Meeting of minds and clashing of souls

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this page but my only excuse is that I’ve been fairly busy with so many other things – but that really is no excuse since this is supposed to be a reflection of my thoughts and I shouldn’t put my thoughts on hold <g> Anyway, I’ve been busy and then I was in Kurunegala and now I am finally back. Even though it’s a Saturday, I went to work since dial-up costs are prohibitive here (you have to pay for even local calls) and Net access is cheap at work since it’s free and I was missing Jen since I’d been at home for the last couple of days with very brief forays online to talk to her. So I rushed to work so that I could talk to Jen and catch up on all that had been happening in her life.

While I was talking to her however, I heard some great news from another friend of mine. Since it is something personal about somebody else, I will not go into details here but suffice it to say that I have been vouchsafed the power of prayer once again 🙂 I have always known that God is listening if you pray to him but sometimes it is nevertheless surprising when you receive a response so quickly – does that mean you have no faith or just that you don’t expect God to respond quickly? I don’t know … But I just know that God is listening.

Jen and I talked through the day while I worked on a variety of things – including installing SP1 on my notebook machine which I took to work with me. How well do we know anybody around us? Sometimes we think we know everything about somebody and then a casual remark opens up a whole new area of their lives that we never knew about and we find ourselves pleasantly surprised (or shocked/horrified etc. but this particular instance was a pleasant surprise – nothing negative at all :p) to find that there is a meeting of minds between yourself and the other person on a subject that you thought they wouldn’t be interested in at all. I treasure such moments of discovery about any of my friends. Maybe it’s because it’s just another cementing of the bond between them and me or maybe because it reaffirms that I am not alone in this world in the way I think or look at things – then again, it might simply be because I’ve found something else to talk about with them. Whatever the case maybe, I do cherish such moments and now that I look back at this entry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this :p

Yes, I didn’t update in the morning :p We left Kurunegala in the wee hours of the morning to come back to Colombo and I went straight to work as soon as I got to Colombo. But that is another story and probably something that I would better leave for my entry on Solipsistic Meanderings (how’s that for a plug? :p) and instead talk about what I did yesterday in the way of coding – or at least site updates. Since I have not updated the individual application pages in ages, I decided to spend yesterday doing just that and even create a few new pages for apps that I’d released a while back but had not bothered to create application pages for.

Since I use DreamWeaver, I thought it would be a good idea to use a template for all the application pages since that would allow me to change the look of all the pages in one go without affecting the content. Of course, I had figured on this without taking my basic knowledge of DreamWeaver, bad documentation, being on dial-up and a few other factors into consideration :p I realized that when I used a template, that I couldn’t have a title of my choice for the page. I thought it would be as simple as changing the page properties after the page was created but it turned out to be not so simple. So I referred to the DreamWeaver help and while it had a lot of stuff on what to do in similar situations – it just didn’t have anything to do for this particular situation. Or it might just be that I wasn’t looking in the correct place due to preconceived notions as to what had to be done. Either way, several hours later and half the day wasted, I still hadn’t found a solution :p So I finally did what I should have done in the first place but was reluctant to do because I was on dial-up, I went online and searched for a solution.

I found a solution almost immediately (I think the second search result on Google if I recall correctly) and was finally able to change page titles. So then I set to work and either modified the existing pages for certain apps or created brand new pages for apps that did not have a page at all. The afternoon passed in creating screenshots, thumbnails and writing up descriptions of applications. I finally had a full list of applications except for Snipper – I actually created the app page for Snipper but couldn’t get any screenshots since I couldn’t compile it to run it :p I had left out one vital source file and so had to wait till I had access to that file before I could do anything. Oh well, at least I had everything else done and I uploaded it all today when I got to work. So enjoy all the brand new application pages on the sidebar :p