2023

no matter how you paint it, 2023 was not a rosy year. if life's about taking the rough with the smooth, this year was more rough than smooth - no doubt about that.

still, now that the year is drawing to a close, I have much to be grateful for. of all the things that went wrong, as well as the many more things that threatened to go wrong, I'm grateful that no permanent damage seems to have been done.

2023 was the sort of year that made me second guess a lot of things I took for granted. I don't know if it's just the effect of things that happened, but now, every decision I make seems to be underscored by the thought that everything could go wrong. and I now accept that.

is it just all the risks I've been taking catching up with me? or have I simply been unlucky?

either way, I don't think I've changed my behaviour. I've just pressed on harder, conscious that I'm doing what I've always wanted to do.

I don't know what 2024 holds in store, and to some extent, I don't particularly care. I know what I want to make of it. 

I don't have any resolutions or even plans for 2024. I'm not going to think about what the universe is going to send my way. all I know is, I'm already doing what I want to do. I'll just keep doing it, maybe a little more earnestly than this year!

The boring movie

It was some sort of spy situation, in a weird part of the world - looked somewhat like India, but not quite. Tom Cruise was with a female sidekick. They were in some sort of dangerous situation and needed to get out quickly. Tom hit some sort of contraption that launched himself and his accomplice like some sort of jetpack/ejector seat, but instead of being launched vertically, they were launched diagonally, almost horizontally, into the distance, past the seafront, into the sea. When they were just a speck on the horizon, the parachute launched. as they got closer to the water, it turned out it wasn't exactly the sea, but some sort of frozen iceberg, except that instead of the ice being white as icebergs are usually pictured to be, it was transparent - it looked somewhat like a frozen transparent wave! The wave was hollow - it had some kind of tunnel, the entrance of which Tom cruise and his accomplice slid through and came to a halt, as the villians or whoever was the cause of danger they were escaping watched on disappointed at their getting away.

Tom Cruise decided he had to go back in, alone.

The next thing, the sun had set, it was dark, and Tom Cruise was back in the ramshackle building he had escaped from, but alone. It was less a building than a crumbling abandoned, possibly half-constructed building, that was long but narrow. It was barely two or three storeys high, and didn't have any lights on. The street was lit in dim yellow light, and while there were other lights in the distance, none of the buildings nearby (all of similar height and not looking particularly well kept) seemed occupied or lit either. There were two guards at the top of the staircase, pacing up and down the corridor outside a room - presumably the room he had previously escaped from.

Tom made no attempt to avoid them, and got into a fistfight of sorts with both guards. The fight just went on with both sides trading blows, but no advantage gained or lost.

At some point, the door of the room opened and the guy who they were guarding (the boss of sorts?) emerged. He didn't seem to take too kindly to the scuffle and pushed the two guards aside, coming face to face with Tom Cruise.

At some point during the scuffle, the point of view had changed from third person to Tom Cruise's, and now it suddenly became apparent that the boss was some sort of giant - Tom's (and hence my) line of vision barely got to the bottom of his chest, and his hairy, muscular abdomen.

A set of quick punches to his middle, and the fight was on again. Despite the massive difference in size, there was still no clear advantage to either side. The fight seemed to just go on and on.

And then, I woke up.

It was 7:19am, and I think it was something on my phone that woke me up, although the wifi was off so it couldn't have been a message, my phone hadn't rang, and it wasn't my alarm either.

I thought to myself, am I really going to go back to sleep? That fight was super boring!

I did try to go back to sleep, and the fight seemed to resume, except the boss was now closer to Tom Cruise's height, and they were more kickboxing than fistfighting.

I remember thinking to myself, there must be some way to make this more interesting!

At some point in that fight I drifted off to a more dreamless sleep.

The anniversary adventure

23rd December marked 7 years since we got married. I still remember some of that day very well, although given the amount of photographs, facebook statuses and other digital evidence I have of the day, it's hard to separate what I remember organically from what I remember digitally. It's true though that the statuses and photos and videos and whatnot are linked to feelings, feelings I can still feel inside me from that eventful day. And I guess one of the overwhelming feelings I have from that day was of adventure!

My life 7 years ago was definitely crazier and more unpredictable than what it is now, and while I remember the feelings and even feel the motivation to do the same things, it's almost like something's holding me back. It's like, every time I sit at my couch and look at my motorbike parked outside my front door, I think, I could just go for a spin in the middle of the night? Only difference is, there's no crazy friends to meet for tea at 1am, no all-night chai and bun-maska stalls, the waterfront feels boring, and I should really be going to bed.

Anyway.

