Teh sux

Greetings readers, it has been many moons since I last updated… alright, just one moon. But it has been a few weeks, so I won’t waste time with foreplay. Ok so, two weeks ago J took me to meet her mentor and we spent nearly 3 hours with him. We mostly listened to him during that time, and he mostly spoke looking at me. It was an… odd experience, but it wasn’t lost on me as J thinks it was. And now I resume this blog entry again 5 days later because work is just so hectic. It’s the 26th now, kind of mellow because not many people have turned up for work. So like I was saying, I’ve begun rethinking about things, I thought I already understood. Kinda like being reborn in the matrix hehe. That’s for you lady ;) I can’t even remember what happened after that day, because that was more or less the highlight for that week. After that came my cousin’s wedding which was held at Earl’s Regency in Kandy. It was a pretty neat affair, I got a good buzz along with the best man, who was high after like 3 glasses of champagne. I spent the day after roaming around kandy on foot and bus, and by taxi when I got lost. I do that sometimes when I want to get away. I avoided the maligawa, went to peradeniya and looked up some people I knew and then came back around lunch time, had lunch and slept for the remainder of the day. The home coming was held at the Ceylon Intercontinental Hotel, on the rooftop. The Cat’s Eye ballroom I think it was called. I wasn’t able to become as buzzed as I would like to have been, because they didn’t server ANY BEER for some reason. Extremely pissed off myself had to settle for some watered down wine and then had a scotch or three me thinks. Oh and I pretty much spent the entire time talking to this girl I fancy on the phone.

Work has been hectic for the most part, it even forced me to delay this blog entry by nearly a week, and that is unheard of. Two of my people are on leave simultaneously and that has me rather pissed. It’s a good thing there’s nothing going on today, only one section of production is working so my workload is down to a minimum. I’m going to take my leave from Thursday onwards. I mean I didn’t take any leaves at all because I was thinking about the department and thinking it would be bogged down since we’re already low on manpower. But it apparently doesn’t bother the others, so why should it bother me? *shrug* I realize I’m being as bad as them, but then I think I’m only taking what I’m entitled to, I have like 7 days of leave left, so I’ll only be using 2.5 of that. A small price for them to pay I think. They have to learn how to handle things without having someone spoon feed them all the time, as has been the case so far because I pretty much tell them how to/when to do everything. I’m their manager, not their wet-nurse, they have to learn to listen and to discipline themselves. So anyway that’s enough of my ranting about work, because in a nutshell work sucks ( lady and I have planned to go book hunting this weekend so I r looking forward to that muchly. I’ve begun reading again, I used to read tons years ago but sort of slacked off, no idea as to why. But I’ve rekindled my passion for sheets of dead tree with words scribbled on them. I began by buying some fantasy novels, namely those by David Gemmel. I’ve started on the Rigante series. He’s a pretty good author, and I’ve made up my mind that fantasy is definitely a genre for me... funny though because I hate playing fantasy games because they’re usually mmorpgs for which I simply don’t have the time to invest in. Two extremely vile examples are World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. And even Guildwars is getting in on the act. I don’t know how/where people find the time to spend 4-6 hours a day on computers playing games like that. I mean I used to, but that was when I was ignoring my education and spending weeks at home doing nothing. Mmorpgs are singelhandedly responsible for the brain drain in the youth of today. Btw, mmorpg stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game. In short people pretend to be little elves running around in an enchanted forest stabbing each other in the face. Frankly give me splinter cell anyway. Splinter cell rules. <3 splinter cell. Well I suppose it’s time I wrapped up yet another useless blog entry. Peace.

