Orchid, The May Flower (Wesak Orchid)

Orchid, The May Flower (Wesak Orchid)

I admire the British Gardeners for their dedication.

I do not have the same patience but my dear friend has. 

This is the story about him not me.

There was one in UK who cared for a dwarf (Pygmy) palm, barely 4 feet tall after 40 years.

One needs meditative mindset and attention for such a task.

Plants can sense and they have more senses than we possess.

If one stops caring for a particular plant, it goes into self imposed hibernation, quite different from perennial hibernation.

My story stretches over 65 years or so.

The plant or the orchid belonged to my father.

I can remember it bloomed several times when my father was alive but it never did after his demise.

Why?

I do not know but my guess now is that it got attached to my father's delicate care which I could not reproduce.

Story goes like this.

He had a lovely orchid house donated to him by a Scottish gentleman who left this country, with the ushering of the Nawa Ugaya (It should be said the Gon Pora Ugaya -decline in values that has reached its zenith now, with bond scams taking shape) in 1956.

We were residing near Kurunegala, then, warm and humid enough for orchids.

The Wesak orchid was collected from a nearby forest where a murder victim (young girl) was hung after the gruesome killing.

The story concocted was to appear as accidental hit and run by a car (but a rape victim, all the same).

Even as a kid, rather a brat, my mind not fully developed forensically could see through the maze, the lies and deception at that time, it was a murder.

 

Coming back to the orchid story, we had to shift to Kandy my birth place due to circumstances beyond my father's control, who did not wish to move.

Ultimately,we did with all the orchids and it needed a orchid house ( 6 feet by 6 feet by 10) built.

This would have been the sore points of my near relatives but I ignited it with a total obnoxious act of hitting my mother's elder sister with a firewood (she was a very sweet lady) for her husband abusing my father.

My father did not utter a word.

His police training during second world war had made him to be non provoking.

I did not do any good on reflection for his act of calm.

So before this aggravated total warfare he decided to move to a rented house.

That house was so tiny without a garden we could not move the orchid house.

So he donated it to a distant relative of ours whose son was my big brother friend (taught me how to make a kite).

He was a very nice guy youngest in the family very well abused by his elder sisters and brothers but all the same a tough guy.

No man or guy would touch me, if he was nearby.

He was sort of a private body guard.

He tells me now, he admired me for my mathematical skills even as a kid.

Me ending as a doctor was an accident (I say it was a clerical mistake by the education department).

This guy who is 90% blind for over fifty years looked after the orchid plant for my father.

Most of the other orchids died a natural death over the fifty years.

But he had a fierce attachment to the Wesak orchid, (even though it did not blossom after few blooms).

Last time, I went to see him, the orchid was in poor shape, being blind he could not detect the problems and the global warming contributing to its slow but sure death.

I told him it is in bad shape and requested a piece for safe keeping as it were.

I am not an expert on orchids and I could name only three or four, Cattleya and Kandyan dancer are the only namesakes, I can remember, now.

My current favorite is big Vanilla NOT the Vanda.

I did not have the patience of a British Gardner anyway.

I borrowed a piece about 15 years ago, but it did not last an year.

It was good fortune I did take a sapling.

When I visited the next time my friends plant had gone for good. 

It died a natural death.

I became obsessively attached to the one I had, which was hidden in my roof top water garden.

Few days ago, when I was watering the plants, I noticed the orchid was in bad shape, again.

Fully exposed and the cement heating up it was near peril state.

All this morning with some clever arrangement, I did find a hiding place for it.

I have placed my water plants in a cascading pattern of arrangement.

Plants needing little water on the top and the plants needing shade and an abundance of water at the bottom and the Bonsai tree cover in between.

It took two hours for me to rearrange, so that the orchid was well protected and enough humidity around it.

Other two specimens, I have were kept as its companion neighbors.

I offered to give him a sapling when it sprouts to my friend and he politely refused.

What will happen to this orchid and its descendants after my demise?

It is an open question.

