In loving memory

After being a part of our family for more than 11 years, Bingo passed away yesterday.




Bindu looking sad over Bingo's grave...



Photos courtesy of my bro

Life goes on......

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
- Mahatma Gandhi



Woke up to the disheartening news that some innocent people were the victims of a cruel war in which they played no part in…one they didn’t want in the first place….which only exists because of a few greedy individuals who want to hang on to every inch of land they could get. It’s not fair…...for those who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and had to pay the ultimate price…..it’s not fair for their loved ones to have to go through the rest of their lives trying to get over it……

And at the same time, here in another part of the world, a person on morning TV was winging about having to pay an extra dollar for a coffee at the airport ………….!!!&^##!*!

It’s a funny place…this world……..some people are worried about which restaurant they are going to tonight and what they are going to wear…when some others are wondering whether they will be able to find a couple of bucks to feed their children …at least this one meal for the day…………………..
Some people are worried about the new furniture they are hoping to buy and whether it will blend in with the existing interior………..whereas some others are very grateful to have found a canvas shelter in the refugee camp along with hundreds of others………..on the gravel bed…….

But I guess that the world has been like that since the beginning of time…….even in ancient times there were wars, where innocent people were killed for no fault of theirs….…. Empires have risen and empires have fallen….. from the Roman empire to the British.
There will always be wars even in the far future…….people fighting over things that sometimes doesn’t even mean anything! …. like the Jammu-Kashmir border struggle. Both countries have massive land masses but after more than half a century, are still fighting for a small piece of land in the cold mountain tops… that is neither arable nor habitable.

It’s a funny place …this world…..one has to put an effort into keeping oneself sane……. Accepting that getting all worked up with issues that one has to face on a personal level isn’t really the end of the world.

Making a difference: The Horizon Lanka Foundation

I used to visit the popular Sri Lankan blog forum Kottu on an ad-hoc basis up until recently. But some very inspiring blogs that started appearing on the blog roll some months ago, made me visit it more regularly. These blogs are not from well trained authors or prolific writers, but from a group of determined youth, who someday just might come to be known as such.

The Horizon Lanka Foundation founded by Mr. Nandasiri Wanninayaka, has been around for a few years now. It started in Mahavilachchiya and have now expanded to several other areas of the country which we regard as 'rural'. But there's nothing rural about the young minds of these villages, who exhibit the courage and the spirit that could help them go all the way to achieve their dreams.

The work done by the Academy is very impressive, and not to be outdone the effort put in by the students is heart warming. You can find some blogs of these inspiring young minds in the Kottu blog roll.

Great work!

Good Advice

The photo looks a bit blurry, because it had just cleared after a heavy downpour.

Mooo.......

A dairy farm in country side Victoria.

Captured during our trip down the Great Ocean Road.

Just my luck!!!!!!!

After waiting for a whole week, just to get my turn at the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), I arrived at the Research lab with my precious little samples, well ahead of time so as not to waste a single minute of my booked 3 hours! .....no...it's not plenty of time to get work done.....these high resolution imaging stuff takes ages for a scan!

And if I don't manage to extract all the information I need within this 3 hours, it might be another week before I can find an available time slot to continue my work, the SEM seems to be in very high demand.

So the person who's responsible for the SEM, let's call him Dr. H, was kind enough to explain to me how it all works before he began scanning the samples for me. And again no....we are not encouraged to 'do it ourselves' with this sophisticated piece of equipment which is worth $$ big bucks $$!!! So there's this Dr. H who operates it for us.

So, all was good and we were just about an hour into our work, took some images of the sample surfaces and was getting into the more interesting and important part of the work when suddenly the computer got stuck!!!

hmm...ok, so he did what he would normally do, shake the mouse a bit....sit patiently for a while....shake it again.................no response.......Esc.......Enter.......shake the mouse again (this time a bit impatiently) and now the mouse was also stuck!!! .....now that's weird....

When we came to the point of realization that the shaking is not going to work, we had to Ctrl+Alt+Del; once,...twice.......thrice....still nothing..........so Dr.H got really impatient and he kept pressing hard down on the keys till it shut down!

