This week: a trip to Ponmudi, more photos, custom ringtone frustration and a job role change.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post. Read my first entry from the series.

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What’s been happening

• My wife’s brother is in the merchant navy, and he just got back after a 5 month stint. All of us went to Ponmudi, a small hill-station nearby yesterday, and I really loved it. It’s amazing how much cooler it is even a 1000m up. I honestly would love to stay in a cooler place like this: the heat and humidity here is sometimes terrible. I also really liked watching the rolling hills of the Western Ghats, and the fog moving in and made a resolution to do this kind of trips more.

• I’ve been trying to get back into photography, and have been watching Youtube videos as inspiration. Here’s a few shots from my trusty Fuji X-E3 with the kit lens:

• Ammu has been asking me to set up custom ringtones for her, and I find it so frustrating that iOS doesn’t make this simpler. What’s more frustrating is that any Apple Music song does work as an alarm tone, but not as a ringtone. I know that the ringtone market used to be huge for the music industry but it’s time this is done any with. The only way to do this now is with a weird Garageband workaround.

• We went to a jewlery shop recently to buy a diamond nose stud for Ammukutty. The number of folks on a Sunday evening spending their time buying gold here is just crazy. Did you know that if if Kerala was a country, it would have the highest gold reserve per capita in the world?
• We saw Anweshippin Kandethum (seek and ye shall find) this week. It’s a nice 2-in-1 detective story that somehow has a bittersweet ending even when the bad guys have been found. Interesting premise!

• At work, I’m switching from WordPress.com to Woo. It’s the first time I’m working in a company larger than a startup, and one of the advantages is this kind of horizontal mobility. Here’s to more interesting problems and challenges ?

Links of the Week

• We have a family function coming up and I used Vocal Remover to create karaoke tracks from a few old Malayalam songs. A karaoke track maker seems like a great app idea: auto-generate karaoke tracks (with synced lyrics) of all Indian regional language songs.
• Although it’s very early days and the app is still buggy as hell, I’m keeping an eye on CodeEdit. I really liked the old Textmate days, and wish we could find a way back.

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