May 24, 2003
This and that
This week has turned out to be fairly hectic and I suddenly find myself unable to write here even though I had quite a few thoughts swirling around in my head that needed to be written down. Of course, none of those will go into this post since each one of them were a long entry in their own right and this was simply to be an update of the events of the last few days in a few simple paragraphs (or so I hope :p) I’ve been coding again and that keeps me busy and at the same time, my workload at work has started to pick up too. I was hoping that my boss would ignore me and find somebody else to groom as his aide now that Robin is leaving but it looks as if I’m destined to get at least some of that work – even though I have a feeling that he’ll get somebody else to be his aide since I just don’t fit the profile and have too stiff a back to do much butt-kissing :p
In the mean time, a couple of my friends who used to work for the company that I work for now are down from Canada and so we had a sort of informal get together of old friends from the company and those who still work here who knew them. There were only like six or seven of us but it was a nice evening since we got to catch up and to talk about all the stuff that had happened in the past. While we might be glamorizing how much fun it used to be – it still was nice to go back down memory lane and remember all the people that we used to know and all the crazy stuff that we used to do. One outcome of the meeting was a suggestion that we should set up a site where all the people who worked for the company (as well as those who currently work there) could keep in touch. I volunteered to do that and yesterday morning got on the job as soon as I got to work. A couple of hours later, I had what is called The YA*TV Bunch (sorry, no link since the site is only for employees :p) and people started signing up almost immediately.
Robin was one of the first members to sign up since he works with me and sits right next to me. Now Robin and I come from the old BBS days in Sri Lanka when we used to have all these guys on a single electronic bulletin board system insulting each other, pretending to be girls, starting flame-wars and what not. We even used to have multiple logins so that we could start a fight with somebody and then both support them and oppose them :p Robin seemed to go right back into that mode since he started making posts right, left and centre and stirring things up 🙂 I think by the end of the day we had around 11 articles on the board and all had been made by Robin (or by somebody else on whose behalf Robin made the posts :p) or myself. Hopefully, that gets the others involved too but you never know – some people just don’t like to put anything down in righting where other people known to them might see it :p
I completed "The Way of the Pilgrim" yesterday evening and while the book as a whole made me think a lot, the ending seemed to be a bit too rushed and somewhat incomplete. And it was kind of irritating (though certainly true-to-life) to have all of humanity joining together against the aliens through most of the book and then find them all reverting old patterns of being at each other’s throats in the last chapter when the aliens are ready to withdraw – I would hope that they’d have learnt something from all that they went through but us being human, I’d guess that probably wouldn’t happen. The story does end with a bit of a question as to whether we lie to ourselves about who we are or whether it’s the aliens who will not face the truth about themselves. This does tie in with an earlier post where I mentioned how people don’t seem to realize who they are or what they want and I might want to go into that in more detail at another time but for the moment, I think I’ve written enough 🙂
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
Tags:
Internet,
Real Life
Posted by Fahim at
6:29 am
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March 13, 2003
Server trouble and other miscellanea
I’ve been unable to publish the entry I made on Monday for the last few days because my host has been in the process of upgrading their server. At first, it was CGI trouble in that I could not execute any CGI at all and then it was the inability to access mySQL from Perl. I did some investigating yesterday and discovered that they didn’t have the DBD::mysql module (which allows you to connect to mySQL databases via a Perl script) was not installed. So I let the people at the hosting company know and it turns out that they’d overlooked this particular module – so I guess it was a good thing that I mentioned it to them instead of waiting patiently for a few more days for the problem to go away by itself :p Anyway, it all got sorted out and I was able to finally publish my entry from Monday, yesterday.
However, since a few days ago, my e-mail volume has suddenly and strangely dropped. Granted, most of the e-mails I’d receive in the morning when I checked e-mail for the first time was spam, I still think that I’m suddenly receiving less e-mail. Maybe they set up a spam filter while they were at it – I hope not since I hate spam filters because they don’t let me decide what is spam and what is not and stops everything before it even gets to me. I guess I’ll need to look into that some time soon but not today since I’m going to be particularly busy (and out of office) today.
So where am I going? I’m going to do a story about what we in Sri Lanka call a “communal” incident – basically an incident involving two or more ethnic or religious groups. This particular incident is interesting in that it happened in a majority Muslim fishing village (Muslims are generally a minority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 8% of the total population) where there was one lone Sinhala family (the Sinhalese are the majority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 70+% of the population). There was a dispute about land which escalated to violence and the end result was that the Sinhala family was driven off from the village. They went to their relatives in a neighbouring Sinhala village and the people there got agitated at what happened and they came back to retaliate. There were clashes and the end result was that three Muslim youths were killed. This happened over a year ago but the anger and the hurt is still there under the surface.
I’ve talked to both sides and as is usual in such a situation, I get conflicting stories from each side which puts the blame on the other. However, both sides blame the police saying that the police was on the side of their enemies and that if the police had done their duty, the problem would not have happened in the first place. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that the whole thing is mostly political since the mayor of the city (as well as the MP – Member of Parliament – for the area) is a Muslim. The whole land problem seems to have started because he was being a typical politician and told both sides what they wanted to hear … plus, the man who seems to be mostly involved in this all from the Muslim side on the scene, seems to be a major supporter of the mayor. There is more to this and I’d like to write it all down at my leisure when (or should that be if?) I get back from the shoot.
Is there some doubt as to whether I will return from this shoot? Probably not but then again you never know since it is still kind of touchy situation and it is possible that something I say and do will set things off :p I do intend to push this as much as I can to do a story which shows the sheer stupidity of such a situation where people think it’s a religious or ethnic problem and blow things out of proportion when it actually is just an altercation between two individuals. But I guess we’ll see how it turns out …
Tags:
Internet,
Real Life,
Site
Posted by Fahim at
6:56 am
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