Bakthi, the Prayer

Bakthi, the Prayer
Long time ago,
One of my Indian friends,
Expressed the view
That there are 800 million
(Now over billion -give an indication of the time of this discussion-and one who reads this should investigate the doubling time of human population, especially India and China)
Indians in India,
And Equally there are
800 hundred million
Gods to Worship
What I am to do?
Whom, I should Worship?

My prompt and curt
Respond was
Worship nobody,
Just like me
As a simple Buddhist
BUT my dear friend
The problem in Ceylon is,
There are 8 million Buddhists
Looking for some sort of god
Or divine incarnation from India
(specially politicians)
In spite,
The majority
Of beings are non-abiding Buddhists

Going back in history,
Five thousand years or more
India the seat of divine incarnation
Of all gods
There were Rama, Ravana and Sita
Who are still revered as gods
And the Hanuman
Who built the Hunuman Way
Or the Rama-Satu Bridge
To recapture Sita
From Ravana who was a celebrity

All the gods
From Hindu to Judaism
Need Bakthi as a nutritive element
Or an animal sacrifice
Or some other sacrifice
For survival
Of the ancient conceptual wisdom

When Christ objected
To animal sacrifices
The Roman democrats
Crucified him
By majority Vote

If the same rule is applied
In the Modern Day
There won’t be any democrats
Or any meritocrats
Left in this world for posterity

The sacrifice of the Christ
Was the beginning
Of Human Misadventure
Of the history of gods
And their human counterparts
In the name of democracy

In this modern world
With so many adherents of its merits
Barring Russia and China
How come the democracy,
Still surviving?

In the midst of
Mayhem and Autocracy
From Myanmar to Zimbabwe
How come the U.N.O
Enshrine the human dignity
Devoid of god’s intervention?

The majority can be right
Or the majority can be wrong
Who is the best judge of all
It should not be
Or could not be
The All Mighty God

The God created,
The man with all impurities
And he is culpable of all
Human deeds
Good or Bad
 
Why NOT?

At the barest level
The love of god
Created the Evil by Exclusion
Of all other faiths of dissimilar gods
The breeding ground for hate and ill-will

It is just
The two side of the coin
On one side love and faith
The other side hate and enmity

If all the god loving men and women
Stop human sacrifices
As well as animal sacrifices
Many of the gods will die of starvation
Or the lack of nutritive Elements of Sustenance 
Or Hate of other Faiths

We can let the gods
Fight their own Holy Wars in Heaven
Then only,
This world would be a nicer place
For us to “Live and Let Live”

The energy saved then
Could be better utilized
For saving the Planet Earth
From pollution
Including the noise in decibels!

Water Plants, Global Warming and Ecosystem

Water Plants, Global Warming and Ecosystem

This piece might invariably become very big, so I decided to make a personal anecdote.

Of course, it has relevance to Global Warming and the Water Ecosystems.

The first to be effected by the above catastrophe are our domestic inland fish stock who cannot withstand temperatures above 84 degrees of Fahrenheit.

Mind you 84 was the highest temperature recoded in the Nineteen Seventies.

Added to this the algal bloom that is ably aided by our detergent industry and soap that percolate into our water bodies, kill our fish stock, right left and center.

Detergents effects the gills of fish and kill them.

Added to this the toxic agrochemicals that are dished out at lib without any control complete the devastation.

For ages my interest was water plants, not fish.

The Guppy Fish, I keep is my ready made answer to the mosquito problem.

All the Guppy Fish that were released by British, imported from Latin America during Malaria Epidemic cannot withstand the atmospheric degradation, currently.

We always blame British for our ills but always forget their contribution, especially in education.

If not for them there would not have been a science stream in education.

 

Strangely one cannot find a healthy batch of Guppies from an aquarium now.

I have an artificial figure of twenty, as my number for a minimum number of plants that should be in a particular location as an ecosystem, to call it a biodiversity hot spot.

In that sense, my roof top garden is a hot spot albeit artificial!

It is 2 (for binary division) and log one (ideally natural log) multiplied.

I counted the number of my plants by memory and I got stuck at 18.

My memory failing I decided to count them visually and stuck again at 18.

