Father Time takes a step?

The New Year festivities started early here yesterday. Several neighbours were blaring loud music in anticipation of partying on till midnight and fire-crackers and sky-rockets were going off every few minutes all over the place. What did we do? We went to bed early and Laurie put on ear-plugs so that she won’t be kept awake by all the noise :p

Call me a Scrooge (that’s a wonderful thought BTW – what would Scrooge have done for New Year if the ghosts of Christmas hadn’t gone and messed stuff up? :p) but to me there is nothing special about the New Year – it’s just another day. How exactly do we know that it’s a New Year? What makes it a New Year? Is all the hoopla all about the fact that you get to discard the old calendar and put a new one up on the wall? What exactly are we celebrating? Does anyone who celebrates the New Year with such gusto actually know what they are celebrating? Why they are celebrating? Or do they simply do it because everybody else does it – or because they like to have a good time and any excuse is as good as another?

Personally, I’ve never been one to go along with the Joneses :p I like to know why I do something and I really see no reason to celebrate New Year so joyously. It’s just an arbitrary day in the revolution of the Earth around the sun. Heck the Earth might not be in the exact same position each year when we do celebrate the New Year – and I don’t mean "somewhat close" when I say "exact same posistion" :p I don’t mind the good cheer and wishing everybody a happy New Year. We should be cheerful and wish everybody happiness everyday of the year 🙂 But I don’t see the point to all the revelry, the noise, the disturbance you cause to the other people who might really want to stay up till midnight and all the rest goes with it. If that makes me a Scrooge – put me down at the top of the list of Scrooges :p

The Games People Play ….

I was offered a job a few days ago by a good friend. I had used to work for the same company but in a different department and I’d quit due to certain differences that I had with one of the people in my department. She (my friend) asked me if I’d like a job in her department and I said "yes" since I liked the company and I was getting a bit stressed out at my current job. She, being the nice person she is, didn’t think it was going to be any issue with my former boss but I wasn’t so sure. Turns out that my fears were well grounded :p

My friend had asked the head of her department (who we’ll call C) to ask the head of my former department (who we’ll call L) whether L had any objection’s to C’s department hiring me. My friend didn’t think this would be a problem since I had not been fired and I’d quit. But the thing was, I knew I would have been fired if I’d stayed there much longer :p Not because I was incompetent mind you – in fact, I was certain I was about to be fired one week when I was saved by the Director of Operations of the company handing me a case where I resolved the issue and turned the customer around. They liked how I helped them so much that they went to WebHostingTalk forums and raved about me and how I’d helped them. I believe the Director of Operations pointed this particular forum thread to L and she was all praises and smiles for a while. Of course, I knew it was too good to last and so looked around for another job, found it and quit. Yeah, call me paranoid but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you :p

So what has all of this to do with this current job offer? Well, the fact is that the reason that L didn’t like me was because her department was being run like a Nazi concentration camp :p You were supposed to do what you were told, no questions asked. I don’t believe any organization should be run that way. Sure, I’m always loyal to the company I work for but I should also have the opportunity to question something if I feel it is wrong. If they tell me, hey, these are the reasons that we do things this way, I’d be happy. After all, at least they gave me the option to voice my doubts. I had tried that with L and had been shot down and told curtly that the forum I used (internal department e-mail) wasn’t the place for such discussion. After a couple of questions like that, I knew my days were numbered and that’s why I left in the first place.

Now, when C asked L about hiring me, L had said that I had told a customer that I didn’t agree with company policy and so I wasn’t a good choice. Now, I complain a lot internally if I don’t think something is right, but I don’t go tell customers that. As far as I can recall, what L said is a blatant lie. What gets me is that she is able to make an accusation like that with impunity knowing that I can never refute her – what are they going to do? Hold a court inquiry to prove my innocence :p I don’t think I personally could do that – tell such an obvious lie about somebody without any compunction. I’d be like, "Hey, they’d know I was lying … what if they questioned me?" But in L’s case, thinking back about it, I guess it’s sheer brilliance – who is going to question her word over that of somebody who no longer worked in the company and who would have no way to defend themselves?

