Of work, vampires and various other things …

I stayed at home since I felt like a little bit of rest since I’ve not been feeling too well the last few days – plus, I’ve been at work for almost everyday for the last month or so. So it was time for a little break :p Incidentally, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut – or at least not be totally honest all the time <vbg> This friend of mine from work asked me about my site since he’d seen some of the PhotoShop work I was doing for the SM layout and I gave him the URL – I didn’t realize till after I’d given him the URL that I talk about work and the current situation with the boss etc. here. Of course, it’s no big deal since he’s a very good friend but the problem is that there is the possibility that somebody else from work will visit next and then somebody else and so on till the site becomes an open secret and before I know it, the boss himself will be reading it :p Ah well …

Since I was at home today, I actually managed to get a lot of work done on this new project that I got started on. It’s basically a tagboard system which runs on your server but anybody can sign up for their own tagboard off your server 🙂 The source is based off an existing system called QBoard but they decided to opensource it and put it up as a project on SourceForge. I had picked up the source a while back but couldn’t install it at first because the installer was a bit clunky – I began cleaning up the installer to suit my need, then spoke to the main developer and offered to give him my changes and he added me to the SourceForge project and so I actually sat down today and wrote a full-blown installer for it in PHP :p It all seems to work pretty well but I’ll probably have to do a little more testing and then it’ll probably get released on SourceForge.

Other than that, I’ve been watching the DVD collection of "Kindred: the Embraced". When I first saw the show (must have been five or six years ago) I thought that it was pretty cool but when I saw it this time, I was struck by how bad the show looked and how cheesy the acting was :p At first, I wasn’t sure if it was the second viewing or if it was just the mood I was in but now I think maybe it was just the original show which was so bad. I don’t think I’d seen the original the first time but it was on the DVD collection and I watched it. Of course, I watched the original yesterday (when I was feeling really bad) and I watched three more episodes today (when I was feeling better) and so I am not so sure if my frame of mind had something to do with it or not :p But I kind of like the three episodes I watched today and am again becoming hooked on the story …

Under the weather …

I’m not feeling too well – both my parents are sick at home and I think they’ve passed on the virus to me too :p My parents left for the other house in Kurunegala on Friday and I’ve been fending for myself over the weekend <g> They’ll be coming back today though and I will probably take the next few days off from work and stay at home since I have a feeling that I’m going to be even more sick than I am already. Ah well – this is the problem with not being sick more than about once a year – when it hits you, it hits you bad :p I am hoping to get some work done while I’m at home – either on the layout for The Developer’s Corner or on the freeqboard project (which is an opensource project at SourceForge) since I’ve been asked to come onboard as a developer for the project. I’ve not done much PHP and mySQL development work (except to do the usual hacks to pre-created scripts to get them working) and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can do something there. There’s so much work to be done in this world that it’s simply amazing that I get anything done at all 🙂

I see you …

I don’t know where I heard this story but I heard somewhere that when a hunter comes at a monkey with a gun that the monkey closes its eyes because it believes that the hunter can’t see it since it can’t see the hunter. Jen seems to be in the same category since she has redirected both the domains I pointed to yesterday to her other domain – probably in the hope that if the evidence isn’t there, then she didn’t do it :p OK, this is the last time I’m going to drag up the subject of Jen (hopefully, unless she finds somebody stupid enough to hijack this domain – as she has been trying to do …) but since she took out her sites, most of what I wrote yesterday probably makes no sense – so I’ve updated the entry for yesterday with a link to a page which contains the actual entry that Jen had up on her site – along with a screen capture in case she claims she never wrote any of it (you never know with her :p) That’s it about Jen … No more 🙂

Thank you all for your kind support and comments yesterday 🙂 As I’ve remarked before, it is great to have such good friends and none of you have even met me! It can never be a bad world with people such as you in it 🙂

As I think I mentioned a while back, I’ve been reading "The Early Del Rey" and while his work reflects a lot of those times (it was around World War II), it has such a lot of characters that I liked that I found myself drawn into the stories over and over again. It makes me wish (again!) that I could write like that or that I lived in those times – though I probably would have hated it since I wouldn’t have had access to computers :p I’m reading a set of five short novels by Lester Del Rey now called "Gods and Golems" and that too seems to be very, very interesting. I’ll probably write more about it eventually 🙂

