...

If you aren't in it for the money,
If you aren't doing it to 'change the world',
If it's keeping you from people and things you love,
and doing stuff that'll truly give you contentment...



...then why are you doing it?

A Day in the Life

Days when your internet access is limited are... strange! (to say the least) And since I've been downloading a 2GB file for the past two days my adventures across the tubes have been few and (waaay too) far between (not to mention painfully slow!). So I've been playing and trying to win this Crimson Skies mission, again and again and again... Everytime you shoot down all the planes you either get shot at the last minute or crash into a Zeppelin... woe! :(

And in the house is no longer a receptive place for life, all the junk that had accumulated during the last 16 years are being thrown out by the boatload, and yours truly feels like he might be the next to go! ;) The fact that I spilled half a bottle of Elephant House milk (yummy btw) in the car doesn't really help my fate either... My mom gave me the look after I started laughing at myself! :/

"The Look"

OK, my torrent's done downloading! I'm off to play some Sims 2 then... ;D (You see how I play the latest games na! Kinda like the dude here... lol)

Right then, going to finish this off by linking to this song I've been falling in love with... enjoy! :)

Shut the door
Cut the light
Davy won't be home tonight
You can wait till the dawn rolls in
You won't see our Davy... again!

P.S. Imagine the smell in the car in a coupla days! "you won't see our Davy again" indeed! lol ;)

Last Night...

was horrid! The beautiful 'oooh I feel like running around naked in this' (ok a bit of an exaggeration so...) rains of August and September have passed, replaced by the 'I wanna fry your brain' electrical storms of October... I dunno if it was the divine chocolate biscuit pudding that I had had earlier in the night or whether the good break we had enjoyed from lightning (and exploding buses for that matter! hehe) had made me soft, but I felt as if my head was going to explode because of the thunder... I.Hate.Lightning!!! -_-

But the highlight of the whole night was seeing a Lifehacker article which said that Firefox 3.6 Beta would startup in under 3 seconds... but this was proven to be a dream when I woke up this morning and Firefox was PMSing on me again, and took like 5 minutes to start up! -_- Oh Mozilla! Do you not want me to use your amazing browser? :/

Some recent photos

Hanthana, September 2009, taken from my cousin's backyard (you can see his roof to the left)

Sundown, taken at around 6.30

Looking outside on a sunny day...

Two lil squirrel kiddos who've made our watertank their playground! :D

Monkey business on the mango tree! ;)

The 'Cute' Beatle??? $^#%!!!

So I did my first FB quiz in like a zillion years and I got that ^ up there... a definite 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!' moment really! Both Makuluwo and GG got George, hmph! :( I think it's the romancing bits that I got wrong, since George never took the slow and gentle approach. (seriously... his exploits with the ladies are infamous!)

Also noteworthy is Papare Boy taking the "Which Tolkien character are you?" quiz and getting "Arwen"! pure hotness! ;D

So, in celebration of this glorious quiz result, I'm going to skip over Macca's good songs and post the most disturbing and distasteful song of them all... enjoy! :P

Pokerface

I've developed a brand new addiction to playing poker on Facebook... which is kinda strange, because back when I was in school (during the last two years of A/Ls) everyone was playing Facebook poker in the computer labs and real poker in the classrooms during off periods, and I wasn't! :S I was more interested in playing Counter Strike in the labs (we'd switch to the easier-to-conceal-behind-your-work Deluxe Pool when the teacher started breathing down our necks!) and wandering about around the school during off periods... man, those days were fun! :D

St. Fallen shared a cool and lightweight application called Screamer Radio that enables you to listen to a wide range of webcasts from radio stations around the world... what I like most about it is the ability to save the tracks onto your hard drive, something that I used to do by manually going through my Firefox cache, but is now only one click away! so we're basically using legal radio webcasts to illegally download music... niiiiice! lol ;)