I was slightly irritated when I started this post but now I’m simply amused :p It was a nice stroke of corporate gamesmanship and while I can be magnanimous and try to believe that L honestly made a mistake and confused my internal complaints with something else, I am more than 80% certain that this wasn’t the case. Ah well, rest assured that this will make it’s way into a book someday :p

Back again …

I’ve finally decided to come back to blogland :p When I started to write this entry, I thought I’d never been away from blogging for this long since I started blogging way back in ’99 or so (or was it earlier? :p) But then I took a look at the archives for this site and realized that at least here, I seem to have had a habit of cyclically going offline for long periods. The last time was in October of 2003 and and I didn’t come back till April 2004! So I guess this time is a much faster recovery … that is, if I keep on writing after this and not stop again after this entry or a couple of more entries.

So what has been happening? A lot actually. Around the end of October both my sister and sister-in-law (Laurie’s sister) paid us visits. While my sister’s visit was brief, Laurie’s sister and her family stayed with us for a while and we really enjoyed the visit. Of course, having guests in the house meant going sightseeing, going shopping and so on and time really passed by in a blur.

Then in November, I got a new job through the help of my friend Tracie (thanks Tracie :)) and finally left my previous employer – I’d been with them for close to five years (the longest I’d been with any one employer) over two different periods. I always will remember them with warmth because I truly felt at home there but I was going nowhere there since they really didn’t have anything to keep me occupied full time. My new job on the other hand, keeps me so occupied that I am exhausted at the end of the day :p I work for a hosting company as a remote systems admin now and since I’m administering servers, I am on alert most of my working hours in case one of the servers decides to act up. While it’s not very physical work (I sit on the couch staring at my computer screen the whole day :p), it’s mentally exhausting because you can never really relax. But I’m getting better at it and learning to relax a bit more than I did at the beginning, when I was too scared to look away from the monitoring screen for even one second lest something go wrong with the servers and I might miss an alert :p

The new job, the new schedule, the changes in work habits etc. have kept me busy and away from blogging (or even doing any other stuff like coding …) for the last couple of months. I now seem to be finally getting into a new groove (which I hope does not become a rut :p) and so am able to think about blogging again. Plus, I started blogging as an outlet for all the thoughts crowding in my head and also because I needed to, was compelled to write. But since I’m so busy now, the compulsion to write is gone. Indeed, I found that the couple of articles a month I was doing for two different magazines was getting to be draining because of all the research that I had to do. So I gave up most of my writing too (I still write for one magazine – but that’s on an occasional basis) and become a gentlemen of leisure … albeit without too much leisure time :p

That brings us to about yesterday 🙂 I spent most of my spare time yesterday cataloguing my DVD collection. I’d been keeping tabs on my DVD’s using an application that I’d found online (what geek doesn’t? :p) but had stopped updating it like three years ago. And since we’d been buying a lot of DVD’s recently, I found that we had a lot of DVD’s not in the system and worst still, that we were buying duplicates at times because I didn’t have an updated system! So I finally decided to bite the bullet and update the system. I started with around 220 DVD’s in the system and now have 456 after I’d entered almost all of the new ones :p I still have about 10 more to go which are mostly Tamil or Hindi movies which aren’t in the database of selectable movies of the application that I use – DVD Profiler. So I’ll have to entere those manaually – I’ve become really anal about making sure that the cast and crew information is as correct as possible so that I can do an offline cross-reference of any actor, director, writer etc. based on the movies I own. So, I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of IMDB refrencing to update the last 10 or so movies – yes, that’s something I found out yesterday … even Tamil and Hindi movies are in IMDB! Granted, they don’t have as much information as the Hollywood movies, but they are still there and that’s probably one of the easiest references for referencing Bollywood or Mollywood movies too 🙂

Later in the evening we watched "Ocean’s Twelve" on DVD. Yeah, I hear you going, "What? It’s not out on DVD yet!" :p These were pirated copies of the movie – and bad pirated copies at that since somebody had shot it in a theater (probably) and the camera was slightly slanted and so the whole movie was slightly askew :p Then there were all the French titles, place names etc. which made the story a bit difficult to follow since I like to know all the details :p The movie was good but the ending wasn’t breathtaking – in fact, I could see it coming a mile away. I don’t know whether Hollywood writers are becoming more predictable each year or if I’m just beginning to see the patterns better but I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie more and more easily as time passes. The last movie that I can remember surprising me was "The Sixth Sense" and even that I was able to figure out what was happening before the movie ended.