I’ve decided to switch over the tagboard to my own installation of QBoard since I do love the features of QBoard and I might as well make use of the QBoard installation since I’ve spent so much time on it already :p

The old order changeth …

As you may have noticed, all things Jen have disappeared from these pages except for her old entries :p I was going to remain silent about her departure since I would have had to talk about somebody else in here if I were to talk about the reasons and the events behind her departure. But now Jen has seen fit to publish a set of lies, half-truths and slander at her site [Update: guess she doesn’t like it when somebody else talks about her :p Here’s what she originally had to say] about me and I am getting tired of her doing this whole oh-look-poor-Jenni-all-alone-in-the-world-and-so-put-upon shtick and am going to say my side of the piece 🙂 Incidentally (this is for Jen’s benefit :p) she might see fit to revise certain bits of her entry after reading this (she has a habit of doing that but more on that later) to make herself look good but I have to warn her that I have screen shots and copies of her page as it stands now and will publish them here if she does do so :p

First of all, I didn’t need to "run a script for my password" as she says because she gave me her GoDaddy password to do name server setup for her hosting business since she couldn’t figure out how to do that herself – I have no idea why she needs to lie about me having her passwords, unless of course, it makes her statements look stupid and a blatant bunch of lies :p Secondly, she gets so drunk at night she can hardly remember what she did towards the early hours of morning (such as asking me to transfer farook.org over to my own name since *it’s my domain that she bought for me*) and incidentally, she does not stay up for my sake – if you really want to know why she stays up, you might want to go over to her other domain. It’s just interesting that somebody who keeps on saying that she hates liars, turns out to be such a big liar herself but then again maybe she just hates the competition :p

I realized she was lying about almost everything during the recent *hacker incident*. She had originally plagiarized an entry from an online source and the hacker caught her at it (read the comments). Then she goes and edits the entry to look as if she had had the link to the original entry all along. I would have been taken in myself except for the fact that I was using BlogMan and had the original entry (without the link) on my machine and I asked her casually if she’d had the link there originally because I didn’t remember seeing it and she tells me brazenly that yes, she’d always had the entry there. I then realized that I couldn’t trust her to be truthful and when she wanted to move and wanted me to pay for the UHaul (knowing full well that I didn’t have a credit card) and then got angry at me for not paying, I decided that it was time to get out. Weirdly enough, my credit card arrived the next day and I got my own hosting and moved my domain over to my new host since I knew she would be vindictive enough to shut down the domain if she could.

True to form, she sends out an e-mail (ostensibly to all her hostees) saying that anybody who uses MT on their site will have their account deleted on Wednesday (today over there in the US) if they don’t remove MT or move – and I was the only one who was using MT on her server (or at least she thought I was still on her server :p). Then she sends out the same e-mail again a couple of days later *in case somebody didn’t get it* – probably because she saw that my site was still up. She must have gone to delete my account today and found that she couldn’t get offline and then gets even more vindictive and starts a whole bunch of lies. Ah well …
They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that "if you lie with dogs, you wake up with fleas" – I guess the same holds true for the female of the species … I’m just glad that I never did :p

Hardware error – user not found …

Yesterday was the kind of day that always seems to come around when management is unhappy with my work. Now I must say (and this is not a phoney disclaimer just in case somebody from work is reading it :p), I have done nothing nor have I incited somebody else to do anything which resulted in the following set of events. I come to work in the morning and I’m told that one of the editing suites is not working and that it was imperative that we get it working since the program was supposed to go out yesterday for broadcasting and as luck would have it, the guy who normally does the hardware troubleshooting and maintenance (whom my friend Robin and I sort of co-manage) was on leave. So it was up to me to get it working since I was the only other computer hardware guy (supposedly – since I have never really been taught anything about hardware by anybody) around.

