Listening to Pandora™ from anywhere in the world

I know I’m supposed to have dedicated this blog to all things creative, which is the very reason for the blog title in the first place – but as most of you might now I’m pretty excited about finally being able to listen to Pandora™ radio while not being in the States!! For those who aren’t really aware of what Pandora™ is, it’s this online radio service that lets you create stations based on either a group or a song and then they go and play you all songs that match your initial criteria! Genius I tell you.. It’s part of the Music Genome project – look it up.

So how does one do this.. It’s pretty simple really – all you need to do is ask your web browser to open whatever webpage through a proxy. But how? I did a bit of research on this on Independence Day in Sri Lanka and here’s what I found. There’s this software called Tor [http://www.torproject.org/] and what it does is it creates a server on your local machine that logs on to this entire network of other computers around the world. All you need to do is ask your browser to send all web traffic to this server [through the proxy settings] and then use the Tor UI to ask it to only look up US based servers – ingenious!

So here’s what you do:

1. Go to http://www.torproject.org/download.html.en and download the Tor browser bundle for whatever your O/S is. This is a self-extracting ZIP file, so extract it into some place convenient.
2. Go to the folder that the files were extracted to and go to the Data folder.
3. Go to the Tor folder inside the Data folder.
4. Open the Torrc file in notepad and enter the following text at the end of the file:
   

   StrictExitNodes 1
   exitnodes desync, 0xL37N1Tor, agrippator, whistlersmother, lefkada, bettyboop, croeso, TorLuwakOrg, nixnix, inap1, redpineapple, cronic, sasquatch, slowturtle2

5. Save the file and exit notepad.
6. Once that’s done, go back to the folder to which you initially extracted the files and run the ‘Start Tor Browser’ program. This will open up a window that gives you the connection status information. Once it says ‘Connected to the Tor network!’ you are in! Firefox will open up and congratulate you for using Tor. The only catch is that Pandora doesn’t work too well with Firefox [I personally don’t think anything works too well with Firefox anymore. They’ve just lost the plot to me. I much prefer Google Chrome now and so will tell you how to configure Chrome ].
7. Before getting to Chrome, you need to know what port your server is running on. Here’s the easy way to do that:
1. Go to the Firefox window that Tor opened for you.
2. At the bottom of the screen, there’ll either be a green onion icon or text that reads ‘Tor Enabled’ – both in green. Right click on that and open up the Preferences.
3. Click on the Proxy Settings tab and take a look at the values in the HTTP Proxy field. It should generally say 127.0.0.1 and then Port: #### [where #### are replaced by 4 numbers.]
4. Note that down. You’ll need to put those same numbers in Chrome.
8. Open Chrome and click on the spanner icon on right of the toolbar.
9. Go to the Options screen and click on the ‘Under The Hood’ tab.
10. Click on the ‘Change Proxy Settings’ button.
11. Click on the ‘LAN Settings’ button.
12. Under the Proxy Server section, check the ‘Use a proxy server for your LAN…’ and enter the values that you noted down from Firefox.
13. Click on all the Ok buttons to get back to Chrome.
14. Enter http://www.pandora.com in your address bar and voila! It won’t redirect to the page telling you the site’s restricted because of your IP!!

Now here’s the catch – you don’t want whatever internet traffic you generate to go through the proxy because that’ll be slow plus it could possibly mean that other people would have access to the information that you send or receive. So when you’re done listening to Pandora, exit Tor [this’ll close Firefox]. Now if you try opening a web page in Chrome, it’ll say that the page can’t be found. In order to undo this you’d need to follow steps 8 through 14 but uncheck the check box and you are back to normal.

Hope you guys enjoy this!

