Monday, January 31, 2011

Mud

You know what would make the Galle Lit Fest cooler? If they had authors mud wrestling. That'd be pretty cool.

I'm rather bummed that I didn't make it to Galle this weekend, but that's cancelled by the whole 'glad to be alive' thing that I've got going on.

I wholeheartedly recommend watching Stranger Than Fiction. Sure, they could've made it better, but the story's serious while being quite funny, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is nothing but smoking all throughout.

I decided I shouldn't hate Java just because it's very popular and a lot of people use it as a golden hammer. I also learned that writing single line methods gives me a 'kick'. ;)

Van Morrison really is an underrated artist. I mean, sirawata! :/

Since I won't really be able to support Wikipedia financially (till I get myself a credit card), I decided that spending some time each week expanding stub articles and starting up new ones on stuff that I like would be a nice way of contributing. I also discovered that I've been a registered Wikipedia member for more than 4 years now! O_o

Stuff I want to do next month: Go somewhere exciting (could be in Colombo, could be out, I don't care), go for the Wagon Park concert on the 12th and pass my midterms. :P That is all.

Javin'

So, hello there after a long long time! :D It's been almost two and a half months since I last posted, so I'd like to wish everyone a very Happy New Year first!

So, yours truly and his friends have now been elevated to the rank of second year students, tasked with keeping the peace and giving the first years a hard time (Well, not really. They have been giving everyone else a hard time, though!). So with being a second year student comes the opportunity to study that intriguing language, Java. I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of the language - or Java culture. People seem to love it, and use it as a golden hammer in programming (check out this xkcd comic), or as we say in Sinhala - a කෝකටත් ෛතලය. In their mad dash to popularise the language, they've spread a lot of misinformation (I once saw in a book belonging to a cousin of mine that the -local- author had stated that Java was faster than C and C++, a fact that any real programmer knows is utter bull). But anyway, I'll share a simple programme I did in Java today. It does nothing of use really, but I just love the fact that I wrote some single line methods. ;)

So, here it is. The things I love about Java are many (as anyone switching over from the rigid C++ environment will tell you), but the foremost among them is the ease with which strings can be handled. I mean C++ makes you wish you weren't born when it comes to string handling, and while Java isn't exactly perfect, it does much better than C++. I just wish there was a compiled language that combined Java's ease of use with C++'s speed and power. But I guess it's already invented (there are literally hundreds of programming languages listed on Wikipedia alone) and I'll discover it someday. ;)

That's all the time we have for today, but do stay tuned. We might have World Cup coverage (haha, fat chance!). :D

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Happeh!

This is going to be nonsensical, but I'm mentally prancing around in joy. This week, everything from Monday onwards, has been awesome. Lectures got cancelled Tuesday (Pirith at uni) and we got tomorrow off as well (research symposium at uni. HA!) and I wrote a report I had no idea was due today in like an hour, got it printed and handed it in as well, and to add to that, I helped out a friend who couldn't make it, made his report look fabulous (note to Meshak: you sent it as email text... aneyyy babo! :P) with my customary formatting (wink wink... look at the design of this blog... imagine that minimalism in a word document. People who've had the (dis)pleasure of working with me hate me with a passion for messing with their formatted headings and painstakingly tabbed indentations) aaaand printed it and handed it in too and I did all of that and I got out of the building just right on the dot at 5 when I told my father that I was coming out and I fully appreciate how much I love my mom for the first time in years and I ate so much food today and had yoghurt and cookies and I'm hiiiiiiiiiiigh...

I told you it was going to be nonsensical. I swear it's the gotukola and all that lime acid talking. :D

But yes, moving on to the more serious part of my post, one of my oldest and bestest (suck it spellcheck, that word exists!) friends, who's also a budding veterinary student, is starting out a small foundation for pooches, that aims to do big things. So if you're inclined towards animal welfare, and would like to learn more, please visit their blog at http://thepoochfoundation.blogspot.com/ :)

Soooo, to end my happy, high, high post I shall leave you with a gig played in the sky (or on the rooftops of London) and the longest microtonal lick George Harrison was ever forced to play by one Sir James Paul McCartney. It last from 1:22 to 1:26 in the video and I think it beats the one in Helter Skelter by a mile, but my ear hasn't been tested recently so can't be sure. ;)


P.s. A note about everyone who's complaining in that video: They got to hear the last gig ever played by all four Beatles together. Imagine what that must've felt like after a good few years! :D

Monday, January 24, 2011

A month in a post

Erm, so hi! Yeah it's me again, the kid who went AWOL all of a sudden. Trust me, there's a good explanation as to why I wasn't around, and as to why my left arm has been shaved of all fur hair just above the wrist. But this is not a time for such trivial pursuits. Or is it? Nah.

Anyway, I was genuinely offline for like 9 days and apart from external factors like nausea and the fact that I was peeing saline... it felt good. It felt good to have some down time. I even learned how to turn off worrying about all the lectures I was missing. I still haven't been able to switch that back on, even after I realised today that I have no flipping clue as to how one could get a user's keyboard input on a Java program (this lapse in programming knowitallitary has since been rectified). Sometimes you realise that there are bigger things, that you could just drop dead and the world could move on without so much as a whimper, that the true value of friendship becomes apparent only when you're lying in a prison (of sorts) unable to move about, that sometimes the little things matter - like you eat one grape too much and you throw your whole dinner down the toilet. It's then that you realise that your dickish, constantly moody, nothing's-ever-good-enough attitude hasn't got you anywhere, and that we're all human and we're all mortals and that we should all chill a bit and be kind to each other and all other kinds of drug-induced crazies. But seriously, this post is getting nowhere.

I just want to jot down something here that's far more important than my ramble up there:

On the 13th of Jan, just 11 days ago, Colombo experienced temperatures of 18.8 Celsius, the lowest recorded in over 6 decades. That day, due to unusually high cloud and an extremely clear lower atmosphere, my little obsession was visible: not only from the 12th/15th floors where we usually look at that, but even from the lunch room of a certain 5 story building, from what I heard. I was in bed that day, unable to crawl out. I missed that golden golden day, and that is perhaps the only thing I regret about this whole month. Meshak got some pictures of it though and hopefully he'll put them up. (I got a sneak peek of the pics off his phone a couple of days later.)

So that's that, that was my Jan. I hope yours was happy and fulfilling. :)