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So we had to transcribe a bunch of interviews we did earlier. One of the sessions was a good 45 minute long and had a tonne of details. It’s quite difficult to manually transcribe this. But hey, we gotta do this. And then we have to do a bunch more later. The wife was in charge of doing this and she was trying to do manually. Then she had a “eureka” moment and tried to use One Note’s speech-to-text function. But there were tonnes of limitations – the laptop doesn’t hear itself and the phone seems to freeze for a long audio block. ...

My son’s school is running an eco-diversity project. Yes, he is in kindergarten, and he probably doesn’t understand the term yet. But that’s ok. It is more to teach the kids to treat all lives equally. But the thing is this – as with all school projects, there is an implicit acceptance from the parent’s side. As a parent, I am thrilled to see my son participate and learn this stuff. This was stuff I figured for myself when I was 30 and reflecting on life (why at 30 is more or less the theme of this blog!). ...

I briefly lost the site to a sysadmin disaster. Although I didn’t quite create the disaster on my own, I had to clean up after a failed upgrade script. Anyway, the site is back up and even if I don’t have much to say in it. It took me about 15 minutes to fix it. The exact 15 minutes I didn’t feel like spending for over two weeks when the disaster first occurred. ...

School killed poetry for me. The only poem I grew to appreciate was – “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost – much later in my life than I was originally introduced to the poem. That said, I never appreciated other poetry for a very long time. I blame schooling for this debacle because I have come to realize that poetry is the most beautiful expression there is. For what its worth, words are always lacking when it comes to expression and poetry is, perhaps, an earnest attempt to fill that gap. ...

I had never been one to appreciate music. I had a few tracks that I listened to all through college. I still remember the CD that Satya gave me – sort of an initiation to rock and metal, so to say. I wasn’t quite a fan of classical music at the time. Neither Indian classical nor western classical. I did like a selected 2-3 songs from each of the prominent boy-bands of the time – Backstreet Boys, Boyzone and the like. A fad that I grew out of in a couple of months time. The only bands that stuck to my playlists are Nickelback and Iron maiden. Most of the rest are singles and a good mix of pop, rock and melodies. ...

I am finally able to write common lisp code. Frankly, though, I don’t think I have arrived as far as Lisp goes. You can take a look at some of my work here: https://exercism.io/profiles/abishek Learning to write code, looking through CLHS for usage and figuring out a workable solution in a near-functional manner is how far I have gotten. I don’t yet know to write a macro. I mean, I know the construct to create a macro. But I am yet to arrive at a place where a macro would solve the problem in a more elegant manner. I am sure the mentors on the site are able to see multiple macros in my code, though. ...

After a while I found my true netflix and chill combination in the least likely of all the things I have tried – Korean Dramas. And the best part is that I didn’t even spend time picking them out. I just picked the first few recommendations. I am on my third drama now and I am ‘hooked’ is the least I can say. Path to here wasn’t straight-forward though. It is not like one day I bit the pill and started watching K-Dramas. It was a very gradual transition, I’d say. I think it started with Suits. I started watching Suits because I wanted to give the legal drama genre another chance. We originally watched a couple of seasons of “The Good Wife” – a series I found increasingly hypocritic and useless. Suits, on the other hand, turned out very delightful. It carefully morphed from a monotonous legal drama into a very engaging relationship drama. The character sketches of Louis and Harvey really matured through the series and at S9, I was wanting a lot more. ...

I stumbled upon this pure genius on Netflix by serendipity. And I don’t think I have laughed as much on anything else. This is the kind of absurd humour that I enjoy the most – I wonder what that says about me, sometimes. This genre is somewhat hard to find, though. For a long time, it was only the Monty Pythons that worked on this genre. Then I stumbled upon Douglas Adams and haven’t looked back since. I think Douglas Adams is the absolute epitome of this genre. There are so many instances in the hitch hiker’s book that I still reminisce and laugh over. Dirk Gently, incidentally, is from Douglas Adams too. ...

We recently completed all 12 seasons of the big bang theory (BBT). I loved the piece so much that I miss having them over during our dinner time. And my 4 years old son (yeah, he definitely shouldn’t be watching this one), dresses up like Sheldon on most days. Now that its over, I am kinda rewatching Friends. My go-to sitcom is Seinfeld, but Netflix seems to have run out of that one. ...

Twelfth standard math was hard. We didn’t have a stable teacher all through eleven and for beginning terms of twelve. Whoever took over math usually left within the year, although for no particular reason. Most of the class went to external tuitions for math. It was all the more critical because we had to clear a separate competitive examination for engineering admissions. Aral Mani’s near my house was the most famous of all. A few people went to a more comprehensive coaching program somewhere near Pallavaram. This place did twelfth coaching as well as prep classes for the entrance examinations. ...