Speaking of "The Sixth Sense", is M. Night Shyamalan’s career going in reverse or what? He came out with his best movie as his maiden offering and it has been steadily going downhill since then. "Unbreakable" was good but left me feeling as if there was something more – as if I’d seen only half a movie and there was an untold story I was missing. "Signs" was just a bad movie – no two words about it. The story was atrocious, so lame that it probably wouldn’t have floated even in the beginning days of science fiction. Come on, aliens who are afraid of water? I read something very similar in one of my first Sinhalese science fiction novels when I was like thirteen and even then, I was sceptical of that whole idea :p I haven’t even bothered to see "The Village" since the guy at the video store was like "This is the same guy who did ‘Sixth Sense’? But this is such an awful load of crap!" ‘Nuff said 🙂

Done, done at last! Thank God almighty, done at last!

The last entry for this site, which was made somewhere in June, was never published at all due to the fact that Blog wouldn’t cooperate :p I finally got that entry to publish today after getting most of the major problems in Blog. Actually, I’m kind of happy to get Blog working again since now, I use one application, Blog, to post to both my WordPress site and my non-WordPress site :p That is kind of cool.

A lot has happened since I last posted here and I’d probably have to make a humongous entry to catch up with all the stuff that has happened :p I just don’t feel like making the aforementioned humongous entry due to the fact that I’m not feeling totally well today. So I guess I’ll do the Cliff’s Notes version of what has been happening so far instead :p

OK, I left my then employer and joined a new company somewhere in May. This new company had been a project of my then employer’s and I’d been involved in the project for about a year before they decided to go off and form a separate company and they wanted me involved. I did get involved but found that I’d taken on way too much than I’d bargained for. I found myself doing systems administration, HR duties, procurement and a heck of a lot more besides when I had actually been hired on to be their lead developer. Things got a bit too hairy for my tastes and so, I went back to my old employer (who now is my new employer … again :p).

I’ve been here at my new/old employer for a couple of months now and things have been fairly hectic since I’ve had to do a couple of proposals as well as a full promotional video for the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka. I really enjoyed the work on the ICTA video since it was something different from the usual run of the mill stuff I get to do. Unfortunately, till about a week ago, all this stuff meant that I was kept fairly busy since I also had taken up writing for another monthly magazine here in Sri Lanka (in addition to my existing column on a different monthly magazine :p) and what with trying to do all that and keep up with my comics, movies, TV shows and so on, not much time was left over for doing other things … such as coding.

Since I couldn’t post here till I got back to coding and got Blog working, that presented a bit of a problem as far as posting on SM was concerned. Of course, I really didn’t have much time to worry about SM and so, I’d think about getting back to the code, but really wouldn’t do it :p I’ve finally been able to get back to working on Blog – mostly because a friend needed Blog working more so than because I needed it working :p – and so, hopefully, I should get back to posting here too. We’ll see …

Interruptions and holidays …

You start blogging again in earnest hoping to post at least every other day and what happens? You have a long weekend which lasts for like five days, that’s what happens :p Honestly, Sri Lanka is probably the country with the most holidays in the world! This time, the holidays went on from Friday the 30th of April to the middle of this week – Wednesday to be exact. When I got back to work on Thursday of course, I was flooded with stuff to do after such a long break. What else is new? :p
Of course, I had been planning to do a lot of stuff over the holidays but as usually happens with the plans of mice and men, I never actually got around to doing most of it – especially my coding :p Did manage to catch a few of the movies which have been lying around waiting for me to watch them though. Actually, that was mostly due to the fact that we’d recently gotten a new stack of movies and wanted to get through the lot before I totally forgot about them 🙂 So what’d I watch? Actually, I forget most of them now though I do recall that there were a few Hindi movies in there. Did watch the Kevin Costner starrer "Open Range" but found it to be a bit tedious. The story was OK I guess but seemed to plod on a bit at times and Costner’s propensity to have wide panoramic shots at times gets to be a bit too much :p