Monday Evening Excitement

It’s been a fun Monday today.. After the most blissfully chilled out day that sunday was Had a long day at work.. Nearly bit a couple of people’s heads off.. n then just as I leave office.. A container truck drops it’s container right across the main road! it was literally like the truck took off but forgot to take the container with it..

by the time I got there though they’d already got a forklift n all.. n from the scrape marks on the road it was rather apparent the forklift had tried it’s level best to get the container off the road.. and failed! tried feom the left.. tried from the right.. but that didn’t do much to alter the result..

finally this cop had the sense to pull use the forklift n pull this ‘Lotteries Board’ hoarding right out of the pavement! just like that! n down that hoarding did go.. wonder what they’ll have to say about that.. but they’ve got enough money.. they rob enough poor people to cover all of Sri Lanka with such hoardings..

and the bus is flying thru Colombo! yay! they’ve suddenly realized that they got severely delayed cos of the fallen container aand that the road to their bus depot closes at 10, so instead of going their entire route, they’re only going halfway – which quite honestly suits me just perfectly.. that’s where I get off

Being 20 something

I am not going to take credit for this post. It isn’t mine. But it’s something that I thought was very applicable to all of us. Life’s so full of ups n downs that sometimes all it takes is a step back to look at the situation and realize that things aren’t so bad after all. Hope you like it..

Being Twenty Something

They call it the ‘Quarter-life Crisis’. It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like. You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren’t exactly the greatest people you have ever met, and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones.
What you don’t recognize is that they are realizing that too, and aren’t really cold, catty, mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you. You look at your job…and it is not even close to what you thought you would be doing, or maybe you are looking for a job and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and that scares you. Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn’t.
One minute, you are insecure and then the next, secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and confused. Suddenly, change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life, but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away, and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward. You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you. Or you lie in bed and wonder why you can’t meet anyone decent enough that you want to get to know better. Or maybe you love someone but love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you know that you aren’t a bad person. One nightstands and random hook ups start to look cheap. Getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through the same emotions and questions over and over, and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision. You worry about loans, money, the future and making a life for yourself…and while winning the race would be great, right now you’d just like to be a contender!
What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.

"good evening sir.. id eka poddak check karanna puluwan da?"

Given the context of this post, I thought the title was rather appropriate. Colombo, and all of Sri Lanka I would imagine, is full of military checkpoints. We’re a country that has been raped by civil war. We’ve been at war with a group of people calling themselves the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who, in their mind, are fighting for a separate state – away from the rest of predominantly-Singhalese Sri Lanka. Why? Because a few warped people (coincidentally Singhalese), tortured an entire village of Tamil people and then continued doing so. Shooting them in broad daylight. Raping wives, mothers and daughters. Cutting their genitals, decapitating them. The suffering was endless! In retaliation to this, the LTTE was formed. Considering what had been done to them, they armed themselves, and pioneered the technique of suicide bombing. Bombs have gone off left, right and center. And ended up taking a lot of people with them – loved ones, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers – no one is spared. Hence the checkpoints.

Some of these checkpoints are manned by the army, some by the navy, then there are those by the air force, and finally there are even those manned by armed police officers. Now however, one finds hybrid checkpoints – manned by officers of multiple forces. It was about 2 days ago, when I was returning from work in the Virtusa shuttle. We were driving down D R Wijewardana Mawatha and we were stopped by one of the two checkpoints along the road. It’s almost an automatic reaction to curse the soldier who stopped you – thinking to yourself “Surely, it says Virtusa on the front of the van and this very same van has been driving up and down this road throughout the day now!! Why on earth don’t they stop the real terrorists??” You are after a hard day’s work after all, and all you can think of is going home and just unwinding, but anyway. So we pulled over to the side of the road, I was seated in front. The soldier signaled for me to put my window down, so I did. Then, with the broadest, nicest smile I’d seen on the face of someone in the forces, he said to me “Good Evening Sir.. ID eka poddak check karanna puluwan da?” All I was able to do was smile back and say to him, “Minnittuwak denna mama dennang.” He read it, and gave it back to me, still with that smile on his face! I was completely blown away! Not for anything else, but for the fact that his smile said so much. It was a genuine smile. A smile that spoke volumes to me and told me that he enjoyed doing what he was doing. That’s something one doesn’t see too often. No matter where they are. We’re all striving to reach the top. We’re all trying to be the boss. And in doing that, what we fail to realize is that it makes us unhappy to be where we are. This unhappiness is projected through our expressions and won’t necessarily make people feel good at all. Think about it. That officer let us go without even looking at the rest of our IDs and for the rest of that journey, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. That’s how his positive immensely his positive attitude affected me! All he needed to do was smile. And to think, you do get some assholes out there. Those who are rude and think they are beyond us all. Those who think the sun shines on their backsides! In most circumstances, they end up giving these poor guys attitude. They’d shout at them, they’d berate them. But still for all, this soldier smiled. And that’s what made the whole difference.

