At the movies

I wanted to go see “Skyfall” despite the bad reviews I have seen. There is nothing like a Saturday afternoon spent watching a bit of ‘007’ action. Come to think of it, I have never heard of a bond movie spy with a number greater than ‘009’. Why is the prefix ‘00’ then I wonder?

Anyway, I called up the dialog movie ticketing line for some hassle free ticket purchase. Alas, they only cover ‘EAP cinemas’ I was told by the slightly irritated female voice on the other side. What was I thinking? Surely I should have known that? My bad.

I don’t have 3G on my outdated mobile phone and going to the internet on that is a nightmare. Didn’t feel like booting up my computer – I would have to get up from this comfy position on the couch to do that – why am I even considering that?

I’ll take the plunge and go to the cinema. Even if the movie is in 3 hours that will give me some time to browse through at the bookstore or at the computer/tech crazy joints next door to the cinema. Yes, as you can tell, I am a pretty brave sorta’ guy.

I reached the ‘city that is majestic’, and took the elevator to the top floor. I was pleasantly surprised, large brand-new white tiled air conditioned space just for the ticketing counters and snack-bars on the opposite side. I blinked hard as I stepped out of the elevator in disbelief. This is indeed a far cry from the cinema I came to a few months back to watch Spidy in 3D. Where was the BO? Where were the snaking queues engulfing every pillar going down the staircase? This is certainly a refreshing change.

I walked up to the ticket counter. There were 3 guys behind the 3 counters but none of them were even remotely interested in me. After much hand waving (y’see the glass between us seem to muffle my voice as none of my repeated ‘excuse-me’s reached their ears), finally I got one of them asking me ‘Yes? Can I help?’. You certainly can my boy, “What time is the next screening of sky-fall?” I asked. “It’s at 1.30 and 1.45” he said. Wow, I only have to wait another 30 minutes – what timing! The show must have been playing for a while, no one else is here.

But then the guy tells me “But sir, you have to stay in the queue till we issue tickets at 1.15”. Hello? What queue? The place is empty! “What do you mean queue?” I asked. Then I was directed at a door which led to a staircase going downstairs. When I opened the door, it hit me like the heat that hits you when you step out of an airplane at Katunayake Tarmac. There is a freaking queue after all – complete with BO!

“Internet Not Found”

Your alarm goes off. It’s 6.30am on a warm Tuesday morning. You know you have an early meeting to attend and hurry into the toilet clutching your blackberry in one hand. You sit on the throne, and start checking your email on your smartphone. Wow, no emails, you are relieved to see that. But wait, your colleague in USA should have gotten back to you on that proposal last night – today is the deadline. You immediately start typing a “reminder” email – must hurry before he goes to sleep. You press “send” but after a while you see “Sending failed” message. You try again, but in vain.

Cursing the mobile provider, you bring up your browser to catch up on your favorite news site. Strange, there seem to be a connectivity issue again. What’s going on? Let me try Google, surely that cannot be down? But wait, it doesn’t connect either. It must be this damn mobile service provider. You cannot waste any more time on this for now. You get dressed, gulp down a particularly strong cup of coffee and jump in your car.

You tune into your favorite radio station while driving to work. The morning news bulletin is unusually brief, almost as if no interesting news to report. But then one item catches your attention. There seem to be widespread complaints that most internet providers having technical problems this morning. “That explain it..” you mutter to yourself – “I hope it is not that undersea cable again”. What a disaster that was.

You arrive at work right at 8.15am. You have 15 minutes to check your email and a headline or two on the internet. But alas, your office internet provider seems to be suffering from the same issue. No connectivity to internet!

Suddenly you realize that a lot of people at work are giving each other nervous looks. Someone even mentioned that this connectivity problem is not just local; it seems to have affected other countries too. What? Can that happen? Surely not?

Colombo Election

I can almost hear all the Sri Lankans out there sighing with disgust at the mention of the word “election”. But why don’t we like them? Is it because they are more frequent in Sri Lanka than the chances of garbage collecting man turning up? Or perhaps there are more candidates than the number of bees in a bee-hive? Or even maybe because none of the candidates come up with a proper election manifesto? Not to forget the likelihood of selected candidate swapping sides soon after the result,… I am sure you get my point here.

