This week note covers the week of 13th–20th July.
Since I’m writing this week note so late, I’ll throw in an extra day for free.
Last week was the week of birthdays. Both my wife and our now 4yo A had their birthdays, and the whole week was spent in celebrations. For A’s birthday, we went to the Aquarium Paradise, probably the largest aquarium in Bengaluru. A had a lot of fun looking at all the fish and other sea creatures. The photo above is from the aquarium, which had a weird theme of Egypt × Aliens × Pirates × Mermaids. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Afterward, we decided to take a metro train back to home. It was A’s first time riding a metro and she was excited as anything. She kept peering out of the window at the scenery. It took roughly the same time as taking a cab, but the journey was much more pleasant away from the pollution of roads.
We got cakes, three cakes in fact, for A’s birthday: a cheesecake for home, a chocolate cake for neighbours and a vegan mango cake for A’s classmates. A loved cutting the cakes and sang her own birthday song 😊
After the week’s usual commute-and-work slog — with one cab ride that took two hours instead of one — we were back to celebrating the next birthday. For my wife’s birthday we went to Nagarjuna and had their special chicken biryani. There were also kachoris and icecream for snacks one day.
The celebrations continued today. We went to Lavonne café for drinks, and then Chinita for lunch. This time I manged to capture some photos.
Food and Drinks
The week of celebrations is over now, and it’s time to get back to dieting and exercising.
Last week I managed to go to two drum classes. I attempted to play Give Me Novacaine by Green Day — actually from my drumming wish list — and quickly realized that it is beyond my skill level for now. I stuck with following the prescribed curriculum after that.
Last week Arun and I upgraded the stic.earth services1 to NixOS 26.05. It went almost smoothly. The Uptime Kuma database migration took too long to run and got interrupted, causing the DB to get corrupted. Thankfully, we had a recent snapshot in our ZFS backups, so we were able to restore the DB and run the migration again.
Last week I yakshaved my way to creating a new static site generator (SSG). I was thinking of starting a new project that would take substantial amount of time to finish. Then I had the idea of writing week notes for the project. Which of course led me to wanting to start a separate blog for it, and then writing an SSG for the blog. I love the bespoke SSG that I use for this website, but it is too tangled with needs of this website and not usable for anything else. So I extracted a minimal feature subset, and turned it into an SSG of its own: BlogShake.
BlogShake is less that 500 lines of Haskell code, plus some CSS and HTML. It supports blog posts, standalone pages, post and tag archives, and a post feed. The CSS is responsive, and supports dark mode and code highlighting. That’s all I need for a small project blog. As a bonus, BlogShake runs directly and completely on GitHub Pages, so I don’t even need a hosting server or deployment pipeline. Now I can fork the BlogShake repo for each project I want to have a blog for.
Wife and I watched The Sheep Detectives last week. It was a cute movie with a nice mystery. We also started watching Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, which I have been looking forward to. After watching anime for three decades, I find most of the recent things boring, and I’m always on lookout for something novel. Jaadugar is set in Middle-east and Mongolia, and has a complete non-Japanese set of characters. Novel, it sure is.
Finally, some interesting things I read on the internet last week:
That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.
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