Status

So beautifully phrased! Be it social gatherings, team meetings, interviews or even regular discussions; there’s so much ’lost’ in all forms of human communication! What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most people aren’t very good at visualizing hypotheticals, at imagining what something they haven’t experienced might be like, or even what something they have experienced might be like if it were somewhat different. ...

Took Appa to the Marina this morning. The beach was open but it was a terrible experience. Trash strewn all over, lingering overnight dwellers, and of course open defecation by the shore ..yeah, that still happens! It wasn’t this bad a few years ago. We could then run barefoot on the sand for a good distance (~5Kms) without having to dodge trash. Agreed it’s a big beach but how complicated is it really to maintain this public space? Of what use is all the digital cameras and equipment if you let people trash the place recklessly? And then add to it the complacence and heavy lack of follow-through on the implemented policies. Most solutions end up being short term and every once in a while a random not-for-profit group shows up on the beach, clean up a section of it (Thank you for that!), click their photos and supposedly get back to their business of ‘raising awareness’. ...

Found this 77 year old coin amidst some old papers. Several years ago I also did find a small collection of stamps which I digitized a few years ago. Someone in the family definitely shared this interest in coins and stamps. Oddly, Appa doesn’t recollect saving these!

Meena is now a certified Ayurvedic Health Counselor! So super duper proud of her. The last year has been rough and being on a different timezone from the rest of the class didn’t help either. Nevertheless, she powered through those classes and we already see her applying her invaluable knowledge for folks within the family. Counseling is something that comes naturally to her and I can’t wait to see how she applies the nuanced learnings of this fascinating science to help more people tend to the source of their health issues. ...

Testing front-end post publishing. This shouldn’t show-up in the feeds but should show-up under the Micro-posts page

The Bluetooth on my NUC stopped working after an apt upgrade last evening. A good chunk of troubleshooting did no help. My initial hunch was that this was caused by the kernel upgrade. Reverting didn’t help though. I finally caved in and ordered a USB<>Audio adapter. This morning, It struck me that this could be due to the BIOS which I haven’t updated in a while. And I was spot on! Now I have a pretty functional Bluetooth system, an up-to-date machine and yet another adapter which goes into my mystery black-box. ...

A really inquisitive young monkey made its way to the pool area this evening. It had its fair share of fun skirting along the pool circumference and jumping in on the shallow end to ‘play’ with the water toys and held us ‘hostage’ for a good 20 minutes. On our way out, Shasta had a close encounter with him/her and she was supremely amazed by his eye color! One terrific evening. ...

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! ...

Got around setting up my music collection on the odroid-xu4 using Navidrome. With that streamlined, I can now listen to the same collection over any connected device and/or cache the songs for offline listening using dsub! Feels like a self-hosted Spotify!

Meena video interviewed my dad this weekend. The intent was to document his thoughts and perspectives of the years gone by and to get glimpses of his generation. We learnt so many interesting things about our family that we wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t done this. An oral history of sorts! This has been on the back burner for a while now and I’m so glad we got this rolling! This along with the family tree project has sent me down the rabbit hole of documenting our ancestral history. ...