Arthur C. Clarke, Tom Hanks, and Me

I was watching the Oscars last night and I had this moment where I felt in connection with two other people … not a really strange thing actually when you know the circumstances but still the moment itself felt good 🙂 But where should I start? Well, it all began when Tom Hanks came to announce an award and he said that Dr. Arthur C. Clarke will actually be presenting it from Sri Lanka – my homeland. I then suddenly realized that separated by distance and time (since Sri Lanka is 10 or 11 hours ahead of EST and California is 3 hours behind <g>) I was connected to these two people (Tom Hanks and Dr. Arthur C. Clarke) by a set of circumstances which were not exactly strange but hmm … curious maybe? 🙂

Some years back, when I was still in Sri Lanka, I had done a series of articles on science fiction and the authors that I considered to be some of the most influential in the field. I have always thought of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov as the triumvirate that was at the pinnacle of science fiction writers of all time and what was more fitting than to do a personal interview with Dr. Arthur C. Clarke himself since he also happened to live in Sri Lanka? I contacted the great man and was actually able to obtain an interview with him and I did the article. When the article appeared in print, Dr. Clarke wrote to me to tell me that he had sent the article to Tom Hanks since he was in communication with him. I had forgotten all about that incident till yesterday when I was suddenly reminded of it when I was watching the Oscars. I don’t know why it affected me but it did as I felt this strange connection with two other people in the world who were oblivious of me 🙂 But the feeling was good and so I thought I’d put it down for later …

Of course, the incident made me kind of nostalgic since I began thinking of all the great science fiction that I had read as a kid since I basically read everything by Dr. Clarked from the time I was about 7 or 8 years old … I remembered some of his novels like "Dolphin Island" and "The Deep Range" that I hadn’t thought of in years. It also made me think of all the other great writers and I felt as if an era had passed because so many of the greats of science fiction are no more. This year another one of my favorites and one of SF’s greatest, Gordon R. Dickson, passed away … I feel so old sometimes and yet, I’m only 30+ … Am I becoming maudlin in my not so old age? 🙂 I guess I’ll snap out of it now … :p

Blogger Woes

Looks as if Blogger is working fine after some tweaking of the templates 🙂 In fact, now the site looks almost indistinguishable from the earlier site – except of course for the fact that I can’t get my older posts into Blogger … Oh well, I guess you have to put up with some problems to get anywhere 🙂 Of course, this means that I will be updating my site a lot though it might not have anything much to do with either Scope or even coding as the site’s going to turn into a general blog … but fear not, Scope will continue to be developed and you will get more news of development now since I will be doing a lot more updating …

I should have spent this weekend doing some more coding since I haven’t "officially" released Scope 1.0 but instead, I decided to take a break and watch movies 🙂 But a very kind Scope user by the name of sinesolis has provided me with some excellent toolbar images as well as some other Scope icons that I intend to integrate into Scope before releasing Scope 1.0 "officially". Plus, the most requested feature for currently is the ability to close/restore maximized browser windows without having to right-click the tabs and select "Close" from the menu. The normal MDI child window maximized state buttons disappeared when I added the rebar band for the menubar. I’m currently trying to fix that by adding new buttons to the rebar bands to emulate the MDI child window maximized state buttons. Unfortunately, my workload at work is kind of heavy at the moment as I am working on a new project and so Scope will come along a bit slowly but it will eventually be released … So hang in there 🙂

It Begins …

I’ve been meaning to use a Blog for a while now but never got around to it – as always so many things to do and not enough time 🙂 LockerGnome had a link to a more sophisticated Blog tool called GreyMatter that I had downloaded sometime ago … I finally decided to give it a try today and while I was at it, Tech TV’s Call for Help ran a segment on Blogging as well – quite a coincidence 🙂 Anyway, GreyMatter did not really work out and so I decided to go back to Blogger since that was that much more easier to set up and use. But that was an experience in itself since I was using my own browser, Scope and for some reason or other, Scope wouldn’t really work too well with the Blogger site itself – guess it’s time for me to debug Scope …

Anyway, I did manage to get the Blogger account setup by using IE and here I am finally doing my first Blog entry … Let’s see how this works out 🙂

Hmm … I guess I did make a few mistakes there since I had named the directory for Blogger incorrectly and it wasn’t there :p Hey, anybody can make mistakes right? I corrected that but now I find that Tripod doesn’t resolve subdirectory names correctly when using virtual domains – ugh 🙁 Guess, I’ll have to merge my existing stuff about Scope and this Blog together so that I can keep both on one virtual domain … Oh well …more work 🙂