Finding Hotels in Sri Lanka

One problem faced by big companies in Sri Lanka is organizing trips for the whole staff. Its pretty hard to find hotels in Sri Lanka that can accommodate around 700 people and more often than not they tend to choose two or three different hotels which are situated nearby. That is exactly what we did in our trip to Kandy. We reserved three hotels in Kandy and arranged a shuttle service between the three hotels. The things worked out very well and we had a great time. Since most of my friends were grouped and given same hotels I think everyone enjoyed the trip. Well it want be easy to find another three hotels next time around , so lets hope for the best.

Merry Christmas

This must be the first Christmas that I didn't went for church , and thinking about it now I do feel a bit of guilt but hopefully I can make up for it in the coming years. Instead of going to our aunts place as we usually do this time everyone came to our place for a change. It is always good to see everyone at least once in a year and I can consider myself truly lucky to have such a close knit set of relations. The food was great as usual with everyone bringing something to contribute to the table. It was sad to see everyone leave at the end but I guess all good things must come to an end.

Merry Christmas Everybody

Playing Basket Ball after a while

Well got an invitation to watch a Basket Ball tournament organized by SLIIT. And in the evening had an opportunity to play a game as well. It felt nice to play after a while although it was pretty hard because I was playing after a long time. Somehow we won the match and tomorrow we are playing the semi finals and chances of winning it seems pretty good.

Imperia Online is so slow

After getting tired of waiting to play mob wars in Facebook I started playing Imperia Online , although the interface looks nice and fun the game moves very slowly for my liking. It takes ages to gather the necessary resources so sometimes it gets very boring. I hope as I level up and build up my kingdom the game play becomes more faster. On the other hand I'm having trouble getting enough members to my mob in mob wars. How hard could it be to accept an invitation and create a character ?

You don't get rich unless you save money

Making money online is great , but you want be getting rich unless you start saving some money that you have earned. Luckily for me I'm not totally dependent on the Internet for my income and I do get a salary well above the average Sri Lankan. Biggest problem is I don't seem to be saving a penny from my salary. So what is the best way to save money ? sending your salary straight to the bank is a step in the right direction. At least then you have to go to the bank or the ATM to withdraw the money. Luckily for me Sampath bank has an account type that does the saving for me and I found it in the correct time as well :)

Online data entry jobs in Sri Lanka

Online date entry jobs in Sri Lanka were a hot subject a while ago , especially after the sea gulls incident and still for many Sri Lankans who are looking to make money online this seems the best option. Why do they go for this option , because they think it is the most easiest option , very few invest some time to learn about other methods like Forex trading , they are afraid of the complicated things. Always remember that if you risk nothing you risk everything. Speaking about data entry jobs it is one of the most competitive fields out there. Thousands are doing this and you need to spend some time on it and build a reputation to start earning some serious money. Worse thing is that there are plenty of scammers out there who will take your money promising data entry jobs but really offers nothing. If you are still looking for data entry jobs please remember to do some extensive search before paying for anything. Mostly what they do is ask for money and give you a list of sites , a list where you can find in the internet for free , if you have any doubts about this feel free to share your concerns in the comment section. You can also check out my article about data entry jobs in Sri Lanka .

Playing mob wars in facebook

What do you do when your on annual leave and going back to office in 20 days or so ? You play games on facebook :) , although it seems cool to put leaves and stay at home after there or four days staying at home also becomes boring. So I decided to check my facebook invitation and started playing mob wars. I have to admit it can be a really addictive game. And unlike Facebook fleet command you can play this quite regularly too. After playing for around 3-4 days I'm already level 19 and owning a hotel :) . If any of you are playing mob wars in facebook feel free to send an invite to your mob :)

United Lanka is PR1 now

Google was kind to me and given a PR of 1 to this blog. That is very kind of Google since they penalize my Make Money Blogging blog for no apparent reason. How important the page rank is debated among many and there are various opinions about it , as long as you get the traffic I guess it doesn't matter that much either , one thing it shows to your visitors is that Google trusts your blog and that is always a good thing. Maybe if I write something nice about Big G they will give me a PR2 in the next update :)

