April 22, 2003

Of Mohameds and moronic measures …

I don’t know if I should be talking about this since it’s second, or even third, hand information but it’s something which seemed in step with the times and so I thought I’d mention it here. An acquaintance of mine at work told me that her aunt had gone to the US embassy here in Colombo to get her visa and that there had been this Muslim guy in the next cubicle being interviewed by a visa officer. The guy had won the greencard lottery and was there to get his visa and had been told by the officer that "We don’t let Mohameds into our country any longer!" If true, this can only be one of most stupid and paranoid remarks I’ve heard but then again, I guess it is just a sign of the times.

America, which prided itself in being the melting pot of the Western civilization, has suddenly become a closed country. And looking at the world, it is ironic that many of the countries that originated with Britain are closed to some extent or another, whether it is Britain itself, America or Australia. Maybe it’s the whole immigrants-take-away-the-jobs-of-honest-hardworking-citizens bit or maybe it is just that we live in strange and convoluted times. There are arguments for and against both sides – I was too simplistic in my maybes in the previous sentence but I’m kinda just not in the right frame of mind to make a valid and reasoned argument for either side at the moment. Who knows any longer anyway? At least not me .. I am lost in this sea of human stupidity, ignorance, prejudice and basic lack of understanding …

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Posted by Fahim at 7:39 am  |  1 Comment

Perchance to dream …

I’ve been having problems sleeping again. Part of it is my fault since I stayed up a bit too late for a few days and then got up early and if I don’t get enough sleep – it kind of builds up and I start having sleeping problems but part of it has also been the dreams. No, they are not nightmares – I never have nightmares 🙂 These are just dreams which leave me feeling so very tired the next morning – dreams which make me think that maybe I wasn’t dreaming at all but was living another life… Yes, I’m going into that crazy twilight zone again … let me come back :p The dreams are real enough – I just don’t remember enough of the dreams when I wake up though. Or like the other night where I was dreaming and thought, "Oh, this would make a plot for a wonderful story" and when I woke up, I remembered thinking that but I just can’t remember any details about the rest of the dream – and I *knew* in my dream that the plot made perfect sense. Ah well …

Then today, I got up in the wee hours – again something I’ve gone through before – and couldn’t go back to sleep. I finally did fall asleep but it was the kind of sleep where you are sure you are not sleeping – does that happen to you? I keep on dreaming and am aware of the dream and of the fact that I’m lying on the bed too – so I don’t really think it’s a dream so much as me thinking … or at least that’s what I think when I’m dreaming. So I wake up feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all and so very tired. I just hope that the waking in the middle of the night bit does not start all over again – I just hate that and it leaves me being so darn cranky :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:36 am  |  3 Comments

Samuel L. Jackson and the Power of Suggestion

Hmm … that title sounds like a Harry Potter novel :p Sorry about that – I just couldn’t resist it since it seemed to fit somehow. Anyway, movies do seem to have a great power over me – the power to pull me out of whatever funk I might be in and make me laugh, clap my hands and start doing roundhouse kicks :p I was in a bit of a blue mood due to lack of sleep and an abundance of dreams (more on that on another entry if I feel up to it …) and I simply sat down to watch "Formula 51" because I had nothing better to do in the evening but the movie simply pulled me out of myself.

It’s a tale about a collection of unusual characters – people you would not normally meet in day-to-day life. A master chemist named McElroy (Samuel L. Jackson) who is on the run in England after blowing up the drug lab of his employer "The Lizard" – played by Meatloaf, whose every movie appearance I enjoy if only because I enjoy his music … this was a bigger part than he normally plays .. or at least, I remember him playing – is the main character. He is joined by a female assassin hired by the The Lizard and a British gangster who is helping McElroy and who just happens to be the former flame of the assassin. The movie is violent, fun and full of sequence which just kept me wanting more – unfortunately all the fight sequences were pretty brief. But overall, it was an interesting movie – not a deep one mind you but an interesting one … which is always not the same :p Oh the title of my post? If you watch "Formula 51", you’ll understand …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:27 am  |  No Comments

April 21, 2003

A bit of poetry …

I wrote a cryptic, meandering, incomprehensible entry today in the morning from home but could not post it due to the fact that my host server was down. I feel like making a post today but can’t think of all the stuff I wrote earlier (plus, I can republish that from home tomorrow anyway :p) and so I decided to put up this poem that I wrote today for the newspaper page that I edit. It seemed to sort of come together pretty fast and while I don’t think of it as “real” poetry, it did flow well and so I’m putting it up … or something …

The Song of Lanka

First came the Aryans to this island fair,
With the heir of the clan from the lion’s lair,
They drove off her native sons,
To the jungle where the wild river runs!