Taking for granted (would you care?)

“BOOM!!”

A deep, loud, explosion rips through the heart of Colombo.

Silence falls immediately. Followed by the sound of wailing sirens. Some people dead. Others reeling – from both, the shock of the explosion, and the sight of bloodied bodies; laying lifeless.. Thrown by the force: Of the BOMB.

Media soon begins to flash news related to the incident. “7 people killed. 68 injured.” All they become to everyone else, is just another statistic.

Imagine this. You wake up one morning. It’s a perfectly fine morning. Up until the time you get a call.. or a message or something of the sort – some news in general – that tells you that someone you really care about isn’t exactly with you anymore? What would you do if you knew that someone you really cared about but never took the time to show it, just died?

Do you think you would’ve taken the time to tell them you love them? Or would it not really affect you? Where you remain completely detached and don’t really care any less?

I’ve noticed a lot of us taking people for granted – I’m seeing it all around me. Just yesterday, I was told of this lady’s sister who passed away – of a massive heart attack. She’d driven herself to work last morning – no one knows what time because she’s normally a person who is late to work – and was found unconscious beside her car in the parking lot. Somebody had gone there purely by chance and found her laying there. By the time the paramedics took her to the hospital and tried operating on her, she had already passed away.

This lady is a person who helped me a lot when I was in Melbourne, and she was planning on building a house with her sister (who died). Things were getting under way and they were rather excitedly getting things together, imagining what it’d be like to be living as neighbours (they were both building their own respective houses on the same plot of land) and they even sent stuff to Sri Lanka for relatives – just so they’d have less clutter n old stuff and they could go to town putting all the new stuff in. As it so happened, this lady who died even celebrated her 50th birthday with her friends here – 2 years before she was actually 50!

She was 48 when she died.

Now her sister who she’s survived by wants to complete this house, no matter what happens, just so that her sister’s dream is fulfilled.

Another thing that shook me really, was the reality of bombs. We needn’t be the actual targets of these things, but given their modus operandi, they take a lot of people with them. Sri Lanka’s been at war for 25 years apparently, and the terrorists here pioneered suicide bombing. How do we know who’s a terrorist and who’s not? How do we know, when we go out – be it to work, or to play pool, or to a restaurant or wherever it maybe.. How are we that sure we’d come back alive? Just recently, there was a bomb in Fort, near the World Trade Center. Hundreds of people use that road on a daily basis. If our office was still there in the WTC building, the shuttle services from the Trans Asia office to WTC would’ve used that road. And it could have well exploded when a shuttle was driving down that road. What if.

There’s a train station just a little away from where the bomb did explode. An uncle of mine who was traveling by train from Mount Lavinia was about to get off the train there and go to the pub at the Hilton. He felt something wasn’t right and decided to get off the train at the next station. No sooner the train left the platform was the explosion! What saved him – only God knows.  9 people died in that bomb and over 90 people were injured.

But imagine what it’d been like though. Just to be told that someone as close to you as your sister, brother, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, whoever they may be – who you possibly even spoke to the night before and possibly had a fight with even – is no longer there. How would you ever take back the nasty things you said? How would you forgive yourself – when you know that you love someone as much as you love them; to whom the last thing you said was “yeah, whatever” before hanging up the phone in their face, is now dead?

My question at the end of this all is – is it worth fighting? We’re all here for a very short period of time. Do we really need to fight of all things? Fighting is healthy to an extent – but do we need to feel bitter about it? One thing I will always maintain is – people have disagreements, people have fights. That’s perfectly fine. It may even help a relationship in some instances. But learn from it. And learn to always resolve a dispute then and there. Come to a compromise. And do it before the moment is lost. Because the more you dwell on it, the more bitter you’re gonna get. And where’s that going to get you at the end of the day?

Think about it – Is it really worth it?

Layers

How would you define a layer? We come across layers on a daily basis – different types of layers and yet if you were to ask Google to define it, here’s what it’ll tell you: “single thickness of usually some homogeneous substance” – quoted from the Princeton Wordnet.

