Dreamsmademe Blog

This is absurd. We've got 4 GSM operators in the country. They make all the hype in the world. We were playing with SMSs years before the US counterparts send their first SMS. Okay true enough but our networks are still sluggish. None covers island in one phase. Batteries won't last when you go out stations (okay that is the technology). No signal when you are about to die in some Bintenna place.

I switched to Mobitel GSM after having enough issues with Dialog GSM during the 1998 to 2003 period.

Now Mobitel calls are too keep dropping even when you are stationary in Colombo for no reason. It's hard to hang on for more than two three minutes sometimes. Sigh!

Dialog had this issue of network congestion due to over subscription and they got their switches updated lately. Anyway I switched and they lost me.

Now Mobitel, are they too trying to allocate more users in the network? But it does not seem to be a congestion issue. It is a problem of switching the cells we are in it seems. The phone keep changing its cell even when you are stationary and calls drop during the transfer, we noticed. OK you gave us the choice of knowing the cell we are in. I checked everybody around me experience the same. We even switched the phones to see with no success. So it's gotta be a network problem. Anyone ?

So you guys at Mobitel, I know you work hard to keep up your cutting EDGE, but would you please improve your network so we can make uninterrupted calls, the phone's basic function first.

I do still have another two operators if I really want to try. Anyway I was happy with you and I had slightly better customer experience with you guys. So I guess we'd better keep it that way, Aren't we?

There was a nice article by someone called Amarasiri Ganewatte in today's Sinhala newspaper, Divaina.

What he says is very true. I also felt English was very difficult when I try to learn it, because of the methods used. But as a matter of fact Enlglish is much simpler than learning Sinhala from scratch.

Here's a nice example from the artcle. The words sounds exactly the same. Different meanings though.

We, Interblocks Ltd, won the Gold for the Financial Category and the Best Overall Product Category in this year's National Best Quality Software Award Ceremony. It's was a wonderful night we all felt.

Last year we have submitted the iSwitch and this year it was for the iPay, the Internet Payment Gateway system for online card verification. (VISA/Mastercard and soon AMEX too)

Meanwhile this is the last year's event.

Wow! My long time favorite band is in town.

MLTR guys have come over for a brief concert in Colombo.

I love their ballades, all the songs, and I have collected
nearly all of their songs. I had long since separately
hosted all of those lyrics from my collection in my website.

Here enjoy them!
Micheal Learns to Rock Lyrics

The play was brief and only limited to 90 minutes.
Some of my favorites were not played. Hay, that's bad of you guys.
Anyway I enjoyed everybit of it.

The Internet has made connecting people so easy in a way our parents' never even have imagined.

People here who have never touched a computer goes to Internet parlors to take Net2Phone calls. Soon it'll be VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phones.

For some the Internet means purely chat.

Chatting has stormed the Internet from the beginning. And there are a million chat cliants out there. Trillian, M2, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL you name it. It was nice to keep company with.
They are so famous and now even double as essential business tools apart from their initial appeal to the Internet new comers and teenagers.

Personally I never used any of until recently. I felt it's just wasting time typing useless dialogue with strangers. Mostly due to the slow but expensive dialup lines we had. It was even painful when we go voice streaming. So I spend all my online time reading and learning and searching, something worthwhile. When you got dialups chatting sucks.

It all changes when you gotta fast DSL line. It all changes when someone you know closely goes abroad. Suddenly chatting makes practicale sense.

Now Udani from Canada, Ruani from Fitch Ratings, Nuwan from UK buzzing me. The best thing is nobody's gonna pay a penny over phone bills.

Wonderful isn't it?

Today is a sad day.

A simple man, my ex-boss Suminda's father, the one who has written the famous Sinhala song ''Chandana Ellen Nâla'' which is coincidently happened to be my name too, has passed away.

This is a great loss to the Sinhala literature. Even though he has passed away the things he has written, songs, books, articles will stay among us, for many yeas to come.

