Project 42

Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice. Philosophers such as Heidegger, Satre and Merlean-Ponty have recognized this task of modern man by calling it the "Project", which is their term for the goal directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individuals life.

                                                             - Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

... a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic super-computer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the "Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything". For seven and a half million years Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer ,which was called Forth, was so large that it was mistaken for a planet.

                                                       - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams


(A new) Life begins at 42. New identities beckon.

Writer. Creator. Micro-preneur.

Here goes it.

Xenial upgrade

Upgraded the laptop at home to the latest Ubuntu LTS release viz. 16.04.1 on Saturday. Started the upgrade in the morning. There were a number of errors reported and the laptop refused to boot to Ubuntu post the upgrade. Thought my laptop was bricked as the Windows 10 boot also seemed to be affected.

Did some debugging in the afternoon to figure out the cause. Managed to boot into recovery mode on an older kernel image and get to the shell prompt. Running dpkg revealed more than 530 packages had not completed their installation. The root cause of the problem seemed to be the failure to configure the cron package due to some issue with LSB headers in VMWare USB init files that update-rc.d did not like. As I was not using VMWare, moved those files and re-installed the packages. Things went fine after that and was finally able to get the new release going.

A brand new OS on the laptop after 2 years. Still getting used to the new desktop interface.
My kindle also showed an upgrade message - postponed it for now.

Carless Drivers

If driverless cars are all the rage, what about carless drivers ?

Well, both Vidush and Vidyut fall into that category.

Endless hours spent driving imaginary cars with any round object working as a steering wheel and loud engine noises from their mouths. Literally motor mouths.

Laughy

Vidyut is starting to use this word "laughy". It means funny. Here's a laughy quote

"If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good." - Dr. Seuss

Sczool

Here's some non-sense verse I cooked up as part Vidush's English book exercise. The poem in the English book called Mish-Mash (an English translation of the original Bangla version called "Khichuri" by Sukumar Ray) is much better read.

In every class you'd see boys and gals. 

But this one class had only animals.

No Madam, No Sir, this certainly is not a zoo 

Even though we have an elephant, a giraffe and a kangaroo

They taught English, Science and some Math 

There were no uniforms but you had to take a bath.

It was tough to keep the whole class quiet 

A bigger challenge was to feed everyone the right diet

English came with grammar, verbs and pronouns 

There were a lot of ugh,er,um and frowns

In science there was lot of theory and an experiment 

While all could stand, the giraffe was always bent

And when it was time time for Math, there was fear and dread

Most could count till four, only the centipede made it to hundred

All day long they had to behave and be mild 

All were happiest at eve, when they could run free in the wild.

 

Cartooning

Attended a cartoon workshop in January this year at the Indian Institute of Cartoonists. Very interesting experience. Below are some scanned images of my creations from that workshop.

Roman god of Pizza ? Tony !

Acquired a microwave oven over the Sankranti/Pongal long weekend. With expired gift cards that had to be renewed by adding an additional 50% of each gift card. A strange quirk that was a result of a combination of gift cards not carrying the expiry date, retain outlets unable to confirm when the card actually expired and patently stupid enterprise business workflows having web forms for the previous era paper gift coupons but get translated to more modern plastic cards. The details could be another blog post - so we leave it at that.

The kids demanded to have a pizza made at home. Went and bought some pizza base and mozzarella cheese. Sunday brunch menu was to be pizza. Followed the instructions that asked for pre-heating the oven to 200 deg C. Literal following of the manual meant I missed the minor detail of keeping the crusty plate inside the oven during this pre-heating process !

Got the base ready in a bit of hurry with butter, toppings of tomato, baby corn, onion  & capsicum, grated the cheese on top and kept this raw pizza on the crusty plate. Asked the kids to pray to the Italian god of pizza. For usual South Indian food, we normally pray to Krishna (by saying Govinda !) - so by induction a Roman god had to be invoked. The kids came up the name Tony almost instantly.
Sounded Italian. So went with it.

Placed the plate on the high rack once the oven beeped mid-program. After 7 minutes, the pizza was not entirely ready so kept it for a few more minutes.
First home made pizza at our home was ready. The kids loved it. It was not great but not too bad either.

Jai Tony !

 हर किसी को मुकम्मल जहाँ नहीं मिलता ।
किसी को ज़मीन, तो किसी को आसमान नहीं मिलता ॥

Pool Shpool

It's day 3 without the car. No cars available is the message on the uber app.Caught an auto to the main road. Turned on the app again. Got an option on Uber Pool for Rs. 118/-.

Decided to go with that option. The cab arrived in about 10 minutes. Had 2 passengers already in the back seat. Had to occupy the front passenger seat which felt cramped with my 2 bags. The other passengers got down after 15 mins.

Thought had the car just for myself till my destination. But when the driver looked like taking a wrong route was when I realized there was one more pickup.
This was a car pool - so part of the package.
Reached office in about 1 hour 15 minutes - not too bad.

One after a billion

It is a Tuesday and the car still refuses to start. Wifey had called a mechanic but he did not turn up yesterday. Decided to try a cab aggregator service. Mostly influenced by a promotional offer that came my way after paying my broadband bill. Still wondering if that offer had anything to do the issue with my car. Far fetched  by any stretch of imagination. A random co-incidence is all it is.

So downloaded the Uber app and registered my account. Booked a cab today morning. Hit with the ominous surge pricing. Was asked to confirm 1.9 - surge factor at 8:30 am. Surge factor can go up to 5X as I got to know while talking to the driver later.

Proceeded and got a cab within a minute.

Got talking with the driver on the way. Better understood the cab aggregator business model.

Driver owns the fuel and car maintenance costs (including insurance, regular maintenance etc.).

They get paid a fixed amount for every ride. Yes, fixed amount for a ride, irrespective of what customer pays for the ride. Driver pays Rs. 300/- per week as device charges for the mobile phone and SIM card that Uber offers. Money gets transferred to the driver bank account on a monthly basis (Ola apparently settles daily). The driver mentioned that he has to do 10-13 rides per day to make it work for him. That implies starting at 6am in the morning and going on till midnight.

No wonder these unicorns are growing like crazy. 

Bill came to Rs. 498/-. Paid Rs. 0/- thanks to the promo code.

Uber just celebrated a billion rides. I have come late to this party.

Realization of the day - Cost of convenience matched by surge pricing.

Starting trouble

Monday morning struck unexpectedly. I was all set to leave for office. Put my bags in the car and turned on the ignition. But the car refused to start. Tried cranking the engine few more times but no change in result. Had to choose a different mode of transport to get to work.

Started walking up to the main road which was about 2 KM from home. Decided to catch an auto-rickshaw as I was getting late. First auto I approached, he asked how much would I pay as he refused to go by meter. Typical response. Stopped another one who agreed and off we went. Took about 1 hour to reach office by usual route. Got exposed to all the traffic smoke and dust on the road. Paid Rs. 192/-.

On the way back, caught a Volvo bus till Sarjapur junction and walked 4KM from there to home. Bus fare was Rs. 60/- and took 1.5 hours. Felt some nausea and got a headache. The walk back also involved lots of dust and smoke.

Reached home with burning eyes and a heavy head. Some corn and hot ginger tea helped pull through a tcon later in the evening.

Realized how bad the air quality was on Bangalore roads.
And the luxury of travelling by own car everyday with the windows up.