On the 23rd, I sneaked out of the house to buy mutton from St George Market. I thought Shruti was still asleep and wouldn't notice. Turns out she did. Does that count as adventure? When was the last time I tried to sneak out of the house without telling Shruti? Must be years!

We then changed and headed out for lunch at the "Dirty Duck", a rather nice (and award-winning, it turns out!) restaurant at Holywood. I didn't really do any research at all, Shruti had done the reservation, and I was thankful I had stuck on navigation before we set off, because I wouldn't had found it - I had no idea Holywood had such a nice seafront, much less that the dirty duck was situated right off it!

Lunch was great, and we were so stuffed we decided to walk around before heading back. We walked to the high street, stopped at Cafe Nero for a coffee, and walked around the town centre and back to where we parked the bike. Wore our helmets, gloves, and was about to set off when I had an "oh no" second: I had popped the keys to the ignition into the locked fairing pocket!

I tried jimmying the lock open with our house keys (yes, thankfully we carried a spare set, there have been plenty of times we didn't because I have one set on the bike keys - in fact evern today, Shruti grabbed the spare set as we were getting out the door, "just in case"!), to no avail. Someone was unlocking their car in front of us, and we asked them if they had a screwdriver. Strangely enough, they said they didn't, but they checked the boot and found a first aid kit, which had a pair of scissors - that didn't work either. In the meantime, Shruti called the nearest locksmith (a half an hour's walk, but still in Holywood) but there was no answer. I then called the next nearest locksmith, but he said they don't do emergency callouts and asked us to call the locksmith we had just called.

After one last call to the nearby locksmith, we decided to head home and fetch the duplicate key instead. Luckily for us, we were just a 5 minute walk from the train station (we had just walked past it), and the next train was due in another 15 minutes. We booked a single ticket for Shruti and a return for myself. Back in Belfast, the quicket means of transport was actually the bus, so we took the bus home - again, a single ticket for Shruti and a day pass for me. Back home, I picked up the powerbank and charging cable, headphones, a bottle of water, and headed back out to catch the same bus that had just dropped us home, headed back the other way. Ran to the station, and caught the next train with just 4 minutes to spare! I was glad the timing worked out perfectly, and also that the key opened the lock, despite my attempts at forcing it open with a scissors!

Given the sort of thing that just happened, I was super cautious as I put the keys away and got ready to start the bike, conscious that all 3 sets of keys were now on me, and there was no plan b!

On the way home, I did stop for groceries, and also picked up a drill machine from Jay before finally getting home around 9pm - 4 hours after I locked the keys in the bike.

The rest of our anniversary was fairly mundane, sitting around with Shruti, watching youtube and talking about stuff - enough adventure for today!

It may feel strange, but less than a downer, I felt it was actually nice to have a bit of adventure on our anniversary. We had a good time, but we also took the rough with the smooth, and all's well that ends well. Which kinda sums up our relationship too.

Happy anniversary to us!

I dream of blogging

I was in a café, with Sidharth, Reshma and Shweta. It's hard to say where the café was, and there was no visible branding, but it did vaguely seem like it was in India. It felt like evening, and it felt like we had been there for a while. I abruptly turned the conversation to my blog. I told them, I've recently gotten back to my old style blog. The same style as what I used to write when I was in VJTI. In fact, the plan is to continue the old blog. Sidharth seemed unimpressed. I told him it would be interesting! The blog has stuff about our VJTI days, like copying Shweta's assignments and Reshma's notes.

Sidharth still seemed unimpressed. He said he'll decide when he can read it. How could he read it? 

This caught me off guard. How could Sidharth read my blog? I fumbled a bit, and then told him, it's in a database. An access database. 

He was even more unimpressed. What sort of blog is in an access database? 

That's when I woke up and decided I need to make sure my blog is fully uploaded to the Internet before the year is over! 

grocery shopping

 I had just entered a supermarket. It was a Lidl. I had cycled in. There was a room right next to the entrance, which was painted in bright colours and with stuff that might make it appealing to kids - a play room of sorts. Except that there were no toys, furniture, kids, or indeed any people at all in it. There was a cycle parked right in the centre of the room though, so I figured it might be acceptable to leave my cycle there as well while I shopped. I decided to stand my cycle against one of the walls of the room - and noticed there's a small door at the end of the wall. The door was locked, but I moved my cycle so that someone opening the door wouldn't knock it over. I then left that room and entered the store proper. There was a counter which had bakery items and a slicing machine. A man was at the counter as well, and it seems he was operating the bread slicing machine, which was unusual. The machine also looked different from the usual ones I've been using in Lidl stores. I saw the man put a bar of dark coloured cake to be sliced, and noticed it was being sliced into long slices instead of along the width of the cake as would be usual. Menawhile, the man was also making some sort of cheese toastie, except that after the toastie was made, he cut it into strips lengthwise, so it looked like cheese and bread strips. I asked him if he'd slice a loaf of bread for me, but he told me this counter was only for cakes and sandwiches. I looked for the actual bread slicing machine, but isntead found an entrance to another room. This room was colourfully (but not very brightly) lit, and had a comic book theme, including moving spotlights that contained colour projections of comic book characters. It seemed quite vivid and surreal. The room looked like it might have comic books, but on closer look, it was actually comic book themed greeting cards!

