On Politics...

Reactions to recently concluded drama by Wimal Weerawansa titled “Fast unto death” had been a good gage of the political maturity of my colleagues.

Some actually thought he would actually fast till he die! And he's doing it for real patriotic reasons etc. They couldn't really tell if Mahinda was with him or not till the last moment. They were touched by the resignation letter and some would have actually sacrificed their own lives for the cause of Wimal... These people sympathized with him and actually thought Ban Ki Moon would actually give a shit about it... Their history has close ties either with the JVP or UPFA; they voted Mahinda just because he's their candidate... They fought each other when JVP and UPFA parted, became allies when they formed governments together etc. etc.; And the JVP fraction followed Wimal when he left the JVP.

The second category actually thought Wimal ate munchie lemon-puff biscuits out of a big brown cardboard box which was marked “Manchie lemon-puff”! Lemon-puff? Really? Why not cake from Hilton? They have labeled cardboard boxes too.. And they genuinely thought that scanned piece of paper with an stupid agenda in hand writing is a real leak! This is the category of people who voted Sarath Fonseka just because Ranil or Somawansa asked them to. Wimal was once a hero for the JVPers but as soon as he left JVP he became their traitor of the decade. UNP never liked Wimal; he was a pain for them. But their ingenious brains simply could not put together the pieces of the puzzle to understand the amount of planning that went in to Wimal's drama. They didn't really understand whether it's staged or not; they just wanted to shout that's false...

The third; actually understood what's going on. They laughed; They predicted and they laughed again. First laugh was at Wimal's act; they predicted what's going to happen with it even to the detail of Mahinda offering him water... and the final laugh was at those from the above two categories. These are the people who made their own decisions in the presidential elections. They could have voted either Mahinda or Sarath; but not because of party affiliations but because they made informed decisions and actually cared about the outcome.

Who let the (police) dogs out?

The government has unleashed the police at the general public. It’s most felt by the motorists but others sure do feel it, through Taliban style censoring acts and pure public abuse.

Just last week, I got copped for driving 84 km/h on a 72 km/h and the policeman asked for a bribe, the money which should have gone to the government instead ended up with a corrupt cop. Today, I heard a friend of a friend is jailed for two weeks for challenging the accusation of a policeman.

He had been driving home after work with his wife and while driving on traffic, had rested his head on his palm like in the picture to the right. A cop has stopped him and charged him for using a cell phone while driving. He has rightfully denied the accusation and offered the cop to look at his call log for which the cop has responded negatively. In the resulting argument with the cop, he has threatened to go to the police commission regarding the issue. The cop somehow has taken his driving license in to his custody.

Later, when my friend's friend went to the Angulana police station to collect his license, the police has taken him in to custody under the charges of trying to assault a police officer and he's now jailed for 14 days. The other friend, who's gone in to the police with the one who got arrested says that every policeman at the police station at the time verbally assaulted them threatening to kill them. There's reasonable doubt that the arrested person was physically assaulted as well.

The Sri Lankan police has reached new heights in its corruption and they are inventing new ways to abuse the public and increase opportunities for them to gain bribes.

PhotWeaver.net

I was thinking of separating my photo-blogging from day-today blogging...

I know; all I do on this blog right now is photo blogging; but you know I write things once in a while, and I used to tech-blog too. I want to start all that again; but that would bore off most of you who come here just to see some photos.

The options I had was either to keep this as the photo blog and create a separate blog for other stuff or create a separate photo blog and make this the general blog. I opted the second mostly because of existing content of this blog and the template issues.

So I started PhotoWeaver.net. I hope you will visit me there, and follow too.

For starters, I'm posting the photos which are already on my flickr stream. So some of you would have seen the stuff before. Bear with me for a while, and I will start posting new photos there.

10 Canine Commandments

Prabath's podcast

Prabath recently did a podcast on OpenId integration of WSO2 Identity Solution.

According to podcast page "Prabath Siriwardene is a member of the WSO2 Identity Solution team and is currently working on integrating OpenID support. He has over 3 years industry experience in Microsoft .NET technologies."

But take my word, he's one heck of a techie than that.

Visit Yasas in Chicago

Yasas is in Chicago for a week. So I drove to Chicago yesterday morning, despite the severe winter storm warning that was in effect yesterday, to meet him. We walk around the heart of Chicago and spoke of older days to politics to people to our careers. It's always interesting to speak with yasas.

I also shot quite a few photos. Shall post them selectively over the coming days.

Wasgamuwa

After weeks of tire and stress, I'm at home letting myself chill down.