I also watched Tarantino’s "Kill Bill Volume I" in anticipation of getting my hands on a good DVD copy of volume II soon. Now if you are the squeamish type and don’t like to see blood spurting out all over the place like a hundred fire hydrants that had their tops knocked off, then you really shouldn’t be watching this movie. I normally don’t like movies with a lot of violence but then again, that is usually when the story is dark and moody and the violence is somehow "real". Here, the violence is so over the top that it seems comical or cartoonish and I just enjoyed the show to its fullest 🙂 I loved the improbable fight scenes and the way over the top storyline and am looking forward to watching the second volume whenever a good DVD copy comes out – the movie is too good for me to go out and grab one of those crappy camera copies, thank you very much :p

Return of the Prodigal

Yes, I am not dead …yet :p And I had to think long and hard about where to post this one since my main blog at The Developer’s Corner has been inactive as well for the longest of times. I finally decided that the post should go here since this post has nothing at all to do with development but the original dilemma arose from the fact that I did have a lot to say about why I haven’t done any development work in a while :p Ah well, guess there are always going to be such cases where you can’t figure out which blog gets the post when you have multiple blogs. Maybe I should go back to a combined blog? This might actually make sense when I combine Blog and BlogMan (whoops, that sounds like a development related statement … see what I mean?)

Anyway, the situation has been like this – my routine has changed so much that I really haven’t had much time for blog entries .. there is always just too much to do. So I kinda stopped making SM entries and then The Developer’s Corner went into neglect as well since I didn’t have time to code any longer either. I’ve been working on two different fronts – one is my regular job and the other is a separate project that I got involved in as part of my job. This second project has gradually taken up more and more of my time until during the the last month I was even working weekends to get things ready for the Sri Lankan elections which were to be held at the beginning of April. The elections have come and gone and things have calmed down a bit now but I still don’t seem to find the time to update my blog or to do any coding since the two jobs continue to go on. I have decided to try and make more regular updates though since otherwise my two blogs that I seemed to be so religious about updating would just die a natural death. However, I think I really must think about combining The Developer’s Corner and SM. This actually would allow me to make more frequent updates and still try to somewhat keep things on topic since the topic can once again be anything at all :p

So what have I actually been doing? Well just last week, my friend Robin and I were discussing old DOS games – games that we both used to enjoy but hadn’t played in ages. The nostalgic trip down memory lane got me thinking about some of the games I really loved and suddenly, I had a hankering to play some of them. I’d already tried to play a few them, like Gods, on Windows XP but had found the game to be slow and I didn’t really feel like going through that again. However, I suddenly realized that there might be a virtual machine or an emulator around for DOS which might allow me to play the games as they were meant to! My search resulted in me finding DOSBox – an emulator for DOS on Windows (as well as a host of other platforms actually …) – just what I was looking for! My tests with DOSBox were less than satisfactory though since Gods still seemed to run much slower than I remembered. However, I did bag a whole bunch of old DOS games from the Web since there were a lot of abandonware sites which had all my old favourites for download 🙂

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across an Amiga emulator – WinUAE. I have no clear recollection as to how that happened now. I realized after some reading that all I needed to run Amiga games was this emulator, an Amiga ROM image and some other little bits and pieces which I was able to get together fairly quickly. I found that there was a whole slew of Amiga games available for download and that all of my old DOS favourites were there in Amiga format too 🙂 Unfortunately, my first attempts at getting an Amiga game running on WinUAE weren’t very successful but this was mostly due to my total lack of knowledge of both Amigas and WinUAE. I finally stumbled upon the correct way to set things up in WinUAE so that I can run a game and my first game was Deliverance. I was so hooked by the game (yes, even though it was ancient :p) that I played it till about midnight on Friday!

