This is the way we comb our hair

I and my friend moved to this new boarding place in rajagiriya. We hadn't brought much of the belongings from the previous place, so had to shop for toothpastes, soap, combs, shoe polish, and all such minor stuff.

I love the pavement shops in the Borella junction. You can shop while you're walking to the bus stop. You can shop when you're waiting for your friend to arrive. You can shop even while you're hurrying for some important task. And, these shops can cater to most of your daily needs, too.

So almost all the stuff we bought were from these pavement shops. The prices aren't scary, and you can always find the cheapest of the kind. But when we got back and tried to comb our hairs, this is what we found out:

Too bad. Why didn't we double check before we put the thing to the bags? Because it was too small a thing to check? It cost only 30 rupees though. But 30 is 30, you know. Got to find some glue to fix the thing now.

Yes, plastic goodies in the market these days are so carelessly assembled. Especially those tiny things we find in the pavement shops including toys. Whatever amount it costs, we ought to check the thing twice just to be safe.

And the moral of the story is, you'll go to work with the hair messed up the next day if you don't do your shopping carefully.

This is the way we comb our hair

I need a book light

I badly need a book light. Because the best time to read without other stuff to think about is when you're in the bed waiting for the sleep to arrive. It's the only time when you're not worried about checking the mail every five minutes or looking what others are tweeting about. The only time you have when the book is the world for you.

But then there's the problem of light. When you're at the bed it's dark. No luxury of a bedlight which you can turn off just on the moment sleep engulfs you. We people are boarders. No one to turn our lights off when we fall into sleep. So the only option seems to be a booklight.

I browsed sites about booklights for several days, but still haven't made up the mind to buy any particular one. Firstly, there was the problem of no credit card, but that problem will soon be solved with a Sampath web card. Then the price. A fairly good one will cost at least $15 which of course is too much for a chap like me. And the other problem is charging it. Seems most of the lights available on ebay are battery powered, AAA ones in that case. Their prices ain't sweet either. Of course, a recharger has to be bought, but still have to pay some handsome money for that, too. The best option would be to look for a light coming with a power pack, as the laptops do. Not quite sure of the availability anyway.

If anyone of you readers have experience in using one, please be kind to share the story.

I need a book light

People around us

Lately, I was thinking about the nice people around me. How unique each of them is! Wow, it's really nice to have so much different people to talk to!

Yes, some of them are really annoying at times, but yet, they're wonderful in so me way or other. Each of them have some nice feature if we think about it. X is studious, but I love him seeing studying, to see how some people can really put whole their efforts into boring things like that. And he does that really well too! Y behaves quite odd most of the time. But the more I talk with him, the more I get to know about the things in the world I don't know.

And there's this person S, who rarely speaks. I watch him walking, how he's not interested in most of the things happening around him. He's by himself. People make fun of him, but it's not him that cares. Why should he?

T's sentences always contain some bad words, even curses. But he's quite creative with that. I know of no one who can use bad words in such a creative manner.

In fact, we always only see the bad things of people. Forget the thousand good things he's done, if he commits one thing we find wrong, that's it. Yet how many of us try to think of the good and unique features of all these people? How the world will lose him if he were not here! Ain't these the people who add spice to the world we live in?

People around us

Youtube wants me to commit suicide

Yeah, it does. It recommends me videos of suicide, execution, and all kinds of videos that would trigger a person who's also considering kind of suicide. And in my case, I've been feeling quite low for several weeks which left my mind in a state where I can no longer think as a rational human being. And, yes, one's youtube profile exposes himself.



So don't get much excited if newspapers flood news about "Youtube kills young student" soon.

Youtube wants me to commit suicide

Installing TrueType fonts in Ubuntu

Switched to linux and feeling the lack of fonts? Not to worry. Installing ttf fonts is fast and easy. Here's how to do it in Ubuntu. Hope it doesn't vary much for other distros.
The first step, of course, is to download some ttf fonts to be installed. Or perhaps, you can copy them from your Windows drive, given you have one remaining. One of my favourite places for fonts is the Fonts section in http://www.gnome-look.org.
Once the fonts are downloaded, copy them to somewhere like Desktop. In case of zipped fonts, you have to unzip them to get .ttf versions.
Now open up a terminal and dive to the fonts directory.

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Now that you may perhaps install dozens of fonts in the future, it's a good idea to keep them separated from the pre-installed ones. So let's keep the new arrivals in a new directory.

sudo mkdir myfonts    cd myfonts

Note that you will be required to give the password in creating the new directory, if you're not logged in as the root.
The next step is to move our new fonts to their new home.

sudo mv /home/<username>/Desktop/*.ttf .

Replace <username> with your username. Also take note of the dot (.) at the end of the statement, indicating that the files have to be moved to the current directory.
Now we have to notify ubuntu about the new arrivals like this:

fc-cache -f -v ~/.font

Done! Now go to your favourite word processing application (AbiWord in my case) and enjoy the newly installed fonts to your heart's content!

Installing TrueType fonts in Ubuntu