Take a look at an onion. What’s it made up of if not for layers? It’s just layers and layers of ‘skin’ – if you may call it that. Look at most fruit – that’s got skin covering it. That’s a layer too right? An apple, an orange, a banana, a mango, a grape? They’ve all got different skins – different texture and thickness – but they’re all serving the same purpose – protecting what’s on the inside. What if we were to look at a jambu? Or “wax-apple”/”love apple” as it’s also apparently known? That doesn’t have a skin at all! For those of you who have been fortunate enough to partake in the delight of having these love apples with a mixture of salt, pepper and chili powder (it doesn’t get more Sri Lankan than that) would know that all one needs to do is pluck them from the tree, rinse them in water (to be safe) and bite right into them. No skin to deal with or anything.

Now, what if we were to look at ourselves as individuals. How many of us have layers? How many of us use this abstraction of layers to portray a certain image of ourselves? I would say a lot of us do. Some may be onions, some may be grapes or mangos or bananas or orange or apples and then there’s the other extreme of people who are jambus!

The next natural question that we may be able to ask ourselves is: Why? Why is it that we put this facade in front of who we actually are? Imagine if everyone in the world was their actual selves to everyone they met. What a difference it would make. You would meet a person and you’d know then and there that you either like them or you don’t. That’d be pretty good I would say. It’d save us a lot of trouble (and/or heartache) and you’d have maybe fewer, but more genuine friends. But then again, how many of us like that? How many of us do we find out there, who if aren’t surrounded in heaps by people pledging their support in whatever endeavor you’re about to embark on, would rather die than live? These people just have to have these so-called “friends” around them – irrespective of their authenticity or their ulterior motives – and sometimes I wonder to myself “do they even realize they’re being played for fools?” Then again, I have been told (and also realized for myself) that not all people are as ignorant as they seem to what’s happening around them. But that’s only a select few who happen to be lucky enough to be on this side of the story. How about the other side? Where people have been deceived by con-artists who claim to be oh-so-loyal friends? I would classify such con-artists as rotten mangos if you asked me. And their victims? Jambus! But again. Why?? The only logical explanation for this that some people just get a sadistic pleasure out of playing other people for fools and making complete and utter use of them. And as for the people who do get fooled – there are but two kinds. One such kind would learn from what has happened to them and be more careful the next time. How about the other kind? They would spend days crying over what has happened to them. Feeling absolute fools for letting it happen to them. And then just go and allow it to happen all over again! In many instances against true friends’ advice – I might add.

We’ve now covered fruits with no skin and moved on to those rather evil, single-skinned fruits. So how about the multi-skinned variety – the “Onions”. They are people, and I have been fortunate enough to only have met the good ones, who wear their layers as but a protection from the immorality of the world. They are people who when they meet someone for the first time could either be reserved and timid – or even wild and crazy. But deep inside, they’re someone completely different, who might or might not have been hurt before and are therefore cautious about the image they project to the outside world. Onions are generally the sensitive kind who are careful about letting people get close to them – simply for the fear of rejection or ridicule. Once an onion does peel off all its layers and reveals what’s inside, those to whom the revelation takes place need tread with caution as the amount of trust placed in the person by the onion is not easily paralleled. Should that trust ever be broken – so is the association. As once those layers come back on, nothing can ever remove them – the reason being that the trust is given but to a few. And betrayal is one of the main reasons for the layers in the first place.

On a closing note, if you were to look at the world as a whole, we’ve got all sorts of people living in it. There’re heads of state, diplomats, ministers, clergy, drug lords, arms dealers, CEO’s, Chairmen, directors – and then there’s us common folk. I would say that in life, one does have to present to an audience only an abstraction of ones self – a layer – and they have to do this to be accepted. Not because they liked it, but because it was either their job and/or their lives depended on it. The world isn’t yet ready to accept people for who they really are and I don’t think it ever will be. But that’s what makes it such an interesting place to live in. So what do those people who don’t want to be taken for a ride do then? Listen to your intuition. People’s body language tells a lot about a person’s actual intentions – and it doesn’t just talk – it screams! Always remember:

“Your eyes are the windows of your soul”

– anon