Chandana: [Sanskrit] sandalwood, the fragrance, or the cosmetics made out of sandalwood

Yesterday, when I login to the Blogger, They threw at me their latest innovation, AdSense. That's what you see now under my profile and recent posts saying "Ads by Google"

I've been studying this, AdSense makes much sense over the taditional web banner advertising because they are:

• Relevant
  Will cover your subject, search or the interests
  

• Text based
  They won't eat up your bandwidth
  

• Yields more results
  So you will have more choices
  

• No hijackers or spammers allowed
  Your computer will be healthier
  

• Reliable
  Comes from the guys who made possible Google and gMail
  

• A win win thing
  You will find something you want, someone will make a penny out of it
  

• Utilises proven Google intelligence inbuilt
  So you can relax and do enjoy your web experience
  

Read on...

How often have you clicked on a distracting popup banner on a webpage?

If you like me, you would probably say "never" because we've learned all those banners were irrelevant, distracting, useless and sometimes happened to be browser hijacks, spam and virus sources.

So we left them in the dust. Period.

Now, think of Google, thing of gMail, think of AdSense, things have changed.

When was it Google did not return you answers that did not satisfy your search?

Has it ever failed you on your search, if it ever was on the web?

Mind you, since I have mastered the art of "search" for the last 5 years or so, If you know how to do a search, you gonna find anything on mankind and beyond, if it is connected to the net and given an IP address. Period.

So the answer is again gonna be "never" on this.

The net is useless without being able to "search". So here comes Google, I respect for what it has done to the net. Look at the dictionary, now we don't do "search" anymore but "google" instead.

Need more convincing?
They have cached "4,285,199,774" web pages in their vast RAM pool right at this moment as I write this. It's more less the whole web.

I have used dogpile, yahoo, altavista, msn, alltheweb, excite, kartoo and what else? but nothing yields fast results as rellevant as Google does when it comes to a search.

I lived and made my life around the net. If it wasn't Google, I will still manage but life wouldn't be this easy. No way.

I've been using gMail for months now. Mind you, it's by for the best responsive mail I ever used. With whoping 2GB + storage you can't beat it.

So likewise AdSense, it is too there to stay. Because it's one heck of a new innovative business model over the industry old web banner advertising. It takes in everyone into account. So if you find anything intersting here, you can click on one or two ads and pass a penny to me too.

Even if not, just relax, do enjoy your journey.
Life is beautiful. Cheer up!

I wasn't the worst in my high school Math class though numbers and figures were something that never took my interest.

Still don't understand much of the accounting jargons either.

Anyway, today Ranjith (our auditor) presented us with our financial results for the second year.

It is nothing much but we were so happy and a little proud of our little CDU enterprise. I've seen enough of these for other big companies but when it is your own signature which goes beneath it.
Wow! It feels wonderful!

Oops! It only takes a day to realize that how much we missed it when the net goes down.

The SEA-ME-WE III Optic Fiber Cable which connects Sri Lanka (SLT) to the rest of the world has broken due to some Indian ship anchor accident.

We are sort of completely disconnected from the rest of the world.

Still worse all of our ISPs interconnet through US and Japan so even the local DNS lookups doesn't work well.

One good thing due to this scandal is (no ship was allowed to anchor there) I guess that our ISPs are now trying to set up DNS locally so that at least locally hosted domains will resolve locally. It shows when some domains outside SLT domain are now resolving like www.ccom.lk, www.lanka.net, my company's website and so on.

Still no www, no mails, no google means no life situation.

Authorities say it will take days before they repair it. Horrible.

NB: This is posted lately. Only today (26.08.04) we got some connection back.

I've been reading this guy for years. Namely Chris Pirillo.

Once when I was alien to the net, hungry for information, trying to figure out things, looking for new ways, new tools for my work. He did speak to the occation. Soon I subscribed to his Windows Daily Nestletter. Had been a long way. The year was 1997 I guess.

Later he formed a company around it and now runs so many information distribution channels that I lost the count. Lockergnome had been a good resource for my knowledge starvation.

He kept sending me all the upto date IT stuff, trends, software, issues, technology, you name it, on daily basis for nothing. He still does.

So, if anyone, looking for information, you new wiz kids having the potential to be another Bill Gates, this is somewhere you can begin with. Go, give it a try. He's worth it.

Thanks Chris, thanks Lockergnome!