This is on top of the four water lilies I have (my latest interest).

Then I decided to investigate and found the the missing two.

One was barely surviving at the rim of a basin.

I quickly uprooted it and transferred it to my fish tank carefully leaving behind a little strand at its original site.

 I made sure the plant had its tiny pot.
This was a tiny plant I cherished a lot.

After period of hibernation (bad weather, too) this tiny plant is now spreading its outgrowths forming a beautiful carpet at the bottom well away from the Vallisneria outgrowths.

Second one which had a beautiful flower was completely neglected by me.

I divided it, into two lots and placed them in appropriate pots to grow.

Given time a beautiful flower would bloom!

In the midst of this I found another water plant barely surviving.
It has its rightful place now.

The problem is with the dry weather coming, if I do not water them at least once in three days, they would not survive.

The global is taking its toll right  NOW!

Now I come to the main topic of this piece.

It was the Vallisneria Plant.

I could not raise a reasonable stock of this plant.

I had grown it in a special plastic container.

It won't spread out from its tiny pot.

I carefully selected two outgrowths and placed them in the front center of the tiny fish tank.

The expectation was one will grow to the right (the space available) and the other to the left and placed them in such a way but still connected to the mother plant.

Funnily one went in the direction of right, away from the light source.

It hit the glass and stopped not knowing to take a 90 degree turn.

Few weeks later it took a 90 degree turn and every week or so (at regular interval), another vegetative growth, sprouts (as it was measuring the length and breath of the tank).
Original stems grow in height while the advancing front looks for space but the whole (total) growth is coordinated by the original stem.

So my conclusion is never put a Vallisneria plant in a pot, let the plant finds it own bearings.

The other outgrowth never grew.

The one growing to the right inhibited it.

I severed it from the mother plant and placed it halfway between the left corner and the middle of the fish tank.

After about five days of dormancy, it sprouted out a new leaf.

I am watching to see which way it grows.

Right or left.

That will be in my next piece.
You have to wait!
Its growth is still inhibited (stunted) by the mother plant but has four tiny leaves now.

Postscript:

Mind you this is not one year (an annual) of collection.

I can revise the total number to 21 and five out of six varieties of lilies left are not included.

Fifteen (15) years of painful propagation and caring for them.

If I go out on a two weeks holiday and come some will perish or outgrown by others competing for the limited space.

Unlike human they do not kill each other but localize themselves in their own nick of the ecosystem, leaving tiny place for the less aggressive plants.

If you are busy and have limited time, I wonder whether you should try it.

It is far better for the aquarium vendor to visit you at regular interval, if your tank is very big.

Experimenting with a tiny fish tank is more advisable but number of plants in the ecosystem will be limited by the space.

Are Sport injuries justified?

This is a revised edition of an old piece.

Are Sport injuries justified?


The facts which are 20 years old are given below.
 
1. Number one for fatal accidents (death) is riding a horse.
 
Accidents in horse riding exceed motor racing.
(Less strains, sprains, dislocations and fractures).
 
I have seen a ruptured spleen with the horse kicking the rider.  
I would not even mount an elephant (just the respect for this majestic beast), never mind, not in my life a horse.
I prefer, watching horse racing in a racing track and be the doctor in attendance (no betting allowed) for the jockeys and sign their books for a small fee.
That is high fun.
2. Number two is boxing (there is always irreversible and accumulating injuries that culminate in dementia).
  (read my blog piece "Is  boxing injuries justified."
3. Number three is Rugger.
4. Number 4 is martial arts.
5. Number five is soccer
6. Hockey my favorite is number six (I have had one injury as an adult, that was due to a guy who never played hockey before, hit my shin).
Never in my life, I have hit a guy with my stick intentionally but this guy's fingers were squashed by me with a single sharp trick, we use to warn the bad guys on field.
He never came again to play.
Of course, I have broken the front set of teeth of a non academic staff member unintentionally and he never returned but was duly referred to Dental School at Dangolla.
Then there was a beautiful burger lady who attracted (including the two guys mentioned above), the undesirables when (keeping goals, as a reserve player) we were practicing.
I was not a saint when I was young and in competitive sports.
It was true to most of us.  
But there was no criminal intent. 
She only had one go on her solar plexus with a tone down strait from my stick, the ball landing on the middle of her chest (if my aim was bit to the right or left it would have been disaster for her bulging breasts) and we practiced uninterrupted for the rest of the season and we emerged as the champions beating Colombo, in a penalty shoot out.  
She never came to play hockey.  
I thank god for that!

