Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Call me names, call me what you will...

... but I did the right thing, not the easy thing, and quit twitter and facebook. I think I'll be back, I really do think twitter is the way of the future, but right now my time will be better spent on my studies. As they say in that old poem, knowledge is the only treasure that one can have, that neither kings nor floods nor thieves can take away from you. After my exams finish on June 16th, we'll see what we can do... :)

Before I leave, I wanted to thank all the people who made every moment of twitter enjoyable and fun and addictive. Thanks Pseudorandom, Papare Boy, Dili, Vileness, Pavithri, Tulie, Meg, Dinidu, St. Fallen, Charm, Maks, Sabby, Deece, Hisham, LadyD, Whack, Jerry & Gehan (wink wink) and everyone else I've forgotten (feel free to throw shoes at me in the comments section!) ;)

And whoever's pretending to be you-know-who (yes, I hate to destroy Voldy's name like this too, but wut tu duu?) on twitter is doing quite a job! I think you're impressions of him are flawless man! :D

And yes, this will also be the last post I'll be writing for a while, coz there's no way I'm going to stop this online procrastination if I don't stop blogging. But since I spend waaaay more time reading blogs than writing anything, I'm going to sadly have to stop that too... I'm going to miss reading him, him, him and him the most (well the rest of you too, but I've already linked no? hehe) :) But my google reader will be saving up your posts for later, so no worries, I'll probably have a blog-reading-orgy sometime in late June ;) muhahaha

So forgive me for my sins, my disappearing blogposts and my crappy writing, my lame jokes and my constant LTPness (wink @PR) and no, I won't be secretly blogging under the names "gonbetta" or "halmassa" or anything like that for the next 1½ months! what made you think that??? :P :)

Goodbye guys,
I loved every moment I spent on twitter! Thank you for making it that way! :)

K this is it, wish me luck guys! :D





Oh, and the baby squirrels want me to say "ting ting" to everyone for them! ;)

Sunday, April 26, 2009

My two cents on social networking

The Whackster wrote about twitter some time back, and these past few days of twittering non-stop has made me appreciate why we fall in love, and out of love, with social networks. Does anyone remember the day you first joined Facebook? I do... It was at the school computer lab sometime in Mid-2007... a long long time before Facebook became popular with the average Sri Lankan school kid (and that explains why it wasn't blocked at school, unlike Hi5, the dominant social network among us at that time) and I remember just why I joined (yes, it involved a girl... duh! hehe) and I have been through a lot with Zuckerberg's contraption: 3 major design changes, the rise and takeover of applications, pokes, superpokes, walls and superwalls, threads, groups, photo tagging (something I had never seen before that, although I believe it had existed much earlier) and yes, the relationships and the breakups that took place on Facebook. And when I first heard about twitter, I was confused as to how a social network could grow based solely on 140-character updates and messages. Then Facebook changed it's design to mirror twitter, and I was furious that this had happened. The homepage became cluttered and all sorts of bull started appearing on it.

So it was with very low expectations that I joined twitter, and that too only to follow 'famous' people... Now, one month and 1057 updates later (mostly @ replies though), I have gone through making new friends, finding out stuff (did anyone else know about fingermonkeys?? I sure didn't!), analyzing Kottu bitchfights (that was fun!), sharing hugs and other 'moments', debating television shows, movies and music, being at the receiving end of quite a number of old 'Thomian jokes', and of course that one instance of getting caught twittering at a class! The sheer number of updates show how addictive twitter is, and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon! :D
So, all-in-all, If you were a guy who should be studying for his final exams happening in less than 5 weeks (!!!), I wouldn't never never never ever never ever never (even if I hated you!) suggest you join twitter! Don't!!! Seriously! :P



Edit: St. Fallen shared this video poking fun at twitter-culture with me, and I wanted to post it here

Friday, April 24, 2009

Lēn Daruwo

I promised yall that I'll upload the pics if possible... but keeping a baby squirrel in your hands requires both hands. They haven't even opened their eyes yet, but these little tykes are as active as hell... and as for the title, my grandfather, who found these droplets of love mother-less and starving calls them just that: daruwo! (it's a very written-language-ish Sinhala word usually used to mean human children) Would've loved to post pics of how they're fed milk through a pipette, but that would require yours truly to have another arm maybe... hehe ;)


it's hard to photograph these little angels:


Anyways, elections are tomorrow... Wish I had the chance to vote, I would've definitely used it... So those who are eligible SHOULD go out and do it... I have seen in these American TV series' how it's kinda taboo in the US to not vote but later complain about the politicians who were elected. Since Sri Lankans love to complain about politicians (it's definitely a national pastime one can say!), we should all atleast go out and vote! noh? ;)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Tagclood is wooorkin!!!

