I've been on Hugo for a while now and I have made a couple of blog posts as well. I am fully using the emacs org mode and am content, to say the least, with the flow. I maintain the website for another friend which is a wordpress instance. I cannot expect them to start using VSCode or Emacs to write their content, let alone set them up with AWS keys and a publish flow.

I recently moved my website from wordpress to hugo. It is taking a little getting used to, but I absolutely love the fact that I don't have to leave my editor to update my blog. I was still editing markdown and had to lookup markdown syntax here and there. So today I spent some time to figure out how to get the ball rolling with org-mode in emacs. Turns out, its not that hard at all.

Hello Hugo! Today I moved my blog to hugo. Frankly it doesn’t make intuitive sense to run a blog on a static site generator. But when I think about it again, my blog is my expression of ideas. I rarely engage on the comments section. And the best way to let me know your thoughts is still to tweet at me. Given these, it makes sufficient sense to run the blog as a static site.

What and Why? Personally, newsletters are the new blogs. While I don’t write or curate my own, I read a lot. And I am over-subscribed too. I subscribe to about 15 different newsletters but manage to read 1 or 2 in a week. That isn’t good. Luckily, I don’t yet pay to subscribe for any of them – and precisely for this reason. The only newsletter that I pay and subscribe to is the Blackbook newsletter by Vijay Anand.

I, accidentally, noticed that my WordPress instance was compromised. Of course, I would be the person to blame for this. It’s not a commercial thing, so I don’t nearly spend enough time looking under the hood. This cost me a couple of hours yesterday fixing and cleaning up the mess. I’ve taken some precautions to ensure I won’t need to look under the hood too frequently but also ensure I don’t sponsor some botnet or click-fraud elsewhere on the tubes.

For the longest time in my life, I have wanted to learn meditation. People always made it sound so mystical and so powerful, that I wanted to have my share of it too. At least, that’s how the fad for meditation started. I remember trying to meditate as early as my mid-twenties in 2006-2007. My mom could meditate but she never made it sound like anything special. My maternal grandfather was so good at it that we always thought he was asleep sitting.

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good.

I’ll be 40 in a year or two. I distinctly remember feeling a stomach churn and completely unprepared when I turned 30. I had just finished my MS thesis and joined Atheros. I had a long way to go to have something I could call a career. It was very unsettling at that time. But then things happened and here I am, almost ten years later, still embarked on a journey to identify the problems I really want to solve.

I had a #showerthought idea yesterday. I am just logging this one here as I don’t have the time to build this one. I hope to get to it if I can get some validation. TL;DR: The idea is a virtual open-mic platform where a comic can share his set as a video and people can react to specific jokes by clicking on emojis throughout the delivery. The comic can choose how long they want to get this feedback and get information on what works and what doesn’t.

Even at the cost of annoying folks around me, I’d dare say that 2020 has actually been a fabulous year for me, personally. I learnt quite a bit about myself, learnt a couple of new skills, learnt what I don’t like, what I don’t want to do, fixed a couple of things about my health and more. I’ll try to chronicle these for the rest of the post. I typically consider my date of birth as the beginning of another year.