November 3, 2002

Movies about children …

I watched "Legend of the Red Dragon" with Jet Li in it. Lots of martial arts action, cute kids playing at Shaolin fighting and some pretty funny moments thrown in for good measure. One thing that sticks in my mind is the mother of the female protagonist (Jet Li’s character’s love interest) saying "If you’re going to court my daughter, you need to have money!" and Jet Li says "I respect her, isn’t that enough?" and she responds "Not in this day and age!" :p I might be being very cynical but while that was supposed to be ancient China, I don’t think that has really changed at all at any time or in any place in the world – not really. A lot of people seem to put money before love and happiness. Maybe they are realists and I’m just an idealist but I can’t but feel that love and happiness should come first. Oh well …
All the movies today seem to be about kids :p I also watched a Tamil movie about a guy who adopts a child after he loses his own wife and child and about their relationship. The child’s father comes in to the picture later on and wants the child back but the child considers the guy to be his father and doesn’t want to go to his real father. While it was drenched in emotion, I still loved the movie and the fact that a person can love somebody else’s child as their own. Some people seem to think this is impossible but I don’t – I think you should love any child irregardless of whether they are your own or not. Children are perhaps the best part of humanity and it’s sad that children are not treated that way instead of being subjected to the whims and fancies of adults – who really aren’t adult at all in some cases.

I’m going to make one of my very rare double-posts (OK, I’m obsessive compulsive about not making more than one post a day – so sue me :p) because I did put the idea I had in the morning about a second journal into action! I went into work (since otherwise I would have had to work on a dial-up connection), downloaded Moveable Type and then set it up and a couple of hours later, I have a new blog named Solipsistic Meanderings! There is only one entry and there is a lot of changes and additions to be made but for the moment I do have a new blog :p Of course, this reminds me why I coded Blog in the first place – now I can post from anywhere with web access but I have to be online to post from home and that’s a pain on a dial-up connection 🙁 I guess I could write the entry beforehand and then quickly connect and post but even that doesn’t really suit me and so I’ll probably end up writing some sort of an app which can connect to a Moveable Type blog, upload entries and perhaps even synchronize other entries made from other places so that you have everything in one place. I know that’s going to be a big job but it sounds pretty interesting and you know how I am about coding interesting projects :p In the meantime, you can get all the personal dope about me at Solipsistic Meanderings while I’ll talk about coding stuff right here 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 1:37 pm  |  1 Comment

So it begins …

Well … the window into my soul is now open :p I made an entry today in my development blog about how I was writing more and more about personal stuff and that I probably should stop doing that – or at least parcel out the personal stuff to a different journal and the general user concensus seemed to be that I should start a second journal. With me, to think is to act (yeah, that’s almost like not looking before you leap <vbg>) and so I decided to come in to work, download Moveable Type and install it and so started this new blog …

Those of you who know me know that I develop Blog, an application to make web logging easier, and that I maintain all my other blogs using Blog. So why am I using Moveable Type for this blog? Two reasons: a) check out the competition and find new features to implement in Blog b) have always on access to this blog so that I can rant any time, anywhere :p Yes, Blog has a feature where you can e-mail in entries and have it automatically published but the situation in Sri Lanka (where I am) where the power goes off at any time and your computer can easily get damaged if you leave it on all the time, makes that a bit difficult. So we go with this and see how it turns out ..

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Posted by Fahim at 11:26 am  |  4 Comments

I don’t understand people at all! They tell you that honesty is very important to them, that they never lie, that they always tell the truth no matter who gets hurt; they tell you that even omitting details or not revealing everything is lying and then they turn around and lie outright to you. Where are all their principles? Where are all the rules that are supposed to apply to you? I guess it is always alright when you are doing the lying but not when you think somebody else might be doing it. Ah well … I know this makes no sense to any of you but I had to rant – sorry. I have never understood people and their talk of honesty. When you are honest, you get castigated for being honest and telling the truth and what you are told is it doesn’t matter that you told the truth, you did whatever you did. And if you don’t tell the whole truth or don’t reveal something that wasn’t specifically asked about, you are accused of lying. There is no winning is there? Again, I guess it comes to the whole moral dilemma thing – you do what you think is right and damn what others think. That’s how I’ve always done it and I guess I’ll continue to do so. Now that I’ve got that off my chest …

I watched “XXX” and two Tamil movies yesterday. While I don’t really care that much for Vin Diesel, I found “XXX” to be pretty interesting – maybe it was the combination of Diesel and Samuel L. Jackson or maybe it was all those stunts and gadgets but it was a pretty fun movie. The Tamil movies (as is usual for Tamil movies) were about love and the lengths people go to for love. In one, the guy thinks that the girl is in love with him and so falls in love with her but turns out that the girl actually comes around to see him and stuff only because he has the eyes of her dead love (the guy’s eyes were damaged in the same accident that the girl’s love died in and they gave the guy the girl’s love’s eyes – yeah that’s how Tamil movies run :p). But since the guy is now in love with the girl, he tries to convince her that it’s OK to fall in love again but she says she’s going to live out her life remembering her love and so the guy decides to live out his life thinking of the girl. That’s how the movie ended and I was entranced.

My ideas of love come from these movies and the books by authors like Barbara Cartland which talk about a pure and romantic love. Maybe it’s wrong to look for such a deep, unselfish love in this day and age but what can I say – I’ve been corrupted already :p I don’t know if such love exists anymore – a love where you will put your loved one before self, where you would do anything to see that the one you love is not hurt. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that I don’t know if such love exists, because I *do* know that it exists because I know of people who share that kind of love but it seems to be very rare. But this is turning into another one of my maudlin introspections instead of anything to do with software. I’ve noticed this trend recently where I write way too much in a whiny, personal note. I have decided to stop (or at least cut down on …) that. I don’t think anybody is that interested in my angst ridden thoughts, moral dilemmas or personal history – if you are, let me know and I’ll probably start a second journal. This one, I intend to keep just for software development, books, movies and perhaps a few important happenings in my day to day life. At least that’s how I look at it now – who knows how it will be tomorrow?

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Posted by Fahim at 6:29 am  |  5 Comments