The Morning Banana Diet

How much I tried I just don't seem to loose weight , I play Basket Ball , go for a swim for about three days a week but still doesn't seem to lose weight. Well my eating habits are one of the main reasons why I cant lose weight and with thousands of diet programs out there its not that easy to choose one either. That's when I found this morning banana diet program , which is easy to follow and cost effective as well. What you have to do is eat bananas for breakfast and after about 2-3 bananas you feel full. Combine that with some good eating habits and you will be on your way to loosing weight :)

Sri Lankan Blogspot

One of my friends pointed me to blogs.lk , a site where you can create a blog for free. It looks pretty similar to the standard Wordpress dashboard and you have some in built in  widgets ready to be added to the theme. There are some Wordpress themes added so you can change the theme to suit your need as well. The tricky part is the Adsense revenue plan. You can add adsense blocks but they are shown in 60-40 sharing mode. That means for every 100 impressions your ads will show 60 times and there ads will show 40 times. With services like blogspot where you can get 100% of your ad earnings why should anyone want to share there revenues ? 

One advantage is you can get a .lk domain name so you will look cool and represent Sri Lanka. Hopefully more and more plug-ins will be added in the future so you might be able to get the full functionality offered by self hosted wordpress. Lest hope the admins will take care of that.

Doing online surveys in Sri Lanka

More and more people are looking for ways to make money online in Sri Lanka. And one of the favorite things seems to be signing up for online survey sites. Almost all of these sites have testimonials from people who are getting paid to do surveys. But the problem is most of them are in countries like USA and Canada where there is a huge competition for brands and customer surveys are a important feature of there marketing campaign. Most of the surveys are targetted for people in those countries so Sri Lankans don't get many surveys. Since there are no surveys people cant reach the earning limit to get paid and hence they don't get any money. The bad thing about is most try only this , gets dissapointed with the results and don't even try any other way to make money online. If you are in Sri Lanka and know about site that has enough offers for Sri Lankans please share it in the comments section. Others, if you are in Sri Lanka stay away from online survey filling sites.

Finally watched Machan

After hearing from almost everybody I finally went and watched Machan directed by Uberto Pasolini and I realised why everyone is highly recommending it. First of all the stroy line is different and the fact that its based on a true story makes it more interesting. It wasn't a star studded crew but the actors did more than justice to the film. After doing some Googling I found out that the director actually spoke to some of the people involved and try to make the film as close as to the true story as possible. The jokes were all very natural and they were in flow with the story. You also get a glimpse into the poor communities of Sri Lanka and how hard it is to survive for them.One of the best Sinhala movies I watched in recent times and I highly recommend that you go and watch it.

Reunion Night was Great

We had the first official reunion of the 2002A/L batch of St.Peter's College and it was an fantastic event. We initially planned for around 60 people and more than 80 were present and because of the success of this event I think there will be more next time we plan a meet up. It was nice to see most of the guys after a long while. And instead of the normal fried rice and curries this time we had Kottu for dinner and it went very well with the drinks. There was liqour drinking competition and a dancing competition and Dilanks who was the captain of the Sri Lanka National team was given a special award. Then it was all dancing and drinking till it ended around 1.30 PM. Waiting until the next get together :)

What is the best bank to open an account in Sri Lanka

Opening a bank account is easy , but finding the best bank to open a bank account in Sri Lanka is pretty hard. Each and everyone of them have there advantages as well as disadvantages. There are many things to consider as well , the interest rates , limit of loans , internet banking , mobile banking and ofcoures all the bonuses that they provide. In the end I decided to go for Sampath Professional , the cool thing about that account is you can specify an amount that goes to another account and as soon as that account reach Rs.25000 they create a fixed deposit. Now that is a good way to save some money because the bank does all the work in creating a fixe deposit. Another factor was Sampath bank was the one closest to our office as well :) .

