weight of my exams and the inevitable failure that’s bound to follow has weighed me down heavily and it’s a constant struggle for me to open my books and actually read. But enough is enough, and it’s beyond high time that I started doing something with my life instead of living like an angst ridden teen. Anyway enough about me, let’s talk about my job. Well there’s not much to talk about that either really, except that the work is rather too easy and I get bored easily, other than that, the people are good and the atmosphere is good and everything’s good, at least as far as work is concerned. Work goes a long way in helping me get over my depression and I’m thankful for it everyday. The lady also gave me some surprising news that she had come across one of my old school buddies. He’s of course all grown up and successful and shit, obviously (duh!) and I’m a little ashamed to initiate contact, but I suppose it should be all good, he was a good friend while we were in school, one of the people I liked more. I remember I invited him along for a birthday treat once, just him and two others, forgot which birthday it was, maybe 16th or 15th not sure. It’s hard to believe over 10 years have gone since I’ve seen some of the people from my O/L days… funny how time flies when you’re full of angst. So I’m updating this blog from work right now, I shifted my seat for the third time since I came here, this time I’m in a nice dark corner sitting next to my team leader, who at the moment is being felt up by his girlfriend, (GASP) I shit you not, if my ngage had a camera I would so post a photo. As it is they think I’m probably typing an email or some such since I’m using the word plugin which is an extremely neat tool, very boss friendly unless he actually reads what you’re typing, which won’t happen here. Things on the girlfriend front are hanging my tiny little threads right now and I don’t honestly know how much longer things will be like this; something has to give. She knows that the relationship is doomed, but she still clings to me and I really don’t know what to do. She’s afraid of the finality of it all. Her mother is against Buddhists, I may even venture to say that she’s got a mild hatred for them, but that how and why is another story, which I may share with you once we break up… or if… heh. I bought a new adsl router last week and at first I was all “yay cool router” but not so much now, mainly because the actual routing part of it has become a bit of a bitch to configure, namely port mapping and routing, which basically is non-existent. With my old one I was able to use remote desktop with my server, ftp to it, and then SSH to my mp3 server as well with minimum effort, but with this POS, I can’t for the life of me figure out why remote desktop doesn’t work, I have forwarded the exact same ports and shit. The only thing I’ve gotten to work so far is ftp, which I suppose is ok since that’s the most vital component for me. Remote desktop is just a nice gimmick to show off to my buddies, although it did prove useful at my old office since I could monitor my downloads and stuff. Oh and the other thing is that I can’t even access the router’s web interface from outside the LAN, even though I have enabled WAN access to it. Maybe I need to route port 80 to itself or something, I don’t know and it’s becoming quite the headache. Any techies reading this feel free to offer your advice to me, free of charge of course. The router is a Micronet SS3351, single Ethernet port router based on the Conexant Hasbani single chip ADSL solution. The interface is identical to the regular Hasbani interface except for the logo and that’s about it. The port forwarding issue is the only drawback to this otherwise excellently featured router for the very decent sum of RS6750. Anyway, enough of my banter for now, I shall take my leave and update again when I’m arsed to :D

Peace

And as promised folks, here is I, once more. So basically, about a week after my last post I was forced to resign from my then current job because someone had squealed on a bunch of us for having smoked a joint within the office premises. While the allegations are true, I don't see what the big deal is. Marijuana is a plant, no different from tobacco; they both give off a high when the dried leaf is burnt and the smoke inhaled into the lungs. The difference is that one is legal, due to the simple fact that tobacco happened to be the first in line to become a legal drug, especially since the lowly cannabis leaf was somewhat of a pariah, smoked only by those from lower classes. There's nothing more to it than politics and the greed of man. To say that an addiction is a cash cow to companies which produce nicotine and caffeine based products is an understatement to the extreme. The pot plant just happened to come in too late, and was systematically stomped out by the likes of the big tobacco companies simply because they don't want a comptetitor. All kinds of clinical tests have shown that marijuana taken in moderate doses is safer than the same dosage of nicotine (not to mention the tar and other shit that goes into your basic fag), and to top it off pot has therapeutic properties to boot. But I digress; people, for the most part, are idiots. And I honestly do pity them. They live in a world which has been moulded by a few powerful people, people who know how to manipulate and shape society as they see fit and lead these idiots like the sheep they are, straight to slaughter. Our country is a prime example of this. I have no regrets about what I did, I didn't kill a man, nor did was I accused of theft or deceit, and to me those are the only three crimes there are. Anyway, despite all that, I *was* in a frazzle of sorts, almost like extended hyperventilation on a much larger scale, drawn out over a week rather than a few minutes. But I managed to cool it, largely in thanks to her Ladyship Judy. She also managed to find me my current place of employment by searching through her vast network of contacts. I visualise it as something akin to a queen spider on the center of her web sending vibrations down whichever branch of her web by strumming her legs. Sorry lady *G* kekekeke... Anyway, the new place is quite unique in the work that they do. For one thing we work according to the time in the US, which means oddball working hours, and the work is interesting too, although it can get pretty monotonous sometimes. I've the work pretty easy, and it apparently feeds my OCD too since I came in early every day last week to complete my file before the holidays, and I actually stayed back on friday morning till about 2 am because I wanted my file to be spick and span. My love life too took had its ups and downs during the past 6 weeks. The gf came back with some nice prezzies for me, including a brand spanking new digicam which I <3 a lot. And then, I nearly broke up with her two nights ago, due to some shit that I shall not mention here, but needless to say it was serious. The biggest hindrance in our relationship is the fact that she and I cannot be with each other physically because she's afraid to be seen with me in public, since she and I are not "official" and she's afraid of someone reporting to her parents that she's going out with yon fella. And the reason why the parents don't know yet is because she's christian, and her parents want her to find a christian boy. If I were able to, I'd pose some logical questions to them that I'm pretty sure would make them rethink their stance about that, since the last "good christian" boy she was with ended up dumping her after 5 months.

Thats pretty much it I guess, not a massively huge post I think, but atleast something to keep ya'll entertained for a while. And no Dmithri, I didn't elope. Don't believe everything she says. Hit me up on MSN sometime if you want to chat 1-on-1.

Oh and another thing. My Nokia N-gage is no longer as of last week. I need to get the software flashed for it, would anyone know where I could do that... other than soft logic, because those idiots don't even know what an n-gage is, let alone have the software for it. Or could someone lend me an extra mobile phone they might have lying around till the end of the month? I'd really appreciate it, because not having my mobile is like not having my right hand.

kbai.

Wow, it's been nearly two months since my last post. Lots of things have happened since thenl smoked a little pot, lost my job, found another job, resumed my degree, sort of trying to put my life back together. Oh and did I mention that I have a girlfriend? Will post more tomorrow, watching the OC right now. Bai.