Catch

Pain relief clinic

So I finally gave in to my sister and went to the pain relief clinic at the NHSL to show my back this morning.

The place was stinky, congested and very poorly ventilated. And the minor staff was rude, dumb and ignorant.

I felt really sorry about the elevator operator who sits in the dark, hot and smelly elevator pressing six buttons for eight hours per day. That job must really suck.

I had to open a file in order to get in to the clinic. So I went to the office to do so. It was a room full of piles of paper files. And a couple of rude and lazy looking men were occupied in selecting them. I stood there till it was my turn, but soon realized it’s not the way to get things done there, because dozens of stinky and dirty people surpassed me to get their “files” (Is being poor an excuse for not being clean?). So I realized waiting for the turn is not the way to go. It took more than five minutes for the person there to write my name (P. M. Bandara) on the file. I’m not extravagating. It really took that time. And I bet even he couldn’t read his hand writing.

After all that, I made it to the doctor. Who actually was quite nice - hmm.. She examined me and said it can’t be something serious and is probably caused by my posture and injected something in to my spine. Now that hurts!! She also directed me to a physiotherapist.

Google calendar SMS support for Dialog and Celtel

Perhaps it's old news for most of you, but Google calendar now supports SMS alerts for Dialog and Celtel subscribers in Sri Lanka. I find it really cool. I can synchronize my outlook calendar in to Google calendar and have it send me SMSs reminders.

More than for me, this should be really useful for those busy people on the move. try it out at http://www.google.com/calendar/render

Yasas interviewed

Yasas is a good friend of mine who started his career at Virtusa in the same project with me. Soon he opted to change his career track to BA to become undoubtedly one of the best business analysts in the business.

Recently Debbie Timmins of ACS interviewed him in her blog. You could read the interview here.

You could also visit Yasas’s blog here.

The Sri Lankan train commuters

They seems to share some of the characteristics of Sri Lankan trains don’t they?

They walk out of the station as a stalk, they don’t stop for traffic (neither vehicles nor other people crossing their path) and they never seem to evolve fast enough.

Some times, when I get a little bit late to come to office I get to experience this train effect. A train arrives at the platform close to WTC around 7.10 A. M. and the passengers start to storm the road for several minutes. Not even the policeman at the zebra crossing is able to stop them. They just continue to cross the road in a stalk and all traffic has to stop.

Getting caught in middle of that crowd is equally frustrating when you walk as well. They walk too slowly but they wouldn’t let you walk overtaking them. They occupy the whole pavement and would jam your way some how.

Balled!

Date time : 06/24/2007 5:53:12 PM
Shutter speed value: 1/251 s
Aperture value: f/3.5
Focul length: 72mm
Focus mode: Manual
ISO sensivity: 50
White balance: Auto
Optical zoom: 12X

Cow's milk and water

Couple of days back, I saw 500ml tetra packs of full cream milk by Kotmale dairies at Cargills and took couple of them home to try out. It was pure milk with no added flavors. I had one this morning and it was OK.

I always wanted to drink a lot of fluid in the morning because it's supposed to be a healthy habit. But I could never drink more than one cup of water, but I drank the whole 500ml of milk. So that's good.

Thinking of doing it every morning, I checked the price of it. It was just Rs. 35/-!!! Now a 500ml bottle of mineral water costs Rs. 40/-...

So milk is cheaper than water...

සිංහල වියුම

මෙච්චර කල් බ්ලොග් කරල සිංහලෙන්නුත් ලියල බැලුවෙ නැත්තම් හරි නෑ නෙ

To hell with the doctors

I’m supposed to be seeing a doctor right now. But I’m much happier sitting at the office. I hate having to go to a doctor and avoid it when ever possible, because doctors here (including my sister) don’t have any respect to the patients. Most doctors think they are a super breed or some thing and don’t have any socio-cultural empathy

Anyways, I’m having this back pain for almost a year now. It started off as a mild pain on the upper part of the spine in last august and by October it got really worse. It started to feel quivers through my spine and legs. First I thought it was the cold but then realized it’s the back. So I stopped working out and started to wear a back supporting belt. I had it till April and then it became kind of hyper sensitivity in the back. Now it’s almost gone but I get the pain when I lift some thing heavy or make a sudden awkward move.

All this time I’ve been avoiding going to a doctor, because baring the pain is much comfortable than baring the arrogances of Sri Lankan doctors. My sister made an appointment for me this morning and was to come with me to this pain relief clinic in the hospital. But she got late to turn up, so I took the chance and came to office.

To hell with the doctors.

Choice

Four years back, .NET 1.0 was relatively new. I had started to read and play with it from the beta so I was pretty good when the 1.0 was out. When I started professional development in mid 2003 I was on top of the business.

One of the luxuries in smaller companies is that you get to work with what you want - at least most of the time. That allows you to use the latest technology in day today work. But in large IT service companies that’s not the case. Most of the time they take over upgrade or maintenance work.

