Posts

I had introduced Unta in an earlier post. Unta came into our lives on the 5th of October. Today he is a month old. He already does a lot of very insightful things like saying “ah” or “oooh” when we aren’t expecting it. He can tell dad’s arms from mom’s. And he loves dad’s better 😉 He knows when to fold his legs so that changing the diaper is a tough exercise. He knows he can stretch all he wants when he is lying on dad’s arms, but most others tend to restrict him. He knows how to position his feet so that mom/dad cannot sit him up to burp. And he knows how to get dad to carry him around. Or to get grandma to carry him around. A very smart chap for his age. Also a very patient listener, he won’t bat an eyelid for hours on end listening to anyone talk. And he is interested in any topic in any language. I even tried gibberish once and he loved it. Of course, he might have understood something I didn’t. Or he just found it funny hearing me out. ...

It was an insightful morning today. I was getting my 1-month-old to sleep after his feed so that we can get our day started. Noni is sort of jealous of me on this: Unta seems to love my arm couch better than hers. Even though I squeeze him like an orange. Maybe he feels super cozy! Ok, please don’t advise me on why I should not squeeze a 1-month-old like an orange. I already know I shouldn’t. ...

I think I came across this phrase in school. Since I chose to study “Hindi” as my second language, I probably didn’t get to study this phrase first hand. “Poruthaar Boomialwaar”. A very powerful phrase that every kid should learn, understand and imbibe in his/her life. I told Noni that the only thing I want to teach my kid would be “delayed gratification”. I cannot say it is an uninfluenced thought, we all have heard of and seen some version of the marshmallow experiment. But my reasons are slightly different. I have personally felt places where I won just by sheer perseverance and places where I lose sleep simply because I can’t wait. And I have generally seen some form of correlation between impatience and poor skillsets (learning/execution/planning) etc. So I sort of have my own subset of proofs for the marshmallow tests. So one thing I want to teach my kid (if it is teachable) is delayed gratification. ...

Here is my about.me page. I knew this existed for a while but never quite managed to create a page for myself. At last the cat got curious: Last week I went ahead and created one for myself anyhow. Looks quite ok, right? Yeah, I need to invest a little more time to make it look better than that. But I liked how I am able to present a coherent story. A coherent and relevant story doing justice to a portion of my skillset that I am quite proud of. Great place to start, especially if you have a good story to back yourself. Or if you are just starting out – you know what it takes to create a good story now. ...

For a couple of months, we decided to start tracking where our money got spent. We felt the need to see if we could do a little better each month. And maybe if we collected this data for a few months, we may see a spending pattern emerge that would help us budget our expenses way better going forward. There is just one hiccup: data entry. I still went ahead and did this for two months. I have excused myself this month and will resume for November and December. There has to be a better way, right? ...

This is my hundredth post on the blog. I got here in less than two years, averaging > two posts a week. But the distribution is not that even. Maybe it is time to have this blog more noticed and have people read and give me a piece of their minds. For a start, I’ll publish the links to my first circle of friends. I definitely like to write. But I can’t write on a cue. It takes a lot of interest in a topic for me to write about it. That is why a good majority of the posts are about how I view the events in my life. And the next major topic is technology and programming. There are a few ideas tossed around too, but they usually come under tech. ...

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...

Noni and I spotted this poster on Orchard road. It was an ad for a movie playing – one of the many as part of the SG50 celebrations. Sorry about the bad picture quality, its sort of necessary to make the point. Noni said “wait, doesn’t this guy look a lot like KamalHassan?” I said “yeah! What’s better? The guy next to him looks a lot like Rajini Kanth” ...

I have come to realize that I need a portfolio. A showcase of what I can do. While I can work in multiple disciplines, I only have a resume to say this. And maybe some references. Going forward, neither of this is going to help. At least not much. And when I am trying to get interesting gigs or get an interview or two with some promising startup, I need a portfolio more than ever. ...

I sometimes think Seth Godin has a team that just spies on me to give him inputs on what he should write about. Because there are so many instances where his post for the day directly answers something I have been pondering over or ranting about to Noni. Ask her, she’d vouch for this. I find it difficult to accept most of his advice, though. I think I have my feet too deep in staying afloat that I am super scared to change any of that. Hopefully, someday I’ll be able to follow at least a portion of his writing. ...