Misc

S celebrated her 6th today. Unicorn themed - of course - and had her first and probably last ever Piñata. But for a mega meltdown initially she did great all through the event. A few weeks ago, we signed up for a Diwali party organized by the Indian Association in Mexico. Primarily on a whim and maybe for the food? The event was last evening and boy, it was a terrible disappointment! It started late as expected. And obnoxiously loud for no reason. Not quite sure if it was the acoustics at the venue or just the MC shouting into the mic. Maybe both? I love some good rock and metal. I love some good loud music. But I guess not all loud is the same. Also, this day and age, who even does a looping slideshow of pictures of people organizing the event? Dinner was supposed to be served by 1900. Servers said they had orders to serve only at 2030. Maybe the organizers wanted the food to be served only after the main event? When we rechecked at 2030, they said it was pushed to 2130. Had enough of it and walked out. People were still on the dance floor and there was a good turn out. I guess this kinda boisterous social mayhem is just not my jam? ...

A few things I’d really like to dumb down or sort out over the next few weeks: Site: This site runs on WordPress, has facets of the indieweb, has ActivityPub and a crude implementation of self engineered micropost interface. All cool but needs quite a trim to make the best use of all these features. Hardware/Infra: VPS, VPN, Odroid for reverse proxy, NCP, NUC, Moose, External hard disks…Love the current implementation for the various utilities they serve. However, I see myself spending lesser and lesser time in front of the PC. Which is good? But which also means I need to find a better way to manage these in the little time I want to spend. ...

Over the last couple weeks, a colleague and I have been trying to clean up the cable mismanagement behind our racks. To work on the equipment you’re literally standing on about 1 feet of coiled cable mess. This issue has probably been there over the last several years and nobody has paid much attention to it. Likely because it does not affect the actual functioning of the equipment? And also, this is painstakingly unrewarding work. ...

With quite a few things constantly evolving over the last several months, I haven’t actively paid much attention to this space. I’ve posted a few micro posts now and then, but nowhere close to chronicling things as much as I’d like to. This is a quick run down of a few things occupying my mind space: It’s been about four months since we moved to Mexico City. We absolutely love it here. People are terrific, weather is just right, and this city’s got a dash of almost every city we’ve lived in so far! M&S have been able to explore the regular tourist spots thanks to the CLO trips. I’ve joined them for a few, but what I really enjoy is just experiencing the city for what it’s got to offer - And there’s no dearth to that. Absolutely blown away by the city planning and the presence of so many parks. The city is spectacularly clean for the number of people living here. Every Sunday one of the main avenues is closed out to vehicular traffic and opened out to runners, cyclists and essentially anybody who wants to enjoy the roads. Amazed at the resources that the local government is able to draw from to sustain this every single weekend! We haven’t been that lucky to find decent vegetarian food here. Most local restaurants offer some form of meat in almost all dishes and the vegetarian items are rarely tasty. Dining out definitely leaves a lot to be desired - unless of course you try out other cuisines. I’m sure there’s good food out there - yet to find it though. ...

@Morganhousel wrote a fantastic post yesterday outlining how each person’s trajectory is riddled with ‘flukes’. Humanity constantly evolves from a quagmire of possibilities and there’s very little merit in looking in retrospect. I think the likelihood of a successful forecast can only be enhanced if we work with the factors in the present - not the past, not the future. The past is barely helpful and you’d rather not rely on those from the future. (Odd I say that after all those years I spent churning numbers as an actuarial analyst.) Ultimately what trumps is that humans find it really hard to delineate emotions from decision making. As much as you’d like to disagree, you see it in every realm - Medicine, Finance, Sports, Academics, Health just to name a few. ...

Leave a comment if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’ll be more than happy to help. Over the last few years, I’ve been wanting to setup a comprehensive and secure ‘handover’ document for my family - In case I cease to exist. My key priorities were it should : be easy to update and maintain when I am alive be easy to reference and access when I am dead have multiple fall-back points Now, the most straightforward way to do this would be to have all the information on a secure spreadsheet or document. But that’s not fun! So I decided to use Trilium Notes for it. When it’s time, my wife has three options to access the support checklist a) Online via a secure portal/app b) Using a secure flash-drive c) Old school printed sheets ...

Not sure how I came across this, but I’m so glad I did bookmark it to watch-later. A beautiful film with terrific snow mountain videography and kids! Having Shasta probably makes me appreciate this a lot more. Meena and I started taking Shasta out on hikes since she was about 3 weeks old. We expose her to sharp tools and fire under close supervision. I still think there’s so much more we could do with her once we overcome our fear of exposing her to the elements. And this video was a much needed terrific reminder of how short we were falling on that metric! ...

Overheard at NatGeo recently produced a great podcast on Orcas and I learnt about Tonic Immobility. Shasta was watching Octonauts and guess which episode she ends up watching? - The one in which they talk about TI. Now that’s some coincidence!

Since March 2020, I’ve had this internal debate of getting the Covid Vaccine mostly underlined by the following: The science behind mRNA is fascinating and so is the engineering of the vaccine Every strand of mRNA is made up of four molecular building blocks called nucleosides. But in its altered, synthetic form, one of those building blocks, like a misaligned wheel on a car, was throwing everything off by signaling the immune system. So Karikó and Weissman simply subbed it out for a slightly tweaked version, creating a hybrid mRNA that could sneak its way into cells without alerting the body’s defenses. ...

An interesting point on M1 and M2 [Measures of money]. With the signing of the 1.9T$ bill today in the US, we’ve essentially created 6T$ over the last 10 months. Just like that… Covid19 has brought unprecedented suffering to many. Deaths, Unemployment, Medical complications, lifestyle changes, Social unrest and several other ramifications which we are yet to experience. If anything, it has taught us highlighted how abysmally poor we are in collectively addressing pressing issues. It has also shown us that when disaster strikes, we only take care of our own and we are selectively biased even at that. Nature gave us yet another opportunity to show how we could better ourselves and elevate us to the next stage of evolution and we miserably failed. With our myopic non-collaborative actions, pushing politics and power over general good, we’ve defined a new low. Mileage on isolated or individual efforts unfortunately does not carry the ripple effect that can scale. Nothing surprising there - Humans are selfish creatures. We of course needed something to balance all the intelligence and cognitive advances we supposedly have over other living things. Humanity rests is constant chaos and Covid19 was continues to fuel that chaos. ...