Shasta’s almost standing! Yesterday we heard her say a coherent ‘Hi’ in response to random call from Meena. She’s growing way too fast!
This was one good workout week. With S needing to work on her general fitness, we’ve been regularly hitting the beach for those early morning barefoot runs. The one day we had to turn around and head home because of strong rains, Meena got us to do a good round of Ashtanga. Also got around swimming thrice at the Madras Boat club. My legs ache in a very good way and I am loving it!
Education: Had some interesting discussions with folks at Teach For Bangladesh on setting up a robust Monitoring and Evaluation system. Pretty excited on what I could help setup for them. The next few weeks should lay out the finer details.
On a related note, came across Gibbon - an opensource school platform. I had helped implement Fedena in the school I taught about 10 years back. Gibbons looks way more ‘packaged’ with features I was looking for then! Excited to explore this as an option for a project I am working on.
Water: Looks like we’re almost running out of water and it’s time we either fixed the Borewell pump or call in the private water supplier. The pump gave in a month back most likely due to a dry burn-out (lack of ground water) and we got in a private water tanker to fill the 4,500 liter sump. That lasted us for about 36 days; indicating a per day, per person use of about 37 liters. Way below what is consumed by an individual in the U.S on average - 400 liters. It hit me real hard when I noticed my sisters, who were visiting us in Boston a couple years back, turned the tap down close to a tickle to wash plates. And now having seen the other side, I am way more cognizant of the amount of water I use for various things. Ironically, I just read a reuters article on India’s ground water consumption this week! India direly needs a robustly implemented and well executed water taxation system like in the Switzerland where a person is taxed for the amount of water us(wast)age.
Interesting reads this week:
- Outside online had an interesting article on a climbing expedition gone wrong - Stranded and Freezing on Mount Rainier . Reminded me of one of best outdoor books I’ve read so far - Where you’ll find me: Risk, Decisions, and the last climb of Kate Matrosova
- Fast.ai had a good piece on privacy: 8 Things You Need to Know about Surveillance . Given the day and pace of work, it’s just so easy to ’take privacy for granted’. This article reminded me tighten the noose on the leaks in my home network and get my guard up.
- And then this article on Washington Post outlining the lesser known leeches in the credit-score space.
- Mic had a good post on Amazon’s carbon footprint. The E-commerce space has a much wider impact than the erstwhile brick and mortar setups.