But to me, this election is slightly different. At least I see it in a different perspective - mainly because I got some insights into some of the candidates. It made it a wee bit interesting.

• For one thing, most candidates seem to be online these days. They promote their campaigns on facebook, twitter and through their own websites and blogs. Perhaps the election laws prohibiting the usual “election poster” has resulted in this exodus to the internet.
• Banning the election poster is one thing, but enforcing it is another. Although the posters are being taken down by police, more new ones get pasted at the same places by the next morning. I reckon what you need is the ability to financially penalize or even disqualify a candidate instead of merely tearing down their poster.
• Then there are these crafty ways to get around the advertising ban. Y’see, apparently the ban is on advertising “Vote for this number”. So some candidates advertise websites that include their number and the “cross” (sign for voting). There are also candidates who organize events (like musical shows) on the day that match their number (ie. someone with number 20 would organize a musical show on the 20th of the month). And advertise in bold letter the organizer’s name (which happens to be the candidate) and the date of the event (which is their number). Too bad if your number is greater than 31.
• Just got to know about a certain candidate who had come out with a poster indicating that he was rubbing shoulders with the president at a certain prestigious international event. But the truth of the matter seems to be that he was neither with the president nor at this event – it was a hoax with a bit of photoshop involved.
• Out of all the people, the “mudalali” at my local grocery shop is also a candidate this time. It takes him a considerable amount of time to figure out the change when I purchase anything from that shop. So he is not the brightest I have met. But then again, level of intellect or qualifications doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for this job.

Few days back the postman delivered my voting documents together with a large sheet of paper. The paper listed out all the candidates. There were 11 groups and 26 candidates in every group. Making it 286 candidates in total. Last time I checked, population of Colombo city was less than 650,000. That is one candidate for every 2,200. To put it in perspective, my school (which had 5,000 students) would have produced 2 election candidates.

All this may be interesting but doesn’t encourage me to get off the sofa and go to the polling booth. After all there will be two interesting world cup (rugby) matches on the 8th.

Face-off with Facebook

Now that I’ve touched on LinkedIn, let me state my opinion about it’s more social/informal counterpart, Facebook. Now we all know how successful and addictive it has become. I have been pleasantly surprised and amazed by the number of long lost fiends I have discovered due to Facebook. Some of them after more than 20 years.

But there is the proverbial “other side of the coin” that we must always look at. The one that give pedophiles yet another tool (a very effective one at that) to exploit unwary children, a place where Spammers can go to town, an avenue to easily and unintentionally expose your deep dark secrets to millions of strangers and an addictive tool which can become the most effective time waster since the introduction of news bulletins at national TV networks.

But more than anything what I cannot comprehend is why in the world some folks want to invite total strangers into their “friend list”. Is it because they think it might be “cool” to have a “friend list” that exceeds the 500 or even the 1000 mark? I of course reject these invites. But I know some don’t.

Any idea why?

Linked-In or Linked-Out?

Lately, I have been receiving reminders fairly frequently from the socio-professional network called LinkedIn. All this time I have been treating them just as I treat any Nigerian email claiming to share a sudden multi-million dollar windfall if I reply to them; drag-and-drop in the trash – the electronic trash that is – on my computer.

But today I had some time to myself and curiosity took the better of me – isn’t it curious how curiosity does it? I clicked on the link and ended up on the sign-in (or is it the sign-on?) page (I’m sure most of my readers are conversant with the terminology – if not, too bad). I entered my personal email address and tried a few of my usual password. I got in on the 4th attempt – had it been a site designed by folks who design ATM software I guess I would have had it after the 3rd incorrect attempt. “Designing ATM software”, now why does that sounds awfully familiar?

Anyway….

WTF? There were 43 requests waiting for me. Some were requests for endorsements and others invitations to join various groups. I was no longer interested in joining any other group. That left me with 14 requests for endorsements. Suddenly I felt important. People actually want my endorsements? Wow! I started writing a few in earnest. By the end of the day, I had only managed to complete 6.

One question though,… Do potential employers really take these endorsements seriously? I mean in this internet/social networking age, deceptions and impersonations are as commonplace as fries at McDonalds aren’t they?

