I’m too weak to lug around my monstrous 7 pound laptop, so I bought a netbook. It’s an eeepc 1000 and I love it. I use it for everything, except for processing the kids' videos and photos. I still use the desktop for that.

The major issue that I’ve had with it is that firefox seemed so slow. I tried other browsers, some which seemed faster, but I missed my firefox extensions. I googled and found that others had the same issue. There are 2 flash hard drives in the eeepc. The first is 8GB and contains the root filesystem. The second is 32GB and contains the /home partition. Apparently the 8GB drive is significantly faster than the 32GB one. So the OS performs excellently since it’s on the 8GB drive, anything that requires a lot of disk access from the 32GB drive slows down. Firefox’s .mozilla configuration folder is mounted there by default.

Moving the .mozilla folder to the 8GB drive has made web browsing speedy again. Here’s how I did it. I’m the only user on my system, so if you have multiple users, this will only fix the issue for one user.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/vinod-mozilla
sudo chown vinod /usr/local/share/vinod-mozilla
mv /home/vinod/.mozilla /usr/local/share/vinod-mozilla/
ln -s /usr/local/share/vinod-mozilla/.mozilla /home/vinod/.mozilla

This site has undergone another transformation. I’ve ditched Wordpress and am now using a tool called Jekyll. It’s a program that runs on my laptop and generates static files from a bunch of templates. I then upload the static files to my server. Wordpress, like any dynamic software, has security risks. Especially since it’s such a popular blog app, it’s always under attack. I don’t have the time or interest to keep up with updates, especially since my blogging is so low-profile. It’s just something I do for fun.

Static files have none of those security risks. There are a lot of static file generators out there, but I chose Jekyll because it seemed intuitive and it’s run by the GitHub folks. I’ve started using git and GitHub and am impressed by their power so far.

This takes me full circle to my post-geocities days when I was generating static pages using Userland Frontier. This still doesn’t feel as satisfying as that did, but maybe that’s only because it was such a new thing back then. I must admit that writing posts in emacs sure does feel nice.

Anyway, the design is completely ripped off from Mark Reid. My design skills suck, and his rock. Of course, I am a tweaker, so I’ll probably end up ruining his beauty at some point.

At the minimum, there is no evidence that it is bad for your knees.

I’ve found some old journal entries lying around my hard drive. I’m sure that these were meant to be cleaned up and edited before being spewed on the Internet, but in keeping with my newfound obsession with Imperfection, I now present them to you, my dear reader(s). Here is the first one, a review of the book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Bronx, NY, April 9th, 2007

I finished “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi on the subway ride into work today. I enjoyed the book. It’s about creating optimal experience in your life. “Optimal Experience” is the feeling you get when you’re doing something challenging and interesting and time just flows by you without you realizing it.

Our quality of life is directly related to how often we obtain “optimal experience”. Things that we normally associate with a high quality of life are not necessarily correlated with subjective happiness. Got money, power, and health? You’re just as likely to be unhappy than if you don’t have them. So, how can we achieve optimal experience? It’s about being in control of your consiciousness. Deciding what things give you challenge, what things interest you … and then pursue them.

Our natural tendency is to think that we want more leisure time and that more leisure time will make us happier. He debunks this by showing that people are just as happy when they are at work as when at leisure. Often happier. Most lesiure activities simply allow us to veg out instead of encouraging us to actively use our consciousness. They are a way to avoid letting our consciousness focus on the stressors in our life. If we were to let our mind go, without providing it any outside stimulus, the first thing we would focus on is our anxieties. Things that we are worried about. The solution is to actively force our consciousness to think about other things, perhaps solutions to those anxieties, or other things that would make us happy. That’s hard. It’s easier to turn on the TV and let the stimuli flow in, so that our mind is occupied and can’t wander off to those dark anxieties. But that only stunts our growth. Learning to be able to face our anxieties and know that we can overcome them (through repeat example) is the way towards a more happy existence.

How does this book affect me? It was written in 1990 and I’ve seen it referred to often. It makes me want to focus more on meditation and yoga. This is the second book that I’ve read recently that recommended control of consciousness as an important objective. The other one was How to live on 24 hours a day, written at the turn of the century.

I want to structure activites so as to give myself some challenge.

Most importantly, I want to be able to give my children the easiest path to optimal experience possible. This means giving them unconditional love, constant challenges and the ability to make and learn from mistakes.

Here are a few pertinent excerpts from the book:

p2. “People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to happy.”

p6. “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action.”