Then came those from the Indian South,
Who some claim had entered the lion’s mouth,
In search of lands to plunder
Or just places to live, they here did blunder.

In to this mix was thrown the Arab traders,
Who some now claim were invaders,
They came to trade
But liked the climes and stayed.

All three races lived, allied and fought
Till the day they sighted the first boat
Of a new race to enter the books of Lankan history,
The Portugese were this new race of mystery.

The Portugese took over the sea ports
But in turn were driven off by the Dutch cohorts,
Who themselves wanted a beachhead
On this island paradise of the sands red!

As seconds turn to minutes and minutes into hours,
So do invaders get thrown out by even higher powers.
The British followed the Dutch to the Indian sea,
And took over this land in its entirety.

After a century and more of British rule,
We gained our independence with a roar, not a mewl
But since then instead of living in harmony
We’ve bickered and fought, called each other enemy.

After all the bloodshed, all the pain
All that we went through to, our independence gain,
Why can’t we learn the lessons of history
And learn that amity is the way forward for you and me?

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Posted by Fahim at 11:51 am  |  No Comments

Life, she ain’t simple …

Life – it just threw me another curveball. Totally unexpected, totally out of the blue and as I mentioned a couple of days ago, totally in opposition to a certain course of action I was beginning to follow up on. I don’t know if it is wish fulfillment or just some sort of a mystic reaction to my actions but there it is – but the thing is that this time there is a certain rightness to it, a certain this-is-the-moment-you’ve-been-waiting-for, feel to it. So I’m going with it again. Anyway, when life throws a curveball at you what do you do? I guess my baseball analogy fails me at this point and I must jump to cricket – you must either hit out or get out :p I’ve decided to hit out since getting out is not even an option at the moment – I hope it never will be 🙂 Yes, I know, none of the above made an darn sense whatsoever. Sorry, I’m just writing for myself today. Putting down my thoughts and feelings and reactions and whatnot down so that I can read it later and both savour this moment and be able to think back a bit more objectively on the situation.

Sometimes you get stuck in this really strange spot half-way between dream and reality where your dreams are real and all you have to do is reach out and touch to have your dream but it seems almost impossible to raise your arm because your arm suddenly seems to have grown so utterly, impossibly heavy. Have you ever been in a situation like that? My thoughts are very chaotic right now, I don’t think I’m even thinking completely lucidly, I’ve just gotten up a little while ago, had a fairly strange night of dreams and am actually rambling just now, get reality settled in again and also getting ready for another day of work after a week of idleness. I am sure today will be full of its share of drama at work – I don’t even want to think about it since I’d like to just not be bothered about all these nitty gritty details of life right at this moment …. (yes, I’m rambling and just trailed off …)

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Posted by Fahim at 6:46 am  |  No Comments

April 19, 2003

Of idleness and indolence

Things have been extremely slow of late. I have not been coding, not updating my main site, The Developer’s Corner, that I’ve been regularly updating for over two years. Basically, I’ve simply been content to be idle, watch movies, speculate on stuff and play with software. This has given me the opportunity to learn a few new things and to explore a few areas that I had not explored before but I find myself asking, "what about the people who are so eagerly awaiting the next release of my software?". I have a responsibility to them too. Yes, it is free software but just because the software is free does not mean that I have no responsibility to my users. It is a dilemma.

That is just one dilemma out of many that seem to confront me suddenly and I seem to be content to think about these matters and yet come to no decision. The others? What am I going to do? Where do I go – stay in Sri Lanka or move to another country? And most of all, what is the purpose to our existence? These are just a few of the questions going through my mind suddenly. For some strange reason, it seems to me that we are at a critical point in history – a cusp if you will. I don’t want to make any decisions right now, I just want to live life day by day, as it comes, since to me it seems that future events will dictate my course. It seems a little indulgent at times and also laggardly to think somethingelse can control my life instead of simply taking charge of my own life and going on with it, no matter what. But my sense of historical forces seems so strong right at the moment (maybe I’ve been reading too much Gordon R. Dickson and his "Childe Cycle" is beginning to affect me …) that I just want to see how things play out before I make a decision. But how long can you stay inert and indecisive anyway?