That tagging game

I think the Drummer started it all. I received the tag from Santhoshi. It's all about expressing your feelings on the recent events in Sri Lanka. Five words should describe it all. So here goes,...

Relieved
Apprehensive
Hopeful
Sad
Happy

I've been so late this time, I cannot think of many bloggers who haven't been tagged so far on this. But I will try my luck with Sujeewa, Dilan, Kokila, Charith and Seshi.

Are we related?

What would you do if you find out that you are related to Obama? Especially if you are Bin Laden? Think about it. Kinda funny isn't it?

I'm sure most people on facebook would have received this message by now (at least I hope they did). It seems that I am related to Obama. How nice!

Java Embargo?

It has been a while since I last had to do anything with Java (no, not the coffee nor the island, it's the computer programming language). Recently something on my computer required the latest Java runtime to be downloaded. It even automatically directed me to the Sun website for the required download.

But then to my surprise I saw this flashing on my screen.

Is Sri Lanka an embargoed country for Java?

Do you Chrome?

I have been hooked on this latest browser by Google. As usual they have come up with a catchy name – Chrome. I’ve see so many wonderful things written about it on the internet. They have covered it’s latest features so comprehensively and I don’t intend to describe them here.

But the nice thing about it is that once in a while I discover another not-quite-obvious nevertheless useful functionality. It is like finding pieces of cashew in your wattalappam – makes the experience that much richer.

For example, You can press Control-F and bring up a search box to search for contents on the current webpage you are on – ok, so no big deal; but then as you type your search text on that search box, the browser dynamically highlights matching words on the current webpage – good, but give me more you say? Now look at your scroll bar on the right hand side of your browser… see those orange colour small horizontal lines? They show you matches on the other areas of the webpage you cannot currently see on your browser – neat eh?

I’ll give you another. Have you noticed a small animation (a spinning circle) next to the text “New Tab” when you type in a URL and press ‘Enter’? Well, that gives you an indication that the page is being displayed… if you look at it closely, you will find that initially it will start spinning on an anti-clockwise direction, and the moment it finds the website and starts to download contents, it starts spinning on a clockwise direction. Talk about attention to detail!

I hardly use any other browser now. Cheers Google!

My perfect 10

I must admit, when Santhoshi said I was “tagged” my initial reaction was “huh?”. Then I checked out her blog and figured out what it all meant. So here goes…

1) Innocent smiles that my two girls give in their sleep
2) Chocolate biscuit-pudding (with extra dark chocolate)
3) Smell of freshly cut grass (don’t get excited, I meant grass as in what makes up your lawn)
4) A good Paulo Coelho or a Arthur C. Clarke novel
5) A close F1 race with Raikkonen, Lewis and Alonso battling it out in front.
6) Beach
7) A good night out in Colombo with Live music, Dancing and my closest friends
8) Italian food
9) Access to internet from anywhere
10) The thought that someday I will learn to play the guitar

It’s my turn to do the tagging now. I wish to tag…

Charith
Seshi
Mithila
Sujeewa
Dilan
Chathu

Google SPAM?

I heard so much about "Google Ads" thought I'd check it out. I registered myself using my Gmail account (being the obvious thing to do since they are both in the Google arena) a few days ago. I was informed that I would get a confirmation email within several days.

Several days came and went but no response... I thought maybe my humble blog just wasn't worthy of receiving the honor of hosting Google Ads and was quite seriously worried about losing out on millions of dollars of potential income through them. Quite accidentally I noticed there was an interesting email on my default Gmail SPAM folder.

Surely Gmail cannot be so pedantic as to prevent it's own Google Ads email (well, they are in the same Google family after all) from reaching my inbox?

Who dares Facebook?

The latest craze in online social utilities seems to be Facebook. I'm not the sort of fellow who spends hours on end online. But after several of my friends raved about it, I finally decided to try it out.

Although I use less than 10% of facebook's various tools and functionality, I have already hooked up with several of my long lost friends thanks to it's vast reach and great search engines. I find it to be a great "friend locator" than anything else.

There are some who registers but avoids putting their profile details including photographs due to privacy concerns. Maybe they have a point,.. but I guess without such profile details, it defeats the whole purpose.