Mind you, cricket comes last in the list of injuries.

I wonder how our ex-captain (I prefer him to be the ex-captain for many reasons) have had many injuries from his first international tournament.

My judgment, for his recurrence of injuries is his laziness and not practicing skills  off play and setting a bad example to the young players.
Other reason is introducing skills not appropriate for the age of the (young) players.

Mind you our players were the worse in fielding throughout his captaincy.

In any case he is too old to practice new skills now, just like, "One cannot train an old dog to learn NEW tricks".

Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux

It looks like Puppy Linux that comes from Australia seems to be in a dormant phase from 2015.

The developer is a dog lover and I am both a dog lover and the Puppy Linux Lover.

They were all tiny less than 100 MiB and I could carry them in a tiny Flash Stick.

There are many flavours now with 64 bit version of FatPup.

I had an old Toshiba computer lying idle and decided to update it.

It had both Knoppix and Ubuntu.

I had trouble with Legacy Iso but the tahr 6.0.5 PAE iso did the job.

When writing the Iso (I did this time with a rewritable CD, to erase it, if it fails) it said the image and the content did not match (even today).

The OLD Knoppix CD also had a broken file and wouldn't boot.

Now all these Isos are SO big (not like when Linux was NOT popular) one cannot boot or install, if you do not have a DVD Driver.

Now that Puppy is migrating to 64 bits versions, the developers should not forget those users with 32 bit computers including Laptops that would be left high and dry.

The way way round is to have a PAE Version.

The bottom line is one should not discard the old hardware that did the donkey work for a 64 bit machine.

My only concern of the old computers is that that they are not energy efficient and consume lot of electricity.

That is why, I dismantled 10 computers for the two 64 bit computers BUT I still keep an old 32 bit computer.

It did the donkey work for me over a decade when electricity was cheap.

Mind YOU I did not donate any of those machines, simply dismantled them but dished out the hard disks and DVD drivers (to save energy!).

Using Portable Disks and old Laptops for Linux

Using Portable Disks and old Laptops for Linux

Over the years I have collected many devices and some of them were not used for many years.
They included a Toshiba Laptop which boot with Old Knoppix and Ubuntu.
It has no USB port  and the CD (no DVD) was without a front end covering or starter knob.
Touch pad was working fine.
They rest were 4 portable hard disks of various capacities and a USB 3 hard drive.
Most of them were filled with various Linux isos.
The newest one I had lot of recent files and it booted with MultiSystem.
I formatted few redundant partitions and left most of the data. 
The second one after recovering useful data reformatted with Gparted 64 version booted.
I used my Debian 9.2 and with its Multiboot utility to install all the recently Linux distributions.
The third one I used French MultiSystem Boot Utility to install only the distributions that could be made into squashfs files.
The fourth one took the longest time and its partitions were not visible and no partition table to mount externally at boot up.
I could not partition it.
What I did was to mount it to a computer internally and used Gparted at as a boot CD (only CD version I have except Puppy Linux) format it it had few Megabites of corrupt sectors that was why it did not boot.
When one uses Linux (unlike windows) those those unusable sectors are sidelined and only the mechanically or electronically working sections are used.
It takes ages to eliminate these bad sectors even though they are only a few Megabites of it. 
Out of 300 Megabites only 2 or 3 Megabites were corrupt.
I was not ready to throw it away.
So I double check after partitioning and put it back under its casing.
Putting inside the casing took lot of time since I screwed the hard disk to the base and try to put the cover. I could not.
It took sometime for me to figure out and took the screws out slide the hard disk and slide the cover and put the screws last.
The tiny gadgets won't align with screws on.
Finally I mounted it and tried to Install Debian 9.2 and the first installation failed since one of the partitioned I had made did not format correctly.
I sidelined it and Install Debian.
Since this took a lot of time, while it was going on, I decided to format the 18 GiB of Toshiba Laptop and install Puppy Linux (No DVD only a CD in the Laptop).
It breezily installed Puppy Linux, my favorite over time much more than Knoppix and Installed squash file persistence.
It needs only few Megabites but I donated it 1 GiB.
The bottom line is Linux looks after hardware very well and detects minor details and failures in your hardware.
ONE NEED NOT THROW PRICED ITEMS SINCE FEW SECTORS ARE BROKEN OR NOT ALIGNED.

