Books and such …

I’m reading a collection of five short novels (they used to be called novella or novelettes depending on length those days but now there are only long novels and really long series :p) by Lester Del Rey and I keep on having this weird feeling that I have read them before 🙂 Be that as it may, I know that the latest story that I’m reading is going to end up making me think a lot. It’s called "For I am a Jealous People!" and starts off by introducing and earth which is being invaded by aliens and the main character is a preacher who is trying to hang on to his faith in God in these trying times. Earth seems to be at the losing end as the story starts and most of Earth’s setbacks in the war seem to be due to strange accidents such as a meteorite striking the stockpile of all of Earth’s missiles on the moon and burying it under a pile of debris, a tornado taking out the defence garrison in a city when the aliens land etc.

I have a strange feeling that the story is going to turn out to be about how God actually intends the aliens to take over the world (hence the "freak accidents" that help the aliens) but then again, maybe I *have* read the story before … I don’t know. I just know that it is going to bring up an interesting philosophical debate within myself as to whether we can ever really know God’s purpose and also as to whether we can understand what happens to us in the context of God’s great plan for all of us. Yes, I know that treads dangerously close to religious evangelism – and I don’t want to do that :p – I believe in God and there are certain things in life and in what I read which makes me think about it but that doesn’t mean that I should go around telling others to believe in God – to me religion is a personal thing between myself and God. But I do like to talk about the dilemmas and conundrums my faith brings up 🙂

I’d like to discuss how I see religion (not *my* religion or *your* religion but simply religion) and God one of these days but I just don’t feel like putting forth the effort just now. I’m still not feeling totally fit and this illness (if it runs true to course) will probably last for a week or two yet. The good thing is that this week is going to be full of holidays here in Sri Lanka. Today is a holiday because it is a Tamil festival and then Friday is going to be a holiday since it’s the full moon and we have every full moon off since it’s a Buddhist holy day. So I’ll have to work only one more day and that’s tomorrow and that’s fine by me 🙂

There is an irritating problem with my hosting server that’s beginning to annoy me – it always seems to be down in the mornings around the time I either collect my e-mail, send out replies or try to publish this journal. I’ve noticed this for about three or four days running and it’s beginning to become a problem. I don’t relish another move but if this continues to be a problem, I might have to move. I guess I’ll wait and see. In the meantime, KuhnDog told me yesterday that he was moving his domain to his own box and that he would be able to host my own domain since he didn’t know that I’d got hosting – that was really nice of him since he’s not getting anything back from me at all in return except for loss of bandwidth. I’m beginning to realize how much of a drain my site must be on his server since now I can actually see the bandwidth stats for this domain :p

I had quite a bit of fun yesterday trying to upload the QBoard project changes that I’d made to SourceForge CVS :p First, I had to checkout from CVS and the network at work was so abysmally slow that it took about two to three hours to simply do a checkout. I then tried to do a commit of the changes I’d made and couldn’t since I kept on getting an error message about not having write access. I’d worked with CVS before while doing the LiteStep project but not with SourceForge and so I went back and did some reading and it turns out that SourceForge gives you write access only if you have SSH authentication and that meant installing an SSH client. I did that and then found out that SourceForge takes up to six hours or more to update your account with your public SSH key and that meant that I couldn’t commit to CVS yesterday. Oh boy, that was a trip and a half but I did learn a lot of things in the process :p

I also worked on the latest layout idea I had for this site. I still am not totally satisfied with it the way I was with the layout for SM and so it’s again here. Take a look and let me know what you think.