It was just some sort of voodoo since all I did was remove the Matrox card in the machine, put it in a different slot and restart and it worked! This kind of thing happens to me often and I have no idea whether I really did anything or if it really was voodoo :p A couple of hours later, the other editing suite breaks down – this time it won’t play sound. I remove the driver and reinstall it but nothing. So I open up the machine, remove the Matrox card and put it in a different slot and again it works! By this time, my stock among most of the people in the company has risen sky high since I’ve been performing miracles :p Of course, it would make no difference to my boss since he wants me out anyway but basically everybody else now have a justification as to why I should be kept around 🙂

That wasn’t all that happened yesterday though – for some reason work kept on pouring in – all sorts of weird stuff. The last one being writing a VBA script to do some data juggling in Excel. So I’m at work today getting ready to do that since that’s supposed to be "urgent" – ah well 🙂

And it goes on …

Yesterday was full of meetings again. My boss (the managing director) doesn’t want to have to fire me I guess (since that would still make him look bad) and so handed it over to my other boss (the editor-in-chief) and I guess basically asked her to evaluate if I can fit in or not. Now she does not want to be a bad guy and so she was basically putting it up to me as to whether I wanted to stay or go. I said that I was doing the best I can under the circumstances and would be happy to do better if somebody can tell me something specific about what is wrong with the newspapers. Of course, got no answer to that. but she basically handed all the newspaper work back to me and asked me to be in charge of them again – plus two other papers that I hadn’t been in charge of before. In addition to that, she wanted to get me involved in some new programs that the company is producing and we had a few meetings about that too. So yesterday was full of meetings and I still am not sure that the axe will not fall after all this since it has not gone back to the big man yet :p He might decide that I have to go anyway or something. Oh well … I’m getting tired of all the rigmarole.

In the mean time, I’ve received a tentative job offer from an outside source. Since that is not concrete yet, I will not talk about it or tender my resignation here either. In a way, I feel that I should simply hand in my resignation and leave but that would be a form of giving into all the intimidation. So I guess I’ll hang in there for the moment … Fun, fun, fun :p

The year begins :p

First of all, a very happy New Year to all who read this page – all three of you :p My New Year has really started off nice – NOT! Yesterday being the first day of the New Year, my boss wants to have an executive committee meeting and I am a member of the executive committee (or the EXCO for short). The EXCO is basically a set of people who are supposed to be the top-level administrators in our company and all of us report directly to the managing director – who will be referred to as "the boss" from now onwards.

Of course, here I have to step back a bit and recount something that happened last year for it any of what will follow to make any sense. Last year, around the time I was trying to get to the US, the boss and I had a major row. He has this habit of trying to get people to do their work by intimidating them and while I normally simply ignore his tactics, he got to be be a bit obnoxious in his verbiage in front of others and I simply retorted back. So basically, we ended up screaming at each other back and forth in front of the whole office for a few minutes. I did apologize to him before I left for the US and he seemed to be OK at that time. On my return however, he calls me into his room and I realize that he’s been brooding about the whole thing and that he wasn’t happy with what happened. I was proven right because he tells me that because of what happened, that he’s losing his authority because he feels that anybody will think that they can scream at him now. But actually what it boiled down to was the fact that he was afraid that nobody would be afraid of him now since I showed that I wasn’t really scared of him or of him firing me. So I told him that if he wasn’t happy with what happened, he could fire me and that I would leave. Of course, he didn’t like that either since that would make him look like a petty, vindictive guy. So he basically told me to be careful and it seemed to end at that.
However, it looks as if it hasn’t ended there after all – did anybody think it would? :p He starts talking about performance reviews at the EXCO meeting yesterday and tells me that I have not been doing too well with the newspapers. So I asked him what was wrong. He says that the page that we are doing is not interesting enough. So I tell him that it is about the (now stopped) war and the peace process and it was hardly possible to jazz it up since that would trivialize the issue. To which he responds that he is more aware of the seriousness of the issue than I but that I’m not doing a good enough job. So I asked him what I could do to make it more interesting as he claims. Of course to that there was no answer. He did take away responsibility for the newspapers from me (leaving me with no defined job for the moment) and gave it to somebody else. The meeting ended there but it looks to me as if the writing’s on the wall since he was also talking about letting people go since the company has too many employees :p

