Chatter

Meena, Shasta and I moved back to India from the US a few days back with bags and no baggage! With most of my family in the states, this was one tough decision to take and it has been on our minds for the last three to four years. Our 2018 vacation in Uganda solidified our resolve to enter the Foreign Service and work towards a more holistic life that involved sustainable travel. During one of those long car rides, we decided it was time and planned to ‘initiate exit procedures’ right after our vacation. Just as we were finalizing things back in the US, we’d realized that we would be having Shasta that year and decided to push the move to next year. Come 2019, once we had Shasta’s paperwork in place and she was ready to fly, we head back to Uganda to spend a few months there with Meena’s father and finally made our way to India with a short stay in Dubai. ...

A beautiful 6 mile hike/walk near Miss Bama’s home. Shasta slept through most of it in the carrier and Dhruv had a ball of a time! So glad we fit this in. Probably one of our longest walks in Florida. The march of dimes event happens here every year.

I finally got my Shoebox server setup working! I now have three Single board Computer [SBC] working in tandem behind my home router to accomplish what I’ve been wanting to do for quite sometime now - Setting up an easy-to-maintain, in-house server for all my data and web hosting needs. Fixing this all together has been a tremendous learning experience. I still need to weed out some pesky issues but I believe I have the bearing right now. ...

Sneaked in a day at Liberty at the very end of the skiing season. Was so totally worth it! Meena didn’t get around taking the slopes since Shasta was pretty much tethered to her. Kids and I had a blast! Last time we were here [Dec 2017] I barely made it down the hill. This time around, I followed Nik’s strategy of letting gravity do it’s job and maneuvering only when I had to. Totally see how this could be addictive! ...

Shasta’s first visit to Patapsco state park. Sharath, Meena, Shasta and I planned to head out together initially. Was pretty breezy and cold. Shasta initially was showing signs of queasiness, so Meena suggested Sharath and I head out while she’d stroll closer to the car. Started out on the downhill and entered the woods around the corner. Meena joined with Shasta as we were heading back covering about three miles. A wonderful, refreshing day out! ...

An impromptu and beautiful 2 mile hike with Sharath near the Soldier’s delight Natural Environment area. Winter storm Gaia wasn’t as severe as they projected it to be (in this area). This is definitely one of those trails that I would love to get back to on a full moon night!

Meena and my family gifted me an Odroid XU4 SBC earlier last month as a Christmas/B-day gift. One of my projects during the year-end holidays was to setup a robust home server; Essentially getting my webservers home from Digital Ocean, where they are currently hosted. This would be a terrific companion to the nextcloud fileserver that I setup earlier using a raspberry pi. Earlier this week, I chanced upon DietPi and decided to launch it on the eMMC chip. One of the first things I did was to install Pi-Hole. With uBlock addons’ that should be some good riddance to ads across my home network! Would be interesting to keep track of these network pings to see what devices are needlessly calling ‘home’. ...

Had my eyes on this trial ever since I saw the ‘Gun powder falls state park’ sign on I95. Drove over for about 30mins with Sharath to get here this afternoon. Pretty surprised not to find many folks on this trail. The weather was just right and this short 5 mile round trip hike was precisely what we needed to close out 2018. The short stream crossing at the end of the trail was an added bonus! ...

A bright December weekend calls for a quick hike with the brothers! Here for the third time this year, and it still mesmerizes me!

I’ve had my eyes on the Billy goat trail for a while now. With a beautiful foggy forecast, this Sunday was a great day to head to the woods. We reached the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historic park in about an hour’s time, only to realise that the Billy Goat section A and B trails were closed due to flooding! Having come this far, we decided to explore rest of the park. The short hike to Great Falls via the locks was insanely beautiful! So glad we decided to head this way! ...