And then restarted it...but this time it wouldn't log in! The computer has gone seriously bananas!!!!

And it's not just a stand-alone computer, it's linked to the SEM, so we had to abandon my work!!!!!!

And my precious samples are still stuck inside the SEM! and they will have to stay there until some service people come down and figure out how to fix the system. Grrrr!!!**&&^# I wonder when that's going to be.

The SEM has been functioning very well for the last couple of months and just my luck it decided to crash right now!!!??!!

Wyomi making a fashion statement! :)

My School class-mate and University batch-mate Wyomi has been selected as one of the finalists of the Fashion Designer of the Year competition in Sri Lanka. Although it doesn't come as a big surprise to me since I've seen her create works of art throughout the years, it sure comes as good news.

At school our class always won the Wesak lanterns competition all thanks to Wyomi's creativity. And she was always the brains behind the annual "Kala Ulela" (Cultural show) decorations.

The article appearing on 13th October edition of Sunday Observer can be found here. And anyone (as long as you are in SL :D) can vote using the coupon in the "Spectrum" section of that newspaper.

Great work Wyomi!

Muilti-culturalism

Melbourne is known to have a very multicultured and diverse society. People from all over the world call the city home.

And I've got a fairly representative sample of that population at my research centre. I share an office space with an interesting bunch of people. an Australian, an American, a Russian, a South African, a Vietnamese, a German, a Chinese, an Iranian, a Spaniard and a Sri Lankan (that's me!)
Funny mentioning America, Vietnam, Germany and Russia all in one sentence :)

So it gets very interesting when we get a chance to talk outside of work, like during lunch or tea, you discover very interesting aspects of life and different cultures. But that sort of occurence is very rare! because all of us don't feel hungry at the same time, and tea/coffee is something you have all day long.....one after another........at your desk...until you finish your work, it's kind of like.... fuel.

Anyway. and even if a few of us meet up in the lounge area for lunch (by coincidence), after a brief chat, as it starts getting really interesting, someone goes "aah.....better get back to work!!"

The joy of experiments!

During the most part of this week I've been locked up inside laboratories doing some very delicate experiments, with the "Laser on" warning light going on outside the door, so that others would think twice before disturbing.

Everything was going very well, and I was feeling very productive for getting so much done within a couple of days, and was just about to wrap up the first stage of my set of experiments. I only had to do an extra set of analysis of the teeny weeny Silicon samples that I prepared so carefully...and patiently!

So I put them under the microscope, which is connected to a PC, a CCD camera and a spectrometer. After adjusting everything, I hit the "Acquire Data" button on the software programme. Tuk..tuk....peep...tuk..tuk....peep........that's the spectrometer analysing the sample and the computer outputting the graph....after a few minutes of tuk tuks and peeps, the computer showed me what the final graph looked like........... "What the...??!!!*&^#"
I didn't need my well experienced colleague to tell me that that is not what we are expecting!

hmm...ok, so back to the begining, adjustments......laser, camera, focus the microscope, cables...etc etc.... ok! Hit the button "Acquire Data"
tuk...tuk....peep...tuk...tuk....peep......

Final graph...."Darn!! What in the world is going on?"
So we were running around the set up, scratching our heads trying to figure out what's wrong.
After about two hours of tampering around, we discovered that the laser we were using was 15 mW in power, which is about 50 times more than what it should be!!!!!!!!!!!
How the hell that happened we don't know, but what it means is that not only were we subjecting our eyesight to potential damage but were burning holes right through my precious samples all this time!! Oh Joy!!!

A Breath of Fresh Air

The music of Yanni is a fresh breath of air during a hectic day at work, so I always keep a set of earphones close by ready to plug in and listen to a healing piece of music, to relax a bit before I set off again.

The complete compositions from his latest album "Ethnicity" can be listened to over his web site using either Windows Media Player or Real Player. As for the rest of his albums you can only listen to the samples.

My favourites from Ethnicity are "Playing by heart", "Rites of Passage" and "Never too late", not that I don't like the others!