Another reason for my inactivity (at least as far as moving out of Sri Lanka or staying on here is concerned) is the same old one – my parents. I’ve had this debate right here about talking about other people on this journal and so will not go into details but my parents have their own reasons for wanting me here – some of it emotional and some of it cultural. They unfortunately are very true-to-norm results of their culture unlike me and so their perceptions, feelings and actions are ruled by their culture. While I can understand their actions, I still can’t say that their beliefs and their perceptions are their own and leave – they are my parents and I am their firstborn … believe it or not, that (being firstborn) carries a certain responsibility with it when you are over here :p

One more thing that seems to be brought home to me again and again is what Terry Pratchett would call the gods-playing-dice-with-us-as-pieces syndrome :p I find that there are certain actions of mine which almost always results in a counter-action by fate, gods, happenstance … whatever you may call it. It seems almost inevitable and seems to have the kind of precision which makes me believe more and more that there is a pattern to it. (Yes, my insanity begins to show through as I expose more and more of my mind <g>) There is a collection of stories (I think by Frank Herbert .. not sure off-hand) called "Case and the Dreamer" – one of the stories in it is about this woman who loses her one true love to death and embarks on this quest to regain him by cloning him and making sure that his life follows a certain path while she remains the same age by going into suspended animation – one day, she will awaken and come back into his life but till then his life will be steered in just such a way as to make their first meeting one where they would fall in love … or something like that. That is an intriguing thought and coupled with this whole being-blocked-at-certain-points thing, I can’t but wonder maybe if my life is controlled in such a way too? OK, I will stop now before the men in white jackets come for me :p

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Posted by Fahim at 7:07 am  |  1 Comment

April 15, 2003

Of verse and worse …

A conversation I had with a friend about Byron led to a whole journey through a full spectrum of poetry today 🙂 The talk about Byron made me want to re-read Alfred Noyes’ "The Highwayman" – how did I jump from Byron to Noyes you ask? It all has to do with the peculiar way I associate things :p Lord Byron led me to another lord – Alfred, Lord Tennyson and from there to to Alfred Noyes was but a hop, skip and a jump. I’ve always been haunted by "The Highwayman" (no pun intended … really :p) and re-reading the poem just made me feel melancholy since I find the imagery in the poem to be very tragic and moody. So I wanted to read some more poetry to get "The Highwayman" out of my mind.

I started out with William Cowper’s "John Gilpin" which made me smile – I’ve enjoyed "John Gilpin" since my school days but have not read the poem since then either <g> I then read a bit of Sir Walter Scott by way of "Flodden" and then went on to Lord Byron’s "The Prisoner of Chillon" which while having some beautiful lines – "A frantic feeling, when we know, that what we love shall ne’er be so", "For I had buried one and all who loved me in a human shape; And the whole world would henceforth be, A wider prison unto me:" – made me sad again. So I moved on to tarry a bit with Keats’ "The Eve of St. Agnes" before moving on to Robert Browning’s "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".

Now this is a poem which has a lot of significance to me because I know of at least two series of books which are based on the poem – one is Stephen King’s "The Dark Tower" series whereas the other is Gordon R. Dickson’s "Childe Cycle". I love the imagery in that poem but it has been a while since I’ve read it – in fact, I’m not sure if I’ve read it fully before. I’m currently reading the "Childe Cycle" and am on the last book and am reluctant to finish it since the cycle remains incomplete due to Gordon R. Dickson’s death. In fact, that other cycle, "The Dark Tower" is yet incomplete as well but I digress … I did learn something new since my anthology of poetry had a note to see Edgar’s song in "King Lear" at the beginning of "Childe Roland .." and so I went in search of my copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. I hunted through "King Lear" and found these lines "Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still Fie, foh and fum, I smell the blood of a British man". Now, I have no idea if this is the only reference to Childe Roland in Shakespeare (I’ll have to do a more detailed online search tomorrow …) but I was fascinated since I’d never known of the reference before and also because of the whole "fie, foh, fum" bit which I’d always heard as part of Jack and the Beanstalk <g> I didn’t know that it had been used by Shakespeare too – now I’ll have to look into the roots of that too :p

By this time, I was tired of weighty matters poetic and wanted something light and so turned to my omnibus edition of Edward Lear. I always find Lear to be amusing and fascinating and a few minutes spent with the "Pobble who has no Toes" and "The Quangle Wangle’s Hat" made me feel much better. I was reminded of Lewis Carrol’s "Old Father William" by a Limerick of Leare’s (funny the associations you make ..) it goes something like this:

There was an Old Man of Port Grigor,
Whose actions were noted for vigour;
He stood on his head,
Till his waistcoat turned red,
That eclectic Old Man of Port Grigor.

