Future Etsy shop owner

Other day it was about 10:00PM and Sandhya informed Avni that tomorrow morning there is a biking adventure planned for it is B's birthday and since it is biking it has to be fairly early in the morning. While Sandhya and me were thinking of what can we gift the birthday person and found an almost new unopened/unread book from our book shelf. Avni had a different idea of her own. 

She asked for an empty glass jar and got down some color papers and glue and within about 20-25 minutes she made this colorful pencil stand as a birthday gift. 

 

 

What's in a browser?

We as a household (as most people) switched to Google Chrome as web browser of choice a long time ago and in general it has worked like a charm (agreed they track every single click). It has worked even on websites where Internet Explorer and Firefox failed. 

Doing work from home and having daughter's school also virtual brings its own set of issues and concerns for ex: the other day Google Fiber went down for the whole day. For me I could always go to office (that's what I did) but for Avni it was not the best day :). A week later the portal through which she logs into for her school work went down. AISD did acknowledge that the portal was down but the classes run on ZOOM meetings (independent of AISD portal) and the teachers were starting those as usual.  

Between the 3 of us we have enough varieties of OS's (Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and IOS) and we went through testing the portal access with all the machines serially only to find the portal was not accessible. Barring the old iPad on all other devices we were accessing through Google Chrome. Thanks to Sandhya, we managed to get ZOOM meeting links for the classes and I went to the office room to start my work. 

For reasons I can't remember I have not installed Chrome on office machines and use Microsoft Edge and Bing. Out of curiosity I tried to log into the portal on my office laptop and voila it worked. Going back to other windows PC, the portal worked on Internet Explorer and same with Safari on Mac OS. At that point the access was denied on Chrome. 

Moral of the story, keep backup browsers and try with them if one browser gives access denied :).  

ps: I can almost hear someone screaming, why don't you have Linux  

Take 2 things - every time

Motley Fool "Rule Breakers" Podcast host David Gardner is a delight to listen. He usually has some small tips or wisdom nuggets to help make one's life better. One of his wisdom nuggets was and I quote (not verbatim) "If a space needs tidying up one easy and less stresfulway is to put away 2 things every time you are in that place and over time things will tidy up". May not be his exact words but a loose translation. Here is an example of how it worked practically for me. 

Thanks to COVID and due to school year starting as a from home instead of actual school; For the first time we had to order some furniture from Wayfair. Assembling was one part of the equation which was easily solved but the second part of disposing the packing material was a harder problem. Again, thanks to COVID there is no bulk trash pickup. 

After letting the boxes with packing material lay in the garage for couple of months, I remembered Mr. Gardner philosophy and started throwing the package material few pieces a day. Had to be careful for we do not have a big trash can. After about a week of doing this, I managed to empty 1 box of Thermocol and managed to put 1 box to recycle. 

During this process I realized I can speed up the process by cutting the Thermocol to small pieces and filling to trash covers and cutting up the boxes with box cutter and dump to recycle. Took about 20-25 minutes of my time and now all the boxes are being dumped in recycle box and Thermocol in 2 trash bags. Now I need to wait for trash and recycle day to finally get rid of the big packages. 

So, I didn't follow Mr. Gardner's philosophy fully but doing it on a consistent basis for about 10-12 days finally gave me the idea to get rid of the trash in one quick go.  

The chromebook - mostly you get what you pay for

Thanks to Covid-19, after all sorts of delays due to multiple reasons AISD finally opened and as expected and known for a long time schools are virtual. To their credit AISD has provided kids with Chromebook and I always presumed Chromebook's are later tech and more like advance tech. 

So, it caught me by surprise when the initial introduction to teacher over zoom video for Avni had video quality issues. Sandhya, thought it must be wireless speed issue. My argument was it can't be for we have Orbi Mesh network setup in the house and having tested all corners of the house for the speed and we can guarantee 75-100Mbps pretty much anywhere. 

A friend of ours suggested that we can order Wifi-hotspot and they have been using it and no issues with quality. I thought unless Austin has 5G that I am not aware of there is no way the hotspot can be faster than our mesh network. 

So, today we did a speed test on Chromebook (something should have done long ago) and turns out connected to the mesh network the speed is highly variable and can be anywhere from 10Mbps to onetime 100Mbps, while connected to our regular Google router it gets a constant 50Mbps over multiple tries. 

Made me realize, its a light/flashy OS on a crappy hardware. Granted it boots fast and screen even though good resolution is not bright enough. Thanks to it being managed by AISD I can't even see the hardware specifications of the Chromebook. 

So for now solution is to use our inhouse laptop for school from home :)       

Two perspectives for the same event

The event happened way back in time when my beloved grandpa passed away at the ripe age of 81. Can't remember the year but know for a fact that me and my brother were very young and when he passed away my dad was in Thagadur (our native village) and we in Bangalore. Compared to the present day connectivity, in terms of communication, I would call that time "stone age" and can't remember how we managed to communicate to my dad about the death of his father but I do remember the over night journey we undertook in a yellow top taxi with a good Samaritan neighbor of ours back to our native village, Thagadur. On the way we informed a few more people of the passing away. I also remember that in spite of some good insistence from our parents me and my brother were wide awake through the whole journey. 

Anyways, I am not chronicling his last rites but only one tiny aspect of his last rites. So, after a morning of body viewing by the villagers and relatives from neighboring villages, burial was scheduled for that day afternoon or very early evening (can't remember the time exactly). The hole was dug in our family farm and the body was on its way to the farm from the house. On the way it rained cats and dogs for about good 30-45 minutes. So bad that the burial hole started to close down, the decorations went away and people had to run to get shelter. I remember people talking how it is a bad omen and inauspicious when it rains at such occasions. Of course the rain stopped and literally disappeared after that heavy down pour of good 30 minutes. 

In the night as part of honoring the dead, one of the natives of the village did what is called "Hari-Katha", essentially we are all supposed to be awake through the night to honor the buried/cremated and listen to stories of god. He started with saying how auspicious it was that it rained right before the burial and he said and I quote (extremely loose translation) "the parted one was so near and dear to every one that even the nature wanted to say good bye and welcome him to be one with it". I slept off right after a few minutes of hearing. I don't know what impact it had on the morale of others but mine was definitely lifted and soared.  

The same event of rain during the burial, while and whole lot thought it was inauspicious and One stood up there and changed not sure of everyone's but for sure my perspective.    

ps: the taxi was a Premier Padmini (an Indian copy of Fiat) and we were 4 adults and 2 kids along with my Grandpa's body in that. Something for that generation I guess.