Excursions

Natural beauty always trumps everything artificial - allows me stay connected to our roots.

There is no point ignoring sleep - you can’t steal hours from what the sleep deserves. You can be happy for a day because you got some extra hours in your day to work on things you enjoy. Or to “relax” by watching some mindless videos that YouTube’s recommendation engines serve you. Or to read those articles you have been adding to your Instapaper queue. Or to binge watch and complete that one season of the show you enjoy on Netflix.

Sure, you can do all this on a late night by stealing some hours from sleep. But it vehemently gets back at you. If not on the very next day, you have to pay back in the week that follows. For days in a row. It is better to let sleep carry on with its routine.

I went very conservative while setting the reading challenge for myself this year - I have been very poor recently in completing any books. Was pleasing to find am 3 books ahead of schedule already. A routine with less podcasts and a lot more Audible gets the credit.

This is the snapshot of my daily habit tracker for August. I have started with a smaller list — but I want to make sure the task itself doesn’t become a burden.

• Morning walk/run
• 100 words published
• Measure weight
• Three meals a day
• Regular sleep routine

Black coffee or a green tea - what would sit next to me as I get started on my next project? Uhmm … nah. Got to be the good old regular chai! ✍🏽

I’m seriously considering buying an instant camera — thought of having an analog note of a memory is genuinely appealing. However, I do wonder what am I signing up for? Would it stay locked in a drawer somewhere? What should I even look out for if I do decide to take the leap?

Written languages based on alphabets are one of the great human accomplishments. (…) when I write the word “human” you can fill in what you imagine a human to look like. The word itself carries some fundamental attributes of being a human but the rest is intentionally underspecified. This allows us to use a single word that applies independent of gender, nationality, race, clothing, etc. That is the power of language based on alphabets, because the letters themselves carry no meaning. Even the meaning of a word can evolve over time. For example, the word “couple” at one point might have meant a male-female couple but is now used to describe any two people who are paired.

A thoughtful essay, but I completely disagree. There is an innate assumption here that everyone can read and write English alphabet. It is, in reality, not the case. There are tons of alphabets across nations and regions. In India itself, there are 11 alphabets. My mom can fluently read and write Devanagari, but that is not the case with English alphabets.

Emoji cross the confines of regions - primarily because it is visual. Is it perfect? Of course, not — we have managed to mess up the standards in implementation across platforms.

However, at least, I can send my mom a “smile” emoji without spelling it out in Devanagari. It was the first thing that lent her confidence to start using smartphones, way before Devanagari support was even introduced.

A couple of my colleagues have been debating on since how long the dinosaurs have been extinct — one claims it was 200 years. Another says 2000 years. And am wondering who should I correct first? Or should I even correct anyone? Because I think it is completely meaningless.

Given a choice, would you prefer a prepaid unlimited plan for something or pay as you use? More things I review recently — mobile data plans, cable, broadband — I realize pay-as-you-use end up being costlier. I do not understand the business sense behind this.

I came across an interesting project - rwtxt - which is now serving the ideas subdomain of my website. I was, since long, in search of a simple writing pad to capture quick thoughts - light enough to be accessible from mobile. This fits the bill, so in trial mode now. (h/t @eli)