This week: a scooter accident, dining at an expensive restaurant, nostalgic school memories, reading a fantasy series, and a review of GraphQL technology.

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.

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What’s been happening

• My dad fell down from his scooter this week. It’s been raining quite heavily and a girl in front of him braked hard so he did too, slipped and fell. Thankfully he got away with just a few scratches and no broken bones. He’s got a few stitches on his chin that needs to be removed after 10 days. Police arrived quickly on the scene and took him to the medical college hospital nearby and they treated him quite well. It’s the main Government hospital here and we usually don’t visit it, but I was surprised by how clean and neat the emergency room was. The doctors were great, helpful, and professional. We took X Rays and a CT scan as well. The accident happened in the morning and by around 2PM Ammu and I drove him back. My brother and his girlfriend were also at home, so all of us were at the hospital all through.

• We stopped by Villa Maya on the way back from Kochi last week to have dinner. It’s one of those places that has good food and a nice ambiance but is extremely expensive. Saw a lot of foreigners there, and that seems to be the target crowd as the prices are more dollar friendly than rupee. But the ambiance is great, the food is authentic and the history is neat.

• I think the cheapest thing to drink or eat in my school canteen was something called a Sip Up. All of my friends used to fight over who got the last bits. The ones you get now all seem to be milk-based, but the ones I remember was just syrup and water, and I finally found an authentic-tasting one:

• It’s mango season and parents have been showering us with tons of the fruit. I seem to have it daily now.

• I’ve been reading the Alchemist portal fantasy series and yup it’s an ok read. Not amazing, but I kind of like Russian-inspired LitRPG. It’s darker and grittier and the protagonists seem to behave unexpectedly most of the time.

• After a long while, I also picked up a game to play: The Thaumaturge. It’s very different compared to the last game I finished (Stray), and I’m still getting used to the ARPG-like perspective and turn-based combat, but the story and the world is amazingly detailed. Again, another non-west fantasy world, this time inspired by Polish and Russian legends. I’m not sure I’ll finish this to be honest, but currently playing about an hour after work.

• I took this neat photo of 3 Apple devices updating at the same time. Apple has been pretty great at these updates recently, and I still wonder sometimes at the audacity of converting over a filesystem silently in a point release (10.3).

• I used the 1Password SSH agent this week to move over my work and personal SSH keys. While doing that I also rotated most of the keys. The Github integration was great, including autofilling the keys and signing commits. We use an SSH-based proxy at work, so that required a bit of tweaking, but after it was done, I thought I should have done this a long time ago. Passwords (& password-like entities like Passkeys and SSH keys) belong in a password manager, and nowhere else.

Links of the Week

• The death section here for the longest lived spider: Number 16 hits hard.  Have an uncle who is slowly succumbing to dementia now, and it’s sad to watch him start to live like this.
• I love stories that make famous figures sound more human, and this letter from Richard Feynman to his wife was so lovely and poignant.
• I really liked this article denouncing GraphQL, and it resonated with what I’ve always felt about the technology but didn’t have the experience to put into words. Every time I’ve started to use it, it felt over-engineered and clunky. I think the biggest benefit was “getting an API for free”, but I much prefer the alternatives suggested there now that it has matured a bit. Or if you are going JavaScript all the way, trpc or a full-stack framework for sure.

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