My Birthday Treat

I had planned to give my treat today. All my friends confirmed on coming except Nazriya and Raunaka due to personal issues. I wanted a totally different celebration for this b'day , so chose to try new places and new things. I have a lot of things to celebrate for this year and also I kind of have a feeling that this might be my last year with my friends (just one of the weird feelings that I get sometimes, and hope its not totally true). So I wanted to make it grand and wanted everyone to have a great time.

Rish and Zafra came over to my place and we started out a bit late, OK, a lot later than we expected to :). We headed over to a new place called The Sizzles. Sarah Couldn't make it for lunch to something that just came up, but promised to join for coffee.
I ordered something calld Rocky's. The atmosphere was nice but nothing great. There was an E-Fm promo going on in the background. The food was good and different, but the best part was the way that they served it. Its all served on a sizzling plate, so its super hot when it reaches us. We have to wait if we dont wanna ruin the meal by burning our tounges :). We enjoy the aroma first and then the food. And as if that wasn't enough, we ordered a dessert, blueberry cheesecake with ice cream. Even that was served on a sizzling plate, which was really cool. I'm not really a cheesecake fan, so ate a bit of that and icecream. We shared the dessert coz we simply cudnt finish a whole dessert each since we were already stuffed.
We were done by around 4pm.

And from there, Rish had to leave after lunch, due to personal issues, again :D
Zafra's sister Sarah and Sarah Pallaq joined on from there after Rish left.
Our next stop, The Cinnamon Grand - Coffee Stop. And this is where I was providing my treat. We headed there and were waiting .... and waiting for Thamzeela and Rehana to join us. They took a pretty long time to arrive. They arrived at around 5.30 pm and then we started oredring our coffee. We ordered Waffles as well, but those never turned up. And then we thought, since Crescat is next door, why not have an early dinner as well. We discussed and finalized on it.

So the next stop, Crescat Boulevard. Zafra and I simply couldn't eat anything more, but we were forced. I finally agreed to share a submarine with rehana, and Zafra went with soup and fries. We were there chatting and eating until 8pm by which it was time for us to leave. My dad came and picked us, dropped my friends and we headed home. I got loads of gifts :D

Right now I'm ending this amazing day listening to Over You, by Daughtry which is simply amazing. I would say its the best song of the year. I had a superb and an unforgettable birthday celebration, but only wish my other two friends could have joined.

My 24th Birthday

Today, december 14th, I turned 24 and no that isn't old :).
It doesnt feel much different. Morning started out as usual and was a bit boring. Towards evening i was getting excited as I was joining Zafra and her family for her birthday treat. BTW, we both share the same birthday (same day same year).

I went over to Crescat Boulevard arnd 8pm. They were waiting for me. Her whole family was there including her fiance. Her sisters and I chose to go for Mongolian, the Supreme Combo with meat, seafood and rice. It was good but spicyyy. And afterwards I had a Brownie with four scoops of ice cream for dessert from Roots. I must say..... it was heavenly coz I'm eating chocolate and ice cream after ages. It was like rediscovering the taste of chocolate :D.
And it contained all my favourites, i.e. brownie, chocolate and peanuts. Zafra had a strawberry something and later we were fighting over the last strawberry.

After dinner we popped into the Cinnamon Grand to checkout the coffee prices and spend a lil time. The atmosphere was really nice and wished we could have stayed longer.

Returned home around 11pm and slept like a baby :D
Overall, I had a great time after a long long time.... now I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Candlemaking by Sweet Tooth Express

This is an ebook I bough off Ebay. It has some basic info about candlemaking , good for a beginner and some simple projects for you to start with.

Heart

The poem below was written by a close friend of mine. All I can say is that its Excellent and touched my heart.

Heart

Every corner is taken
Every crevice is filled
with memories of happiness,
sorrow and guilt.

The endless trickle
of emotional treasure
The harmony of jealousy,
content and pleasure.

Bleeding in pain
or hammering in surprise
My heart throbs in
continous disguise.

Madiha Idrees Motiwala

Paypal in Sri Lanka

I just found out that paypal is available to sri lankans. Wow, this is news. I've been hoping that this would happen, but didnt really think that they would consider it even.
I'm really happy anyways :)
It proved to be a problem when i was trying to buy/sell on ebay since majority use paypal and prefer paypal.
This is GREAT news :D

Misery loves ME

Sigh... Where do I start, Where is it gonna end?
Lifes as miserable as it can get. Mentally, physically and spiritually, its just hell on earth.
I was wondering if God has something personal against me, coz its pure torture that I'm experiencing. First with my continuous health problems which seems to have no cure. That has left me with depression and stamina equals to nill. Just getting up and going about each day is exhausting.

I've been working day and night on this long due project and times almost up. June's here, so only a month and 14 days more to go. And just when I'm satisfied with what I've achieved so far, my whole life comes crashing down on me. My hard disk crashes. No backups, none. Am so close to the edge now. Giving up seems to be the easy way out but at the same time I'm not a person who gives up. I hope I just dont crack under the pressure. No one seems to understand and its not worth the effort trying to make them understand. Hopeless!

