Entering LCD world

I got my 17 inch Samsung Monitor after various hesitation on which brand to by. ViewSonic is also a good choice but my older Samsung CRT performed well so went for the Samsung. It seems like new things becoming more affordable these days.

If u buy a LCD there are some differences from the usual CRT world we have used to. First the brightness. Most LCD users are saying their screen are more bright. of course u there is a brightness control, but for me it seems too bright no matter what. Second problem or the ajustment to make as a new LCD user is that the viewing angle is 90 degrees. I used to rotate a litte maybe 100 - 120 degrees in the CRT. Now with the LCD I need to ajust with the straightening screen hmm. Also we need to use the native the screen resolution, in my case 1282X1024 becuase if we change it to anyting else the fonts are blurred and the images are not clear. But on the good side I got more space on my computer table !! thats a bigger plus point !

My final conclusion is that LCD is way better than CRT spacially with gaming, interner surfing and entretionment stuff, reduced eye strain and the electricity bill.

For more info on LCD monitors go to: http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/a/LCDSpecs.htm?terms=lcd+monitors

Vista

Windows Vista promises new features which might made me to upgrade in future release. One of the most important feature is the Windows ReadyBoost. with a USB thumb drive windows will be added as a physical RAM. So even if u're low in RAm with your USB drive we can increase it within minutes. Volume Shadow Copy is the other nice feature I was talking about. This will create backups of the files we delete or move. So that always we can undo the move or delete actions to the original files. These are the only feature that I think important aprt from the new look. Even the new Media player version 11 can't match up with features provided by open source players such as media player classic v6.4. I'm not sure why Microsoft is only considering about the look & feel of the software not the overall fuctionality. Looks like I'm going to use my favourite meida players:media player classic for videos & winamp for mp3, even with Windows Vista.

blogging

when I first started the blog few months ago , I searched other newly created personal blogs just to see how they are blogging. And what I saw was most of personal blogs have been abandoned long time back, no post were made recntly only the old one were there. Hmmm now I'm writing this blog after one month break. its not that I didn't have anything to say, but maybe the interest for blogging faded :-( anyway what i'm just doing is writing ( rather typing) a blog, so I'm re-entering to the blog world.

Python ?

Python ? Well I've never heard of it but considered to look about it today. As a software developer I've been "going with the flaw". My academic years JAVA was the teaching language for us and I also did a final year project in C#. But now in my job working as a PROGRESS developer (it's a programming language) . Most people never heard of PROGRESS either. anyway I got a 3d modelling software called "Blender" and just went through it and saw it was developed in python. The interface and user interactions are really good just like in a VB or C# application. If its written in java we can always tell b'cus the flicker type of interface and the slow type of performance in a windows enviroment. But as for a open source object oriented language this seems to be a great product. python language might become the standard OOP language of Open Source community.

The Weather Man

Finally today I got a sense of cold rainy day after couple of months of "HOT & Sunny" days. B'cus of the Weather pattern in Sri Lanka, its very difficult to do anything, that is if you go outside. Very high temperatures can be seen in Colombo B'cus the SUN is directly above our country usually from march to April. When talking about weather reminds me of "The weather Man" movie starring Nicholas Cage. Its a "lost in translation" type movie which tells the life of the weather anchor of a local tv station. The story goes as ordinary troubled marriage life of the weather Man and how he tries to change it with all the happenings around him. Also it give a good message for fat people, which is his daughter always wears cloths that shows the fatness of herself b'cus she's wearing cloths that normally used/Fit to slim girls. and later with some help from her father gets new clothes that fit to her personality. In the end the movie gives something for us to ponder about; We can't change the way we are, but been nice to others and trying to do things that best fit us can make us live a happy life .

Been the Best Programmer

Software Development engineers (programmers for short) including myself (yes I'm a programmer ) thinks that whatever we do in the 0ffice environment- projects,bug fixing etc will give us the knowlege & experiance needed to conquer the field of IT. But if U check this article on Practicing Programming , we might have to re-think.

Here's quote that describes what I mean; "Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn't practicing your people skills, and replying to mail isn't practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something." I learned a lot from that article and I'm going to try some of the Drills he's suggesing.

New Year & Time

Happy Sinhala & Hindu New year !! festival days are great, infact today is the dawn of our new year. After the ceremonical things I went to the temple to participate in religious activities, I was suprised & pleased to see huge amount of people at the temple. I really like the feeling of the festive season (perhaps B'cus I got the whole week holiday). But not that much of activities can be found in Urban areas. But most of the rural areas are having traditional sri lanka style festival games and I too enjoyed watching them live on television. and that's not all we got to see celebrations of sri lankans living in dubai also live. It's good to see at least one day of the year all the people celebrate at exact auspicious time.

Hmm.. when talking about time we have to go back in time (at least Half an hour 1/2) from 12 midnight today. Sri lankan GMT +6.00 time zone will be changed back to GMT +5.30 from today. It's been a while since we changed time zone back and fourth :-), anyway there are still debates over the time change. some argue by changing back we are loosing day light & obviuosly high consumption of electricity will occur. That may be true but in the point of everyday life I don't think it will affect anyone except we all have to change every clock, mobile phone time, computer clock etc ;-( .

Veronica Mars

today I watched veronica mars Episode 1 - a teen "OC" like series. It was better than I thought , obviously better than OC. The story goes around a girl named "veronica" and her investigative lifestyle. This story seems to have a interesting plot. anyway I have to start watching rest of it to see if its going somewhere :-).

Also I continued my Sims 2 journey, with little googling found a great free modified content site http://forums.modthesims2.com . Which has variety of clothes, celebrity sims etc created by many artists just for free. It's very hard to find this kind of sites b'cus most of the sites we see today are offering content for a fee. from that site I found some good sims object installation tools, two of them

• Q-Xpress Installer [http://qxpress.modthesims2.com/]
• MultiSims2PackExtract [http://sims2pack.modthesims2.com/]

which will make it easy in getting the custom content to be installed in Sims 2.

First Blog

This my first blog post. :-) well got a little late in jumping to the concept of blogging.

Yesterday I installed Sims 2 : open for business expansion pack. It gives some nice additions to the already great game. New infleuvance option and hiring and firing people from u're own business was quite good !! but after a while it became a little bored and shows us how difficult is to manage a bussiness. If U find need any tip on running a business this link http://tg.sims2techguide.net/ might be helpful. Also a great way to manag u're downloaded sims 2 content (objects, skins etc) get the sim file maid 2. It's really easy to use: just drag the file(s) or the Zip itself. Here's the link http://mattwork.potsdam.edu/projects/SimFileMaid/index2.html

Eye of the Beholder? I watch this film today .., it's not a typical thriller film but has some good moments. It has some great cast including Ewan Mcgregor - my favourite actor. But the film goes all the way with following a women who is a serial killer and that's it .. the whole film (BOORING). Usualy I really don't Understand the whole Thriller Thing !!

More Info : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120662/