The Lair

Well, actually - I cannot, but go look anyway. Worldmapper provides maps of the world with sizes relative to various criteria; most of them arcane.

Endlessly fascinating if your interests include geography and a bit of statistics.

In other news, I seem to have more or less lost my self in activities outside the internet since I came back here. Trying to resume online behaviour in small steps. When I was living in the UK, life was more measured.

I do about the same amount of work there as here (different sorts of work, so it’s apples to research work really) but I feel more a bystander, more detached in the UK than I do here. Here, I’m somehow more in the middle of things and that leaves me precious little time to concentrate on internetterly activity. A large part of this can be attributed to living close to family - it’s much more difficult to lead a hermit-like existence when you’re sharing a city with my folks.

But in the meantime, at least life outside the internet is finally beginning to pick up.

To the outsider who hasn’t bothered to find out anything about the country, it seems that India is this scary place which only eats rabbit food. To some extent, this is true. There are lots of vegetarian restaurants. In fact, in the unlikely event that I wanted to become a rabbit food eater myself; there probably isn’t a better country to live in.

But the problem is, I’m anything but a vegetarian.

The first hotel we stayed in for the night featured (as most hotels do) a comp breakfast. On heading downstairs, we were treated to a delicious repast of South Indian breakfast food. All good right? Well, the problem is that it was all vegetarian.

Although the situation has improved a tad, this is why I find Hats of Meat unbelievably funny. If you can’t look past the horrendous website design and you think this is like a domestic accident gone horribly wrong; then I’m sorry. But all I fixate on is the mound of meat.

In other news, the bombings in this here parts have compelled the hotel authorities to drag out two metal detectors and install them in the front lobby. Guests and visitors alike (there are lots of visitors to this hotel, there is a wedding reception on almost every night it seems) need to walk through the metal detector.

No one seems very concerned about monitoring the detector, or indeed, about a random beep when a metal detector wand is passed through a vehicle - but I guess it’s the thought that counts.

So, why am I away from Colombo? Because the client that I’m meeting thought that Sri Lanka was too dangerous to visit. In retrospect, I don’t blame the client. Random bus bombings tend to make anyone nervous, hell they make me nervous.

Which makes the news of a serial killer in the vicinity of the hotel all the more ironic. In a moody, murder and mayhem sort of way. No doubt sensing an opportunity, the guests at the hotel have been issued a mini travel-advisory of sorts. Do not, the advisory says in officialese, trawl bars in the region. Instead, patronize the inhouse watering hole. Also, reads the subtext in large lettering, don’t stagger around the streets drunk. In addition to drunkenly stepping on something that smells noxious, getting hit by an errant driver or tripping and falling over pieces of the pavement, a pedestrian is liable to have his head smashed in by a psycho.

So, cable TV and lots of nice facilities (and a comp mini-bar!) notwithstanding, I think we were all a bit bored with life this week. There is only so much drinking that can be done after a hard day of arguing about the nitty gritties of requirements; so everyone was feeling some degree of cabin fever. Even if it is a very large and luxurious cabin with a working ethernet port and super slowmo internets.

This is why the development manager in the client’s establishment and I were in the bar talking about the time honoured tradition of asking hotel staff for female company. Not that we were particularly inclined, of course - but we were in the company of a young, impressionable developer type who had gotten himself a free business class upgrade. “Easy”, we insisted. “Just walk upto reception and ask for some female company for dinner. We’re sure they’ll oblige you”. Wide-eyed, this little munchkin swallowed the story.

Strategically waiting until after we had all eaten dinner (so his motivations could hardly be mistaken), our hero sauntered upto reception and made his request. Until the very last minute, I thought he knew it was a joke. I only realized my mistake when I saw an emphatic head shake from the hotel staff.

Apparently that sort of thing doesn’t happen around here. Who knew?