Love's bane

The beginning of this week has been a total downer. I don’t know what it is with women and me. This lament is nothing new of course, in the sense that it’s something that ails most men in this world. I mean… is it about me that puts women off so much? They’re fine for as long as we speak on the phone… and then when we meet… *BAM* ttylkthxbai. It’s very very depressing. This Saturday I spent at a conference conducted at the Ceylon chamber of commerce. There’s a new lady in the finance department who has caught my eye in a most unusual manner. I say unusual because it has been many years since I felt this way for a lady. Anyway, this lady was attending the same conference, and by sheer luck sat opposite me on the other side of the table. I spent the next 8 hours furtively glancing in her direction. Sometimes I’d catch her looking at me, at the time I thought maybe she was checking me out, but I realized later that she was probably looking at me with the curiosity that one looks at a corpse that just dropped in front of them. She even smiled back at me, the one or two times I dared to. One of my techies also talks with her, through the corporate instant messenger service, so he and I share everything she says to us. I sent her a text message yesterday, and she never replied to it. She had however told my techie that she would ask me not to text her, but I received no such message and she hadn’t sent one it seems. So I don’t know the story is there. And now, as I type this she’s still ignoring me on instant messenger. I think she’s hoping if she ignores me for long enough that I’ll leave her alone. But I’d like her to say it to me, instead resorting to the cold shoulder technique. I think she owes me that much at least, I’m a big boy I can handle the rejection. Anyway, the longer I think about this the more depressed I get, especially when I know that she’s lying to me and chatting with the guy next to me. Oh yeah, she lied to me this morning saying that she was busy, when in fact she is still chatting with my techie. I have no qualms with him, he and I are tight and we help each other mutually. There’s obviously something very wrong with me to put women off in such a manner. It’s really fucking depressing. This whole week is going to be bad. And to top things off, my cousi’s wedding will be on the 16th and I’ll be leaving on the 15th for it, so more depressive situations for me to look forward to. Fun fun fun. I would love to enjoy this week in a coma. I truly would. And wake up next Monday. That would be perfect. We should have these things where we can be put into suspended animation at will. That would be great. Imagine staving off arguments for centuries. Feh, I’m full of shit and angst today. The only good thing about this week is that I’ll only have to work today and tomorrow. I think I might just confront this lady soon i.e. tomorrow and get the hold thing over with. I think I’d at least deserve the decency to be told that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me instead of THIS. Why are some women such bitches?
Peace.

Feh

Greetings again. I bring good tiding from the east… or some such thing. Anyway, there I was sitting in my bus at the terminus waiting for the bus to roll out. It came in just as I was coming out of a boutique after having a refreshing caffeinated beverage, so I knew I had about 20 minutes to kill. I hopped onboard, made a beeline for the rear seat and made it my little corner of England. I broke out the ipod, hitckhikersguidetothegalaxy, and an assortment of fried nuts. Thus I settled in my little nook and became completely oblivious to the world around me for better part of a half hour. The in came the conductor, tore me a ticket, and began the ritual. What ritual you say? Why, the age old ritual of summoning the driver. This, my dear reader, is a fascinating phenomenon that predates the internet and even mobile phones, and is widely practiced island wide. If  this is the first time you’re hearing about it, or you’re going (o.O) right now, then you are forgiven, and let me enlighten you. The ritual begins when the conductor has finished tearing the tickets, although some say it starts when the first ticket is torn, there is still some conflict in the definition. In any case, the ball has been set in motion now. He will next pull out from his bottomless pocket a large pouch which contains all the change in coins that they say they do not have when you try to change a 10 rupee note for a 9 rupee ticket. He then proceeds to open the cubbyhole and paw through its contents which may or may not include one or more of the following:

1. several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular English songs sung by Singhalese artists in English


2. several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular Singhalese songs sung by Singhalese artists in Singhalese


3. several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular English song sung by Singhalese artists in Singhalese


4. several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular Hindi songs sung by Singhalese artists in Singhalese


5. several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular Hindi songs sung Singhalese artists in Hindi


6. and last but not least, several tapes containing very bad “mixes” of popular Hindi songs sung by Singhalese artists in English

Once the “condosthora” has found his tape of choice, he proceeds to phase two, which is attempting to get the tape player working. This often involves fiddling around with a bunch of wires hanging loosely anywhere in the vicinity of the dashboard, but maybe located elsewhere too. Once the tape player is working, he will then adjust the sound levels so that the highs are on par with an opera singer screeching at the top of her lungs and pretty much breaking every wine glass within sonic reach. So now, money jiggling in pocket (still waiting for the 1 rupee change), stereo blaring, the pre-summoning rights have been carried out, and he now moves on to the actually summon the driver. This is the more vocal bit of the ritual, mostly made up of chanting ancient sutras. Note though, that here I use the word chant in a very very generalized form, as it is less of a chant and more of a repetitious yelling in all directions the name of the driver, with curses injected ever few seconds when the driver fails to materialize. After a suitable period of time has gone by, and the driver is still a no-show, the conductor switches to an alternate noise source, i.e. the horn. Dear reader, at this point I will have to pause my chronicle and deviate a little to explain the significance of the horn. The horn is the bane of every traffic cop in probably every country in the world. It used to annoy the fuck out of the person ahead of you. In countries like ours, it is often used for other purposes too, a good example would be for blaring it in a residential section in the early hours of the morning. This I described out of personal experience, but I have now circumvented it through the very simple device of a well aimed rock at the rear windscreen of a Hyundai Sonata circa 2002 HW25xx, light blue in colour. But I digress, so lets back on track. The horn, may only be noisy, infuriating and annoying to us, unless of course we’re behind the steering wheel, where it becomes a god send, but to the bus driver, the noise created by this horn carries a unique signature which is only identifiable by bus drivers and no one else, rather like a whale call. SO, the conductor turns to this means as a final resort to summon the driver, because the attendant type at the terminus is tapping his clipboard with his pen indicating that they were due to leave 10 minutes ago. After some more blaring, in the distance, appears the driver, bathed in sunlight (because it’s early evening) coming at us like the bus driver he is. He pulls himself up the right side of the bus, doesn’t make it the first time, tries again, succeeds and slams the door closed with a resonating slam that rocks the bus and makes me upset my bag of mixed nuts. Then he takes his time adjusting various extremities around himself, details into which I shall not go into, not to protect you but myself. Finally, a fearful noise erupts from somewhere upfront, along with a bone jarring vibration, the engine not so much leaps to life as it does splutter cough and wheeze into a rotary motion, and sets the bus in motion, and takes us into the sunset. And there, my dear (hopefully still lucid reader) is my belated and thoroughly useless blog post for Saturday which took me so long to write since work was a major hindrance on Monday. Peace.

