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. 

Italian vacation – some salient features of Italy

From the industrial Milan down to the eternal city of Rome, onward to the birth place of Renaissance Florence and then to the island city of Venice. The above sentence sums up our Italy trip this Thanksgiving. While a travel log is in process, I figured I will highlight some of the key takeaways from the trip related to culture and general stuff about Italy.

• Download the App “Rick Steve's Audio Europe”, it has detailed talks and explanations of a lot of locations in Italy. Listening to the audio before and during the visit to a location helped us immensely with understanding Italy better
• Lots of public bathrooms but no free bathrooms, usage costs varies from Euro 0.80 to Euro 1.50. Another interesting thing is that there are no urinals per se in the men’s restrooms and only sit down toilets. All the rest rooms were pristine and well maintained. As a tour guide pointed out, you are better off buying a Gelato or a coffee and using the rest-room rather than paying the fee for rest room usage.  
• Restaurants charge a cover-charge for getting you seated. typically about Euro 2.00 per person. While on the topic of restaurants, unlike USA, there is no free water and they sell water in bottles. Come to think of it, I couldn't understand the fascination of Italians about carbonated water aka sparkling water.
• If your hotel provides breakfast either included or at a charge (typically euro 3,00-5,00 per person) blindly take it. Keep in mind, kids eat free in most hotels.   
• One of the great things about Italy is the coffee and cafe's. Cappuccino at an Italian cafe beats the Starbucks coffee any day any time. Here also, if possible just order coffee for drinking at the cafe instead of to go. Unlike America the to-go coffee (if available) costs about 2x the price of in cafe drinking
• We mostly used public transport in Rome and very little to nothing in Florence. If you are in Rome for 2-3 days and you don't intend to visit all museums I still recommend the Roma Pass. 
• The high speed trains are amazing and they run on-time, the train platform numbers are assigned 15 minutes before scheduled time. If your budget allows I recommend upgrading to slightly higher level tickets instead of barebones cheapest ticket (just a personal choice).      
• We climbed up 3 domes while in Italy and it was all well worth it. It is a tough climb but worth the time. 
• Vatican museums, if you can afford take a guided tour, it is expensive but in our experience we appreciated the museum exhibits and Michael Angelo's work at Sistine Chapel much better thanks to our tour guide. The guide was so good that she managed to keep our 9 year old also engaged throughout the tour 
• All 3 cities had a flavor of its own, Rome had the big city and the things that comes with big cities. Florence had the small town feel and Venice was Venice.  
• Again, unlike USA, the default way Pizzas are given uncut and many a times we had to request the restaurant to get it cut. Also, there is no thin and original crusts in Italy, most everything we saw were thin crusts and very few thick or regular crusts
• There are 2 transport buses from Venice island to Marco-Polo airport, one is ACTV and other is ATVO. ACTV is the company that operates vaporetto (the grand canal public boat) and ATVO only transports to airport. Tickets to ATVO bus can either be bought online or from driver. Both services cost $8 but I recommend using ATVO for it is a non stop bus to airport and only 20 minutes ride.
• For rest of Italy, kids under 10 have free bus rides and train rides but for Venice where the age drops to 6      
• Bread in Florence is baked with no salt, the reason being a historic fight more than a few centuries ago with neighboring port city of Pisa, when city of Pisa refused to sell salt to Florence and from then on restaurants in Florence are baking bread without salt. 
• The only place we encountered where Google Maps were almost useless was Venice, they work in terms of showing the locations but don't trust their driving/walking directions fully. They apparently have come a long way but feel they still have a long way to go. 
• Read this in Frommer's guide to Italy, apparently you can be fined for buying contraband leather goods. 
• Talking of leather goods, we found Venice to be a better place to shop for leather than the capital of leather Florence. 
• Subway system in Rome runs on time, smoothly and granted bit crowded to my desire but it works. I can't say the same for bus system in Rome. Rule of thumb, if a place you intend to visit is 15-20min walk, just take the walk and don't wait on the buses. 
• Uffizi gallery in Florence is one of the few museums we visited. Recommend to buy tickets at least a day or so in advance that way you can schedule a time to get into the museum. 
• Talking og Uffizi, they have some strange rules. They will not allow you to carry back packs into the museum and have to be stored in the museum storage area. Next one if you rent audio guides they want to keep your passport as collateral. They check tickets both going in and coming out. So, don't throw your tickets once you are inside the museum.  
• Don't know if it is specific to Florence or for Italy in general, the milk we bought in the grocery store had an expiry date 2 days from the selling date and there were no gallon sized but liter size. 
• Breakfast cereals unlike our local HEBs there were only 3 choices or may be 4 :) 
• I cannot end this without mentioning a word about Gondola's; its not worth the money :)   

The instant era

It’s one thing to watch and record your kids performance on stage and another to share the same with friends and family. 

Yesterday was the event of Rajyothsava and Deepawali organized by our very own Austin Kannada Sangha (AKS). Our kids practiced a lot, parents (read moms) worked hard behind the scenes and made the entire performance a grand success. 

Now, the dads on duty were given the task of recording the onstage performance and thanks to our high end smart phones it was not a tough job to accomplish. All that mattered was to find the right location nearest to the stage to sit and hold the phone still to record a good video. It was an easy task, the tough task that none of us (primarily Windows user) didn’t foresee was the problem of sharing the video with our friends and family. 

Considering the act was exactly 12 min long, recorded at the rate of 40-60 FPS with 18 megapixel cameras the file sizes were larger than we had ever imagined. Considering the high speed internet that we all are so used to, we rarely pay attention to file sizes and come to think of it  it’s the fault of the phones too which doesn’t let us know the file sizes. 

So, the traditional method of sharing on WhatsApp petered out for the file size was too big for their network. Then it was decided to go home and upload to Google Drive. That’s where the challenge started which none of us really foresaw. Apple’s iOS was working seamlessly to backup the phone to the Windows PC but try downloading a file either through the traditional windows explorer route or through windows photo app or even through Picasa it would throw an error saying device is unresponsive and hence can’t copy the file. 

So, windows was a no go, next step direct upload to Google Drive from the phone but that was taking so long to even process; It was not worth the wait. After almost an hour of fighting with the iOS ecosystem I had reached a point of giving up. At this point by sheer luck I decided to upload the video to iCloud Drive and that worked like a charm and few moments later when I logged into my iCloud Drive, I could see the file there. Surprisingly it allowed me to download the same. That’s how the file was transferred to PC and finally put up to Google Drive/YouTube and shared.

Moral of the story, If the video you are trying to share is more than 5-7 minutes long and WhatsApp has petered out and your options are windows PC or laptop then the best way and possibly the only way would be to upload video to iCloud and then download from there .