Why its not a good idea to quit drinking suddenly

Admitting you have a problem is the first step of solving a problem. Although I wouldn't call myself a drunk I do have a tendency to get carried away a bit in parties :) . Friends recommended I took professionla help , but with the internet around I was sure I would be able to find some nice articles to get over my drinking problems. After all there are plenty of alcoholics out there. Word of caution though , if you are a heavy drinker who drinks regularly stopping suddenly can have some unwanted effects and you should be on the lookout for common alcohol withdrawal symptoms. If you are light drinker who tends to get carried away in parties there are plenty of articles out there to help you get through it. And the best method of them all is to avoid going to drinking parties :)

Make money online in India

After the success of my squidoo page make money online in Sri Lanka I decided to creat another page for make money online in India. Indians have a definite advantage over other countries because of the high number of IT work force and the high number of Indians living abroad. In a few years time it will be the most sort after internet market in the world ( Maybe China will give them a good challenge ) , so I will wait and see the success this one gets.

How to make money online

One thing I love doing and don't get tired doing is making money online , The problem with most Sri Lankans is instead of building a blog or niche website or something like that which really makes money online they tend to go for reading e-mails , filling surveys etc. Making money online can be broken down into three very basic steps. Build a website or find a product to promote , bring traffic to that blog or website and then monetize that blog or website. Building and monetizing are easy , getting traffic is the hard part. Getting search engine traffic is much harder than that. I found this great article which explains all the basics or making money online and also lists some great resources to get back links. So check this article about Earn Money Online. You are bound to learn something.

Make Money Online in Sri Lanka

My squidoo page about Make money online in Sri Lanka is at the top of the search results for the term make money online in Sri Lanka. That is pretty good but after changing the blog title of one of my other blogs about make money blogging from "Rumbling Lankan" to "Make Money Blogging - Rumbling Lankan" I found that some of the old posts that were totally not relevant to making money online have come up the search results for that term. If you Google for that search term you will see that some of my old posts about our APICTA win and blogging in Sinhala are right up there in the first page. Although not totally relevant one thing I learned from this is the power of your blog title plays in your search engine results. So if your blog title doesn't have the keywords you are targetting now is a good time to add them. Check out my hub about making money online in Sri Lanka as well.

Cluster mate getting married

Well my cluster mate is getting married , and its about time as well , being the considerate friends we are we decided to have a bachelor party. All the naughty thought came to my mind but the problem was he was kind of a shy person so we wouldn't want to spoil party with him creeping out. So we decided the trusted method of getting drunk is the best way to go about it. Most of the others wanted to involve some chicks but knowing my friend I thought it wasn't such a good idea , after all it is his bachelor party. Being a party it is not that good to go empty handed especially here in Sri Lanka where everything is analyzed and scrutinized. Well I found plenty of Bachelor party gifts that can be given. Since Sri Lankand are not that much into golf I guess the second option is not so good but cigar related items definitely seems a good idea. The party went as expected with everyone getting drunk to the point where not one of us were in a condition to drive back , other than that it was a great success.

Squidoo lens getting some traffic

Well some of my Squidoo lens are finally starting to get some traffic. Like most things in the internet you need use a service for a while before you see some results from the service. My lens how to make money online in Sri Lanka seems to be ranking well and getting some traffic.Well lets hope they bring some traffic to my original blog as well.

Importance of Grammar

Yesterday's toastmaster session was a bit special because most of the roles were done by our own club members and they did a fantastic job of it as well. There was a project speech and the evaluation was done by the guest speaker and there were few good points to be taken from that evaluation.
The guest speech was done by Mr.Yukthi Gunesekera and it was about "Achieving your goals through language" , it was a great speech and really pointed out how we neglect pronunciation when we are speaking. He also pointed out how improper use of grammar can ruin your credibility. The thought that immediately came to my mind was those blogs with poor grammar and spelling mistakes. It doesn't matter how good your content is if the reader can't read it in a proper manner you are going to loose the reader. With spell checks and lots of other tools to help you out there can really be no excuse to have spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes in your blog posts.

