These are some of my favourite things …

I’m still recovering from my bout of illness but then again, as those who know me are aware, this happens to me about once a year – it’s a cyclical thing :p It happens pretty regularly and has a known time frame for me to get well – I’m on my way to recovery except perhaps for a relapse – and that’s been known to happen too. There’s no joy in life when there are no surprises :p That actually brings up something that a protagonist in the latest book I’m reading – "Necromancer" by Gordon R. Dickson – says, or rather, is said about him. In describing his character, it is said that he can analyze isolates in anything and so he is rarely ever surprised because he knows that something is a logical result of the preceding moment or moments. I sometimes feel like that ….

But to get back on track, since I haven’t been feeling too well and was all alone at home for part of the weekend (my parents again went to the Kurunegala house but came back early because they were worried about me – which was sweet of them but I sometimes think that they worry way too much about me :p), I spent my time doing the stuff that I love to do. I’ve been reading – both "Necromancer" and a trade paperback collection of X-Men stories called "The Asgardian Wars". I finished watching the DVD collection of "Kindred: the Embraced" and also have been doing some PC gaming after a long time. Now the gaming is all Edward’s fault since he’s the one who got me hooked :p

Edward told me about "Dungeon Siege" and that it was a great game. I went and looked at the website and it looked pretty interesting and so I decided to give it a try. I got the game and installed it at work on Friday (it was a holiday and nobody was there) to see if it was interesting and I think I played for close to an hour – I brought the save game home with me and then installed on my machine at home and I started playing it Saturday evening and just couldn’t stop :p I played part of Saturday evening (had to stop when the mosquitos came out in force :p) and then started again on Sunday morning and kept on playing till about lunch time. I think I’ve put in close to six hours by now and while it *is* getting a bit repetitive (I mean the battles and the dungeon crawling) it still is very interesting. The strange thing however is that I don’t mind the repetitive battles and the incessant dungeon crawling on console games but don’t so much like it on PC – maybe it has to do with the fact that it is a bigger screen and a different controller? I don’t know … but I’ll probably play "Dungeon Siege" for a good while yet …

Thanks to all who wished me luck – and Collin, it took a *lot* of whining to get here and to stay here :p Actually, the new job (or the sub-contract rather) might not be materializing after all since there’s suddenly been a cessation of communication from the other end – of course, it could be just because of the weekend or it could be that they decided to go some other route. If it’s the latter, cest la vie 🙂 I did complete work on the CSVReader component but ran into problems in testing it out because for some strange reason, none of the Visual Studio .NET webform components show up on my machine at home. Of course, I’d upgraded that machine to Windows XP SP1 recently and had installed Visual Studio .NET after the fact and have not done any Windows updates on it since then (I’m on dial-up from home, what do you expect? :p) and so that might be the reason. I intend to take the code to work and see if I can make it work there since that machine has had Visual Studio .NET installed forever and has had all Windows updates applied except for Windows XP SP1 and IE 6 SP1 :p So I might be able to pinpoint where the problem is … I am already aware that I’ll probably need to do some debugging on the CSVReader component since I don’t think it’ll work right off the bat and so want to get this problem sorted, get the component working and then I’ll be done – unless I get the subcontracting job of course :p

Haven’t done much more in the coding-line since I’ve been busy with other stuff – since I prefer to keep this journal to just coding related matters, I guess you’ll have to go over to SM to see what else I’ve been up to :p