Earlier this year, we all got our booster doses and were eligible for traveling. And the situation also seemed to ease a bit after the initial Omicron wave here in S'pore and in India as well. So we took a quick 2-week trip to Chennai in March. Flights were empty, airports were empty and the whole experience was so chilled out. Am getting ahead of myself. Let me just look at how the year has fared so far.

2021 was not the best year I've been through, going by how tough things got for me - personally and professionally. But it is highly likely that this is the year that taught me the most about every aspect of myself, my life, my aspirations and motivations. Instead of pouring over everything that went wrong, am just going to reflect on the learnings and see what I can do better for the next year.

I've been on Hugo for a while now and I have made a couple of blog posts as well. I am fully using the emacs org mode and am content, to say the least, with the flow. I maintain the website for another friend which is a wordpress instance. I cannot expect them to start using VSCode or Emacs to write their content, let alone set them up with AWS keys and a publish flow.

I recently moved my website from wordpress to hugo. It is taking a little getting used to, but I absolutely love the fact that I don't have to leave my editor to update my blog. I was still editing markdown and had to lookup markdown syntax here and there. So today I spent some time to figure out how to get the ball rolling with org-mode in emacs. Turns out, its not that hard at all.

Hello Hugo! Today I moved my blog to hugo. Frankly it doesn’t make intuitive sense to run a blog on a static site generator. But when I think about it again, my blog is my expression of ideas. I rarely engage on the comments section. And the best way to let me know your thoughts is still to tweet at me. Given these, it makes sufficient sense to run the blog as a static site.

What and Why? Personally, newsletters are the new blogs. While I don’t write or curate my own, I read a lot. And I am over-subscribed too. I subscribe to about 15 different newsletters but manage to read 1 or 2 in a week. That isn’t good. Luckily, I don’t yet pay to subscribe for any of them – and precisely for this reason. The only newsletter that I pay and subscribe to is the Blackbook newsletter by Vijay Anand.

I, accidentally, noticed that my WordPress instance was compromised. Of course, I would be the person to blame for this. It’s not a commercial thing, so I don’t nearly spend enough time looking under the hood. This cost me a couple of hours yesterday fixing and cleaning up the mess. I’ve taken some precautions to ensure I won’t need to look under the hood too frequently but also ensure I don’t sponsor some botnet or click-fraud elsewhere on the tubes.

For the longest time in my life, I have wanted to learn meditation. People always made it sound so mystical and so powerful, that I wanted to have my share of it too. At least, that’s how the fad for meditation started. I remember trying to meditate as early as my mid-twenties in 2006-2007. My mom could meditate but she never made it sound like anything special. My maternal grandfather was so good at it that we always thought he was asleep sitting.

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good.

I’ll be 40 in a year or two. I distinctly remember feeling a stomach churn and completely unprepared when I turned 30. I had just finished my MS thesis and joined Atheros. I had a long way to go to have something I could call a career. It was very unsettling at that time. But then things happened and here I am, almost ten years later, still embarked on a journey to identify the problems I really want to solve.