Starting a niche website

Niche website is a very valuable online property. The trick is to find a market that is not crowded but have enough audience to earn some money. Only way you can succeed this way is by doing research research and more research. I'm testing out a new blog which is about Yeast infection in dogs. There seems to be a decent amount of search for those words so maybe I'll do pretty well in that one. Results will be shown in another blog post.

Another lens in squidoo

Squidoo is a nice place to add your expertise on different subjects and also a nice place to get some traffic to your blog. It is especially useful if your blog is covering one niche and you are dying to write about some other thing that you know of. I know a bit about adding a favicon to a website so I decided to create a squidoo lens about it. Check it out and let me know if you like it. How to add a favicon to a website.

Evaluation contest

Today we had an evaluation contest and a humourous contest in the Toast master meeting. I also particapated in the Evaluation contest and one thing I learned is that two minutes is a long time when you have deliver a evaluation in front of an audience. Other than that I think I wasn't prepared enough for the evaluation , sure I read the articles in the web and the pdf files , but I havent't thought of specific suggestions and so on. Well hopefully I can do better the next time.

The event as a whole was a great success , the humourous speach part was especially good and there were few very nice topics.Learned a lot from them and maybe I can do better next time.

Another great toast master session

Last Mondy attended another Toast Master meeting. I was the ah counter for this meeting and was a bit nervous about it. But it wasn't that hard but I have to make sure I prepare a nice introduction next time. The guest speaker was Mr.Niranjan Silva and he gave an exellent speech about public speaking and evaluating others. It was full of information and I learned a lot from that speech. I'm beggining to like this Toast Master club very much , after all its friends helping friends.

Going for social dancing

Today was the first day of our dancing lessons and it was fun. With my history of breaking hands and teeth lots of jokes were flying aroudn teasing me. The attendance was huge , I guess there were more than 100 participants. The first lesson was on jive and it was not that hard to follow. If nothing else it sure was a good exercise. If Basket Ball practises started on Wednesday then this is going to be a problem. Just have to wait and see :)

SLIIT Open Day 2008

Went to SLIIT after a long while , SLIIT Open Day was held on 19th and we were going to get some certificates for winning the gold in NBQSA and winning the gold in APICTA which is a good thing because as far as I can remember we didn't get any certificate other than the trophy. As usual lots of stalls from IT companies were there , people seem to like IFS because according Suckitha who was at the IFS stall there were around 300 applications. As you can expect after kicking out around 300 employees Virtuas was not that popular. Since I went to SLIIT got the transcripts as well , it wasn't easy since I had to go first floor , then to ninth floor and then back to first floor. Why can't they keep all of them in one place is a mystery to me. Well they gave us some nice big SLIIT envelopes so can't fault them that much.

The award ceremony started around 4.30 and the chief guest seems to be pretty impressed by the discipline shown by SLIIT students. How he came to that conclusion by just visiting SLIIT for two to three hours is a bit hard to understand but it was nice to see that he was impressed. I think the reason for no unnecessary incidents in SLIIT is people come here after paying.After completing the diploma they usually find a job so they simply don't have time to get involved in incidents. People who have nothing to do are usually the people who starts trouble.
Year 2007 was a good year for SLIIT , they won the NBQSA , APICTA and Techno2007. They came runners up in the imagine cup and SLIIT staff also excelled with SLIIT awarded with the best Cisco Academy in Asia or something like that. SLIIT started with a good note in 2008 as well winning the ISACA IT Security awards for the research category. And if rumours are true SLIIT have won this years NBQSA as well.

Another Great Toastmaster Session

This was my third Toast Master meeting and it was another great one. Attendance was low today which is a shame because the guest speaker Dr. Gouse gave a great speech. I always thought success was achieving your goals but guess I was wrong. Defining success is a bit tricky thing but according to Dr. Gouse Success is improving your personality continuously. So success is a journey not an destination. Also what Toast Master try to teach you is not to give public speeches but to be a better communicator. Importance of good communication is such and under estimated thing. I think I'm getting to like Toast Masters , sad thing is when practices start I'm more than likely to miss it :( .