Yes yes yes yes yes!!! :D It's twirling and whirling and doing all sorts of tumbles down there! The link to the site is here.

Anyways, for everyone who tried to get the tag cloud into their blogs and failed, I would like to share why my cloud didn't work in the first place. It is because I had used the apostrophe (') in some of the labels, and this somehow makes the code go haywire... :)

I should especially mention Miss Pseudorandom, the wise and fair witch of the west, for getting me to play around with the code! Thank you for the support! :)

You know you're living in Sri Lanka when...

...one day you're boiling in the heat, and the next it's raining cats and dogs and thundering and lighting like there's no tomorrow! :) Yes, thank goodness the heat's gone away... man that was the worse couple of days I've had in the last few years. Hope no one starts complaining about the rain now, as John Lennon put it so aptly in the often forgotten (or rather, underrated) Beatles B-Side "Rain":

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead.
If the rain comes, if the rain comes.
When the sun shines they slip into the shade
And sip their lemonade.
When the sun shines, when the sun shines.


So from nagging about the weather, to something we men (or boys as some would say...) like to nag about a lot: women! I mean I love women and all (ok maybe not as much as Mr. Bush's gynecologists! hahaha) but you know, when you're in a boring class trying to horen twitter* write some complex VBA code to update tables in Access, the last thing you want is for a bunch of girls to start giggling (in that annoying high pitched voices of theirs too!) about how hot(???) some jobless bugger in Twilight(???!!!) is... and the feeling of sweet revenge when the teacher shouts "Girls! enough gossiping now, get back to work!" is followed by that feeling of your stomach turning upside-down when the bugger cries "oi Chavie?! twittering are we??!!! wtf man! I thought we were facebook brothers and all!!! Stop procrastinating and get back to work!!"... Haiyooo, women! ;P hehe *runs away from horde of females out to kill him* :D

Anyhooo, what does it say about a guy when he's trying to turn on his computer in the middle of a thunderstorm just to write a blogpost!? :S nothing good I suppose... heh :(

* horen twitter- trying to twitter in class without getting noticed by the teacher! :)

Friday, April 17, 2009

12 Simple sins...

Making use of Dee Cee's open tag, here are my 12 simple sins: (although none of them are really sinful when you think about it...)
  1. Waking up naturally (without an alarm etc.) at 6.30... Really love it coz when I wake up at around 9 like I usually do (lazy is not the word to describe me... lol), I feel that I've wasted the best time of the day even before it began! I think it's a family trait, this being insanely early shit... I for one ain't complaining... :)
  2. Drinking my morning milk + milo... Made by myself, just the right concentration, just the right ratio of hot water to cold water. Makes my day!
  3. Eating a good plateful of rice, with fish, wattakka, gotukola mallum and cooked mangoes... Delicious and Nutritious! :)
  4. Catching a Beatles song on the radio... Although I have 113 of their songs (and their solo work: 10 by Harrison, 6 by McCartney, 4 by Lennon) it's still a pleasure to listen to it in the car, knowing the parents are listening too, coz I rarely listen to stuff with them, and having stuff we can listen together is pretty nice... And they weren't called the Fab four for nothing, there's something truly magical in those perfectly harmonising vocals I tell you!
  5. A meetup with the good friends... Only the best ones, not the pretenders!
  6. Going places, travelling... Rajarata, Ruhuna or the hills (yes I sound like a radio presenter giving out the frequencies... lol) and hopefully the North and the East in the near future...
  7. A drive through the streets of Colombo, on a holiday (like the one we're having now, when the streets are virtually deserted) at dusk! I love the shadows and the light falling through the high rises into the little lanes!
  8. Watching a good comedy. The last good one I watched and can still remember why I laughed is "Forgetting Sarah Marshall".
  9. Reading a good blogpost... Something funny and thought provoking at the same time... RD is the man when it comes to stuff like that... :)
  10. Eating mangoes! :D or durian, or rambutan, or avacadoes, or ripe-to-the-perfect-degree (any Sri Lankan ought to know what that means) kolikuttu with tikiri marie! (what can I say, I'm a simple man! haha)
  11. Time spent with the cousins, all of them! and at a place where we can play our good long games of cricket from dawn to dusk!
  12. Seeing that look of quiet pride in the parents' eyes when I do well at something... Priceless! :)

Monday, April 13, 2009

A visit to the temple!

This is the 2nd post I'm writing about a visit to the temple, and unlike the first post, which is still languishing as a draft, I'm determined to publish this tonight. It's my way of proving to myself that I can get over this urge to can an idea of a post and never revisit it. To develop this post, I've come up with a rather technical looking system basically consisting of writing headings and later deleting them
a rather simple system. So let's see how things go... :)

Introduction
GAH!!!

