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.