Dota is so addictive

After fixing my internet connection the first thing I did was join Garena to play Dota. My main aim for getting the connection was to spend more time updating my blog , although I do spend more time now it isn't nearly the enough time I was planning to spend. The main culprit is Garena , there is almost always a game for you to join and on Saturday there were games available at 1.30 in the morning. So now its time for another self imposed restriction, only 1 game per day in weekdays and 2 games per day in week ends :)

Cant access Internet after installing Kaspersky

After getting a original license for Kaspersky Internet Security 7 after doing a review about it I was aghast to find out that my brother has already installed a cracked version of Kaspersky Internet Security.The problem is after installing Kaspersky I'm just not able to access some sites of the internet. I can't access Google but I can access MSN :( . Even uninstalling Kaspersky doesn't seem to work. I was hoping to kick start my other blogs after getting the broadband connection but I guess that have to wait. I was told that Dialog customer service is pretty good , well now I have the chance to find out ;).

Got a fast internet connection at last from Dialog

People from Dialog showed up today and installed the necessary things to access the internet. They promised to install within a week and they did it exctly in a week. This will definitely help in my blogging activities and reduce the time spent in the office as well.Connection is not super fast but you can browse almost any site without a problem. I don't intend to lot of downloads so I think I will get by with this connection.

Mummy 3 - waste of 250 bucks

Went for a birthday treat last Monday and after having a nice healthy meal from Merry Browns we decided to go watch The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and I was dissapointed with this one , especially after wathching the last two ones. The visual effects were good but not great compared to recent movies , but the battle scene really sucked. There were some funny scenes added to the movie but this one was not in the same league as the rest of the Mummy movies. Atleast there were some A-Level students who made shouted and gave some fun but other than that it was a boring movie. At least I went to watch this with the guys , If I have watched this alone as I watched Kung Fu Panda I'm sure It would have being a forgettable experience.

Sri Lanka Cyber Games sucks for spectators

I went to watch Sri Lanka Cyber Games ( SLCG ) last Saturday and I have to say I was very dissapointed as someone who went there just to watch the games. There were many games going on and although the organizers had three wide screen TV's and a prjector only one game was shown. I came to watch my friends Dota game and instead I was stuck watching Call of Duty which I have no idea about. Finally a kind organizer let us into the gaming room to watch the final moments of the game but by that time the game was good as over.What really surprized me was that when asked about why they are not showing the other games in the wide screen TV's the answer they gave me is that they forgot to bring the cables.That seems a pretty lame excuse especially since this was the second day of the games. I guess the gamers had a good time and hopefully problems like this will be resolved in the future events.At least they have shared the replays in the official site , but the problem is you have to search through the forum to find them. A specific place in the site would have being nice :)

Watching Kung Fu Panda Alone

Yesterday was the last day Kung Fu Panda was screening in MC and I decided to put a half day leave and go watch it. It turned out to be a wise move because the 7PM show was fully booked.Until about 7PM yesterday this was not how it was supposed to be. The plan was to meet the GF at 9 in Kolptty , Have breakfast , Go watch Kung Fu Panda , Have lunch , watch Hancock in Savoy ( I have seeing it but she hasn't watched it yet ) and go home. But all those plans changed , what did I do ? I forgot to inquire my GF why she was late when she didn't send the usual SMS saying she was home :( .
Why girls always picks on those small stuff is a mystery to me , For my sake I hope not all girls are like that , In any case the relationship doesn't seem to work , Things that seems trivial to me is a big deal for her and more often than not it lead to confustion and dissapointment. I still love her but I guess you need more than love to keep a relationship going :-) .
Watching movies alone is never enjoyable and even more so when your in a bad mood , but since this was the last day I had no choice so I went to watch it yesterday. I'm no expert on graphice but I have to say the graphics in this movie were great. The story line was kind of predictable but it had enough funny scenes to make me laugh and enjoy the movie. So its fair to say I walked out of the cinema in a fairly good mood. And it got that much better when I found that computer guy had brought the new PC to our house. Guess its not such a bad day after all :-)

