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

As my father is a computer instructor, computers were never strange to my life. I’m working with computers for more than 15 years. But when it comes to internet it is something different. About seven years ago we got a internet connection which was very slow and expensive. It was a dial up connection and in that time we have to dial to a number in Colombo. As I’m living in Ratnapura, our telephone bill in the first few months was more than Rs.6000. So you can see how much it was expensive!

In that time Yahoo was the most popular e-mail provider and they provided a 6MB free mailbox. Also with the help of Yahoo I created a personal home page and published in their free domain(blogging was not much popular at the time). That site is no longer online now. Within few months I published my second web site called “Math Tricks” which was never upgraded. But the site is online even today.

Today the internet and its concepts are much more advanced than those days and fortunately the internet connections are also powerful.

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!