The TV show the Sopranos taught me a lot about Sri Lankan politics. I was very sad to hear that the lead actor James Gandolfini passed away recently, in Rome. He created a deeply compelling and complex character in Tony Soprano, one which had you alternately rooting for and disgusted by him. Tony Soprano was like a big, angry, somewhat psychotic child, communicated mostly through the eyes, facial expressions, and extremely loud breathing. By all accounts Gandolfini was both a brilliant actor and a kind and interesting man.

Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A DIG was recently arrested for conspiring to murder a businessman, ie be a hit man. On the low levels reports of police torture and abuse are widespread. Low-ranking policemen are usually the ones disciplined, if at all, but this fish is really rotting from the head. The Sunday Times has a good piece on how the people at the top don’t get punished and how the structure of the government leads to corruption and abuse on the streets.

I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.

I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the Google Play Store now. Inosh Perera did the programming (learning Android in the process) and Janith helped out with some design. My main contribution was a bunch of dead-end designs and like 6,000 lines of code we’re not using. The app isn’t perfect but it’s more perfect than it was 10 iterations ago. We think it’s pretty good.