I would have liked to have completed my poetic journeys with some stuff by Lewis Carrol – maybe "The Hunting of the Snark" or "Jabberwocky" – since I enjoy Lewis Carrol almost as much as I enjoy Lear and my appreciation of the former is as old as my appreciation of the latter but I couldn’t find my edition of the complete works of Lewis Carrol either – wonder what’s happening to all my books? (Speaking of which, I just discovered that I have a 1935 reprint of the first edition of Dickens’ "David Copperfield" – some of my books are more than twice my age :p) I think my appreciation of "Jabberwocky" – Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbal in the wabe … sorry if I misspelt anything but I’m quoting from memory and some of that is just made up anyway .. I mean by Carrol, not me :p – comes from a science fiction story which is built completely around the poem and the fact that the words might not be nonsense – I forget who wrote it but it might have been C. M. Kornbluth or Lewis Padgett (which was actually a pen-name for Henry Kuttner) … It seems to be kind of their style but I might be totally off here. I’ll have to look that up too.

All this poetry makes me want to write some "real" poetry. All I find myself doing these days is what I call doggerel – quick jobs done in the course of half an hour to one hour based on a central idea. It rhymes but I don’t feel it is quality work – more like a hack job. I can’t explain it fully but I guess the best way to do so is to give a sample … if I can find one …

I have lost my peace of mind
And instead, worry on all sides do I find.
I have lost the will to love
And in return think of a mailed-first, an iron glove!

My country has lost its peace, serenity and harmony,
Where once was calm, there now is only strife and agony.
Gone are the days of races living in peace, side by side
But instead, armies against each other stride!

Mothers their sons to a bloody war have lost,
Like blooming flowers to a cruel frost,
In their loss they’ve only found,
That in their loss all mothers are together bound!

I called the above "Lost and Found" and what I’ve posted here is incomplete since what I have on this machine is the incomplete version. I wrote that for the peace page I edit (and usually write too since there is a dearth of contributors :p) for work. I’ll post the full version (if I remember <g>) tomorrow when I get to work …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:13 pm  |  1 Comment

April 14, 2003

Movies and other miscellanea

What do you do when you watch a movie and it leaves you wanting to twirl and flip around in the air like in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? :p I’d had the "Coyote Ugly" DVD for at least a couple of years but for some reason or other, never got around to watching it. I really felt in need of some good, light-hearted entertainment today after watching a couple of intense movies – first a Tamil movie and then "Carlito’s Way" – and so gave "Coyote Ugly" a try. For some reason or other, Piper Perabo reminds me so much of Jennifer Garner of "Alias" fame and while I enjoyed the movie and the soundtrack even more, I couldn’t totally get into it … OK, Piper Perabo’s appearance had no relation to my enjoyment of the movie – pardon my sentence structure :p It did however leave me thinking about a few things.

The first thing was basically related to the story line – "Coyote Ugly" is about a songwriter who goes to New York in search of her dreams. I’d just heard a couple of days back from my friend Meraash who’s also in New York currently and following his dream – to be a film maker. He worked here with me in Sri Lanka and always wanted to make movies and now he tells me that he actually might get to work on "Spiderman 2" and I was really happy for him and proud of him since he went after his dreams and made it happen. However, watching "Coyote Ugly" and the conditions under which Violet, the protagonist in the movie, lives under, I was thinking that maybe Meraash had to live the same way and that I could never do that. That also made me realize that I could never go after my dreams the way that Meraash and Violet did – that I would always hold back either because I was too afraid, too lazy or just didn’t have a goal that I wanted to reach that bad … makes me (or rather, my life) feel so pointless all of a sudden. I’m doing what I love – I love coding and I am in computers, I love movies and do watch a lot, I love writing and do write all over the place, I enjoy music and do listen to music from time to time … but where is the big dream? The big ambition? I guess the only thing that would qualify in that category was me wanting to be a successful writer. But would I drop everything, risk failure and a life of doing part-time jobs while looking for my big break? I don’t think so. So maybe I don’t have the vision or the commitment. I don’t know …