My favourite station on it at the moment is Radio Luxembourg, which is the descendant of a famous station situated in Luxembourg that used to broadcast rock music to the UK back in the day... something like the offshore pirate stations in the movie 'The Boat That Rocked' I watched sometime back. That movie was good! The soundtrack was awesome! I'd definitely recommend it for lovers of '60s music! :)

Something for Sunday

Today was a hectic hectic day! The house is getting painted so mom wanted me to throw away all the useless exercise books I had piled up in my room, some dating from my pre-O/L days! O_o so, stacked them all up in a neat heap of books ready to be thrown out. Of course I found some stuff that COULDN'T just be thrown out, they had to be burnt! :S So some matches and half a bottle of paint thinner later, they were sufficiently charred to make their content unreadable. And so ends the lives of many of my glorious childhood doodles, maps, secret codes and battleplans to conquer the world... muhahahaha! >;)

Oh, and I stumbled upon this while on Facebook... :D

Republics without elections?

When I first came across the Wikipedia article about Demarchy (accidentally) I thought it was some sort of joke... I mean who would want important decisions (like who your representative to the legislature would be) left to random chance right? Here's a quick quote for those too lazy to click on that link:

Demarchy or lottocracy is a political system run by randomly selected decision makers who have been selected by lot.

Sounds absurd and untried right?

Wrong! Life and death decisions are made by randomly selected people every single day, and this has been going on for quite a long period of time without major glitches.

An example of demarchy in most democracies is the use of a jury of peers in criminal cases. The jury is normally a body of randomly selected citizens who decide the guilty or not guilty verdict, which is a prime example of demarchy.

One of the things I found really interesting is that Demarchy effectively ends partisan politics, the single most despised thing about democracies (and also end the enormous wastage of funds that goes into election campaigns as well as the process of holding elections and counting votes).

I'm not going to go on about Demarchy, because it has never been implemented as a system of government, but what would your reaction be if there was a proposal to make your elected representative, well, not 'elected' anymore? :)

Warring Frontiers

I watched an interesting documentary on Channel News Asia called Warring Frontiers, which is actually a series, and the episode they showed today was about Vietnam, and how Vietnam's economy is growing 30 years after the end of the war. The rapid pace of development that's taking place is astounding, and what struck me the most is the resolve with which the Vietnamese people had stood up. An interesting fact that they mentioned was that Vietnam was the most bombed country in the history of warfare, with the U.S. dropping 7 million tons of bombs in its 11 year involvement in Vietnam. In comparison only 2 million tons of bombs were dropped in the whole of the 2nd World War! 77 Million litres of Agent Orange was sprayed by the U.S., resulting in horrible birth defects and other illnesses.

But today, all of that seems to be forgiven (but maybe not forgotten) and Vietnam and the U.S. have become close trading partners. The level of development reached in this short period is telling of the resilience of the Vietnamese people and how they overcame the immense adversity that the Vietnam war caused.

I just love documentaries! :P (and I've noticed that Channel News Asia is making better and better documentaries with each passing year!)

anyways, the reason I thought I'd sharing this whole thing is because it gives me hope that maybe someday Sri Lanka would be able to leave all of those bitter memories behind and become a better place to live in... :)

Fukitol

I Need You is a song off The Beatles' fifth album, 'Help!'. Written by George Harrison it was prolly meant for Pattie Boyd, his (and Eric Clapton's! what was it with her and guitarists? lol) future wife whom he was trying to date (apparently unsuccessfully) at the time... good song I must say, they all look like they're freezing in that video though! ;) I can't also figure out what all the tanks/army dudes are sitting there doing! are they gonna bomb the fab four or something? O.o

So, one of my best friends knows about the blog now... wazzup Sai! :P :D

anyways, posting this coz I've kinda gone AWOL from the twittersphere and stuff... not to worry, I'm still alive and well... ;) *cue groans*

I was reading some of my older posts, and it occurred to me that this is not the first time I've found it hard to update my blog because I think too much, so I'm just gonna take my 'fukitol' pill and be normal again! :D

by the way, where have Harumi and MTC disappeared to? :S I totally miss you guys and your writing!

p.s. this better not get posted on the thread Sai! :P ;)

So, twitter!

