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