So even though I managed to keep myself up to date after joining Virtusa, my work had always been in older technology; but it had at least been .NET. By the time .NET 3 was released, at work I was just migrating a .NET 1.1 code base in to 2.0.

But now it seems as if things are to be worse. There’s VB6 maintenance project in the horizon signalling to come my way…

My love of Tamil music

Couple of days back, I made a comment on Parthi's blog about A R Rahman's music. But he seems to have thought I was being extravagant. But the truth is, I listen to Tamil songs more than I listen to Sinhalese or English. So I gave him a glimpse of my Tamil Music collection. And today thought of writing how it all started.

I never was a music lover. I had several hundreds of MP3s in my machine but never listened to them regularly. During late 1999 or early 2000, my good friend Shamik (yeah Muslim) brought his hard disk to be backed up to mine. In there was a huge collection of Tamil MP3s. I played couple of them randomly and was touched deep in my heart by the fascinating music. Of cause I didn't understand any words. It was just music for me. I decided to keep the MP3s and listened to them much often.

After some time I realized that since I do not understand the words, I could concentrate on anything else while listening to them (Which I couldn't while listening to Sinhala or English) and more over, that music always had a soothing effect on me. It made me calm and happy. So I became an Tamil Music lover - they were in my car, in my phone, at home and at office.


BTW, I like Tamil movies too

Tell what you will do, do what you told you would do, say so if you couldn’t

Many software companies use fairly matured and evolving project delivery processes. Most of those processes could be tailored to suit individual projects. But we often see projects that runs in to misery, and worse, there are projects that have 100% process compliance and still runs in to misery - and some times fails!

The main cause as I see is project managers think process is like law. So if they fail to follow it, they cheat. They lie, produce forged documents and do every thing in their ability to mislead the process auditors. In this process not only they jeopardize the project, but burn out the resources and risk demolishing the moral of the team members. They do not realize that it’s not something measuring their competency or performance but a simple guideline to aid their work.

Lying to a process auditor is like lying to a doctor. No matter how humiliating it is, you got to tell the truth. In a service oriented company, delivering a quality service on time is the key to good business. And a process is there to guide that delivery. If things go out of track, they need to be identified and rectified.

Macro again...

If I blog about this...

I was accused of blogging about politics and terrorism just to attract traffic. No hard feelings - I'm excited to see more traffic, but I write what ever that comes to my mind when ever I feel like writing it down. When people read them and comment, there's a little excitement in it. But I don't think what I write about politics or the terrorists would have any impact on the system or the situation in the country. Nor do I expect to change the way people think. It would be bonus if they ever do.
There had been many a discussions in this blog on the terrorist issue (No it's not ethnic and that's my stance) and how it should be handled. Every one had their say and then that's that.
The current news highlights are on eviction of Tamils who are from NE and could not provide a viable reason for staying in Colombo from the lodges. I'm tempted to write my view on it, even when it serves no purpose.

• Why were they here in the first place? Why did they left their homes to come live in lodges in Colombo?
• How on earth do they afford paying for lodging, food and all other expenses? They do not work here. Can't presume they earned that much money while in NE.
• What do they do here? If they aren't working or learning, why are they in Colombo for months? How and on what do they spend their time?

Anyways, that's that and I'm having a issue with how Microsoft Resource Schema 1.3 and 2.0 stores OcxState. There's a difference but I can't find it documented any where...

The black and white effect

The rights of terrorist suspects in Britain

Gordon Brown, who is to succeed Tony Blair as the next British prime minister, is proposing to triple the length of pre-charge detention period for terror suspects. So that's going to be 90 days. And he also plans to make amendments to the laws so phone tap evidence can be used in court.

search google for more

Human rights organizations again seems to have found a bone to byte on. I won't blame them, they need funds to keep the organization and they wouldn't receive funds unless they oppose a government.

But what we must understand is that every country who are facing terrorist threats are forced to make such compromises which indeed would violate human rights to ensure national security. It's about safeguarding the lives of the people in a country.

Mega zoom effect

Scattered thoughts of memories

I would try to make some thing out of this as much as I could. But be warned these are raw thoughts.

We remember things happened in the past. There are some we love remembering and some we wish we didn’t. Usually memories are triggered by some sort of incident, it could be some thing we see, some thing we hear, some thing we taste, some thing we feel through touch, some thing we smell or some generation of thoughts.

But why do we remember them? There are a lot of things that we do not remember even if we want to. We have memories that makes us hurt, memories that makes us happy and also strangely enough memories that are neutral.

Theoretically there is some sort of an attachment to these incidents that makes them remembered. So that means we are attached to those unpleasant incidents as well.

When a memory arises in our mind we tend to keep thinking about that. So generations of thoughts are populated on an incident which happened in the past. And those thoughts are mostly based on how we perceive those incidents at the moment the memory arose. So over time, how we perceive an incident could very well change. So it is possible, over time, our memories of a certain incident to change. So logically, old memories could very less be different from fantasies.

So, it could be that we cultivate our thoughts in memories.

If you read this far… you would care enough to share a thought of your own.