Democracy India and US

For the first time in my life I got to participate in the democratic process, aka voting. Yes I do regret I never got to vote in my home country. That said, now lets focus on some interesting aspects of democratic process, more importantly difference between the 2 great democracies USA (my adopted country) and India (home country). 

The big difference between the 2 countries that every one knows is that in one we vote for the president and the other we vote for the president directly and in other we vote for the member of parliaments, who then elect the prime minister. 

This much is known to all but the thing that caught me by surprise was the fact that in India, the elected PM and his party has the choice of cabinet members to work with but in USA the president gets to select his cabinet members but almost all other than his chief of staff has to go through senate hearing and need to be confirmed by the senate, albeit simple majority is probably sufficient. Another key difference is the number of cabinet positions are fixed from president to president unlike India where we expand and contract (mostly always expand) based on how many parties are huddled in the coalition.  

In short, the elected leader cannot appoint his own people to work with unless both the senate and house are in control of the president's party. 

If anyone had asked me about the elections in USA before 2020, I would have said 2 things. USA votes for president directly and it is determined by electoral votes and not popular votes, vote in 1 election cycle and I know all the nooks and crannies including what the term Gerrymandering mean :).   

Trace the river

Above pictures, taken from top of a peak in Garner State Park(GSP). Look closely and you can almost trace the path the river is taking flowing through Texas. Want a clue, look for the non green (more like reddish brown) trail in the pics. 

What amazed was that barring a few tens of yards around the river where there are Maples and Oaks tress rest of the area is mostly covered with pointy cedar trees or their relatives. 

The river is Frio river but some reason my old memory has it recorded as Dry Frio river. 

Symbolism in Hindu god depictions

If you are like me, you believe that all the representations of gods in Hinduism have deeper meanings than the mere image or idol they "represent". One such things that came over in the last few days are the images of goddess Lakshmi and Goddess Saraswathi. 

Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity and Saraswathi is the goddess of knowledge and wisdom.  Observing the 2 images above carefully one can observe that goddess Lakshmi is standing

(balancing) on a lotus while goddess Saraswathi is happily seated on a rock in a forest.  

As they say everything is subjective to ones own interpretation, my interpretation is that our ancestors believed in non permanence of wealth while on the other hand believed knowledge is permanent. If I can take a step further, considering lotus (a flower) can barely carry any weight, it is easy to see that our ancestors also thought wealth is a fleeting imagination while knowledge can give rise to new life and is more permanent. 

Conclusion, as my dear Dad always said, "knowledge is power". 

ps: all of this was triggered from Navaratri 2020 :), yes a very auspicious time. 

 

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 :)