It's the Festival time of the year. Rembmer ... last year it was ASOCIO and MVPs and .NET User Group 'Rocked' there. And this year it is eCarnival on 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December @ BMICH. And once again we are planing to Rock @ it. Well! this year it is not about We.Rock :).

Last Saturday I was checking couple of DVD shops to collect some new movies. In one shop I found Visual Studio 2005 DVDs. Amazsing!!!. The shop owner told that it came in about 2 weeks ago. So Saturday was 26th and two weeks ago means it was around 12th. and Visual Studio was released on 7th.

See how fast the software pirates are

Was waiting anxiously for the Office 12 Beta. Finally I was selected to the Office 12 Beta program. Last night I downloaded and installed the stuff.

Guys believe me It Rocks. Well still lot of bugs. But It Rocks.

Finally couple of days back my old guru Fiqri started blogging. This is also 100% coded from the scratch like mine. So i'm glad to see another geek. So far i know of only 2 who coded the blog ... him and me. Sometime back Buddhike was there. But he started blogging in some other place.

Once upon a time when I was very new to the field when I didnt even knew how to install windows and when people who knew gave million doller talks about it and was not ready to share the knowledge, fiqri is the one who helped me  ... remember the old days on my 486 with 16 mb RAM (or was it 32 mb) ... which me and your brother did that project.

Great to have ya online ...

After checking all the required info in the web I went to EPSI Computers as they are the authorized dealers for Creative goods. When making the payment I was told that I have to collect the item from the flower road stores and a person from the 1st floor stores was suppose to help me to get there. But when I went to this 1st floor stores the person there was very rude to me and forced me to get an old looking unit he had. I was not happy about this and got really disappointed about the service. So I had to ask for a refund. Anyway nothing against EPSI Computer. I personally know that they have a very good reputation for good customer service. Previous day when I went to the showroom @ Majestic City gentleman there was really helpful, unfortunately they were out of stock at that time. Even when I called the inquiries line the girl who answered was also really helpful. I think this is just a minor glitch. There is a saying that every family has somebody to screw things up.

Anyways I badly wanted the 5.1 ... So I just walked into Abans showroom which is in front of EPSI building and bought a LG 5.1 sound system with a LG DVD player. It is cool because it can play Windows Media and DIV formats too.

Its ROCKS !!!

Tomorrow is a very important day to the whole country. It's the 5th Presidential Election. Whos going to win? Is it Priminister Mahinda Rajapaksha or is it the Opsition Leader Ranil Wickramasinghe. In couple hours time people will decide. See how powerful a vote is

Meanwhile all the media channels are preparing for their own battle to do a cool telecast on the Election, Results broadcasting etc.

I have couple of friends who are smokers. Some are light smokers some are heavy smokers.

Once a friend told that it is ok if you drink a bit once in a while because your liver is there to clean up the waste. (Dont make this an excuse to drnik everyday ... bceause when your liver keeps on duing the same thing everyday it gets fedup and it will stop cleaning alcohol for you and you will die). BUT your lungs are not there to clear the smoke. It is there to filter out O2 for you. So next time when you you are going to suck that stupid stick keep this in mind.

Another thing is that everytime they say 'machan this is the last cigarate' i'm quiting. Well! Ha... it's the last one until the next one. I know of only one guy who truly quit smoking. Sometime back he use to smoke about 12 per day. And everyday he use to say 'i'm quitting this soon'' .. but he kept on continuing. Finally  I told him ''Hey bro .. you cant stop it because you dont have a guts to do so'' ... Guess what ... he stopped. Lets see who else got the guts to quit .

I'm just trying to say ...

DON'T SMOKE GUYS ...

I'm sure when all of us started doing 'IT' we went through several interesting lectures on 'Introduction to Computer' or 'Computer History' or 'How Computers evolved'. But have you ever seen any of those machanicle calculating devices or those big ass analog machines. Or a hard disk which is about 1 feet in diameter that can hold couple of megs only?

Well! If you havent seen any of those check out the following two URLs from channel9 to see the 'Tour of the Computer History Musium'

Tour of the Computer History Museum - Part I
Tour of the Computer History Museum - Part II

Thanks to the guys who are doing the Computer Musium. I always wanted see all those old stuff. Hope i'll be lucky enough to visit the musium someday in the future :)

NEW version of the Sri Lanka .NET Forum is going live today. I'll be doing a small (15 minutes) intro at the .NET User Group November Meeting (today evening) about the new site, just to give a taste of the new features etc.

Prasanna did an amazing job in migrating the users and posting from the old one. I managed to allocate time to configure and to design the interface even while having a  very tight work schedule at office, and finally came up with a sexy look and feel for the site. I learned hell lot of things about the community server while doing all these.

While playing with the database I screwed up two of my other hosting accounts :). Trying to recover those, or the final option will be to recreate the database. Luckily those are not heavily used databases.

Ah!    the mission does not stop here. I have to complete the work started on building the IT Pro Forum.