Over the weekend, I perfected my configuration of WinUAE for playing Amiga games and was able to get a few of my old favourites like Gods, Lemmings, The Lost Vikings and Chaos Engine working just fine on it. The game play is as good as ever, there is no speed difference and the best thing of all, the games take only a few megs on my hard disk! What more can one ask for? :p

Another month, another entry …

Boy, how time passes! It’s been more than a month since my last entry and I really haven’t noticed the passage of time at all! Ah well, what can I say except that I’ve been busy? :p I’ve been coding up a storm, working and to top it all off, I’m probably going to start writing again too 🙂 And when I say writing, I don’t mean here on the blog (unfortunately, my blogs are probably going to be the ones to suffer because of my writing – ironic since I used to write the most here) but for actual publications … I used to do quite a bit of writing for a local Sunday newspaper before I got into the whole blogging thing but that was about seven or eight years ago. Then I left for the US and most (if not all) of my writing got targeted for an online audience. When I came back to Sri Lanka, I thought of writing again for the newspaper but things never seemed to work out and I sort of forgot all about it.

Then last week, a friend of mine that I used to work with visited my workplace and she asked me if I’d want to do a piece on gadgets for her since she publishes a magazine here in Sri Lanka. I said sure and since she wanted it that day itself, dashed off about a page on my Sony Ericsson P800. In the evening, I received an SMS from her saying that she loved the article and asking me if I’d like to do it on a monthly basis for her and I said, sure. The next day, I decided to give my editor at the old newspaper a call and say “Hi” since the whole article thing brought up memories of writing for the newspaper. I call her and she says “I’ve been meaning to call you since I wanted you to think about writing a column for us again” and I was again set off wondering about whether there are is anything called a coincidence :p We discussed several ideas and as the day progressed, I began thinking more and more about one particular idea we’d discussed and by the end of the day, I was ready to write the article 🙂

I have this habit of going the whole hog when I do a regular column, I design the logo, I do the graphic and then I also do the column since I have a particular look or feel in mind and so I try to get my whole vision out – not just the words. This time was no exception – I scouted around for a specific graphic to convey the idea I had in mind and then worked over the weekend in creating a logo that I was happy with. I can’t say that I’m totally happy with the final product since I was kind of limited by the fonts on my machine but I decided to go with what I had and move on to the article itself – which I think I finished within an hour 🙂 Now I’ve got all the pieces together but my editor still has not seen it and I have no idea if she will even like it … Guess I’ll find out when I present it to her this week and if she does, I’ll be writing again weekly – and never fear, I’ll post a link here to the online version of the paper so that you can read every word that I write – if you want to read them that is 🙂

Life under a thumb …

I hate talking about people who can’t/won’t actually read this since then they don’t get a chance to defend themselves and it seems equivalent to talking behind somebody’s back. However, there are exceptions to every rule and this is one such :p I’ve talked about my boss and the sort of strained relationship that exists at work between him and I .. Well, things are getting even more .. umm .. interesting … It’s come to a point where I’m ready to say "You big baby, will you stop acting like a child and grow up?" but alas, I cannot say this to his face since I happen to like this job (it pays fairly well ..) and it’s not so easy to find a job at short notice in Sri Lanka – especially when you don’t know "people", which I don’t :p Or maybe, I just dislike people and associating with them after a few incidents such as the ones I’ve been going through with my boss.

The latest? Well we’ve been working on a cross-organization project which involved people from sister-organizations of the company as well as organizations from outside. My boss worked closely with another guy to set the project up and so we all assumed that he was aware of everything that’s going on. We are given contracts to sign for this new project and are told that we’ll be paid for the work we do – again, I assume my boss knows what’s going on. Then he comes back from a trip abroad, has a meeting with all of us involved in the project and suddenly says that he had no idea that we’d signed contracts and that it was illegal (at least as far as I was concerned) since I was already under contract to the company and so cannot sign any other contract! He goes on to say that I already get paid for my work and so will not be paid for work on the project since he can’t pay me double salary. Of course, it turns out that the contracts (which I honestly didn’t look at or even think of as being contrary to my current contract since I thought my boss already knew of it) were signed with the guy who set up the project *care of* my company and so it wasn’t actually with a different company and so probably does not create any legal hassles .. But that was after the fact.