Sithira and NC came over on Saturday and we headed to Wasgamuwa on Sunday. It was a welcoming getaway for all three of us. And it turned out that it would be the last trip that all three of us would go as bachelors!

Prabath's last day

(Picture taken in 2006 September)

40 Months ago, on 1st of July 2004, Prabath and I started work at Virtusa. We both were in the same project for three years straight and passed so many milestones together.

Prabath is a person who can take on any challenge and overcome that in style. Every constraint is just another reason to be motivated for him. He always kept his head up and kept things rolling until he reached his targets.

He's a heartiest friend on whom I would trust my life with.

Today is his last day at Virtusa. His absence would be much felt in the years to come, as a top notch techie as well as a great friend.

I wish him all the best in his life...

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.

Bombing at the doorstep

Came to office around 7.15, had breakfast, checked mail and the syndications. Then slowly started with day's work when I started to receive IMs from friends asking about a bomb blast in Fort, where my office is.

I didn't hear a thing, but the IMs were too many for it to be a false alarm. One said it was in front of the harbour. I get a clear view of the harbour, so I took a look, nothing seemed to be moved. Hmm...

Half an hour later, it's in the front page of my iGoogle!!

http://defencenet.blogspot.com/2007/05/suicide-attack-on-army-transport-pettah.html
http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2007/5/15203.html

How you find me

It’s quite interesting to know how and where from my visitors come. There are like 40~50 visitors (unique IP) everyday who just type in http://mahasen.blogspot.com or use a bookmark. Probably syndicates count in here as well. Then there are another 50 or so coming from kottu.org, achcharu.org or geeklanka.com. Another 20 or so comes from sites that have linked to my blog. An interesting 15~20 come from search results every day as well. Search criteria that had directed here yesterday were
“Mahasen”
“Tamil Elam”
“Tamil blog Canada”
“sri lanka blog”
“Virtusa”

Interestingly, some IPs have visited me 20 times during yesterday!

Most of my visitors come from Sri Lanka, second highest is shared between Australia and United States. There are some regular visitors in the UK and the Middle East as well.

Being pissed off in the morning

I wish I could keep my head cool all the time. Being angered creates more suffering for me than any one else. But that’s how things are. Perhaps I don’t meditate enough. Even the monk told me so yesterday…

Any ways what made me angry this morning is the dumb head neighbor of ours (I hate having neighbors - doesn’t every one?). I had to pick up my sister at 7 this morning. I got up late and had to hurry so didn’t lock the gate as I was leaving. The idiot came out from no where and very rudely said “make sure you ‘close’ the gate when you go out” (no “please” - no smile). I was in a hurry as I said so just said “yeah sure” and walked away without locking it.

We, living in an apartment complex, share the same gate with our neighbor. There were times when they (neighbors) just take the darn padlock with them for days and we weren’t able to lock the damned thing. But this bugger had the nerve this morning to tell me what to do. I was in mood to tell him a thing or two when we came back but the bugger wasn’t around - that prevented some thing that could have been a really bitter experience for the rest of our stay there.

So what made me cool off later? It’s the friendly stray dog I feed with biscuits every morning. She came on to me smiling and wagging her tail. She probably sensed I was in a bad mood so she made sure I feel better before attending to the biscuits. Isn’t that wonderful? The animal had more sensibility than that human.

You might want this

I’m intentionally avoiding commenting on certain posts these days. Because I’m pretty sure, if those discussions last any longer, every one would need one of these

Liberty

Everybody captures the front, Niluksha had the nerve to capture the back...

Prabath’s last day on CRS

Prabath and I joined Virtusa on the same day. All this time, both of us had been on the same project. We started as associate engineers and came a long way since then. There were ups and downs and we managed our way through all of them.

Recently we received a really high scorecard from our client which our client service manager quoted as the best scorecard ever on the account. Prabath, Frank and I were handling three different components and different clients and it was really responsibility and professionalism that bound it to that final score.

Anyways, Prabath decided to move on from the account from next month onwards. That makes today, his last day on the account. Prabath has done a tremendous amount of work on this account and has contributed immensely to make the engagement what it is today.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for all his dedication and hard work on the account and to wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

Kalinga

This dude used to be my class mate and was together with me for most of the mischiefs. Now he's down in Australia and was back for a vacation.

He paid me a visit on last Wednesday and we went to meet up with few other friends in the Kandy town.

As the night fell this bugger went crazy and wanted to light up fire works in the middle of the town!! So we bought some, and went up to this cool place and lit them over looking the town. It was awesome!! I’m sure it wasn’t only us who enjoyed it. The whole town must have seen it. I missed the camera… may be next time :)