Of morons and circumcised bald men.

I think I’m much too emotional for my own good. My entire evening was ruined yesterday simply because of an argument I had with one of the retards I’m forced to with in another department. It was a stupid argument “Machang, when I try to telnet to this server it says ‘Connection refused’… why is that?” “Who knows? Maybe the port is closed, the service you’re trying to access on that port is down or the server’s firewall is blocking you, or the service itself may have timed, it could be many things.” “But I can telnet from other machines!” “That maybe so, you may have reached your connection limit to that server”  at this point I must interject that I had no idea what server/service/etc this moron was talking about. Anyway, he continues “So can you send someone down here to fix it?” “How would sending someone down there help fix anything? It’s a problem on the server or its connection, not on the machine you’re trying to connect from.” “But I can connect from other machines!! I’m already connected to that server on three other machines” “*sigh* yes I told you this once already, then there is probably a connection limit set on the server you’re trying to connect to and as such it is preventing any further connections. What you need to do is disconnect an existing connection to the server from another machine so your machine will be free to use that slot.” “So then you’re going to send someone to look at it no?” “No” “Why not?? We’re falling behind production, we’ll mark the downtime on account Systems’ inability to rectify this problem” “Go ahead, there’s no problem on our end, if you’d like to come up here I can show you a real-time representation of our network all the way to New Jersey”… at this point the moron’s manager gets on an extension and says pretty much the same thing his bitch has been saying so far. About a minute after the bald circumcised bastard started talking I began to lose my cool. I said I would come down and have a look at it personally, in a rather unfriendly manner. When I went down there, I asked the moron where the workstation in question was, and went up to the operator and asked him to telnet to this server. It connected instantly and he logged in, and tried to not look too much in awe/surprise/guilty/embarrassed (although I doubt these ungrateful fucks have either of the latter two emotions... that would require men with some ethics and moral fiber and just plain decency). I called over moron and his keeper and showed them, “But it didn’t connect before! You must have done something upstairs!” “Listen you uncivilized toad, how long did it take me to put down the phone and come down here?! A minute or two? That’s how much time it takes to come down here. So are you saying that I did this while I was traveling from my office to your department?” “I don’t know, I-,” “Exactly, you don’t know, so don’t fucking form assumptions on something you have absofuckinglutely no clue about. Now show me the other machines which connect to the same server”. And he showed. One was displaying the login screen. “Only two of them are connected, you said you had three workstations online.” “Yes but operator of that machine logged out because his shift is over”. So I logged in with my trusty domain admin account and brought up a telnet to this server. Connection refused. “Now this computer won’t connect to the server! Did you change the settings (he doesn’t know what settings, how or where, just that the word is available for his abuse) so that the other computer can connect and this can’t?” At this point I shall have to point out that my fuse was very short indeed, therefore I decided to completely ignore moron from now on, since my work here was nearly complete anyway. There was no need to get abusive. I simply gathered everyone around me, moron and keeper included, and explained with much coldness what exactly was happening, and went on to mention how all this could have been avoided if moron (yes I named him.. I usually don’t directly accuse people, but this was required) has simply listened to me, especially since I *am* the network engineer, I *do* have some inkling of what I’m talking about. I managed to pull this off with pretty much a straight face, even though I felt like grinning a little at the looks I was receiving now by some of the people in our friendly circle.

P.S. the entire conversation pretty took place in Singhalese and using the Singhalese equivalent of those expletives in English would be too rude even for me, I merely used them for effect, but I pretty much conveyed the same idea through my liberal use of large Singhalese words.