I’ve said it before; I’m no programmer. One of the stalwarts for open-source has been Linus Torvalds, and he’s seen a lot of code over the decades. It’s just been disappointing hearing him speaking positively about using AI. The recent clarifications show some form of naiveness in his assumptions I find hard to...

Driving in India, in the major cities is a hell-like experience. Civic sense spills over on the streets, and that leads to endless traffic jams with everyone trying to squeeze themselves into the queue. It’s always a stressful experience. It’s why I choose to drive to work once a week, maybe twice if I’m up and out...

Recent conversations with friends and peers who have been proactively using AI have surfaced their fears of not really knowing or understanding what they have up to with work. They seem to have the results but with litle understanding of how and why. One of them, a younger newer entrant to the workforce, said that...

My wife lost her dad two weeks ago. David suffered from Parkinson’s. My wife, her sister and for the longest, her mother witnessed his deterioration. The past year has been rough on all of them. My mother-in-law is an iron-woman, being able to maintain her absolute composure, while running the household. It is quite...

Visual Studio Code was a reluctant adoption ages ago when I first tried it. Microsoft makes terrible software but VS Code was an exception. It seemed like they were warming up to opensource. Since about a year back or so, it is lined with AI garbage in every crevice. It is bloated and it is unusable. I have long...

I haven’t written a post in a long time but it’s been on my mind all these weeks and months. Writing these notes offers me some relief. Things have been busier and not the good kind of busy. My father-in-law hasn’t been well; my wife has been away. She returned about 3 weeks back, only having to rush back a week...

Things have been happening faster than I can blog about them. The most interesting event has been my visit to my ancestral hometown, Mangalore in India. I was there for a cousin’s son’s wedding and a holy communion party. Many of my cousins also made it. It was one of the largest family gatherings in recent times...

I have bad handwriting. I used fountain pens in school till ball-point pens and then gel pens replaced them. I wasn’t fascinated by fountain pens then, as much as I was about gel pens when they first arrived. Over the past 8 years or so, I’ve taken on a liking and appreciation for fountain pens. There is something...

These are the phones I remember owning since 2000. Nokia 3210 Sony Ericsson K300i Nokia E63 Dopod D600 Motorola Milestone Samsung Galaxy Nexus Nexus 5 Apple iPhone SE OnePlus 5 OnePlus 7 Pro Motorola Edge 40 Neo I’m about to buy a new phone. It’s about two years old, and it’s not bad for what I need - listening to...

My folks live in an apartment complex. We have a security guard, and here in India, they’re called the “watchman”. Their days are uneventful. They ensure shady characters don’t wander into the apartment compound, they ensure the lights are turned on, the cars are cleaned, the water is pumped to the overhead tank,...

I Think I’m Paranoid was one of the coolest tracks from Garbage when I first heard them in the 90s. Shirley Manson was hot, bold and in your face in that music video. The song also had one of the freshest, crude yet appealing sounding distortions from a guitar. For someone in his teens, it wasn’t my first rock band...

Things have been a bit busy yet again, and I’m just about recovering from a mild case of flu. It hasn’t been as bad as the truly bad ones I’ve had growing up. We flew to Kochi over the long weekend. It was a good excuse to fly via the new airport I wrote about a few months back. It was so much more comfortable than...