Gardening

Home Garden – Foxtail Fern

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The Foxtail Fern is the second most favourite plant I have at home. Here’s a good website with more information about this plant.

Foxtail Fern
My Foxtail Fern

This plant requires almost no maintenance, maybe clipping off yellowing branches once in a while for aesthetics. The most time I have spent on this one is when I transplanted it from a plastic pot to this ceramic one.

I keep this in partial shade.

I water it between once a week during peak winters and alternate days during peak summers. I fertilise it every 2 months or depending on when it shows signs of growth.

Here’re some good tools which will help you with your gardening.

Gardening

I am into Gardening now

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I am officially old; in the last few months, I have grown increasingly interested in gardening, having plants in beautiful pots and watching them grow (most of the time).

There’s nothing as peaceful as watching the fruits of your labour flourish and sway in the wind.

Anyways, below are a few tools I recommend everyone doing casual gardening to have.

  • PictureThis (Plant Identifier) – This is a terrific and useful app which uses Machine Learning to identify plants from their photos. I found the accuracy of this app to be very high. After identifying a particular plant, it shows you information about the plant. It is especially useful when buying new plants because in many instances, I have seen that a seller is not able to explain details about a plant. The basic version is free, but there’s a subscription which allows you unlimited identification and also lets you diagnose plant problems or diseases.
  • Trowel – This is a must have for everyone, is useful for loosening the top soil of plants periodically, mixing fertilisers etc. Buy different sizes depending on the size of your pots and requirements.
A trowel
  • Water Spray – These come in different varieties. You need to fill water, pump the top handle to compress the air inside and then you can use the trigger to spray water out.
Water Spray

Most of these have an adjustable nozzle which can spray a fine mist or shoot a thin jet of water. It is especially useful to spray water on plant leaves (cleaning and moisturising them) or watering smaller pots without making a mess.

More detailed posts coming up.

Rant

Pathetic Fool-2

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It is impossible to go anywhere in Gurgaon (Sorry, Gurugram) without stumbling across such idiots. What a pathetic fool!

German Engineering

This one has a Mercedes Benz logo on his Nissan Sunny. Immediately reminded me of people who put Apple logos on their non-Apple laptops.

I do not understand what people achieve with all this. Maybe there are even bigger fools out there who actually believe that it is a Mercedes/MacBook.

McDonald Drive thru VIP

On closer inspection, it turns out this guy is a McDonald Drive through VIP. I don’t even know what that means. In a drive through queue, when this guy comes along, they remove all the other cars and let him get his Vegeterian burger first?

Education, Motorcycle, Rant

My Worst Purchases-Honda Activa

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So, I was “studying” in my first year of engineering (around the year 2002) in Nagpur and living with 2 of my seniors in a rented apartment. For those not familiar with Nagpur, public transportation was almost non-existent at that time and 95% of the people rode 2-wheelers (Motorcycles, Scooters & Mopeds), remaining 5% had cars.

I had nothing of my own and soon started to feel the heat of wanting to go everywhere but not being able to go anywhere.

I wanted to buy a bike, but the aforementioned jealous roommates didn’t want me to have one, so brainwashed my father into buying me a Honda Activa. I was desperate for anything, so didn’t argue much and greedily accepted it.

The Activa is by no means a bad scooter and it is quite handy for middle age men/women looking for a quick trip to the nearby stores or for kids who are just learning to ride. For a college freshman however, it was the social equivalent of walking around college with “dork” written on the back of his head in Bold letters.

As if the social ridicule wasn’t enough, the scooter was also not suited for a hormone ridden teenager riding around town “trying” to show off and competing with motorcycles. Inherently unstable, it caused me to have numerous accidents within the first few months itself.

Eventually, it was either continuing to ride the monstrosity or drop out of college, so I chose the former and sold it before it had completed one year.

It took 2/3 years, the manliest bike available in India at that time and a year away from college for people to forget I had one.

Technology

My Best Purchases-O2 XPhone II

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This is first of a series where I reminisce about my best purchases and purchases I regret to this date.

I will start with something positive, my second smartphone. The O2 XPhone II, 9th in a long list of phones I have used over the years. Although I did have an N-Gage QD before this, it was barely a smartphone, severely crippled by software.

The O2 XPhone II

The software on the O2 XPhone II was phenomenal. Instead of writing all about it again, I will just link to my original review.

Unfortunately, not all good things last and its joystick broke after a while and was eventually stolen.

This is one of those purchases that changed my life.

Work

Obsession & Burnout

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Last few weeks I have been obsessed with some project at work. It was something I was dreading not doing for some time, but eventually took up because no one else would do it, resulting in burnout.

