Of love and loonies …

I watched this made for TV movie called "Don’t Tell Me Secrets" (at least I think that was the title, not so sure now) a couple of days ago that that made me want to write this entry. It was about this woman who is a lawyer and has just divorced her husband who is also a lawyer (at least I think they’ve just divorced – I missed the beginning of the movie). She is involved in a case where her client has been raped and then threatened not to go to the authorities. The woman persuades her client to prosecute and her ex- becomes the attorney for the defendant, Sean. Her client ends up missing, Sean keeps on following her and making threatening remarks and she is haunted by memories of her mother with whom she had a disagreement years ago and who disappeared never to be seen again.

In the midst of it all, she finds love in the form of a shoe salesman who used to be an attorney but gave up practicing law after some harrowing incidents in his life. Her client turns up dead but she can’t prove that Sean did it due to insufficient evidence. In the meantime, she gets threatening letters and she is not sure who is doing it whether it is Sean or the new guy in her life who seems to be so mysterious in certain ways. I will not go into all the details but in the end it turns out that the orchestrator of all this drama is actually her ex- that he wanted her back and so had tried to scare her into needing him. He’d actually unleashed Sean on her knowing that he was guilty and it turns out that he had even murdered her mother because she was against their marriage.

Over the top? It seemed to me so. Why would anybody ever do all these things to somebody that they claimed to love? But then again, I guess that depends on *your* definition of love – whether it is a selfish love where you want to (or need to) *own* the person you claim to love or a selfless kind of love where you just want the other person to be happy, wherever and with whomever that they like. To *me* love should always be of that second type but unfortunately, I don’t think that kind of love is that prevalent. Everybody wants the kind of love where you have the person you love with you – sometimes even if they don’t love you. What sort of a relationship would that be? A very unhappy one is all I can say …

The movie made me sad in a way … for the woman, for her mother, for all the suffering that they had to go through – just because one person was selfish in their loving. This was just a story but I do hear of such incidents quite a lot here in Sri Lanka, where a lover will kill the object of his affection and then take his own life. What kind of a choice is that – kill what you can’t have? Isn’t that really childish? I don’t know … Sometimes I do really wonder about the human race … but then again, I guess these are the things that go into making us what we are and when we are able to overcome all these baser instincts of ours, we will become worthy of the name "human" – if we haven’t wiped ourselves off the face of the Earth before that, that is :p

First of all, I’d like to thank James O’Donnell for sending me “The Thomas Crown Affair” off my wishlist – it’s the original version of the movie and something that I’ve been looking forward to watching for a long time. Thanks a bunch Jim 🙂

I started work on the next release – whatever it is going to be yesterday again. I had gone back to the original 7.1 codebase – the one without the WPTools WYSIWYG entry field – for the 7.11 and now I merged back the 7.11 changes to the WPTools version. I’m still not sure if I will release 7.11 or complete integrating WPTools and release the whole thing as 7.5. At the moment, I’m leaning towards the latter idea since I’ve just realized that the planned feature list is going to be huge and that there are going to be some major changes – so that would mean a long beta cycle or releasing all the features in bits and pieces in incremental versions till we hit 8.0 and that looks to be a better idea at the moment to me.

However as it may be, since the new entry field is going to be WYSIWYG, I had to add a lot of new toolbar buttons for text formatting but I couldn’t get these buttons to work properly till yesterday. I finally figured out what was wrong and had the bold and italics options working. This incidentally will invalidate the built-in custom snippets bold and italic functions. I am not sure how I’m going to handle this but I have a feeling that it will somehow tie into what I’m going to talk about next – the plain HTML editing option. I was going to include an HTML editing option anyway, but I was going to make the WYSIWYG editing the default. However, talking to Jordan made me realize that some people might actually prefer to edit in HTML without all the spiffy WYSIWYG goodness <g> – so now I’m thinking of how I could set it up so that people can choose what their default editing option in Blog is to be – for the moment this is not going to be a major problem with the UI but it will become a bit more complicated when I merge in BlogMan. Guess I’ll just have to look at the UI a lot more closely :p

Another problem (albeit a minor one) is doing nice icons for all the new toolbar options 🙂 Sinesolis did such a great job with the spiffy, true-colour icons for Blog that I feel ashamed to include drab monotonous icons for underline, ordered list, unordered list etc. along with the existing icons. I might try to see if I can do something using Axialis Icon Workshop but if not, I’ll simply not bother with it for the moment and go with whatever icons I can get and figure out what to do once I actually have a release going :p