I picked up a very fancy card - I don't remember what was on the cover, but it was a birthday card. The inside ofthe card had a whole long message, which almost looked like a whole letter to the person whose birthday it was! Strange. Stranger though, was the fact that it was pre-printed with the name of the recipient and the sender! It was a birthday card to Stephanie from Roseanna. As I realized the names, I thought to myself, this can't be real! Why would a card shop in Lidl have a card which was clearly from my (late) aunt to my cousin?

And that's when I woke up.

shower thoughts

 an sms I sent an hour ago has not been delivered.

it's because the messaging app used RCS by default.

I'm not sure why it's set to do so, but I guess nobody would actually use RCS unless it was turned on by default. 

nobody cares if a message is sent over RCS or SMS as long as it gets to its destination.

these days, everyone has data on, unless they've turned it off, in which case they probably don't want messages either - so that's an advantage.

wonder what other advantages RCS has.

I assume, unlike MMS, there is no fallback system for RCS (MMS used to send you a SMS with a link as an alternative to downloading the MMS itself on the phone).

so RCS probably is completely carrier independent and should be free/unlimited.

can RCS have a fallback like MMS did?

that would require the messaging client to support it over SMS.

any client side SMS to RCS bridge needs an intelligent client, but there is no guarantee of that. after all, you could be sending a SMS to a 25 year old phone.

25 year old phones are interesting. they had a strange sort of data connectivity, WAP.

I wonder how WAP actually worked. it definitely wasn't regular TCP/IP, and while the pages looked like very basic HTML, I'm sure there was more to it.

I wonder what's the application protocol part of WAP. could there be applications other than a browser on WAP?

MMS is an application, in a sense.

If there could be other applications on WAP, I wonder why I never heard of them.

I'm sure if there was a way to use WAP to chat, yahoo and msn messenger would have developed an app.

man, yahoo and msn messenger on WAP was crazy!

remember hitting refresh every 5 seconds to check for new messages? and the contact list that sorted itself by time seen, with online, idle and finally offline sections?

I think there would be an asterisk next to the name of the contact who had an unread message waiting for me.

unvisited links would be blue. visited, magenta.

I wonder how big each page was. definitely under a kilobyte. but they still took time to load!

I guess mobile Internet was so slow and limited back then that there was no point counting data. if you could find a way to use more than what would be considered fair, knock yourself out!

it's so hard to come to terms with that until WiFi came to phones in 2008, the only way in was via mobile networks.

2008 is not that long ago. broadband was pretty fast. MP3s were 10 years old. YouTube existed! and yet the only way to get something on your phone was mobile data or the memory card/USB port. and only data could be realistically called online communication.

it's now November 2023. so that was 15 years ago. my second phone.

my first phone was purchased in February 2004!

i wonder what was the date I purchased it. it definitely deserves a commemorative blog post. 20 years of smartphones!

I know exactly where it would be. my old blog!

ah, my old blog. back when I blogged and nobody read it because nobody around me knew what a blog was.

it's so much easier to blog now.

I miss my old school, hand-crafted blog.

I don't need to miss my old school, hand-crafted blog.

I am going to revive my old school, hand-crafted blog!

I wonder if it'll be safe to run ASP on a windows 2000 VM and expose it via my dynamic DNS.

Nope, definitely won't be safe!

Let's just stick with old school and forget about hand-crafted.

If it's a good platform, I should be able to import all my old posts into the new blog.

wouldn't it look weird? a post a day (or a couple a week) from 2003 to 2006, and then suddenly we jump to December 2023?

actually, it won't be weird. I'm sure I'm still almost the same.

I should take the images from the original website and stick them on the blog though.

"welcome to Kristopher's corner of the world wide web" - it doesn't get more late 90s corny than that!

I remember the font. my favourite font.

did the font make Kristopher look like krist0ph3r?

if it did, I now know where I got my inspiration from.

I must blog this on my main blog. 

all-inclusive!

