Weekend-Notes

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. ...

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. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: David offered us a complementary sign-in to his Breathing Workshop. Excited to get that rolling! He’s also released his first book - Breathe to Perform. Can’t wait to get our hands on it! Over the last week, I’ve been strongly considering moving over from WordPress to a static site generator. I’ve been using WordPress for 15 or so years now and have had absolutely no issues. The minimalism factor of static site generators makes it quite appealing though and then there’s that constant nudge to try something new. Will have to weight that against the migration work involved and take a call. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: With the kids at home, weather mostly good and the lock-down lifted we did venture out a bit and got a lot of hikes in this week. We obviously had all masks on and avoided crowded spaces. Also had this sudden realization that most of the hikes I was doing over the past few years in Baltimore were on the banks of the Patapsco river. Would be wonderful to plan a good long 15-20 miler one of these days. Should be a good recce for the half-marathon that I said I would organize for Meena, Nancy and Sharath next month! ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: Weather’s been pretty erratic this week. We also had a mild dusting yesterday out of the blue! Might consider heading out for a hike later today. I nudged Meena to write more. We’ve had some interesting discussions on Yoga and other things over the past week and I do think she has a ton to share! She’s also planning to train for a 50miler which I am super excited about! Oh and beyond all that marketing ploy, Happy Mothers’ day. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: This week I got a better handle at deploying and maintaining docker images. With that squared out, I decided to decommission the Digital Ocean servers that I had setup back in 2017 and migrate the applications over to my Hetzner server. I no longer have to rely on ServerPilot. All my applications are now deployed as docker containers fronted by #Traefik as a reverse proxy. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: The last few weeks have been pretty ‘choppy’. Some recent developments on the work front has gotten us back to Boston. Always wonderful being back here. Looks like New-England has had a pretty mild winter and we’re making sure we take Shasta out as much as possible! Over the next couple weeks we’ll have to make a few interesting decisions. Between grad programs, fellowships and other exciting opportunities; 2020 is already off to a happening start! ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: Finally got around installing PixelFed on a Hetzner server. Absolutely love it! It’s truly an Instagram clone sans the tracking. The lead developer has some interesting updates up his sleeve and I am very keen to see how this project shapes up as it evolves out of beta. Meena suggested Nik and I work on the 3D puzzle Nik’s had for quite sometime now. Worked on it till about 0200 the next day morning and finished setting up this beautiful musical box puzzle. The engineering could have been a bit more nuanced. However, had a terrific time working on this. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: Earlier this week I helped Sharath setup a nextcloud instance on the RaspberryPi 4 that we got him for Christmas. Installed the DietPi OS, moved the user data over to a 5TB WD disk and while at it also setup a pi-hole for the network. Weather wise, this was one odd week. Had a good dusting of snow on Tuesday night and a balmy 60 degrees for most of the weekend. The kids had early school closures and we made sure we hit the trails. ...