IFS confirmation treat

Well finally we gave our confirmation treat , We have being in IFS for four and a half years but the first four years were spent as trainee students , so we only got our permanent employee status at the begining of this year. The treat was a grand affair , around 600 people were invited to the event and by the end of it the hands were aching from all the handshakes. Since we were there for around four years every one was expecting a grand treat so we decided to give a big Mac , Cornetto and drinks.
Sukitha was in charge of organizing and he did a good job organizing it. Guess he learned a lot from managing us in the last year project :) . In the end there were some left overs and I think I had two big Macs and around four Cornettos.
I guess one person that I would have liked to come for the treat is my former PM Chintha , she migrated to Australia and she was very helpful and understanding when I first started here at IFS

English is Pretty Confusing

Attended a Toast Master Club meeting today ,this was the third time I participated in the meeting and it was kind of fun. A very nice lady gave a presentation and if you follow it closely you can understand why people find it hard to learn english. I do have a fair understanding of English but the difference meaning given to different words according to the pronounciation was facinating to say the least. All in all I think I like the idea behing the Toast Master Club

Sports Day Around the Corner

Well its the sports day of our office on the coming Sunday.With the company growing to around 700 Employees we are having very few events for the whole company,Annual IFS night and the sports day being the only two occasions where the whole company get together.The sports day is held after 3 years and unfortunately participation isn't that high.There are four teams and surprisingly I'm the leader of one :).
Well its not something that I was hoping for but somehow or the other I became the leader.Luckily I got a great team to co-ordinate with other so the things should go according to plan.With 150 in a group I guess its a bit surprising that it was hard to find 7 gals for netball , I guess sports isn't a girl thing. Other than finding girls everything seems to be going fine so and the draw for events were also a bit favorable for our team.With a bit of luck we could be the champions :).
Tomorrow we are preparing the decorations for the tents and finalizing the details of the Mascot , One of our group members Shifana did a great job of creating the Mascot so we might win the Mascot event as well.

IPL is giving me headaches

I'm sure most of you are watching IPL , but aren't you all a bit confused about who to support ? When its Mumbai Indians vs most other teams I support Mumbai Indians because Sanath is on there side.Same when Murali is playing for Super Kings and when Sanga and Mahela play for Kings XI. Problem comes when Mumbai plays against Punjab or something similar like Chennai super kings against Punjab. Finally I decided I will support Kings XI punjab. They got two Sri Lankan players , has a great batting line up , a more than decent bowling line up , fields very well and best of all they got Preity Zinta :) , Thats one cheer leader you can't find everywhere in the world.

How the times have changed

There was another bomb threat recently and I was amazed at the reaction of some of the people , it happened during the lunch time and people just played carom and etc without any concern about the bomb threat.Only the people who were near the windows bothered to go somewhere else and other were business as usual.This reminded me of the bomb blasts just a few days ago , although our office was not badly damaged there were few broken glasses here and there.Yet almost everybody came to office and the ones who got late and the ones who didn't come were teased.My first recollection of a serious bomb blast was the LTTE attack on Kollonnawa and I think we got a holiday of around three months at that time.Of course we were school children then but I remember how everyone was shocked and sad.Now nobody even bothers much about a bomb.How the times have changed .............

Sri Lankan Blogs

Compared to the rest of the world the presence of Sri Lankan blogs in the blog sphere can be negligible. But feed readers like Kottu have come up and more and more Sri Lankan bloggers are coming up.SLBlogs.org is another great feed reader like that with where you can get your blog syndicated.There are not many blogs submitted yet so chances of your blog getting some exposure are pretty good.An excerpt from the original post is shown with a link to the blog post , so your bound to get visitors if you write good enough articles.So all you Sri Lankan bloggers why don't you head to Slblogs.org get some exposure for your blogs.