Shandy's Blog

Another pleasant evening in Colombo was spent in the Cricket Club Café (CCC) which we introduced to Ken, a Canadian, who had just arrived in Sri Lanka to work. Ken had contacted me via my blog , this afternoon, and we arranged to meet at the CCC at 17:30. Helen, my wife, and myself spent a very enjoyable couple of hours chatting to Ken and I hope he enjoyed it just as much :) Ken & myself had the Chilli crab which, as always, was excellent and Helen had Nachos which she enjoyed. Ken & myself stuck to the Lion lager (we had 5 between us) and Helen had a couple of Carlsburgs. The meal cost us around 3000 rupees in total.

We stayed on for another hour after Ken left and Helen tried the Alexander Brandy cocktail which got the thumbs up.

The CCC is our local and one of the main reasons for moving to St. James, where we live ;-) It is two minutes walk from our apartment, which backs onto the CCC. To find it just find Galle road (the one running next to the sea in Colombo) and travel south from Galle Face Green. Look out for the sign for the Galleries on the LHS (if you get to Majestic City on the RHS you've gone too far). When you see the Paradise Road shop turn right and the CCC is on your left.

The CCC has 4 rooms, a veranda and some tables in the grounds outside. There are TVs in all the inside rooms, showing whatever various sporting events are currently showing, mainly Cricket but also football, rugby etc. The CCC has a good menu (with all the meals named after famous cricketers) and bar. It can get rowdy during the weekend in the evenings and any time a major sporting event is showing. As far as I am concerned it gives some of the best service in Sri Lanka (although tonight was not a good example of this) and at very reasonable prices. Remember to add 10% service charge and government tax (usually 15%) to the prices in the menu. The food is usually delivered very quickly.

Around the walls in the CCC are various examples of cricket memorabilia. You can spend an hour or so wandering around checking it all out. Often, when touring cricket sides are in Sri Lanka you will find the cricketers in here. My wife has had her picture taken with Matthew Hoggard, who was an excellent sport, very polite even though he'd had a few beers and was probably fed up with people asking him for his photograph :)

So all in all the CCC is one of my favourite eating/drinking places in Colombo and one we will certainly miss when we finally leave Sri Lanka.

Thought I'd mention the Online Spyware Detector I came across from Zonelabs Security. It's free to use and just requirers a single ActiveX download (that Microsoft Windows Anti Spyware Beta passed as a know non-spyware product). I currently have no Spyware on my PC having Microsoft Windows Anti Spyware Beta and Ad-Aware SE Personal installed on my PC (I'm not paranoid, honest) - but it did find a load of tracking cookies I'd not bothered to remove. Next time I know my system is infected with Malware I'll give it a run and see if it detects it too :)

I finally got around to updating to the latest version of ZoneAlarm today. The scary thing is It was actually 27th May last year when I was prompted to update my copy and somehow I had never quite got around to it. Just to put the record straight and quash rumours of my photographic memory about software prompting me to update, I simply stumbled across this thread, INFO: ZoneAlarm 5.0.590.015 Update - Potentail problems: IIS, ASP, ASP.NET and Anti Virus at vbCity, which explains my original reticence towards upgrading.

I had been using ZoneAlarm for a while before switching to IP Cop when I ran my own home network in the UK. However, after coming out to Sri Lanka I needed a solution I could run on my laptop and so I switched back to ZoneAlarm again. I only use the free version, not the Pro and find it adequate for my needs. So what is ZoneAlarm? Well in it's simplest form it is a firewall. It simply acts as a manager for you to specify what applications can access the internet (or LAN) from your computer and how your computer reacts to requests from the internet (or LAN) to acces itself. You'd be suprised how much activity goes on from the internet to your own computer, even if most of it is just straight forward pings. Zonealarm tracks it all, prompts you to allow/disallow access and provides logs to see what has been trying to access your computer.

The download was around 6.5 Meg and the installation was seamless and took just a minute or so. The only annoyance was a requirement to reboot after the installation. When I fired up the new version for the first time I was prompted The GUI is still pretty straight forward to use. ZoneAlarm also prompts you with popups whenever a program that has not been given permission to access the internet (or LAN) tries to do so. To start with you will get a lot of these as applications like your web browser, email client etc. will require permission being given. But after a day or so I find I get only the occasional prompt, usually when a new piece of software is installed and requires access to check for updates. (The upgrade does keep all your old settings so no neeed to configure each time)

The one immediate improvement I noticed over my previous installation of ZoneAlarm was that Zonealarm now automatically detected that the current pattern file for my copy of Trend's OfficeScan was out of date. Very nice :)

As a piece of software I can't fault and award it 5/5. I have never knowingly had my system integrity compromised whilst ZoneAlarm has been running and have never had any issues to cause me to criticise it :)