So, the thing is you don't know you're hooked on twitter till you're waking up everyday and unwittingly checking twitter before proceeding with the rest of the days business... twitter can be useful in many ways, some of which have been highlighted in this article. Some of them are:

Getting Feedback: like you want to ask what the best phone in the 15-25k price range is, and someone (I'm willing to bet on Jerry) would instantly send a tweet your way giving you some info on the matter...

Direct traffic: using your twitter account to get more people to visit your latest blogpost or something... overdoing this is usually frowned upon (that doesn't stop *SOME* people though). Sharing links can also be listed under this category, so if you see a funny article or listen to a good song, you'd tweet the link and send peeps that way. Can also be used to rickroll someone! lol ;)

Read News: when a natural disaster happens, twitter knows first! when an important government announcement happens, twitter knows first! twitter users tweet from the ends of the world, so you know everything that's going on first hand...

Make New Friends: yeah, I can testify to the fact that your twitter buddies will prolly end up as real-world friends! :)

also something they haven't mentioned: twitter relieves stress! trust me on this, you get stuff like this sent at you, bam in the middle of a depressing day at work, and you just look at it and ROFL! instant stress reliever! :D

So, how do I get started?

First, follow people: Most bloggers and websites display the link to their twitter account prominently. Follow the likes of @cracked for ROFL tweets, @mashable for news on social networks and the internet, @cnnbrk for breaking news stories, @kottufeed for the latest posts from Kottu, and also follow our blogging community! Click on the reply button to send replies to any of their tweets that you find interesting, start a conversation! Retweet (which is basically repeat a tweet) any tweets that you feel you want to share! twitter is all about interaction, you have to actively tweet for it to be fun...

What Client Should I use?

Well, when I first started tweeting, I used their website mostly... and stuck with for ages, till I moved to my ever-faithful twitterfox (now called Echofon). I chose it over the other contender (TweetDeck) because it was lightweight and it sits neatly in the bottom corner of your Firefox window:

see, the little blue circle in the corner

The only major complain you'd hear from a Firefox user is the fact that it only updates every 3 minutes (which is waaay too slow in the twitter world) and that when you close your browser, twitter is gone too (minor concern since most people never close their browsers these days), and the most common complain you'd hear from users of other browsers is that they can't use it 'coz they don't use Firefox! well good for them! :P

Now we come to the stand-alone twitter applications: DestroyTwitter, TweetDeck (which I personally used and disliked) and Spaz are 3 that seem to be popular among our bloggers... Seesmic (which also has a desktop app) and Brizzly (still invitation only, but those aren't hard to come by) are 2 popular and easy-to-use web based clients, which means you can access them from anywhere and everywhere! I'd recomend Brizzly if you're already used to the twitter web interface and only looking for more functionality... You may also like to check out the recent Lifehacker poll on the most popular twitter clients.

Caution: Twitter is extremely addictive! Use with care! ;) :D

If you need any assistance feel free to send a tweet my way to @darthchavie! :)

(and no I didn't type this out at 2 in the morning, just trying out scheduled posts to see if it works! lol)

The New Post button...

...is just plain annoying, waiting there on the Dashboard, all big and blue, assuming that you've got something to write! :/

:D

I complained sometime back that I hadn't written anything properly for quite some time... it's just that I've never been a natural writer, writing always seems to stress me out and take waaaay too much effort (unless I have exams, coz then posts seem to flow into my mind fully formed and ready to be published! lol)

But I'm tired of seeing the same old posts on the top of the blog so here I am, clicking on that 'New Post' button! Very little blogworthy stuff have been happening on this end of the line, unless you want to read a boring post on washing the car or spraying hormones onto bananas... (ok that sounds a biiit wrong! lol)

I'm talking about boring stuff that I can blog about, but this post is turning out to be even more boring! :S I'll stop now, and leave you with my excuse for not blogging:

;)