It was in my high school I first encountered the phrase “The Human is a Social Animal”. Personally I would tag myself as unsocial, and anyone who has been around me in the past would definitely agree. Inter-personal communication plays an important role in deciding how much social are we. This includes vocal, visual and textual communication with individuals and groups. Vocal communication with other individuals has been the scale for measuring the social factor for long, and that had always marked me as unsocial.

I grew up in an environment with less friends, and I could not recall a single day from my childhood playing with any friends, but my cousins. It has been the same during my school and I was never a popular boy around. I had few friends, mostly guys with similar interests in hacking a computer or making some music or making a smoke bomb. Beyond that I even my existence was barely known.

It was with the Internet, the unsocial boy with the name Nimal, became the social animal with the avatar TalkOut. It was my chance to redefine who I am socially. I started writing, I started making new friends an I started communicating through emails and IM, and all these thing I rarely or never did before. The major change here was the mode of communication, that shifted from the “voice and me” in the real world to “text and the cropped image” in the online world. It was still the early 2000s, a time when telephones were not my favorite.

Then came all the social networks, and started using many of them in the order of hi5, MySpace, Orkut, and Facebook. They came as the right tools for me, and I became as social animal at the end. I started communicating with my classmates and colleagues more often. Then came mobile phones, SMSs, Twitter and a lot more. Thought I was an early adopter of many of these communication technologies, the only thing that was never exciting for are the vocal communications, telephones or VoIP.

Few days back, I was just thinking about how I use my mobile phone and realized that it would be one of the rarely used phone based on talk time, among my colleagues. Did a small calculation for the last two years, and my daily talk time average is less than 4 minutes. This includes my home phone, my office phone, my two mobile phones, Skype and all VoIP communications. If I ignore all the official calls related to my work, this would be even less.

Am I spending time talking to friends in any other way? Do I hang around with friend? Except to couple of colleagues at office and few friends who are my “free”lance clients, I haven’t talked much to any other friends lately.

Thus the point I want to make here is, I’m still unsocial when it comes to vocal communication, thought I used to think I have changed.

[Now I'm thinking of doing few experiments, may be from early next year, which would mostly like based on abstinence from vocal communication. I am yet to find out how this could be done, with my job and other professional interests. I'll be posing any updates if I happen to proceed with this.]

“Peace on earth will come to stay, When we live Christmas every day…” – Helen Steiner Rice

May the beauty of the season brightens up your life with joy, love & smiles…!

“Buried Alive: The True Story of Kidnapping, Captivity, and a Dramatic Rescue” is the story of Roy Hallums, an American civilian (albeit ex-military) contractor who was kidnapped while working in Iraq and spent almost two years in captivity. The very material that is covered means that you will be reading about a unique experience.

This book is well written and with a consistent narrative flow. The narrative is in first person and flows quite easily. Unfortunately, the same conditions that make Roy Hallums’ experience horrific, make its retelling less interesting. It does feel at times that this conversational style of narrating events get in the way by becoming too wordy, but on the whole I felt that it makes the book better.

Overall, I felt the book was educational, but I wouldn’t be likely to recommend it as a must read.

Disclosure: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive/negative review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

A short message from Bhagi on Facebook was the start. He suggested a photography trip during the last weekend of November. First plan was a one day trip to Bundala and Yala, and as my new DSLR was sleeping in my closet for sometime, I instantly said “I’m in”. But due to some reason, it didn’t work out as planned. I called up Bhagi on Friday and we decided to go to some place along the Southern Coastline of Sri Lanka, but we didn’t finalize on a place that day and as usual I went to sleep around 3am on Saturday.

My got up on Saturday with the wake-up call from Bhagi around 10.30, and he asked, “Shall we go to Unawatuna or Hikkaduwa, we can take some good sunset shots there?”; “When?”; “Today, around 11.30…”. I was not sure about this instant trip plan, but thought at-least I could spend a Saturday without sleeping all day. When it was 12.30 we were on a C0lombo – Kataragama (yeah, its no more Katirkamam) bus, from Wellawatte to Unawatuna. According to Chamin, whom I talked in the mean time, it would be a 3 hour journey on road.

Unfortunately we had to stand for 3 hours with our backpacks, and when we reached Unawatuna little later than 3 in the evening. We had no plans whatsoever, and didn’t know where we could find lunch. So I called Chamin and he asked us to meet him near Wella Devalaya. It was a 10 minutes walk towards the beach and we waited there till 4, and clicked few shots of the beach in the meantime.

One important fact I noticed is that Unawatuna is a pretty expensive place for locals, specially with food. We couldn’t find a good place around for lunch, so we went to a small restaurant in Magalle with Chamin. And when we came back to the beach around 5, we almost missed the sunset…

We spent another 2 hours there, until its too dark, and took some photos around the beach. Bhaghi managed to take few good shots of the sunset, and I experiments with manual modes. We had to comeback that night as there was a assignment for Bhagi.

Though it was an unplanned trip, and we didn’t do much there, it was a good chance to learn few things. One, even unplanned trips, plan to some extent. Two, I know too less about my camera. Three, learn and practice night photography. May be I should plan for another trip down south soon…!

Bhagi’s Photos from Unawatuna // My Photos from Unawatuna

RSS feeds are very common today, and at times we want to write a simple script to grab some information from a feed.

PHP has got and extensive set of functions that can be used to manipulate XML (RSS feeds or even HTML) files. PHP DOM library is one of the handy libraries that can be used to parse RSS feeds in PHP. DOM (Document Object Model) is a standard way for accessing and manipulating XML documents. XML documents can be represented in tree-structure (a node tree), with the elements, attributes, and text defined as nodes.

Below you can find the script for parsing a standard RSS feeds:

// Create a new DOMDocument object
$doc = new DOMDocument();
 
// Load the RSS file into the object
$doc->load('http://feeds.feedburner.com/talkouttrojans');
 
// Initialize empty array
$arrFeeds = array();
 
// Get a list of all the elements with the name 'item'
foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
	$itemRSS = array (
		'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue
	);
	array_push($arrFeeds, $itemRSS);
}
 
// Output
print_r($arrFeeds);

The getElementsByTagName method is used, within the loop of the item nodes, to get the nodeValue for the title, description, link and date tags. The nodeValue is the text within the node. An array is used to store each set of values and each array represents an entry in the big array that holds our structured RSS data. At the end of the script all the data will be hold by the $arrFeeds array, which is well structured and can be used to display or further manipulation.

One drawback of using the DOM library is that it reads the entire XML document into memory, and then we use the functions for manipulating the data. Thus this method is that is not recommended for large XML documents, which would take too much memory to build the model of the document.

Anyway, usually the feeds we are dealing with are of normal size, and this won’t be an issue at most occasions.