Multi Booting with Linux

Multi Booting with Linux

I have had smooth transition to running only Linux in both computers.

This is what I did soon after.

I use the computers sparingly NOW with my tablet in hand doing usual stuff.

However, annual update of my computers takes around November, each year since Linux guys/girls take a well deserved long holiday.

This the time, Microsoft cronies snoop your computers and introduce malaware updates.

This happened to me while (now totally disbanded) updating Windows operating system (I dished them out fully) as a forerunner for updating Linux.

I usually have a USB stick with either Linux OPs running or Knoppix live running.

Another stick with my boot loader (GRUB) for rescue (never happened over the last 15 years) missions.

The third is a portable hard drive with all my favorite distributions running.

I used UNetBootIn for this purpose and lately used the French Multi Booting DVD for the same purpose.

Now I have fully migrated to Debian, I had few problems with MultiBooting.

Debian does not support UNetBootIn but Peppermint (which I dished out few days ago, because it cannot configure my BIG TV screen) does.

With some fiddling I found Multiboot Utility from SourceForge for Debian.

It is almost like UNetBootIn.

Its advantage is, it can be booted in a Linux partition (not necessarily in a fat partition which MultiSystem requires) and any unnecessary distribution can be weeded out (Uninstalled) after installation.

MultiSystem does not support Uninstalling and some distributions does not support squashfs files.

Similarly Multiboot in Debian cannot support DVDs with lot of software (Emmabuntus Ubuntu version NOT the Debian version is a culprit, in a live session without the DVD placed in the disk drive).

Elsewhere, I have written lot about MultiSystem and NetBootIn this piece is brief.

This is an update to say Debian has a revised version of MultiBoot.

Debian the Fall Guy

Debian the Fall Guy

Debian is my “Fall Guy”, what I mean is when everything fails, I fall back to Debian for Rescue.

Recent Microsoft destruction (Indian guys working for Microsoft) of my NTFS partitions (not any of my Linux partitions and my data) made me to revise my options and drop every shade of Windows except Workplaces in Linux.

May be I can call myself fully liberated from the Microsft Monopoly.

I could not have done this without Debian.

Many moons ago, it took almost one year for me to master and boot Debian in a 4 MB of RAM (not GIB) (an old) computer, NOW I can effortlessly boot Debian in many flavours.

Not only that all desktops are integrated to One Installation and one can pick and choose from Gnome Classic to LXDE to xfce and to many more flvous of desktops at boot time.

I love the Workplaces of Gnome Classic. 

They make multitasking easy.

I almost hated Ubuntu desktop, even though it was installed somewhere in my hard disk.

I loved Mandrake (when going was tough with Debian) which was easy to install (it had a Globe Trotter, portable boot up disk) and I am sad about its demise but have a copy of OpenMandriva in my other computer.

Then I migrated to SuSe and its current distribution cannot boot up my other Linux distributions.

But with Debian’s superb GruB file which detects seamlessly all other distributions, I am up and running.

I am going to say Good Bye to Peppermint since it cannot configure graphic of my TV monitor (I use an old TV monitor to ease my eyes with large fonts).

I say Good Bye to Ubuntu for its divergence.

I feel sad for the Ubuntu guys who a left high and dry by Canonical about turn.

This to say Thank You to the Debian’s Guys and Girls for keeping the spirit of Linux and flowing.

Now I can have AbiWord in Debian (it wasn't earlier.