I’m waiting for his next move to see what it will be but my friend Robin and I discussed it yesterday after the meeting (Robin is part of the EXCO too incidentally) and he wanted to know if I wanted an educated guess as to how soon I’ll get fired and I said that it would probably be within the week and Robin says maybe sooner :p So that’s where it stands at the moment. I’m not really worried about it except to wonder about the level of professionalism in the company when the boss acts like a little spoilt kid. Oh well … stay tuned for the next episode I guess :p

Interpretations, innuendo, insults, invective and inalienable rights

There have been raging debates here at SM the last few days and while I am not going into the whole debate myself (I stated my position at the very beginning when it all started), let me state a few personal things so that everybody understands where I am coming from and where I stand on certain issues. I believe in the right for people to express their opinion – I will defend somebody’s right to express their opinion even if their opinion does not tally with mine. Personally, I believe we should live and let live and that our opinion/stand while right for us, might not necessarily be right for somebody else. I do what I think is right and everybody should be free to do what they think is right. And here, spare me the arguments about how a serial killer might think going around killing people is right but that doesn’t necessarily make it so – as long as you do what you think is right and don’t harm either yourself or others, I think each person should have the right to their own opinion and freedom.

One of the things I love about Jen is the fact that she is never afraid to state how she feels – even if that might fly in the face of popular opinion. She states how she feels about a certain issue and will back her stand to the hilt with arguments and facts. But she isn’t above listening to the other side of the case either and I love her for being who she is. Yes, she and I might not agree on certain subjects but that does not necessarily mean that she has to see things my way or that I have to see things her way – we are both individuals with minds of our own and we are perfectly willing to let each other have our opinions and to understand the fact and to respect that. To me that is part and parcel of being a human being and interacting with other human beings – the willingness and ability to listen to other people’s opinions and to respect them but to stand by your own convictions if you think what is right for you is not what is right for somebody else.

Sons and relationships …

I really hate talking about other people and/or washing my dirty linen in public but I guess sometimes you have to do what you believe is right and this is one of those moments. Jen has seen fit to comment on something which involves my son in response to something my ex-wife posted on the tagboard. Yes, Jonathan is not my birth-son but I’ve known him since he was about six months old and I am the only father he has ever known. I’ve seen him grow up to be a four year old and I’ve washed him, fed him, taken care of him, played with him and comforted him when he was sad or hurt. (OK, my ex- will say that I did none of these enough but the fact remains that I did do all of these things :p) Through all that time, I was the only father he knew and still I am the only father he knows and the fact that I am his Dad will never change because *he* considers me to be his father. The day that he says "you are not my father" then maybe it will change but even that I am not sure of because to me he probably will always be my son even if he doesn’t consider me to be his father.

So that might bring up the question as to why I left him if I consider him to be my son and he thinks of me as his father. I guess I can give many answers but none of them would really make any sense to anybody at all without all the background information and the background information cannot be given because it involves too many people and too many of their own stories that they might not be willing to have me reveal here. Suffice it to say that I felt that the reasons were justified at that time … But just because I left him does not make him not my son – he still is my son.

Riding in the rain …

Yesterday had been overall a sort of a down day because of a variety of things but all of that disappeared in an instant when I left work in the evening. The reason? Rain! Rain you ask? Yes, rain 🙂 It was raining cats and dogs and I rode through it all! It’s a great feeling to have the rain slashing into your face, you doing about seventy or eighty on your motorbike and there being nobody on the roads! I was screaming at the top of my voice and composing a song about riding in the rain at the same time. It went something like “Riding in the rain, ugh ugh, Riding in the rain ugh ugh, Raindrops in your face, stinging like mace, Riding in the rain, ugh ugh!” :p Yeah, I know … stupid :p But it was a totally awesome experience and while I felt as if I would meet imminent death at times since I was swerving and weaving in and out between vehicles at times and splashing noisily and muddily through puddles at other times, I just loved the whole feeling. I should do it more often and simply forget about all the other stuff that goes on in life – the stuff that brings you down 🙂