Category: Memories

Me, My Team and The Gran Hotel Elba Estepona

Yes, you read it right! After almost 3 years of working together totally remote, I finally got to meet my awesome colleagues at Scrapinghub back in November 2017 when we had our first ever company get together in Estepona, Spain.

Estepona Sunrises are to die for.

So my flight was around 10:30 pm and I was driven to the airport by my little sister two hours before. She has staff access there and knows everybody so I got the total VIP treatment and the whole process was super comfortable for me.
(Of course It did help that I had all the documents in proper order, as airport security is no joke, no matter how important of a person you are :D)

City of stars forever!

I was just about to step outside of the window for some fresh air when I saw the warning sign =)

I was driven from Malaga airport to Estepona by this wonderful gentleman with a BMW… BMW’s are somewhat of an elite vehicle in Sri Lanka and I had not been in one until this so I was pretty thrilled to have that experience.
It was a comfortable drive; took about 45 minutes to the hotel.

Finally we came to Elba Estepona! It looked just as magnificent as I imagined!

Main entrance was this really cool rotating door which kept the inside of the hotel away from the cold air outside.

To be continued…

As I came out of the hotel, my ride to the airport arrived and the chauffeur put all my luggage into the back of the vehicle. I turned around and took one last look at the magnificent main entrance of the Gran Hotel Elba Estepona, where I had both the most wonderful time with awesome people and also indulged in the luxuries of solitude and quiet with a view that is absolutely out of this world, and whispered to myself “Until next time!”

And then I jumped into the vehicle that was going to take me back to the airport, This time, another Sri Lankas’s favorite, a Mercedes…

23 years…

So here I am, back on blogging after a long silence. But this long break was not because of the fact that I didn’t have anything to write. I think its fair to say that it was because I had so much to say that I couldn’t really figure out how to manage them all in to this little blog of mine. There were so many interesting things happening around me. They’ll always be in my memories. (Naah! I’m pretty sure I won’t forget them. So no! you won’t be reading them here hehe!)

Also its been a crazy semester. Just finished the last paper of the 2nd year final exam yesterady and I think I’m feeling kind of relaxed now. It’s funny, when I looked forward at this moment few weeks ago I never thought I’d be able to happily blog about the end of the exam 🙂 But it went really well and I’m pretty satisfied with all the papers I had to answer. Considering all the crazy things I went through in the past few months I should be glad to be able to blog about it like this…

Anyways! yes! It’s my 23rd birthday today. I’m not quite sure what I’m feeling right now… But when I look back at the last round around the sun, I notice something different than the ones before. I see that I have learned so much about life on this ride. I saw how some things that seem to matter so much in our lives has no real meaning… I saw how easy it is for people to completely ignore the things that really matter in life… I saw how unexpected life can be… I realized that we should not be having too much expectations in life.

And also a really good outcome of all the problems I faced is that I got to make out the people around me. I realized who really cares about me, and who… well, lets say “doesn’t give a sh*t what happens” 😛 Not that I’ll be treating the latter party differently(being angry with people for too long is NOT something I’m very good at) But its good to know that they will not be there for me when I need them. I was glad to see that there were people who believed on me. People who cared about me even when I was not in the usual “guy who saves the day” mode. And I pity the poor souls who tried to enjoy the show when I was down. Hope they’ll be able to stick to the mentality that they did the right thing. 😛

So after all these incidents I’m still doing pretty fine to start the next year of my life. And this time with a little more knowledge about life 🙂 there’s a saying “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” There were many of those moments in the past few months and I really gained strength from them. I will be facing good times and bad times as usual but I’ll know enough not to worry too much about any of them. I was having a great life with pretty much everything I really needed. I stupidly forgot that truth about me sometimes and I’ll try my best not to do that mistake again… because now I know, It’s good to be me! 😀
C.J.

Yippee! Got myself a new Lappy!

Since I’m studying for the BSc Honors in IT at SLIIT, I had no choice but to move to a boarding place near the campus. After moving, all I had was my good ol’ ThinkPad laptop, which wasn’t exactly cutting-edge anymore 😛 I had my desktop PC at home, but moving that beast to the new place was too much hassle. So, I had to stick with my IBM ThinkPad for a few weeks until I could get a new laptop. I checked local dealers for a few models and quickly realized I’m too broke to buy an IBM ThinkPad, which, in my opinion, are overpriced in Sri Lanka. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think those Lenovo ThinkPads have the same durability as the old IBM ones. Any Lenovo users out there???

So, I decided to go with another brand “well-known for durability”, ASUS! Yep, luckily they had a new series of notebooks priced reasonably, considering the quality of ASUS products. There were cheaper HP and Acer laptops too, but I didn’t want anything other than ASUS since I’m such an ASUS fanboy 😀
I ended up buying the ASUS X51R series laptop with a Core Duo 2.0GHz processor. I even got a 7.5k discount from the Epsi guys (our local ASUS dealers) thanks to my BFAM Suchetha! 🙂

The first thing I did after getting back from Epsi was repartition the 120GB HDD, wiping out the evil proprietary OS from my precious laptop. While partitioning, I created one big (90GB) partition for /home and 1GB for swap. The rest was split into three more partitions: one for my primary distro and the other two for testing versions and betas.
So now I’m back on track, and my only problem is the lack of time. Not because SLIIT stuff is keeping me busy (actually, there’s not much to do these days, maybe because it’s the first semester), but because I have a ton of other things to tackle. As most of you have noticed, my blogs have been neglected over the past few months. I’d love to return to my old schedule of posting 10+ articles a week, but I don’t think I’ll have that much free time in the coming years 😦 So, I’ll aim to post at least once a week. It’s better than nothing, right??? 😀
~SeeJay

Finished moving to the new domain ;)

Finally, it’s done! 😀 Yep, I’ve finished moving all my previous posts from the old blog to the new site. Phew! Now it’s time to add some widgets and give my identity to the blog 😉 Well, I had this idea to move to my own domain from wordpress.com, and now it’s done. Since this is a Blogger-hosted site, I can edit the layout without spending extra bucks, so here I am with my new style. Hope you all will like it 🙂 If you’ve ever read my previous WP blog(s), you might know I’m a big fan of Garland (the famous Drupal/WP theme). I did find the Blogger version of the Garland theme, but then I thought it’d be nice to switch things up 😀
OK, enough for now. I’ll be back with more boring news 😉
~SeeJay

PS: A big thanks goes to my friend Bud @ geekaholic.org for the awesome help with the new site 😉

Hap P B’Day Randy!!!

Ha ha! Can’t believe it? I don’t blame you because I forgot every year for the last 20 years 8O, but not this time!!! So here goes!

HAPPY B’DAY, RANDY! CAN’T WAIT TO MEET YOU GUYS AT OUR NEXT (best in the world) BEACH (LAN) PARTY :TWISTED: (I’ll make it the best beach party ever. And that’s a promise!)

PS: Hey, Randy! How’s the b’day card I mailed you? Will you believe me if I tell you that Aish took $4.5 million for that one? 😈 Yeah, the price is a bit high, but thanks to our buddy CNX, she didn’t take that much from me. lol