Last week, we spent 5 days in the sunny (and occasionally - but only very briefly - rainy) Dominican Republic. It was my first time at an all inclusive tropical resort, and the sort of thing I wouldn't have planned myself, and definitely not in the part of the world I'd have usually considered for a holiday either. It was all thanks to Nisha and Pieter deciding to celebrate their pandemic wedding with a proper party! They picked a splendid resort, the Excellence Punta Cana, and going by reviews, it could very well be the best resort in the area. 

Punta Cana fits the definition of a tropical paradise to the letter, and after all the planning and booking and the long flight we landed at this quaint airport which even has a thatched roof!

Through the airport, we were at the spot where we were supposed to get our pre-arranged airport transfer. The staff were very courteous, the transport felt exclusive (a massive 7-seater Chevrolet Suburban for just the two of us, seems every group got a suburban to themselves, even though it was just 6 of us on that flight to that resort!)

Champagne at the resort gate while our bags were unloaded, we were escorted to the front desk where we were given the all important WiFi details (no password even!), key cards to our room, and the link to download the app through which we could get all the information we could need - restaurant and bar timings and menus, dress codes, etc. We were told what's included (basically knock ourselves out with the mini bar in the room, everything in the fridge, 24 hour room service etc.) literally everything!

It's a strange experience, when you can eat and drink everything on offer. Don't like something? Ask for something else. Can't decide what to drink? Order both! 5 or 6 restaurants, 3 or 4 bars, 3 swimming pools, Jacuzzi, a private-ish beach (open to the public, but there's no other resort around so it's pretty much exclusive). Sun beds, staff walking around to make sure food and drink is in constant supply. Courteous and attentive staff. Your belongings are safe anywhere you choose to leave them (and you obviously don't even need to carry anything besides your room card around). Shruti had looked up the menus of all the restaurants and made a list of what we should eat at which one. A list of cocktails/drinks we should try. At some point I stopped caring. The food was all passable, but nothing was truly great. Some of the drinks were uniformly good, others were hit-and-miss. There were so many activities, but at some point I wasn't really feeling like doing any of them. I realized it had reached a tipping point when there was a game organised in the pool where the staff threw dominoes into the pool and people took turns to fish out as many dominoes in a single breath (ie without surfacing) - something I'd normally love to do, but I just didn't feel like it it. I literally stood by in the pool for 15 minutes and watched people give it a try. 

Of course, I did enjoy the company - it was great to spend time with Nisha and Pieter, couple of their cousins I haven't met in decades, a few of their friends who we got to know over the period, interesting conversations, including one night we were up till 3am because the conversation was so interesting we lost track of time! But generally, by the end of the 5 days, I think we were ready to leave. I guess the only event we really enjoyed was the "Dominican Republic festival" they had one evening, which was a buffet of local dishes, with a live band, some traditional dances - I would honestly have preferred to eat local food every day, but there was no such option (except for a few measly offerings at the buffet restaurant which seemed neglected by everyone I saw!). My only regret was not eating at the Mexican restaurant which actually seemed authentic - it seems Shruti didn't really look at the menu when she was planning our meals, or maybe I didn't sound very enthusiastic about Mexican food when she read the menu out to me the weekend before we flew?

By the end of our stay we stopped eating lunch and instead would snack on coconut pulp from the fresh coconuts we were regularly drinking - something I noticed most people weren't doing. I stopped trying new cocktails or even looking at the menu. 

I realized I was eating and drinking way more than I should - not more than I used to say 10 years ago, but more than my body is currently used to. But given there was nothing much else to do, I had no way to assess how happy or unhappy my body was with the treatment. I felt mentally un-stimulated. I was feeling like taking naps instead of lazing in the pool. 

I felt a bit of guilt about being in this centrally air-conditioned room with the thermostat set to a cool 20°C while the rest of the country suffers from blackouts that lasted hours. Of drinking bottled water because that was the only option. I felt sad about having staff at my beck and call, doing everything to make my stay enjoyable.

When we were in the taxi to the airport, I was excited to actually be able to see the country outside of the resort.

I thought to myself - that one experience was enough for me. An all-inclusive resort certainly made it stress free when it came to organising and spending time together, but I definitely don't associate it with travel or a vacation. It's hard to put a name to the feeling, but I somehow feel like I must put some effort in order to enjoy things... in fact, I don't think I can fully enjoy experiences if there is no degree of discomfort involved. Maybe that's why I enjoyed my first night the most (if you disregard the wedding evening itself, for obvious reasons), because we were exhausted from the flight and I felt some discomfort in pushing myself to attend the "silent disco" after over 16 hours of travel!

Anyway - one more experience ticked off my list. Next up: Puerto Rico!