THE CRACK

Yesterday I scanned some of my childhood photos with my brother and those photos recalled our sweet memories of the past. Few weeks back my brother developed a wordpress widget which can use to show random photos on a picasaweb account in the blog. So, I thought I should use it in my blog with those photos.

But I’m not a technical guy so I always seek help from my brother in these matters. First he installed wordpress 2.2 on my blog (otherwise the widget plugin should be installed) and then installed the widget. I uploaded the photos to picasaweb and it worked nicely. But all the photos I had was my childhood photos so I asked him whether I can use the photos on his account too. But it was only capable of handling one account so he upgraded it to a newer version.

Now you can see three random photos on my sidebar and every time you refresh the page there are three new photos. If you are using wordpress and picasaweb you can also try this. Click here to download the widget. Copy the file into wp-content/plugins/widgets directory. Then, activate the plugin and add that to the sidebar from Presentation -> widgets. If you encounter any problem leave a comment on this page or here.

By upgrading the blog into wordpress 2.2 I had another advantage. There was a really bad error with my feed and any of my posts didn’t appear on kottu on last month. The feed worked with Google reader but feedvalidator indicated there’s a problem. But we couldn’t find any error so we gave up. But with the wordpress 2.2 the feed also work nicely.

So at last I’m showing you my sweet memories as well as my brother’s

Yesterday, I attended to a funeral in Gampaha and came back home around 9.15 pm. Our home is little bit far from the main road so I have to walk about 1km. On my way to the home yesterday, I saw something very bright, falling towards the earth. Within 4-5 seconds I lost the vision of that thing as our area is surrounded by hills. But it was falling to the north-east direction from here(Ratnapura).

When I first saw it I was stunned without knowing what it was and the first thing came to my mind was that it may be a LTTE attack. But I didn’t hear any noise. Then after little while later I thought it was a meteoroid because LTTE can’t attack from that much of high. Anyway it was much bigger than what I have seen on movies and tv.

Then in today morning when I opened Google reader I saw there’s an article from lankanewspapers.com with the heading “Mysterious noise causes panic in several areas“. According to the article there’s a possibility that it was a falling meteorite of some magnitude. Then in the lunch time news on sirasa tv their headline was also about this incident and in the news Dr. Chandana Jayarathna told they suspect that this is a meteorite and they are investigating.

Recently I watched a nice movie called “Deja Vu” and that leads to write this post. This is not about the film but about the deja vu concept. Here’s the description about deja vu from wikipedia.

The term “d�j� vu” (French for “already seen”, also called paramnesia) describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously

As it further says,

the experience of d�j� vu seems to be very common; in formal studies 70% or more of the population report having experienced it at least once

So I think you have also been witnessed this. For me it is common. I can’t remember how many times I have been through this. Deja Vu film is giving an explanation what’s happening there. As in the film an ATF agent travels through the time 4 days and 6 hours to the past to save hundreds of lives. There he says something to a bomber which the bomber was told to him in the future. Here the bomber encounters deja vu. In the end of the film this agent also meets the experience of deja vu. So the film suggests this happens because of time traveling.

As soon as the film is over I began to think why can’t we explain this using the reincarnation rather than using such a complex idea of time traveling. Eventhough time traveling is theoretically possible we don’t know what are the effects of that (such as paradox of grandfather). But we have so many witness to say there’s reincarnation and it can explain the situation more precisely.

When I visited wikipedia to collect some more information regarding this I didn’t expect there will be a explanation using reincarnation but I expected something related to time traveling. Both my assumptions were wrong. There were so much explanations such as links with disorders, pharmacology(people who use certain recreational drugs increase the chances of d�j� vu), etc. If someone is interested here’s the link to read more.

So now, if you encounter deja vu again remember that it can be from your past lives or from dreams or you may have a disorder or you have taken some specific drugs etc. But remember it can even be someone have traveled through the time! So, you have hope to take a journey though the time in future!

Anyone who is looking for a vacation to relax from your workload? Well, how much time do you want? I’m sure if you are loaded with work you’ll ask for a long long vacation. But I prefer not to take a vacation more than a month. Here’s my tragedy about my vacation!

All this happens after our end semester exam of the 4th semester (end of 2nd year). We were supposed to have a vacation from 28th January to 17th April. Last time, when the 1st year ended our vacation was from 30th January to 22nd May (2006). But I thought that rather than having a vacation it’s better to have a training period (in last year). So I worked for CECB in a site in Ratnapura. Our official training is after the 3rd year and soon after the training our final year begins. After that work work work! So it’s obvious that this year’s vacation is the last one I’m having of this kind (somewhat long). Therefore I decided not to go any training sessions and stay in home this time.

In February it was very nice and I went on some trips specially to Matara and to Sri Pada. I also studied for the 1st semester of BIT. The exam was on 9,10 March. In the meantime I watched some nice movies and tv series. A little by little I began to feel boring and frustrated. Anyhow, just before the new year I received a letter saying that due to unavoidable circumstances our field camp which was to start on 17th April was postponed. Then after a week the non academic strike began.

Today, in the news I heard that the non academic strike is over. That’s a sign of starting the university. But suddenly my feeling was “Oh I can’t go”. That’s because after having such a long vacation now I’m lazy to do work again. I can neither go to the university because I’m too lazy nor stay at home because it’s too boring. So what should I do? This is all about my vacation!

I think it has gone more than one week from the starting of this blog to write down this first article. One reason is that I had an exam (BIT semester 1) on last weekend so I had to concentrate my mind on studies. Other thing is that I really don’t know what to write and even the meaning and purposes of a personnel blog. My brother is the one who asked me whether I want a blog. He is writing his blog since January 2006 but I have read his blog only several times. That’s just because I’m not interested to find out what is really happening there. Anyway after my brother asked me to write a blog I thought it is a good idea to spend my time in this vacation.

So let’s start! Here in this blog I’ll write all my thoughts on different areas like politics, cricket, my university life, may be about the computers etc. etc. etc. Since this is my first post it is better to stop here. Visit here frequently and you’ll find more and more thoughts of me.

Thank you very much. Any comment is welcome.