Wish

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good. But on most days, Siri is deaf. Not just any deaf, she’s so deaf that I’ll be screaming at the top of my voice to get her to effing wake up. Eventually I figured, maybe if I used a headset, things might get better. So I picked up a $75 Beats headset. Excellent headset actually. Stays snug fit in my ear – something the default iPhone headset doesn’t for me. Apparently, I don’t have the generic ear that the rest of the world has. Turns out, though, Siri doesn’t care if I used a Beats headset because it still depends on hearing me properly. Incidentally, Beats has a small button that I can press to summon Siri. The problem for me, though, is that I need to start the timer after I get into the pose. When I am in the pose, I can’t move around my hands much. So summoning Siri with a button is a non-starter. ...

I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content. I used to hate Javascript, which in turn meant I was not too fond of Ajax calls. So my web applications always submitted forms and handled the details in PHP. ...

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. ...

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 sort of went into an exile since the last post. I think none of this blogging platforms in working for me. I hate to type with my phone, in spite of its bigger screen. I don’t carry my pad everywhere either. Not so much of the mac too. Basically, I travel only with my phone and I don’t want to have to type with the phone. That means, I lose all the brilliant thoughts for a post by the time I get to the mac or to the office laptop that I usually write these posts from. Last week, I tried another “brilliant” attempt. I quickly logged in from the phone and wrote the title alone for two posts. I forgot about this when I got back home. Then when I logged in over the weekend, I have completely forgotten what those titles are for. So lost two more posts, effectively. ...

I spent some time listening to some TED talks on creativity (yes, again). And I noticed something that I had missed all the other times I did this. The first step to being creative is being engaged to your environment. Duh! That is quite basic understanding right? But somehow I missed this part. And this is something I complain to Noni about a lot. I keep telling her that I can’t seem to find any problems around me. Just about everything seems to be working fine for me! Clearly, am not engaging with my environment. I have a whole lot of assumptions that make my environment work for me. Or am making an “ass” out of “me” – flicked that from “Silence of the Lambs”, creative huh? ...

So I got about 60% of one app working on my iPhone to a satisfactory extent. I still need to add a couple of features before it can used as an app. I thought this is perhaps a good time to think about and generally fix the horrible UI that I have created so far. Thinking about it, I suck so bad at UI that I have never written a GUI application all my life. I briefly dabbed with GTK, PyGTK, PyQT, Tk-Wish, WxWidgets and a bunch of others (including VB and VC++). I failed at each one of them. As in the buttons usually clicked and the labels and tables got updated as needed always. But I was never proud of how it looked. I almost hated myself for this failure. But then I stumbled upon websites of many programmers (friends, some times stuff that I just stumble upon) and found that most of them were really bad. And they didn’t seem to have a problem with it. That is when I started feeling very good about myself – at least I could see that my work is not presentable, even if it was worth presenting. ...

What I am about to discuss here is not a basic need. It is more of a luxury, good to have setup. Nobody quite misses it now, but maybe it will become essential in the future. Or maybe not. During the formative years of the foetus, parents get to see their baby(-ies) take shape through the months with the help of the ultra sound scans that the doctor uses. For the first 6-7 months, the baby is still not very active. But around 7 months, it becomes quite active and is almost able to listen to sounds from outside and maybe also responds to them. Usually, you would have to be in luck to see this happen during a regular checkup visit. And not a lot of us would be that lucky. ...

I have recently got on an exercise regimen to fight my back pain problems. It is sort of like Yoga but in a controlled manner. I don’t know if its fun, but it definitely helps to keep pain away. Typically, I’ll need to do 4-6 exercises twice a day. Each exercise is repeated three times and lasts 30 sec each time. Pretty simple, right? You need to keep aside about 30 minutes twice a day to take care of this. So far I am able to keep up. ...

There are a lot of websites to plan your vacations and trips. I don’t want to list them all here. But the most common theme is along these lines: you have a budget and I have a package. you have a destination and I’ll tell you the budget. Well, I really wish there was a third category. I have a budget and number of days. I’ll tell you the sort of hotels I am looking at as well. Give me a list of flight + hotel combinations that will still get me there. ...