The other thing that struck me is totally unrelated but also something I’ve been thinking for a while now – do television and movie writers write women the way they perceive them to be or are these really women as they are? The reason I wonder is more so because of a couple of my favourite TV shows than because of how women are portrayed in "Coyote Ugly" though there were a few instances even in the movie which made me wonder. The two shows I’m talking about are "Gilmore Girls" and "Nikki" – I liked both the shows and the characters in them when I originally started watching them but recently (these might not coincide with the US episodes since we get them really late – just a note :p) some of the characters have been getting on my nerves because of the way they behave and since all the characters are women, I was wondering if this is just some man’s interpretation of how a woman would behave or if this was actually written by a woman and if it’s the latter, then why are so many women being portrayed as being so bitchy all of a sudden? Yes, I know, it’s just TV shows and none of these people are real but their actions still bug me … yeah, maybe I’m weird :p

Take Lorelei Gilmore for instance – she dumps her fiance the day before she is to be married, gives the guy no explanation and takes off for parts unknown. Then she keeps on leading this other guy who obviously has feeling for her on – yes, the guy could simply tell her how he feels but just as obviously, she should be able to tell that he feels something for her out of the ordinary since he behaves completely differently with her than he normally does. Then there’s her daughter who does not seem to realize what she’s doing or her own mind since she’s got a boyfriend but also is dallying with this other guy, while claiming that it is "just a friendship" whereas some of her actions seem to indicate that it is not. Or take Nikki from "Nikki" who dumps her husband who can’t dance and gets another partner just to win a dance competition and then thinks she can make it all better by being all sweet and lovey dovey and her husband who actually falls for it. Ok, I’ll stop now :p I know all this is just make believe but the actions of each of these characters bothers me and it bothers me even more as to who conceived these particular actions and if they really think that this is how women normally behave and I do wonder if this is *actually* how a majority of women feel/act …

It’s been a while again since I’ve posted here but most of what I’ve had to say the last few days has been more for SM than for here :p I’ve not been doing much coding but a lot of tinkering around – with the hardware on my desktop, with video codecs in order to figure out the best conversion formats and with quite a bit of audio and video software in order to figure out about a few edits I was planning. I’ve not had much time to mess around with my site in the middle of all this but I saw this neat script to add collapsible lists to your site while trying to do something for a friend. I like the concept and while I am not sure how well it will work with non-IE browsers, decided to give it a go on the sidebar since I do have a lot of stuff on the sidebar and it looks a bit untidy <g> So here goes .. if things break, I’ll probably fix it in a day or two when I get around to it :p

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Posted by Fahim at 9:33 am  |  4 Comments

April 13, 2003

Of net outages, holidays and life

We had no Net access for almost the whole day yesterday. From what I can discover based on application logs at work, I think the outage occurred during the early hours of the morning and the first time I knew that we were back online was around 9 o’clock at night. I still have no idea what happened but such a long outage usually means problems with the trans-Atlantic cable but then again, since were are on a long holiday weekend, it might be just that they had nobody to look into the problem yesterday.

Of course, that’s as good a segue into talking about the holidays as any :p It’s the Sinhala and Tamil New Year (which is based on the sun moving from a particular zodiac sign to another) over here, or at least, it will be soon. I believe the New Year festivities begin tomorrow and the day after will be a holiday as well. So it’s going to be a long four days all by myself since my parents have gone to the other house and they might not come back till next week anyway. I spent four or more years mostly by myself in the US and did all that was necessary on a day to day basis – cooking, cleaning etc. Of course, I always did the minimum necessary but I still did it :p I find myself too lazy to even make a cup of tea here since usually I know that my parents would be back in a day or two … This time however, since they might be gone for longer, I seem to have put myself in a pattern where I once again do the minimum necessary – OK, I guess I’m just plain lazy :p

Anyway, though we are supposed to get back to work on Wednesday, there might not be many at work and we might not even have any work till next Monday since I believe Friday is again a holiday and most people would simply take the extra two days in between off as well to make it a really long weekend. The only problem is going to be that most of the shops and restaurants are going to be closed as well. So I’d better start cooking at home or stock up on pre-cooked stuff :p I guess it’ll be a good break for most people, I don’t know how it will be for me. I probably should be coding during this time since I’ll have lots of free time, but I just don’t feel like coding at the moment. I just want to sit back and relax – I spent most of yesterday watching movies, I’ll probably spend a little time at work today setting up downloads and stuff which got interrupted due to the Net outage and then it’s probably back to the movies and maybe a little bit of PS2 gaming later on. I also have a lot of stuff going through my head that I want to write about here … So I guess I’ll stay occupied even though I might not be doing any coding :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:29 am  |  No Comments

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