The week: reading unMIND, adapting a standing desk setup, IVF visits, driving challenges, and revisiting my old school.

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.

What’s been happening

• I read the graphic novel unMIND this week. It’s an interesting introduction to Advaita Siddhanta and its proponents Ramakrishna and (new to me) Ramesh Balsekar. The Advaita school of thought in Hinduism was one of the counter-reform movements introduced after Buddhism pretty much took over the sub-continent. It’s also one of those schools of thought that have heavily coloured how Hinduism looks at itself, although nobody I know really practices Advaita Siddhanta. Also closer to home: the first Shankaracharya was apparently born in Kerala and he’s the person who apocryphally debated a Buddhist monk to a standstill and restored Hinduism to south India. Frankly, I find this school of thought a bit nihilistic, but it’s interesting to read about how old scholars thought about consciousness, and the lessons we can learn from them today.

• This week I started using the standing desk as a standing desk again. I also bought a longer 10Gbps cable to connect the new under-desk desktop computer to the router so the standing desk could stand up. I’ve been sitting too long the past few months and really should get back to regular exercise. As an aside: These cables have been getting really cheap and I want to wire up my new house entirely in 10Gbps cables so I can use a NAS wired up somewhere just like I’d use an internal drive.

• I also made a small tweak to add an iPad (this was Ammu’s, but she wasn’t using it much) as a sidecar display. I almost exclusively keep my Notes app open on it when working and it’s like a nice adjacent display that constantly keeps displaying important info. One problem I’ve found is the sidecar display seems to disappear after the Mac is locked for a long time and needs to be re-added manually from Settings.

• We went out to the Olive restaurant nearby for dinner. Decent ambience, but the music (bhangra and loud Hindi music) totally didn’t match the vibes at all.

• We had another round of IVF visits this week. Our doctor is in a different city (Kochi) that’s around 200km away, but takes around 6 hours by road. For context, that’s about half the time it takes to travel Bengaluru to Thiruvananthapuram, but it’s 4 times shorter. Yes, that’s how terrible roads have always been in Kerala. Because these visits are unplanned and we can’t book train tickets in advance (& flights always seem very expensive), I end up driving 500-odd kilometres and 12 hours to and fro in a couple of days. There’s a lot of construction work going on in the NH, and hopefully things will be better in a few years.

• On the way back from Kochi we stopped by my old school. There’s been so many changes, but it still feels like home. I also saw some recent students playing Basketball and when I told them I’m of the 2002 batch, they said they weren’t even born then ?

• Also while driving, we managed to listen to almost the entirety of Kazhakinte Ithihasam. I’ve never been super good at reading Malayalam, but audio books such as this give me a great way to enjoy my native language literature. It’s a wonderful stream of consciousness book filled with magic realism and anecdotes that scatter around everywhere, but I did find it a bit confusing to follow. The Malayalam used is also difficult to understand and parse, with a lot of words that aren’t in common usage nowadays or a lot of really literary Malayalam that I’ve never been exposed to. I did like how open Ravi (the protagonist) was about sexuality though. Kerala I’ve always felt is filled with repressed souls, and perhaps these books (& recent movies) give everybody an outlet.

Links of the Week

• There’s now a way to biohack your mouth. We’re living in interesting times.
• Was looking into adding NFC tags around the house to control a few smart home appliances we have. Surprisingly, there’s apps to read and write NFC tags on iOS too.
• Inspect seems like a cool way to debug Safari Webviews on iOS. Last time I did it, it was always a guessing game.

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