The Elements of Enjoyment:

• A Challenging activity that requires skills

• The merging of action and awareness

  When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attentions is completely absorbed by the activity. There is no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli. As a result, one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that they activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing." (p. 53)

• clear goals and feedback

• concentration on the task at hand

• sense of exercising control in difficult situations

• loss of self consciousness

p83. “For example, TV watching, the single most often pursued leisure activity in the United States today, leads to the flow condition very rarely. In fact, working people achieve the flow experience – deep concentration, high and balanced challenges and skills, a sense of control and satisfaction – about four times as often on their jobs, proportionately, as they do when they are watching television.”

Promoting optimal experience in teenagers:

1. Clarity - teens know what their parents expect of them
2. Centering - teens perceive that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, rather than being preoccupied about the future
3. Choice - teens feel they have a variety of choices, including breaking parental rules as long as they are willing to deal with consequences
4. Commitment - teens feel comfortable enough to set aside defenses and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever they are interested in
5. Challenge - parents provide increasingly complex opportunites for action

p119. “Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“We don’t usually notice how little control we have over the mind, because habits channel psychic energy so well that thoughts seem to follow each other by themselves without a hitch. After sleeping we regain consciousness in the morning when the alarm rings, and then walk to the bathroom and brush our teeth. The social roles culture prescribes then take care of shaping our minds for us, and we generally place ourselves on automatic pilot till the end of the day, when it is time again to lose consciousness in sleep. But when we are left alone, with no demands on attention, the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself. With nothing to do, it begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations.”

p133. “Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.”

p139. “In philosophy as in other disciplines there comes a point where a person is ready to pass from the status of passive consumer to that of active producer. … But if one records ideas in response to an inner challenge to express clearly the major questions by which one feels confronted, and tried to sketch out answers that will help make sense of one’s experiences, then the amateur philosopher will have learned to derive enjoyment from one of the most difficult and rewarding tasks of life.”

p179. “In other words, accepting limitations is liberating. For example, by making up one’s mind to invest psychic energy exlussively in a monogamous marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns.”

p180. “For such goals to result in interactions that will help increase the complexity of its members, the family must be both differentiated and integrated. Differentiation means that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills, set individual goals. Integration, in contrast, guarantees that what happens to one person will affect all others. If a child is proud of what she accomplished in school, the rest of the family will pay attention and will be proud of her, too. If the mother is tired and depressed, the family will try to help and cheer her up. In an integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others.”

How to get Optimal Experience?

1. set goals
2. become immersed in the activity
3. pay attention to what is happening
4. learning to enjoy immediate experience

Kottke linked to some great deals on classical music at amazon. In order to download them, you need to have the amazon mp3 downloader installed. They now offer a Debian (linux) version, but I couldn’t get it working. It’s meant for an older version of Debian, but it doesn’t recognize the newer versions of the libraries installed on my system. I thought about doing some fancy apt-getting to try to get the right versions, but just thinking about that made my head throb. Then I heard about clamz, an open source project to replicate the amazon mp3 downloader. I installed the library packages they recommended (libgcrypt11-dev, libcurl4-openssl-dev, and libexpat1-dev) and then installed it.

I’m always a little leary to install packages from source, because then they’re not managed by the package manager (apt-get). It becomes more of a tedious process to keep them updated or to uninstall them. To partially workaround that problem, I use a program called checkinstall. It basically creates a package for any program that you want to install from source. So, instead of :

./configure
make
sudo make install

you do:

./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

It then creates a .deb and installs it. It asks you for some basic info about the program, but guesses as much as it can and does a decent job. I haven’t delved into anything more involved than that, but there are ways to document dependencies which would allow it to be even more integrated into the package management system.

Anyway, it installed perfectly and within seconds I was downloading the music that I had purchased.

vinod@ike:~/Music $ clamz "Desktop/The 99 Most Essential Mozart Masterpieces.amz"

In order to lose any remaining readers, I am very proud to announce that Kavi made a poopy in his potty. First time! It may well have been a lucky accident, but I’m happy about it. In other news, Anika is 1 week old and doing great.

Kavi, Mala and I are so happy to announce the arrival of Anika Puri Kurup. She was born on June 22nd, 2009 at 11:07 PM after a happily uneventful labor and delivery. Mom and Baby are doing well. Here is a quick video, with of course more to follow soon.

I can barely believe it, but Kavi is 2 years old now. This is such a great age. I remember saying that a year ago, but he’s even more enjoyable now. He’s excited about everything new. He’s running nonstop, singing out loud, and dancing up a storm.

