Geek with an attitude

1999 was the year! I was only 22 and boy did I party like "It was 1999!" One boat, Forty Sri Lankans, One Sri Lankan band, Three good friends, Two crazy girls, One hot mother and unlimited liquor, December 31, 1999, Long Beach California, somewhere in the middle of the lake where you'd least expect to be hit by Y2K. Ahh the good old days! When we working our butts off, sometimes 48hrs+ straight, on a novel project called Menus.com. Those were exciting times, when an idea can easily end up being turned into a dot com site, billboard everywhere displaying some new dot com name, which ultimately ended with the dot com crash back in 2000. Keith is in town and I was invited with a couple of other old friends to Hilton Colombo for lunch. I got a bit late getting there after the Python group presentation, but made it just in time to start lunch. It was nice seeing Keith, who I thought had got slightly thinner, and Manik (daughter) who looked pretty much the same excep...

My office is a MESS! There I said it! With the amount of people we now have, being packed in to a small lecture room, means I usually have to get up from my seat when who ever is next to me has to go out. To make things worse finding a network cable that works, power source or a decent place to keep my notebook is sometimes very difficult. I've really found it very hard to concentrate on work, especially programming every since we moved in here. The only success I had was while wearing the ear phone and listening to some personal music :) The solution... welcome to "Work from home". Ok this isn't really a solution that I've even mentioned to my boss, but its something I've been doing the last 2 days. I went to office late while I worked on the project from home. I found that I was really able to do a lot of work, since I was planning to go and show some progress in the evening. I got up at around 7AM and first started working on my openOffice presentation (...

Such a boring and wasteful day it was! I got up late at 9AM and was slightly late to go for a meeting with our marketing guy, but luckily he had managed to set the meeting at 11:00, we made it just in time. After getting back and having a boring lunch, I decided to go for a small walk down to Tasty's and had a caramel. The walk wasn't much fun since it was drizzling through out and the sky was all gray. The rest of the day of the day sort of flew of the day sort of flue by till about 6PM. It was only after about 6 that I really got around to doing something for one of the projects that I am working on with another guy. So eventually we ended up working late till about 10:00. It really shouldn't have taken so long for the stuff I was working on but hey what can I say.. my brain was way underclocked! One thing I did managed to start on was dowelled a lot of gentoo sources. After failing to compile a kernel (that booted) with the genkernel utility, I opted to ...

After typing the previous blog, and having failed to fall asleep, I got up and ended installing some goodies on my Mandrake box. By about 3AM I managed to get a beta version of Suns Looking Glasses 3D desktop, DVD watching, CD burning and a 3D demo of UT2004 working. The next day (or shall we say after a couple of hours of sleep), I went over to the Narada center, where I heard Anuradha's and ven. Mettavihari's voice. Ven. Mettavihari suggested I bring the barebone and show it to Anuradha just before we left, and a good thing I did! It didn't boot. The most peculiar error was reported by LILO about some date problem. Oh well tried using the Mandrake CDs to recover the automatic method but that didn't seem to work either. Now time was running out, so Anurdha just opened a shell and installed the boot loader the old fashion way :) - using the Command line! Unlike the previous day,we did managed to get to ICTA on time. When we got to the conference room, there awaite...

Today was an interesting day for me, as I was very much looking forward to joining with the LKLUG crew, to go and convince ICTA effort headed by Riza, that Linux was the way to go for their 100,000 Home PC initiative. Though nothing is official at this point, ICTA is planning to offer 100,000 personal desktops at a very reasonable price to Sri Lankan families in an effort to increase computer literacy among the population. It is rumored that after approaching Microsoft , and seeing their lack of enthusiasm to provide a cost effective and attractive price solution for Windows/MS Office suite, ICTA had decided to go with OpenOffice as the Office Suite and possibly Linux as the Operating System (OS). It is also rumored that once news got out of the possibility of going with OpenSource, Microsoft had decided to cut prices and reapproach ICTA. If these rumors are true, then it is really a good fortune that ICTA, despite the influence from one of THE biggest software giants (a.k.a monop...

Today was one of those 24 (TV series) days -- started out one way, ended in a totally different way. To begin with, today was my last MSc first semester paper on cryptography. This was a paper I was more confident of, and was hoping to bump up my overall averages. So I guess you'd understand why I didn't feel like driving back home from the junction after discovering I had left my cell phone behind. Now don't call me superstitious , but I just didn't want to take the chance of having to go back! .. Its BAD LUCK! But not having the cell, did bother me through out the day, specially when trying to communicate with my better half. As expected the exam was quite easy and most of us couldn't complain. After the exam Deep had organized to take a few of us out to celebrate his new found fortune (aka new job), so we headed over to millennium Park to find a couple of more MSc Friends had also independently shown up. NO problem, deep was paying, so the more the merrier! ...

It's been a while since I started walking a bit more than usual. Back in the days before I had a car, walking was something I did more often since I hated going riding buses (specially when they are full). Anyway today I decided to service my car after a really long time. May be it was that last washout incident with the whole rain thing (see my previous post), that strengthened my bonding with the car, for I had neglected it far too long. Even cars need love :) Specially when they've gotten you home safely under tough conditions! So I went early as possible to the service station, hoping to catch an early time slot, but I guess people had already booked so I was either going to have to wait hours and hours or be more productive. My plan was to study anyway for the next exam (Cryptography) on Sunday, but I also had few things to do. So I set on my journey by foot. I walked from Pagoda to Nugegoda, then took a bus (walked inside the bus :P) to Thumulla. Then walked t...

Last night on my way home after a long idle day (office is still under construction), I experienced one of the worst rain storms in a long time. With my car wiper working at full capacity, I could barely see the tail light of the immediate vehicle in front of me. Roads were quite dark and the rain was just punching straight and hard to the ground (good thing there wasn't any major wind to go with that :^) If things couldn't get any worse, while driving I noticed a small trail of vehicles slowly moving with plenty of room for overtaking. So I slowly passed them and moved a couple of meters, to discover to my horror that most of the road had flooded upto knee length! I had gone too far ahead to turn back -- a couple of vehicles had decided to follow me :O So I slowly marched forward as I felt the water splash against the bottom of my car. SPHhhhhhhhhh! and there it was! a lot of while, grayish smoke escaping out of the hood of my car. There was also another diesel van in fr...