Dreamsmademe Blog

This has become real nuisance lately. Neither we nor Police can catch who is responsible for this. This area was quite, peaceful and had no history of burglary that we know of, until now.

Now there is either organized or a random gang who breaks into houses and do the burglary. Last month we lost all four set of our vans' signal lights set while they were parked inside the garden. It was nearly a Rs.16,000.00 fine for us to replace. We felt it was some drug adicts work for quick cash and complained the Police. But nobody was caught eventually.

Today some have done it agian. Luckily nobopy was harmed though they have broken into my aunt's place and taken her jewelry and some other stuff.

Sniffer dogs, finger prints, left slippers and the Police came in but still no lead came out whatsoever to catch the culprits. It is like giving them a license to go for the next break in. I bet they will make a easy living out of it. Go ahead!

Unfortunately as everything else, Sri Lankan doesn't seem to have any effective Criminal Investigation Unit in operation or rather give way to the political reasons. Crimes are at large but nobody is nailing them.

So we bare up our losses and live in fear. Anyone?

I didn't realized this phenomena until I set foot in my neighborhood with my camera. Surprisingly it's gotta quite a bit of bio diversity. Nice.

Though it is difficult to catch it all this is what I could capture on my lenses. There's a bit of plants, flowers and wild life too. Mugati*, Kokku*, Korawaka *, Thala Goya*, Atikukula* and few other unknown birds and serpants. Unfortunately I don't know how to capture them on the move without a tele lense.

This shows the vast pool of Sri Lanka's Bio Diversity in a small area. Specially since this place is only 1 Km away from the busiest Colombo city limits.

Complete gallery could be found here. Enjoy!



(*)= All names are in Sinhala since I do not know most of the English names. If one can send me the names I can post it there :-)

I hate to get up in the early morning. Still when timing is concern I try to be as punctual as I can if other things do not fall in my way. You know traffic blockades, dropping someone along the way might change this though.

Today I had a friendly pick up. Getting up at 4.30 am and I was sharp on my schedule.

At their doorstep, I horned, no sound. Then climb up their wall bang on their door and woke up the whole neighborhood. The mobiles were off and the neighbor said nobody must be at home. Gone somewhere ? Forgotten ? They should be there, I was wondering and came back.

Gosh! What I later found out was they were sound a sleep inside at the very hour they asked me the pick up.

Sigh! Typical Sri Lankans. Never on time.

I’ve been eying new Treo 650, now it seems like ages. PalmOne had created unnecessary buzz but did not deliver the goods as such. There were so many drawbacks. One can see the follow up if he’s following this Treonauts Blog.

Following the memory issue there were the mistaken price debacle and the isabled DUN issue. And now the European model is being nearly 300 US$ pricier than the US model is another to the list.

And it seems that I won’t be able get any official Treo release here in this part of the world anytime soon.

But the Treo 650 is one heck of a true converged device that I do not want to miss. One can’t blame the Treo for PalmOne’s faults. So I will wait for a while and see if things improve whether I can bring down one from US. 

Still I’ve got to wait… sigh!

Tihs is one of the emilas I’ve got tdoay. I’ve seen tihs earlier tuhogh I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to a rscheearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.  Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.  Such a cdonition is arppoiately cllaed Typoglycemia.

And you awlyas thuoght slpeling was ipmorantt, huh?

How many mp3s files you’ve got at your disposal?

I’ve nearly got 7 GB of mp3 music library on my local machine which was a real nightmare to keep them all sorted out properly and pick one for an occasion, Untill now.

If you install an application like Apple iTunes it will make finding the right music is a snap, granted only if you’ve gotta properly named and tagged music library. Since we collect our mp3s from random sources, the order is the last thing  you can expect from these files.

Inconsistent file names, wrong tag data, misspellings, WeiRd CAsE, weird chars you name it. This makes even iTunes can’t handle these files properly.

I got really really fed up with this situation and spend days Googling all the web looking for tools to easily sort and rename these files at large. After nearly two days of search I finally came up with two sheer winners that help me to come out of this mp3 mess.

The two pieces of software that helped me to get this thing done is namely:
a free general file re-naming tool called BulkRename and the mp3 naming tool called UltraTag Editor.

Wow! now I have properly named and tagged neat mp3 library located in one of my local drives ready to be iTuned any way I want. Let it be the Genre, Artist, Album or whatever I can simply locate them in a second.

So, If you too suffer this mp3 phobia, it may take a while to get the hung of these software and get your collection sorted but it really worth the effort since it’s only a one time job. Go and try these babies.

After a while our gang went on the long due trip to
Ambilipitiya in the gone weekend.

It was one of the nicest journeys I went for a long time.

While we were there we climbed up and stayed at the 
Rakwana Suriyakanda Rupawahini Transmission Tower
Circuit. The care takers of the place were very nice to us
and let us share their small circuit for the night generously.

It was freezing cold though we didn’t forget to take a bath in
one of the beautiful streams found there. The view was simply astounding.

Enjoy the pictures below. The tower can be see in the background.

No offence for whatsoever the reasons but what this guy 
really talks about makes a logical sense.

Read it here

And he says prior to the artiles and so I am repeating it here
“I'm entitled to have my opinion, and you're also entitled to have your opinion even if it's stupid”

The tsunami could not have a come at a better time for Sri Lanka. This unfortunate country was well on the road to being an international outcast when the tsunami came. On the strength of those tens of thousands of deaths, suddenly we are at the receiving end of international sympathy. Truly, it is a gift from Hades.

This article is nice. Afterall its typical Sri Lanka. Read here

I know hopes are grim for the county when the new year dawns but if we all can geared toward the county's prosperity aftermath that is never lost. It is good that we didn't here any of the fire crackers but the pirith, unity chants and blessings at the midnight.

Hope this years brings us the much needed turning points for all of us in the country.

I wish you all a Happy New Year!