Mala organized a great birthday party for him at a local park. He got a lot of great gifts from all his friends, some of which we’re saving so that he can open when the new baby is getting a lot of attention. But, his Mossa and Mossi got him the best gift of all by delivering Vishali into this world the day before his birthday. Kavi has been enamored with her from day 1. She’s now a week old, and Kavi will still drop whatever he’s doing (even if it’s drinking milk or playing in his black truck) to come over and ‘kiss baby shali’.

Now, we’re just waiting for our bundle of joy :-)

I’ve had a lot of great plans which I’ve never fulfilled. Don’t get me wrong. My life is beyond great and I see it getting better every day. There just happen to be a lot of things that I’ve planned to do which I have not done.

I planned to create a web-based running log. I actually did do this and used it for a long time, but I never did build in enough features to make it worthwhile for others to use. Or even enough to make it exciting for me to use.

I planned to create a system to help me keep track of my finances. Something that would give me a snapshot of where we are now while also letting me know if we were on track for where we want to be. I am meticulous about recording all of our financial transactions (in a great program called ledger), but I haven’t taken the next step to easily and simply analyze that data.

I planned to create checklists that would make it easier to do my daily work in the hospital. There are certain things that I do everyday, or for every patient, that from time to time I forget. It’s not even that I necessarily forget it. Sometimes, I just don’t remember if I did it, so I have to go back and check, often finding that I didn’t forget. Following a checklist would remove that doubt.

I planned to make my website really reflect me. It would have more stuff about my interests and the things that are happening in our lives. I read a lot and think a little and I’m sure some of these insights, however mundane, might help someone else who happens to be thinking about the same thing.

I planned to create a website for our family. A place where anyone in the family could create their own space to do whatever they want. A place where we could document and investigate our family tree and our family history. I actually built some of this over 10 years ago but took it down because I needed to password protect it (at the request of some family members). It’s now more than 10 years later and I haven’t done that simple task.

I planned to create a website for my father which would talk about the great things that he has done in the world of science and now in the world of religion. Fortunately, he beat me to it, but I want to make his site even better.

I planned to create a website for my brother-in-law, Ethan, who is starting an immigration law practice here in Durham, NC. This finally got done, but there are so many things to do to make it better.

These are just a tiny percentage of the failed projects on my list. What’s the point of all of this ‘woulda shoulda coulda’? I just read a great article over at defmacro.com called “Taming Perfectionism”. It’s about me. OK, I’m not 100% sure he meant to write about me, but that description is me. All of these projects that I listed are relatively simple. The reason they’re not done is because whenever I think about them, I start to get overwhelmed. I cannot begin to work on one detail without thinking about the perfect way to implement that detail. Let’s make a running log. OK, but first, let’s model the database. Is that third-normal form? Hmmm… I wonder if I should write the unit tests before the database. Let me google ‘unit testing software’. And before you know it, I’m back to my RSS reader to do some passive reading. On that vein, I happened to find this little video on 43Folders at the same time that I read the “Taming Perfectionism” article. It’s an oldie by Ze Frank, who is amazing:

So, I feel like the internets are conspiring to get me to drop my perfectionism. And writing this article is my first step. I won’t get everything on my todo list done, but I’m going to make an effort to be a little more imperfect. I hope you don’t mind.

I’ve been meaning to thank Deepu for giving me a list of some cool podcasts to check out. My commute is about 30 minutes each way, and listening to podcasts I enjoy helps keep me sane. I added the Moth Podcast, NPR Selected Shorts, and RadioLab to my podcast list and have been enjoying all of them. NPR Shorts is my favorite of the bunch. It’s usually 2 short stories being read live somewhere in NYC. I love short stories. I thought I loved them because they’re short. Reading a novel just takes too much devotion sometimes. But there’s something more than that, too. I just love how a good short story starts with a simple premise or a few simple characters and then draws you in, so that within a minute, you feel completely involved.

I was running today even though I didn’t want to. I figured I’d just go around the block, maybe a mile. I strapped my nano Ipod to my arm and started off, feeling completely unmotivated. A minute of slow jogging later and I was deeply engrossed in a great story about a middle-aged long distance runner in NYC who jogs back to her old neighborhood and gets accosted by the new neighborhood kids living there. I couldn’t stop now! So instead of turning right, I turned left and took the long way home. (Well… 3 miles long).

Podcasts - they’ll make you healthier!