Weekly Notes 15/2024

The heat wave continues in Bangalore, and there is no summer rain yet. We have been considering buying an AC for a long time. This week, we purchased it. It is here but is yet to be set up. On the other hand, plants love the sun. All of our balcony and neighborhood plants are shining, and there are new dasavala (Hibiscus) flowers on our balcony.

• 👪 We had lunch with extended family at Karavali, inside the Taj Gateway (now called Vivanta, Residency Road). The restaurant is inside a Mangalore tiled house, which is cooler than the surroundings, even without AC. It has excellent food and a relaxed atmosphere. It's a great place to spend time eating with family or friends. 
• 🎉 Many parts of India, including Karnataka, celebrated yugaadi on the 9th. Happy New Year, everyone. ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ಹರುಷ ತರಲಿ. ನಿಮ್ಮ ಹೊಟ್ಟೆ ಹಾಗು ತಲೆ ತಣ್ಣಗಿರಲಿ. Also 11th was Eid. Happy Eid. I hope you get to eat the best food for the rest of your life.
• 💻 It was a short work week, but some important things got done.
• 💻 I have been going through NMG/2024 submissions. It always takes more time than I plan. This year, there were ~350 applications. It means days of reading, even if I spent a couple of minutes on average on each application. For some, I need to re-read or go into detail. It's fun but also quite a bit of work. The final list is ready; I should send initial emails in the next few days. 
• 🚙 I collected my RC card from the RTO office this week. It was just lying there. Online, the status was "Paper RC pending at printing," so I waited a long time (we got IBV a year back) before making my 45-minute trip to Jayanagar. They are supposed to send it home. According to the person at the counter, they did, and apparently, the postman couldn't deliver, so he returned. But I doubt they even tried.
• 💻 In week 45/2023, I wrote about building the Surveillance in Bangalore contributor's leaderboard using Budibase and CouchDB. This week, I replaced Budibase with good old Node-Red. I am pleased with this rebuild. It's simple and stable—the way I like it.
• 🫂I will be in Chennai for Paradox/2024. I plan to be there for a day or two, mainly on May 30th and 31st. Let me know if you are in Chennai and want to catch up. I will be inside the IITM campus, but I am okay with getting out to meet people for coffee or food. 
• 💻 I updated the default language of @vachana bot to Kannada. Now, clients can use this information to do whatever they want. 
• 🧘🏼 I joined basic Yoga classes at The Practice Room. I want to practice and see how my body feels. 
• 🍻 There is a new We:Neighborhood in the neighborhood. Anju and I paid a quick visit. I miss the old Windsor Pub at Vasanthanagar. I wish there were something similar in the area that I could visit casually with friends. 
• 🕸️ MediaTemple, where I used to host the blogs, has been acquired by Godaddy. So, all my blogs now are on Godaddy-managed WordPress. The migration has worked quite well. Except for today, thej.in and social.thej.in went offline. I checked the server it was up, but when I checked DNS, it returned nothing. I checked the DNS records, and everything looked good. I have not changed anything in months. Then it occurred; I checked the Nameservers. Unfortunately, for this domain, I had used MediaTemple's name servers. It looks like they finally brought down the MT's Nameservers, which caused my DNS records to vanish. At least they should have checked how many of their hosted domains use MT's nameservers before bringing it down. Anyway, I updated the DNS to use default Godaddy Nameservers, so they are back.