Posts

We have this mid 2009 model Macbook Air (MacbookAir2,1) that has been idle for quite a while. I made the mistake of upgrading it to El Capitan a couple of years back which made it a functional brick. It would boot, but would take a tonne of time doing that. And then anything you click would take 5-10 minutes to happen. I tried all the usual stuff. I threw the DVDs that came with the device, so I can’t so much as roll it back to its good self. I tried finding snow leopard or lion online, but mostly you get fake downloads for 3G that either don’t finish downloading or are useless post downloading! Trust me, I wasted quite some bandwidth doing just that. This was in late 2015. I briefly tried to get debian working on it. But I didn’t have too much patience to figure out the EFI stuff so everytime I reset my NVRAM or SMC, I’d promptly be back in an unusable MAC that would boot El Capitan and have no disk space. Then I destroyed all debian on that machine and reset it to stay El Capitan, put the device in the attic and tried to believe it doesn’t exist any more. ...

The biggest update since the last time I posted something is that I have moved to Chennai. Singapore is fun and a great place to live, but perhaps it didn’t work out very well for my career aspirations. It did work great for the wife, but she is happy to back in Chennai as well. Besides she is on the planned break for Sid, so maybe it doesn’t matter all that much in the short term. ...

I think Career is the worst snake oil I ever brought home. Education being the next. No, I am not writing this post in regret or in bad times. Whatever oil I bought is still making me good food and giving me an acceptable lifestyle. So, I can’t just pour it out the door and get done. Which is precisely what makes it snake oil! I am sometimes so damn scared about taking a step because am worried precisely about losing this oil. A break in career cannot do you much good. I wonder how I came up with that conclusion?! ...

Recently my mom had come visiting; more to spend time with my infant son and a little to spend time with us. Now my in-law is here with us – more to take care and spend time with our son than much else. A trip we arranged for our convenience as well. Of course, we took this step to evaluate our options. But this taught us more about our parents and gave answers to most of what we are. Yeah, and an answer to what our options really are. ...

Recently, I have been coming across a lot of people who use their work laptop as though it were their personal laptop. Of course, there isn’t anything wrong with that. Companies know and understand fair use of the equipment provided. That’s the keyword here: fair use. I think an extended definition of fair use is also acceptable. In my opinion, it is fair use as long as you don’t benefit from or misuse the equipment. In that sense, skype video calls to your parents back home, watching your weekend movie on youtube or some crappy pirated website is ok too. By doing these, you largely don’t harm the trust factor in the fair use clause. But Skype interview using work laptop is a strictly unethical. At least, in my view it is. Making job applications from your work laptop is just as unethical also. But most companies do expect and forgive some of these. I don’t even keep a copy of my resume on my work laptop. ...

I am a Jobs’ fan. I mean, by now you must already know this. I have heard his “Stanford commencement address” almost once a month ever since I came across it. I take inspiration from many of his quotes. I don’t want to be another Jobs. I just like his example. But unlike most Jobs fans, my favourite quote wasn’t “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. Simply because I never understood what it meant. At least not until now. But maybe I understand now and so maybe I’ll join the drones of others who love this quote as well. ...

For a while, I believed that jQuery and bootstrap are the best tools out there for getting a frontend working the way you want. I am sure there are jQuery pundits who still stand by this. But I am not a jQuery pundit. In fact, I am quite bad with javascript – for whatever reason, I never managed to master this one skill. I have been using javascript from 2005 but I still have to look up every now and then for some super basic operations. The same holds true for jQuery as well. But I still manage to write some apps here and there using jQuery and javascript. So basically, I can find my way without too much of a struggle. ...

Yet another year has gone by! I was just running by my last year’s birthday post. It is sad to see that not much has changed from that post although quite a lot has happened in the year. I still cannot call myself an entrepreneur. Not even a freelancer. I still am trying to beat the blues from last year. Maybe I’ll just count my blessings this year and set some realistic goals for 2016. ...

Another day I never dreamt would happen – I actually am beginning to believe Dhanush might be one of the better movie makers out there. Thinking about it, absolutely every movie made by his Wunderbar Films has turned out to be brilliant and/or entertaining. For instance, even the lighter ones like Maari or Kaaki Sattai were absolutely entertaining. Kaaki sattai even had a good premise. Of course, Kaakka Muttai and 3 are perhaps the best movies to have come under this belt. Ethir neechal and VIP were both entertaining and had a decent story to tell. ...

I posted this as a problem in the “Ideaspace” platform here. I usually end up paying for 30KG baggage + 10KG cabin when all I carry is <8KG in my flight. Can I just sell the other 32KG and get back portion of my ticket cost? Will the airline buy this back? Can there be a middle man who will do this on both our behalves? This, as I note on the platform, is a regulatory nightmare. God knows what can be pushed into such sold baggage space that would then compromise the security of the flight, its passengers or the destination country (at least its airport). With rising security issues all over the world, a new venture trying to add more nightmare is the last thing to have. But maybe it needn’t be a nightmare after all. Just maybe. ...