Theres just only one thing left to do. Just keep going on like nothing ever happened. Just a few more sleepless nights and things should be fine. Sleep does not matter anymore, in fact it just feels like a waste of time. This is the last straw... and I AM definitely gonna make it, trust me. Oh yeah, and my prayers will keep me going on.

Looking forward to a brighter day tomorrow and hopefully a brighter life.

Gel Candles

Today was surely an interesting day. I learnt the art of making gel candles, something that I've been wanting to do for quite a while now. We had a fun group :) and it was like going back to childhood - the days when you played with clay for the first time and discovered what fascinating things you can do with it.

Gel candles initially fascinated me when I was shopping one day. I saw a couple of them and was thinking 'what a beautiful ornament'. Then I noticed that it had a wick at the centre. 'Could this be a candle?' I wondered. It sure didnt look like anything I've seen before. Did some research on it and found that they are indeed candles, made out of a special kind of wax, not paraffin. After googling it, I was astonished at the beautiful designs that were available. This got me more excited. And what you can do with them, plenty. They can be used more as ornaments than as candles, perfect as personalized gifts, used for aromatherapy etc.

I hope to exploit this new found hobby of mine and look into the future prospects. Credit should be given to the teacher, Mrs. Ramani Arsecularatne who very patiently explained every detail of the process. She further gave us business ideas and encouraged us to make use of them.

These are the images of what we made today:-


BEER MUG

DESSERT

Cricket World Cup Finals

Today, the 28th, a much anticipated day. I've been so excited about this match where the Lankans will face the Aussies, fighting for the Cricket World Cup 2007. The whole country is on its toes, getting prepared for this exciting moment.
The day - Saturday, 28th April - 2007
Venue - Kensington Oval, Barbados
Teams - Sri Lanka Vs Australia

As they say, we have our plan and god has his plan.
The day started off as any other normal day, but had this exciting feeling from the time I woke up. But at the back of my mind I was wondering how I was going to watch the match since our tv was down due to lightning two days back. And it didnt look like they were about to deliver today. I pleaded to go over to a friends to watch, but nope, that didnt work out. Finally my cuz was generous enough to lend us their extra tv, its small but atleast I would be getting to watch the match.

When I thought all was well, and sat down waiting for the match to start, it seems to raining in Barbados, oh crap, just what we need. I wait and wait and all I can see is ' Match delayed due to rain'. Finally they decide to begin play and make the toss. Australian wins and chooses to bat. The rain comes on again, and they have to further delay it.

Later when the rain finally ceases, the overs are reduced to 38. Adam Gilchrist started off making us feel sorry for the Lankans. Australians scored a good 283 runs.
When it was the Sri Lankans turn to play, the rain came on again. The game was not at all in sri Lankas favour. The wether was disurbing, the batsman couldn't stay long at the pitch and for the bowlers, it just wasnt their day. Not even for Malinga. It was pathetic, frustrating and dissapointing to watch. And when it was almost over and the Australians had started to celebrate, the umpires wanted to call it off due to bad light. The lankans continued play in spite of bad light. The game already belonged to the aussies and they knew it.

And in the middle of all this there are air strikes going on. That is the ongoing battle with the LTTE. We experienced blackouts, twice and missed the most important parts of the match. Of all the days, they had to pick this day to attack the air force fuel storage tanks. That didn't go exactly according to plans. We did see the air missiles. It was exciting as well as scary at the same time.

And thats that. WHAT A DAY!
I cant express the dissapointment, coz me and the rest of the country wanted the guys to bring back the cup home :(

An Open Source Weekend

Last weekend, that is the 3rd and 4th of March 2007, I attended this 2-day seminar on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). It was a last minute decision, since I read an e-mail about it on thursday or so. I'm glad that I did attend it, coz learnt lots of new things. It was held at kandy and was organized by the university of peradeniya and the FOSS team. It went under the name FOSS-ed on wheels where this team of FOSS guys and gals travel around the island to present FOSS to the people and create awareness.

Learnt what open source is about and why they make it open. Linux and other interesting s/w like Open Office, GIMP, Blender etc were spoken about. There was a lecture with demo about VOIP. Games were spoken about. Watched a short open movie called 'The Elephants Dream'.
We had a few demos of Open Source CMS's like Drupal and Joomla.
At the end of each session, there was a Q and A session as well.

The motive was to make people aware of the availability of FOSS tools since a developing country like Sri Lanka cannot afford proprietary software like Windows due to the expense. At the end they also told us about how FOSS can be used to bring about business opportunities as well as how WE could contribute to the community.
Get involved in APACHE, SAHANA etc and contribute by coding , finding bugs, documentation etc.

www.foss.lk - sri lankan Foss community

http://sahana.lk - Open Source Disaster Management project

www.sourceforge.net - large repository for open source projects

To Blog or not to Blog?

That is indeed the question.
After understanding what the whole blogging world is about (to a certain extent),
i decided to try my hands at it :)
It seemed kinda boring at first, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.
Its interesting and fun.
Lets see how far I'll go with this!