Anyway, my boss seems to think that I am hell-bent on getting my share of the money and that I am inciting others to work on my behalf. He also seems to think a lot of other things about the others involved in the project and their motivations for working on things and I find myself wondering how somebody can think so ill of others when there is no grounds for it? Is it because that is how they’d behave themselves? Or is it just cynicism born through years of experience? I don’t know ….

However, I haven’t come to the most irritating fact yet. The project is centered around a collaboration tool and all of us are using it to keep in touch and to work on the project. My boss is supposed to use it too but he hadn’t logged on in ages and he suddenly mentioned at the meeting we had that he couldn’t get it to work since his machine crashed constantly when he tried to use it. That was the first I had heard of it – he’d had problems using it since it was a resource hog and so we’d disabled it from running at start up but as far as I knew, it worked. So I happened to mention to one of the others in the project that that was the first time I’d heard about any crash and in conversation with my boss, he happens to mention the fact that I’d said so. And what happens? I get called into office early on Monday morning and am interrogated as to what I’d said and what I’d not said. And suddenly history is revised and my boss says that he’d had problems for the longest time and that he’d told me before he went abroad to fix things and have the machine running and that he can’t even log into the collaboration tool. I told him that as far as I could recall no such thing had happened and that I’d mentioned to the other guy that I never knew about the crash before because I hadn’t! Then I’m told that my loyalty is to the company and to him and that I shouldn’t tell other people anything etc. and am told to contact this guy and tell him that I didn’t tell him what he thinks I said or something like that. I’m like, "What? If you are upset about things, you clarify with him .. why get me involved?" I even told him that I was sick and tired of all this bickering and finger pointing and what does he say? He says "You have to stop the crashes and clarify things with the other guy!" I tell you, I could strangle somebody by this time ….

I try to keep calm and ask him what exactly is wrong with his collaboration software. He says that it won’t even load. So I tell him that then we’ll have to uninstall everything and reinstall but that would mean he’d lose his old profile and all messages under it … then he says, "Oh wait, maybe it did start when it needed to be started but it wasn’t starting up on Windows start up .." Well, duh! We disabled that because he complained about the speed of the machine and told him so at the time … Anyway, I upgrade the product to the latest release and then start it up and it comes up just fine. So it looks as if he never bothered to start it up till now but decided to blame these mysterious crashes … Which his statements also seemed to indicate were just that the auto-update feature of the app was failing on downloading updates – not an actual crash of his machine itself. I find myself wondering at this point whether he’s delusional, or just clueless about computers or actually saying whatever comes to his mind so that he’s blameless and everybody else is totally to be blamed. I really don’t know but I had to sit down and type all this out at top speed since I was boiling over by this time and needed to vent … So there :p

Back at last, back at last …

Yes, I’m finally back … actually, I’ve been back for a while but there have been problems but where to begin? 🙂 Guess I’ll begin at the beginning itself and then go on till the end as I think the White King said to Alice :p I initially was away from SM, my other blog and general coding due to the fact that I’d met somebody online and I was spending every moment I was online with her 🙂 Then she decided to move to Sri Lanka in August and we got married soon after she got here and then there was a whole heap of other things to do. My wife Laurie is not a Muslim nor is she a Sri Lankan and so, my parents were dead set against the marriage – but to be fair by them, I didn’t tell them of the marriage beforehand. I sprung it on them after the fact so that they wouldn’t be able to guilt trip me into reconsidering – cowardly? Probably :p Anyway, my parents wanted to have nothing to do with Laurie or I and so we had to find our own place.

I’d anticipated this and had already rented out a house and had also gotten time off for two weeks from work and so Laurie and I were able to spend the time setting up house and attending to the hundreds of little things that needed to be attended to. The daily nitty-gritties are probably going to be way too exhaustively detailed for me to go into right here but if you are interested, you could always take a look at Laurie’s Sri Lanka blog since she has detailed everything that happened every day since she got to Sri Lanka 🙂 Anyway, since we were at a new house and had no telephone (except for my cellular) let alone dial-up access, I was again offline for several weeks except for the brief periods I had to come into work to attend to various things.

