Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
—David Allen, GTD for Teens
The more I hold in my head, the more my head flips around between thoughts, the less focused I am, the less productive I am.
Just write the thought down, bring it to a (temporary) closure, and focus on the task at hand.
There’s no trying new things without letting some things go.
There’s no new life, if there’s no death.
There’s no bandwidth to explore new books, genres, TV shows, people, if we’re not ready to abandon the ones that turn stale, or we grow out of, or finished.
Bandwidth is finite. Cognitivo capacity is finite. Time is finite.
A core constraint on growing, changing, exploring, is our reluctance to let go of some of what we have and are.
Create space by letting some mediocre stuff go. Then fill it with something new, untested, unusual. If it fits, great. If it doesn’t, chuck it and try again. Something new, untested, unusual.
Wake-up with the second or the third alarm, and start doing ankle stretches—10x each of 4 side stretches. Chewie senses my feet moving, and starts snuggling-up tighter, while also turning his belly up. So, the ankle stretches are quickly followed by a couple of minutes of belly rubs, snuggles and kisses.
Then I get off the bed, and do a small set of yoga stretches on the floor—10x lower back stretches, 10x cat stretches, a couple of baby stretches, down dogs and roll-ups. Chewie occasionally joins me for the stretches, though many days he just stays sprawled on the bed.
After the floor stretches, I kick him off the bed, and make the bed—not as well as him, but I do.
Only after that, do we head downstairs to drink water, make coffee, feed Chewie, and take him out for his morning business. I’m wide awake before the coffee is ready.
Little S was sulking yesterday afternoon.
I saw him standing outside his house, doing nothing, looking morose. I know that look. That’s almost exactly how I used to sulk.
Later in the evening, he came over for a bit of play and chat, sans parents.
I asked him how/why did the sulking session end?
“My legs started hurting”
I love the honesty in kids 🙂
This week I moved this website from a Dreamhost shared server to a Linode VPS. I then distributed that Linode server through Cloudflare.
It took me a a day and a bit to get it working well on Linode1. Most of the work was
i) backing up databases and files from Dreamhost and transferring them to Linode, and
ii) ironing out the kinks with the WordPress/PHP configuration that I didn’t have to manage at Dreamhost.
I also had to configure the sites on Apache by myself—it was fairly straightforward—and set up some security measures and firewall. I’ve always had separate domain registrar (Gandi now, Godaddy earlier), hosting provider (Dreamhost earlier, now Linode fronted by Cloudflare), and email provider (Google Apps + Dreamhost/Gandi), so configuring DNS wasn’t a bother.
The website was already faster and more stable after moving to Linode. I had been itching to use Cloudflare2 for a while, and decided to give it a try. I switched the other website first. It worked fine, so the next day I switched this one as well.
Switching on Cloudflare was a breeze. No messing with config files or terminal was required (though I kind of missed it3). They auto-detected all the DNS settings from my existing Linode server. I only need to change the name servers at Gandi, and wait for the change to propagate. I’d done a bit of research on common issues people face when connecting WordPress with Cloudflare, and was prepared for them. Thankfully, none of them appeared for me.
With the full Linode+Cloudflare configuration now in place, the website is massively faster than it ever was on Dreamhost. It’s served through a global CDN, the server is better specced, and gets a lower peak load due to CDN caching.
The other interesting bit: this amazing Linode+Cloudflare setup costs me half of what the Dreamhost shared server did.
I am happy 😊
Continue reading Goodbye Dreamhost. Hello, Linode + Cloudflare
It was a beautiful day.
It was a long day.
It was a happy day.
I was trying to access one of my shared hosting servers (Server A) using SSH. Entered the password wrong a few times, and got my home IP blocked.
I already had an SSH session in another VPS server (Server B). So I SSH’d to Server A from Server B’s SSH session. I am now copying data from Server A to Server B by creating a SSH session (SCP) from Server A’s SSH session (within Server B’s SSH session).
Me -> Server A (SSH1) > Server B (SSH2) > Server A (SCP/SSH3).
Should I create another SSH session from Server B’s SSH prompt into Server A to verify that the data got copied? :D
Earlier I wrote about remembering fractions of 6 due to influence of cricket. In the footnotes there, I mentioned also being good with number 7.
I remembered why I (subconsciously) know so many multiples and fractions of 7. It’s got to do with all those physics problems in high school.
Gravitational acceleration (g) near earth is 9.8m/s2. This can also be written as 7*7*2/10.
2 and 10 are easy to manoeuvre. 7 required me to calculate the fractions and multiples.
Since there were a lot of questions with g involved, I subconsciously memorised the frequent multiples and fractions. Now, decades later, I still (subconsciously) remember a fair number of them without having to bother with the calculation.
I want to live in Spain some day. Not visit. Live.
The only two cities I have considered for living in are Madrid and Barcelona.
Barcelona is my favourite but they don’t speak Spanish.
Madrid is a close second, but they don’t have the sea.
Valencia has both, but it’s not Barcelona or Madrid 🙃
I read a fair number of books every year. Based on the stuff I’ve read last couple of years, I have observed a winning method of structuring concepts in non-fiction books. The easiest to consume non-fiction books appear to use this familiar structure to present the chapters/concepts:
- Start with an anecdote, or a story. The story displays, or better, ends with the concept the chapter intends to impress.
- Follow up with an explanation of the concept—its definition, origins, benefits, why-it-works, side-effects, etc.
- Reinforce with references to research, or interviews with researchers who have studied the characteristic in depth.
- Finish with a few more short anecdotes. Even better if these are follow-up stories to the ones in the first section, and/or lead to the concept in the following chapter.
