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! ...

A short morning hike to the Liberty Dam near home. Scouted a shorter trail but ended up hiking on a proper road up to the Dam. 3.6 miles round trip and a quick scrambling attempt on a rock face with N at the end. Got back here via the trail the subsequent weekend. The trail was pretty picturesque. Winding by the North Patapsco river and eventually terminating at a beautiful vantage point right near the foot of the dam, this dirt trail made it totally worth coming back here again. A branch off this trail also seemed to lead back to the parking lot at the top. Will likely get back here while putting in some mileage for trail runs. ...

As we stood there in front of the casket, me pouring the last drop of water in his mouth, memories flashed in front of my eyes. Of monkeys cornering us that early morning on their house terrace in Ahmedabad; Of walking on the busy roads in Habsiguda, him walking on my left, guarding me from the traffic and I craning my neck to look at him as he mentions how I would be wonderful doctor; Of us both sitting beside Amma in the hospital bed and him explaining in ‘kid terms’ what was likely happening in Amma’s brain as she was fighting her tumor; Of him and Sharath gate crashing wedding receptions in our colony; Of all the discussions we had on ’living’ life and making a concerted effort on spending more time with family; Of the weekend in Queens, NY during their visit to the east coast; Of Grouse Grind and the Dragon boat race, he wanted to do together; Of setting up a local cloud server and him wanting to get into software development and app design; Of all the outdoor trips we planned to do over the next few years; Of our visit to Allouette lake when we visited them a few years back in Vancouver; Of him making arrangements to get a ride for us from the airport to the hospital where he was the patient, Of him asking me not to leave that early when I visited him in June… ...

Came across this phenomenal documentary from Patagonia about the Tarkine in North western Tasmania. Reminded me of the incessant wood logging that I witnessed almost on every backpacking trip across the western ghats in India. Irrationality of humans blows my mind beyond all proportions. If only there was a master switch to reset it all… [embed]https://youtu.be/MHdE2YCRjck[/embed]

Last year, I procured a Nextcloud box and moved part of my data to it. I’d just heard about Ubuntu Snappy Core OS and was keen on porting my install to that setup. I finally got around doing that last week and thought I’d quickly jot down the install steps for reference later. Essentially, I installed the Core OS on a 32GB microSD card and installed Nextcloud as a snap. Two 1TB hard drives service the Pi3 and are synced with rclone. Below is a crude outline of the setup: ...

Photo taken at: Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park Last November we drove to Acadia and had a terrific experience there with the Labrador cold front.Being off-season, there was sparsely any crowd and we had most of the park just for ourselves. Those three days were the most relaxed days we spent together in a while. Earlier this month, we revisited Acadia, this time with family. The park was very crowded and we had to rise up pretty early to have access to some quiet zones. Nevertheless, it was a just great being back there. Drove around the park loop, hiked up the bubbles, and visited Schoodic peninsula and Bar Island. Stayed at an RV camp park in Ellsworth. ...

Photo taken at: Mount Moosilauke First backpacking trip in recent years. Had a 27 pound backpack on and felt every ounce of it on my spine as we hiked up Moosilauke on Day 1. With a thunder shower forecast for the weekend, we had one person drop out from the team just the night before the trip. After the initial meet at the Appalachian Trailhead on NH-25A, eight of us packed in two cars head towards the Beaver Brook Trailhead at Kinsman Notch on NH 112. Started the hike at around 09:30hrs up the Beaver Brook trail. ...

Photo taken at: Walden Pond State Reservation Absolutely spell-bound. This is one place I would love to go back to!

Photo taken at: Charles River, Newton, Massachusetts That sums it all up. Psyched!

Photo taken at: Mount Garfield First hike with the AMC. Four hours climb up to the summit with icy conditions in the last 1000ft. Microspikes saved the day! Under tree line pretty much all the way till the end. The peak does open up to a 360 degree view. Could spot quite a few other 4000 footers from the top. Franconia Ridge looked pretty tiny from here! A quick 2.5 hour hike got us back to the trailhead. Good pace, good work-out and first ’technical’ winter/early spring hike! ...

Photo taken at: Camp Lyndon Appalachian Mountain Club, Spring Leadership Training - 2018

As we enter Lugazi on route A109 towards Jinja, Google Maps suggests we take an unpaved dirt road on the left. The red slushy path meanders through small shops and houses and an eerie sense of awareness creeps in as villagers notice the Toyota Rav4 rolling into their ‘area’. I read last night that the 10km stretch to the Griffin falls camp area would be dirt roads winding through sugar-cane plantations. Last night’s rain and the incessant drizzle seem to have worsened the roads. Thankfully, the Rav4 handled the conditions insanely well. ...

Photo taken at: Bear Mountain State Park First hike of the year/season! Quite a lot of post-holing but was absolutely worth it! I ran the Bear mountain half a few years back. This hike brought back some good memories of that treacherous run!

Over the last 12 or so years that I’ve been hiking now, I’ve learnt a ton from my goof-ups. I believe in taking calculated risks and am reasonably okay with ‘winging’ a hike as long as I have the right gear and know what the game-plan is. Still, every hike that I’ve been on and the deeper I’ve been into the wilderness, I’ve always pondered what would happen if either me or someone in the group needed medical attention. ...

Decided to come over to Florida for the long weekend. On of those slightly impromptu plans. This visit was long overdue. Been here at Aparna’s place a few time before over the last five years. But then it’s mostly been for a celebration or event, when the family is already pre-occupied with arrangements and everything that comes with having people over. This trip was just to spend some time with them when everyone has some ‘down-time’. It’s already been three days’ in and we’d have to head back tomorrow. At times you just wished you lived closer and/or together. ...

A few weeks back I heard Outside/In’s Powerline podcast - A four part series on Hydro-Quebec and the Northern Pass. For the longest time I’ve only heard all good about Hydro electricity. This series helped dissect the effects of such projects through various angles and brought up some pretty interesting facts. One of those must-listen-to series… Today while catching-up on some Nautil.us reading I came across this wonderful post on the removal of the Elwha dam. Supremely surprised and intrigued! Thinking about it, I’ve never heard or imagined a dam being brought down intentionally. I’ve always thought, once something huge is built, it lasts for a long long time until it sees its natural end…the push to bring it down would be so miniscule. The podcast series and this article in tandem build a strong case on the converse. That said, Can only imagine the insane amount of effort that would have gone into seeing this to fruition! ...