To those who may give a rat's you-know-what, I live in a suburb of Colombo about 20km away on the A4 Colombo - Rathnapura - Batti road (Yes, I've ironically never been to Batti in my life, although mom has, and she's seen (or rather, "heard") the legendary singing fish!) The village temple is a rather magical place, and is situated next to a sprawling paddy field. It has a replica of the Avukana Buddha which I believe must atleast be 40-foot tall. Why I call this humble temple rather magical is the location of the Bodhi-tree, which is right next to the paddy field. And when the wind blows across the vast swaths of countryside and animate the leaves of the great tree, one cannot fail to imagine a certain 35-year-old prince, sitting under an ancestor of this majestic tree, leaves shining in the light of a full moon, 2500 years ago... You have to see it for yourself to understand it. (sorry if I come across as a religious nut, it was never my intention... lol)

Now today, we visited the temple as it was customary during the "Nonagathe" or "Punya Kaalaya" (time for religious observances) and the first thing we attempted to do was lighting oil lamps. Now with a lightning cloud visible in the distance, and a downpour possible at any time, it's no wonder that the wind blowing across the paddy fields was rather "gusty", if that is the right word to use. So Ammi keeps on trying and trying to to light them (at the same time telling me off for filling up the lamps to the brim with oil) and then I observe something that seemed strange at that moment, but in hindsight makes perfect sense. [incident removed coz hindsight is a bitch ;) lol] And now I know where I got all of that from!!! Hah! *glum look!* *sings "I got it from my Dada"* haha :D

Another interesting observation I made was the amount of people there from all walks of life, people we have a lot in common with and a lot of difference with. But at the temple, whatever superficial "statuses" we have built up in the outside mean practically nothing. I'm not saying that any person can walk into a temple and be looked at as nothing more (or less) than a fellow devotee. What I mean is most of them can. And this is something that is common to all religious institution in all the communities. It may not be 100% inclusion, but the number cannot be anything below 85% atleast.

And talking about inclusion, I was afraid I would be kicked out of the temple for wearing a tee that might've been used for the last 15 years... (maybe it was!) and before anyone launches an argument about thrift and modesty at me, let me clarify: there's a not-so-fine-line between modesty and the shirt being shitty enough to show off half of your chest, and half the time I was pretty sure I was on the wrong side of that line... heh xD

And in conclusion, let me briefly praise my own monkey tail and evaluate how well my system
wish you a happy and prosperous new year again, filled with lots and lots of blogging and drama! ;D K maybe not so much drama, we've got twitter for that no? Haha

Why Avurudu ain't my Thang... :)

Well when I was a small kiddo, I used to love this season. Mangoes, Rambutan, Durian, Kavum, Kokis and what not... Well I still do love the food, but this messy exercises of Avurudu cleaning (I think this must be like our equivalent of spring cleaning...) really ticks me off... I mean you do it in Jan, and then you have to REPEAT it now? AGAIN??! like what the heck man! So after a full day of back breaking work, here I am... chillaxing... enjoying my newly updated browser (decided against going for Safari 4 beta... not safe enough atm.) and all. Waiting to fly to Kandy tomorrow as soon as the Nekath work is finished. Ah my cousin bro, say goodbye to your computer baby boy!! :D muhahahaha hek hek... :X

anyways, without much further ado, lemmi wish you all:

ඔබ සැමට කිරියෙන් පැනියෙන් පිරි සුභම සුභ නව වසරක් වේවා!

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Facebook reaches 200M users

Kinda gives you a sense of where all the world's resources are concentrated, doesn't it? Information truly is power. And looks like we got 12 of that per square mile right here... hmmm :P


Saturday, April 4, 2009

10.31 seconds...

...that is the amount of time it takes to load my blog, bypassing the cache (without doing that the time comes down to 2.76 seconds) according to numion.com/Stopwatch

Check it out, pretty cool site. And remember to bypass the cache. :)

Stressed!

Even guys who take in all the bull in life and laugh it all out have some tough times. When the dude who's marking my computer project for my A/L's told me that he was expecting the completed project to be handed in next monday all I did was utter "when you're given lemons make lemonade..." and started doing what little I could to salvage a few precious marks... and why am I wasting time on blogger right now, with a deadline looming in 48 hours? There's a misguided belief in me somewhere that I might get an extension (fat chance!) and then there's the fact that my mind is not letting me relax, it doesn't even let me finish my breakfast. Yep had to throw half my plate to the bird feeding thing, and couldn't even finish the banana that I foolishly tried to gnaw. There are some forces in here trying to overthrow my "take it easy... everything in life happens for a reason" regime, and in the end I'm left suffering! Way to go anarchists! :)

Thursday, April 2, 2009

random post #57

just to see whether my new scene is working out. and if anyone visited yesterday, just want to say that that was my lame idea of an April Fools joke... :D