AbiWord is the lightest but most powerful word processor.

Even Knoppix 8.1 the latest DVD has problems.

U.E.F.I Monopoly of Microsoft Sucks

U.E.F.I Monopoly of Microsoft Sucks

This is the first blog post of mine, after I got my two computers working only on Linux, Debian to be precise, without Indians guys/girls working for Microsoft, Meddling with Bogus Updates that really upsets the booting of alternative operating systems.

I did not lose any of my data except the Knoppix 8.1 iso (may be misplaced), the latest.

I found Knoppix hidden in a partition.

But I did make a start up SD Card and the Live DVD.

U.E.F.I. that stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) sucks and is the Monopoly of Microsoft.

It intends to suppress booting other operating systems especially Linux.

This is how YOU nullify these business monopoly on new version of boot up BIOS .

I won’t go into minor details.

First go to UEFI boot up menu (press Del or F2 at boot up).

Find csm and change to other OP systems.

Find the legacy menus and change every options available to legacy.

Go to boot up and change options to boot from CD/DVD.

Go to boot up and change which hard disk to boot first if you have more than one.

There are many other changes you can make but fiddle with one options at a time.

Then save your changes and boot your Live DVD ideally, Gparted and prepare or partition your hard disks to satisfy your liking.

Boot up and install your distribution.

GruB boot loader takes over booting (if Debian Do Not activate at boot up, UEFI even by mistake) seamlessly and YOU own your computer not Microsoft cronies.

This piece is only for Linux guys and girls.

If you have Windows and it sucks do not blame Microsoft, blame yourself for the stupidity.

Read the description below, it a tiny operating system hidden in the firmware and interfere with free software freedom.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification for a software program that connects a computer's firmware to its operating system (OS).

UEFI is expected to eventually replace BIOS. Like BIOS, UEFI is installed at the time of manufacturing and is the first program that runs when a computer is turned on.

It’s not just a BIOS replacement, either. UEFI is essentially a tiny operating system that runs on top of the PC’s firmware, and it can do a lot more than a BIOS. 

It may be stored in flash memory on the motherboard, or it may be loaded from a hard drive or network share at boot.

How to ROM or FLASH an Old Android Tab?

This is a mail I posted to a friend.

How to ROM or FLASH an Old Android Tab?

I did a survey on how to erase the current operating system and install a new version of android and was bewildered by its complexity.

They are bound by rigid protocols of Android and Google Giants.

Unlike computers, the hardware parts are brittle and finding a “patch” for a broken piece is not easy.

Besides, the terminology is funny, and only term I liked was BRICK for a stalled hardware.

Only open source ROM (Kernel should be the correct term) was CyanogenMod but developers had given up developing it and a firm has taken over it. 

There is a Romanian guy who wants to make open source hardware!

But the problem is that there is no seamless integration since OEM guys are reluctant to give up their monopoly.

If one fiddles with the system it may end up as a Brick.

If you find any article that simplify this (Linux Magazine may not do it) minor process, please let me have it.

By the way, having gone for Zeroing I have stop reading big articles, especially political ones.

I have lot of time at hand after "Zeroing In" and sleep well after dropping Caffeine to almost Zero.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s Canonical and Firefox have stopped developing an Open Source Phone. 

CyanogenMod is arguably one of the (if not the) most installed Android ROM in the world, and for good reason.

It offers a ton of great features, is available for more devices than most other ROMs of its type, and has the type of polish and support that makes it easy to fall in love with.

We have Kit Kat (version four in this country) in this country and Android is on version seven or higher.

Even the Kindle Tab, a total failure, I believe.

Luckily, I bought a Lenova Tablet in Singapore and it is miles ahead of my Kit Kat Tablet which I want to erase and upgrade but the only problem is its RAM which is limited and it breaks up before a full film is viewed.

I am glad that I got a good laptop for my son and if you have a laptop do not throw it away, in spite of its weight. 

It is pleasing to see a film on a laptop.

One who buys an Apple iPOD is probably stupid or has lot of money to spare.

They are stop making (with a DVD driver) them (laptops).