Lazy Sunday

Well can hardly call it that. I'm just sitting here in front of an HP Compaq cause all my schedules got postponed until late afternoon. Pathetic.., but atleast I'm not alone. And being Sunday, you can't do any serious shopping too or else I'd have gone out and bought a DCU-11 or a mountain bike helmet. Been looking for one but still couldn't find any decent store which sells them. Leave a note if you know somewhere.

I feel like hungry and it might be a good idea to duck into McDi but since Galle Road is one-way I really don't know where to get down from Duplication Road. And besides, I've got a boxful of seenisambol sandwiches I guess. But can manage a muffin of two.

Woke up to the news of Tiger air raid. Don't know exactly, but now people are saying even the harbor was bombed. This is pure shit: we should've acquired at least some A-to-A and night capability so we could've scrambled a jet, but still we don't seem like able to do it. oh well..

Just great.

Got Bombed Thrice

While the Sri Lankan cricket team battled it off with Australians in World Cup finals, woke up to news of the unbeatables of Tamil Tiger Rebels' Air Wing launching another air attack on Colombo in the early hours of today morning. As usual, defense.lk has only a sweeping statement, but Yahoo! News says that the targets were vital oil installations at Kolonnawa and Kerawalapitiya. Although the damages done are still not clear, it seems that there were some damage at Kerawalapitiya.

This Is Pathetic

Indeed. That is the only word. As usual, the aircraft came, bombed, and flew back. The air force didn't even scratch some paint outof their kites. At last now the capabilities of the air force has come into public light. For sure they still can't fight it out in air. The fast jets, unless armed with sophisticated air-to-air weapons systems, cannot 'gun down' slow and low moving propeller driven aircraft, especially at night. Only hope is a helicopter gunship, but last Thursday one of them got crashed when one was scrambled to check on an air attack report. I don't know why we pay taxes.

Now the Tiger Air Wing has totally defeated SLAF in their own skies. Still the AF people issue statements wearing combat pants. The arms procurement has been utterly ineffective. Although it is reported that the US Pacific Command recommended that SLAF acquire night capabilities almost 5 years back, what the air force and the GoSL have paid for were lambchops and 52-member cabinets. Non of the government procurement committee members seem to have any idea about what the AF really need. What happened was AF officials misleading government funds [even the meagre available], and buying obsolete purchases adding a definite zero to air force capability. I'd eat my hat if these aren't millionaires now.

And we still get bombed the shit outof us.

Futile Check Point

Today also got caught in one of Mahinda's painstakingly time-eating but totally useless security checks. I first wondered whether World Cup finals have been shifted overnight to Premadasa Stadium from Barbados. The whole Galle Road was literally blocked for all types of traffic. The check? simply your ID. They look at your national ID card only!! What a check. Any guy with a decent printer could print one. And for heaven's sake how can you tell whether a guy's a terrorist or not just by looking at their ID? The bag check was there again for the sake of it, but purely useless. I bet I could've smuggled an ICBM in my backpack without them noticing. I don't think the sleepy policeman who pretended to look at my ID even saw my name. I also don't think they bagged any suspects either. What I saw was they are just stopping people and looking at their ID's just because they were ordered to, and those who ordered just did it so they can say "we've got security in this country!" at evening news.

The thing is, the government wants to prevent the people from panicking by making them feel a false sense of safety. I don't know whether the public are still dumb enough to feel safe just because some slumberjacks in uniforms are stopping morning traffic and pretending to check people's IDs. I walk into one of the high security zones in the country on a fairly routine basis and mostly they look at whatever ID I present, 80% of the time don't check my bag however heaving it is, and ask where I'm going. You don't need extremely big IQ to figure out that anything could be smuggled in if anyone really needs to. And on the other hand, LTTE has already struck at almost all the targets they wanted so we might as well go on with the futile checks.

The government has failed to safeguard the country and it's people from LTTE air attacks. GoSL has a full fledged air force but got bombed twice and almost thrice by light propeller-driven aircraft carrying homemade bombs. And now Mahinda and the whole mob are in Barbados to watch cricket, with their propaganda posters here hailing the Rajapakse Brothers. Just excellent.

SL Anthem Instrumental

Found this nice instrumental of Sri Lanka Matha from Wikipedia. It's an OGG file, but better than MP3 anyways I think. If you've only got Windows Media Player, you won't be able to play it so I recommend VLC. It is a worthy install cause it can play almost all the media types in existence, and really is nice.

The anthem copy is here, and the player is here. Enjoy!