It took us three hours from the Atocha in Madrid to reach Granada. Hotel Anacapri, located in the moorish quarter of Granada, remained an unsolved mystery for our taxi guy. Dragging our luggage, we found our way into our quaint and small room. They were sold out, so our request for an upgrade also went amiss. Unperturbed, we stuck to our plan of hiking up to San Nicholas viewpoint. The hike goes right through the middle of the town, and the colorful lamps constantly attracted us like moths to a flame....

Writing a daily personal journal is a procedure to express and record our thoughts for ourselves. It is not easy to journal consistently My earliest surviving journal entry from 2017 attests to this difficulty in a rather stark manner: [2017-09-23 Sat] diary? 3rd attempt to start a daily diary. grievances: - fucking nothing happening on my own startup - whatever Journal entries Weekly reviews Year Tooling 4 0 2017 Google docs 2 13 2018 Google docs, sheets 8 15 2019 Google docs, sheets 18 1 2020 Google docs, sheets 91 5 2021 Git, Emacs, Org-mode 334 0 2022 Git, Emacs, Org-mode My journaling journey is a story of six failed starts, three or more changes in tooling, and finally resulting in one year of being somewhat consistent....

Happy New Year! As I’ve grown older, I would want to imagine that I am growing wiser. However, its more the case that I have more experience of things not turning out well. I am not just talking of high stakes risk, reward scenarios, but also the mundane straightforward tasks that we all have to perform from time to time. An example from a recent experience may help clarify: a regular oil change service that I reserved time for, and on the day spent 30 minutes queuing, and finally being advised that due to the rush, the shop will only deliver back my car in the evening (spoiling my weekend plans)!...

What better way to spend the last day of the year than making up predictions for the next one? Technology layoffs are temporary, and reshuffles brain trust in the industry without associated increase in labor costs. Why? Smart-X (substitute X for phone, car, home, office, and entertainment) trends continue, and accelerate through advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Both chat-gpt3 and generative AI are impressive tools that will find widespread use in these industries....

I shared A few of my favorite foods before. This post explores more information using the same dish name data as the previous post. The question and answers are for the months of October, November, and December 2022. Question Answer How many special meals over the 3 months? 52 How much did the meals cost (only when I paid hard cash)? $1461.94 How many people or restaurants lovingly prepared the meals?...

I am in the prime of my abilities, but at the same time also becoming wary of the Ageism rampant in my chosen field of software development. Ageism refers to the stereotypes (how we think), prejudice (how we feel) and discrimination (how we act) towards others or oneself based on age. — WHO Ageism is a problem that society needs to tackle actively, as when left unchecked, it will undermine effectiveness of our work as a society....

Holidays is a time for annual celebrations and inevitably some travel. I love digging into old favorites and opportunities to explore new cuisines. This season’s tastiest culinary treat award belongs to the excellent Italian fare (especially the black truffle Pizza Mushroom) we partook at Forma in Santa Monica. I do admit that I may be suffering with recency bias and also the year is not done yet (3 days to go), so there could be (hopefully 🤤) a change in the rankings?...

Caveat emptor: This post is a compilation of highly abstract half thoughts… Premise Humans (we) are at the top of the food chain on planet Earth, and are fascinated with ourselves. Our capabilities are orders of magnitude superior to our nearest surviving species: apes. The secret sauce for this system seems to be (and most probably is) the organ between our ears, our brain. With the invention of internet, and maybe even before?...

For all its popularity today, cloud computing wasn’t considered as a viable option by established and large enterprises for a long time. The reason is surprisingly straightforward: how can customers of cloud computing trust that the cloud provider is not tampering or getting unauthorized access to their private and secure data? To this date, there exists no technical limitation that stops a malicious internal actor (can be a cloud provider employee or contractor or an external agent breaching into the provider organization) to get access, copy, and sell customer information....

For 2023, I am setting new year resolutions in a different way. I will build a list of outcomes and have incremental progress indicators, much like how I track outcomes in work projects. Nidhi felt supported and loved in 2023. I was a patient husband, an active listener, and a doting husband. We had healthy debates when we made important decisions, and spent quality time together on many activities. How many times did Nidhi thank me?...