Then I finally got back to work around two weeks ago but still was not able to attend to my blogs since I had so much piled up work that needed to be attended to – among other things. In addition to that, I discovered that SM had a problem – I could not rebuild old entries and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The network at work in the meantime had become extremely slow (I am still trying to figure out what the cause is – whether it’s a file sharer or one of those all too frequent worms) and so I was unable to do much online stuff such as trying to debug my Movable Type installation for SM. I tried replacing all the Movable Type files in case I’d made some sort of a mistake when I switched hosts (which I’d done just before Laurie came down BTW), I tried moving the Movable Type scripts to a different location on my server, I tried playing with different configuration options, I referred to the MT forums for days on end on an extremely slow connection – all to no avail.

I had installed Norton Personal Firewall just after I’d gotten back from vacation/marriage but I had not thought to test out rebuilding SM without the firewall. Or at least, I’d remember when I wasn’t at my computer that I should test without the firewall but never do it. Finally, I hit upon an MT forum entry which specifically mentioned that rebuilding and other activities on MT get affected when Norton Personal Firewall is on and how to get around it – disable the popup ad prevention feature in Norton Firewall. I did that and finally I was able to use my MT installation fully again – and this was on Sunday 🙂 Incidentally, the reason that I needed to rebuild all my old entries was because somebody kept on leaving strange and apparently pointless comments on one of my entries. I still have no idea what that was about .. unless they wanted people to visit their URL and while the comments and the URL’s were usually the same, the IP the comments came from was always different. Anyway, I deleted all these comments but could not rebuild the old entries due to the problems I had but now all that is done.

And yes, I’m back and hopefully will be posting more and will also start working on all those coding projects too but since I will not have Net access except from work, things are still going to be a bit slow – I still need to find a way to update my main site since that’s updated via Blog – I guess I should move my Blog installation to my work machine … So many things to do .. so little time :p

Jacta est alea

The die is cast – the answer given … and what was the answer? Well, the answer at least to the company which wanted to hire me was a "no". They did want to know why I didn’t want to join them and what was I to tell them? :p That it was an instinctive feeling that I was at a cross-road? That I thought that this might be a cosmic question directed at me? 🙂 I decided to say the least and yet remain within the bounds of truth and so, simply said that it was a personal decision and had nothing at all with to do with their offer or the company itself. The person I spoke to seemed to accept that but he wanted me to look them up anytime I felt like changing my mind and I told him that I would.

Was that the end of it? Not really :p Well, that was the end of it as far as the job was concerned but a little bit of weirdness was left to play itself out. I got home in the evening and was lying in bed simply thinking when my phone rang – I looked at the caller ID and it was the guy from the company which offered me the job, the guy I’d talked to in the morning. I answer the phone and all I hear are voices talking and nobody says anything – it was as if the phone had been turned on in the middle of a meeting by accident. I said "hello" a couple of times, there was no response and since I didn’t want to be an eavesdropper, I decided to hang up. But being as curious as I am, I was left wondering what that might have been – images of maybe a possible hostage situation with the guy dialling his phone out to the first number he could find in memory and keeping it on so that I’d figure out what was happening and call the police, flashes through my mind. But of course, I tell myself that such a thing is just fanciful thinking and dismiss it from my mind. But then, the phone rings again!

I look, and it’s the same guy. I listen, and it’s as before – nobody says anything but I can hear a conversation going on at the other end. I can’t really make out the words but I listen for a little bit longer this time to make sure that nobody seems to be threatening anybody else – just in case that it was indeed a hostage situation since I can’t think of any other reason why I should be called repeatedly. I then think that maybe his son or daughter got hold of the phone and is playing with it. Or that it’s in his pocket and the redial button(s) had been pressed twice by accident. I’m not satisfied with any of the explanations but since there is no answer, I hung up again. And there were no more calls after that – so I guess I’ll just chalk that up to a bit of weirdness … unless I learn otherwise later on …