Now, I am a Network Engineer by profession and this project requires skills in Linux, PHP, Perl etc. so was challenging at first, but eventually I got hooked and it took over my life. Some examples of the madness include

  1. Waking up in the morning anxious to go to office (But not in a good way)
  2. Sitting at my desk for hours without moving
  3. Ignoring all other projects
  4. Not realising it was already night and I have a home
  5. Going home and researching about the project on my phone
  6. Not able to sleep thinking about the project
  7. Having dreams about the project

After 2 weeks now that almost all major challenges are over, I am left spent, exhausted and close to burnout.

Need some time to divert my thoughts to something else.

Rant

Hyundai Creta is the new Suzuki Swift

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There’s a word used in and around Delhi and most of North India. The word is “Lafandar”. It basically refers to a class of teenagers (but could also extend to people in their 30s) who have a lot of free time, whose fathers have a lot of money and whose favourite past time is driving around the streets from evening till late night in their pimped our cars. Also, they do not contribute to society in any way, except by occasionally crushing pedestrians under their cars, keeping this country’s burgeoning population in check.

You can easily spot them at a distance; they are the ones driving aggressively, changing lanes unnecessarily and cutting others off.

Till a few years ago, a vast majority of these “Lafandars” were driving Suzuki Swifts. It never made much sense to me, as the Swift is a middle class car and not a show-off worthy car.

Now that the swift has fallen out of style, most of these people are now driving Hyundai Cretas.

When you spot a Creta at a distance, you can be reasonably sure that if you drive too close to it or overtake it, the owner will cut you off; hence it is best to keep some distance between you and them.

Education, Rant, Satire

Nerd of the decade – Part II

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I wrote this article about a freak called Subhankar Mohapatra almost 12 years ago. Since then I haven’t come across anyone matching his level of loser-ness, till today.

Meet Ankur Garg, another freak of nature who managed to score 171/170 in his Macroeconomy exam at Harvard.

One look at his Resume and you know that his whole educational career has been an aimless pursuit to prove only one thing- that he is good at studies and exams.

Garg, who is 36 (but looks 63) first wasted public money studying at IIT. Then he made a complete U-Turn in his career by appearing for the civil services exam and being the youngest (22 year old) to do so (I believe he looked at least 40 then).

The freak writes

“In the last phase (possibly!) of student life now, I end up getting this score (171 out of 170) in the final exam of the macroeconomics course.”

Sure, at 36, he is just finishing the last phase of his student life. At this rate he might even start working and contributing to society in the next 20 years.

If one wonders what happened to this freak during his childhood that led him to be like this, they only have to read this quote from the article

“When I was in school, my father used to say – 10 out of 10 isn’t good enough in any exam. Always strive for 11 out of 10″

With a father like this, I think it is safe to say that the fault is not his own but of his abusive upbringing.

Also, in this article, there’s no mention of his contributions to society or any achievements other than clearing exams.

The overall beneficiaries of all the hard work this person put in his life would be the politicians, whose boots he can (hopefully) lick with more vigour now.

Hate, Rant

Sanghi Rule

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The country is going to the dogs.
1 year before Narendra Modi came to power, things slowly started to change in the country. Suddenly the word “Hindoo” started getting used much more around the office and in general life.
RSS[1]
Everywhere around me, chants of “NaMo NaMo” started gaining fervour slowly, but surely. Being an atheist, I have never  been in favour of political parties with a religious agenda, but surely NaMo would be a sensible man and would focus on things that matter instead of religion, right? He would keep his party people and the RSS in check, right?
Wrong.
One year since he became Prime Minister, the following things have happened in the country

  1. Beef has been banned in my state and many other states of the country. Being a person who likes eating beef, I am not happy with this move. There have been a few incidents of mobs killing Moslems on the suspicion of eating beef.
  2. Almost all new kid’s shows on TV are now based on Hindoo mythology starring the child versions of Hindoo gods.
  3. Gurgaon has been renamed to Gurugram, Allahabad renamed to Prayagraj and talks of Shimla to be renamed to Shyamala and Delhi to be renamed to Indraprastha, soon.
  4. Ramen from Nissin and Nestle both tested positive for high levels of MSG and were banned for a couple of months. Ramdev Baba, a known BJP crony “coincidentally” chose that exact same time to launch his own brand of instant noodles and immediately filled the void in the market. Nissin and Nestle both successfully appealed and got the band removed (turns out the test results were wrong), but by then the damage was done and Ramdev Baba’s noodles were already famous.
  5. One day after the PM banned most denominations of currency, a full page advertisement by PayTM (which gained most users because of the ban) was displayed on the front pages of most Indian newspapers with the PM’s photo prominently displayed. Is the shameless endorsement of private companies by a country’s sitting PM even allowed?

The country is going to the dogs.