RIP Brian Dennehy

Whenever I think of First Blood (1982) I think of Sly Stallone and Brian Dennehy. I actually think First Blood would not have been as successful if it were not for Dennehy's portrayal of Sheriff Teasle and Jerry Goldsmith's goose-bump inducing background score. The only other "villain" who has impressed me as much on the silver screen would be Alan Rickman's character of Hans Gruber in John McTiernan's excellent Die Hard (1988).

RIP Brian.

Canso

Back in 2009, a buddy of mine and I did a motorcycle camping trip to Nova Scotia and back. We were on the road for two weeks. We camped one night in a small town, more of a hamlet really, called Canso in the easternmost point of Nova Scotia. Anyway, we rode our bikes that night to get dinner in town -- the campground was a bit outside of town. The restaurant also seemed to serve as a dance hall, a video game place and possibly was also the spot for folks to gather to vote, for town hall meetings, etc. There were only a bunch of people there that night. Anyway, while chomping down pizza, I spotted a young couple and their two young children having a bit of fun by a video game machine.. and it immediately made me wonder as to how they got along in general in that fishing hamlet far away from the big city lights of Halifax, Boston and New York. And now.. now I am wondering how that family is doing? Have they paid off all their debts and are getting by comfortably in the current global pandemic situation? Did they eventually move on from there seeking a bigger and better life elsewhere? Are they even still together as a family? I guess I will never know.

Canso, Nova Scotia

Habib and the Mars bar

I love this show!

Adithya Yegan Charitable Trust

So happy to have built a website for a friend of mine in Chennai, India.. who is running a food bank there along with his son:

That's it...

...as soon as this pandemic is over, I am heading to one of my favorite destinations of either England or Germany for a week out in the country.

Or I might just stick to a bunch of walking trails in one of many New Hampshire farms serving fresh donuts and coffee, ignore the firearms and pretend that I am in England. Woohoo!

Ignorance should be bliss

Between 2013 and 2016 (or thereabouts), I stopped reading the news completely. I remember those years as having some of the best mornings.. completely free of bad energy or any form of gloominess in my mood. Then, after a few events, one of them being trivia at a pub where I could not answer a single question regarding the American presidential candidates, etc., I realized that I had become completely ignorant on a lot of topics. So.. I got back into the scheme of things by starting to read the news daily. But to keep things simple, I decided to stick to just the BBC website to get all my news. I have no interest in American sports and so that worked out quite fine until...

Of course, now one hears about nothing but the ongoing virus pandemic. And, frankly, I was starting to get tired of reading the news. So about a couple of weeks ago, I stopped reading the news again but with a twist: I only read the news once a week.. just before I step out to do my weekly grocery shopping. This frequency of news reading seems to be just about right as it allows me to find out if any new restrictions regarding food shopping or travel or health are in place and whether people have started slaughtering each other yet. But the other six days? Ignorance is bliss.. as I have settled down into a pleasant yet efficient daily routine regardless of whether it is a week day or weekend.

Bliss.

Duly noted

Asstute readers of mine will duly note that the following sentences are comprised of technical jargon. And I most profoundly apologize for this intimate invasion into the deepest recesses of your brain tissue. Bear with me for two minutes as I explain the reasons immediately after.

In late January 2020, I started architecting a very important software data mapping tool and its associated components for a client. This client had a long-standing backlog of data integration issues with their clients that had come about from both being a small business that could not afford a dedicated software engineering team and by being stymied by thought processes revolving around an ancient company vision. So I decided that while I addressed immediate billable integration needs, I would do so in as generic a way as possible.. so that my efforts could be repeated and scaled out or up for subsequent integration needs for the client. I am 80% of the way there now.

My buddy the whiteboard. No, nothing proprietary is being shown here. I am too seasoned a pro to do that.

So why am I mentioning this? Because this has been a very, very absorbing project. So absorbing in fact that my previous day schedule of waking up at 5 AM and tucking kitty and myself in at 8 PM circa 2019.. has been convincingly replaced with an 8 AM to 12 AM schedule. Rather than listening to reason and stopping work exactly at 4 PM like I used to -- before Miss Univirus came to sing us all a lullaby -- I decided to give into logic and just plug at it until sleep beckons and/or kitty starts vigorously meowing wanting to play.

With not being able to drown my sorrows at the local watering hole every evening after work, I instead found myself stretching my neck at the computer on my home desk every evening as I delved deep into the innards of the .NET ecosystem in incisive attempts to solve the problems that arise every day in elegant yet optimized ways. Stackoverflow.com is my best buddy these days. I hope kitty did not hear that!! And my other buddy would be...

...a mini ham salad sandwich!

A mini ham salad sandwich!! Ok, I vary it with tuna or chicken salad. But a pound of any of these choices and a dozen sandwich rolls plus cut onions with brown mustard provide a week to 10 days of delectable little goody-gulping. Wash each down with a cuppa of black tea or chai with one sweetener and you have the makings of an in-home picnic. A pleasant break for the brain from the mental efforts imposed from architecting and writing software.

In other news, I finally have a decent workout system in place. Below is my current setup. A pair of adjustable dumbbells are on order. But everyone is facing delays and back-orders these days. Not to worry. Back to my teenage years growing up in India filled with body-weight push-ups, squats, etc. on the open terrace of an old house. More on my workouts in a future post. But, oh sunny days! I await thee so I can huff and puff on the balcony.

There's no setup, no.