stupendousblog

Starting this year all schools in the county have a weapons detection system at entry which basically means every student has to remove everything in their backpack, put it in a tray, and pass through detection system. Every day. This of course is adding to the start time daily. The fact that the society has come to this is shameful.

Ever since OneFreshPillow has gone down, I have been on a lookout for new pillow, and sadly nothing has matched it. Today I asked Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude on what’s going on with OneFreshPillow. Gemini gave the most useful answer to an ambiguous qn “what’s going on with OneFreshPillow” while ChatGPT gave the most useless answer and wanted me to tell it what does one fresh pillow do. You don’t bet against Google IMO and while they were behind, I can see them leapfrogging others soon (unless of course, Google as we know it can also fuck itself up fairly quickly too).

Dad got his US B2 visa approved today after interview in Hyderabad. That marks an eventful few years where he went from B2 visa to green card, to giving up his green card earlier this year and going back to B2 visa. He was apprehensive about if he would be asked why he surrendered his green card, but turned out his interview lasted less than 2 minutes. And as my dad put it, Trump or no Trump, the rush and line at the embassy was humongous. I am glad he went back to B2 visa though – he was not going to stay full time here anyway, and it actually makes it way more easier to get health insurance on a B2 visa then on green card (weird I know, but its true!).

Wife and I have been listening to Saiyaara soundtrack in repeat mode. We had no idea the music of this movie was so good; should’ve guessed that Mohit Suri generally has generally always had good music in his movies. Especially loving Barbaad, Tum Toh and Dhun

After being one of the earliest users of Amazon Prime and nearly 18 years later this is the first year we are debating doing away with it. I am not sure we get THAT much value out of 139 bucks a year. Feels like we could just do with a monthly membership during key seasons (thanksgiving/christmas or a famous show on prime) and be done with it. Its sad because if you look at Bezos’s philosophy it was to make Prime a no brainer for anyone to sign up for – you should get so much value out of it that its a no-brainer, and yet over the years it has only become less valuable. You get fast shipping yes, but you are pretty much paying for grocery delivery, the prime music is shit, prime video does not have a great catalog enough to subscribe a full year but you get ads yay, and like everything is like nickel-diming. I’d gladly play 249-299$ a year on Amazon prime if it simply included Grocery/Photos/Video/Ring/Blink/Music/Alexa+ all in one big package. As a standalone 139$ service it doesn’t seem to have that much value anymore.

Having done so many house projects now, I have come to accept that when a contractor says it’s a 4 day job, it’s more likely 10 days. It totally helps me mentally because I am not getting annoyed after promised end date that things are still half way through. So yeah, I know my deck will be done in 2 weeks because contractor said its only a 5 day job 🙂

One of the things I and A talk about our Spain/Lisbon trip was how much I let my guard down in Spain and did not feel like I was going to get scammed. Sure we all take precautions in big cities, but at no point in Spain did I ever feel like a taxi driver was out to scam me, or the hotel employees for straight up lying, or a laundromat operator was not giving us the right information, or a restaurant was simply trying to push things. Heck, there was no heckling anywhere either even in middle of chaos in Barcelona. The first experience I had in Lisbon was the taxi driver scamming me into paying 5x what it should have cost to get to hotel, and then our overall hotel experience being horrible for a supposedly “boutique” 5 star. The nonstop heckling by Tuktuk drivers (though they respectfully backed out at a simple no) around old town was annoying. Within the first 2 hours in Lisbon, all my guards were back up constantly scanning, thinking and a general feeling of slight distrust. This is probably why we loved Spain so much. It’s that feeling of just letting your guard down knowing that people around you are just nice. (Yeah yeah I have heard pickpockets and Barcelona and all, but that’s a simple solve and it’s a common thing everywhere).

DC is always 95% democratic in any election. It’s about as left as it possibly can. And what does the mayor do? Cave in at the first opportunity asking the police and people to cooperate with ICE. She should be the one leading 24/7 protests on the street. instead what we have is the instant capitulation by one party while other goes on a rampage.

Houses are simply a money sink. A few weeks ago while playing with doggo in backyard I noticed that some of the joists had completely come off from a part of our deck and broken. The horror of this discovery led me to call a contractor right away, who then discovered not only I had multiple joists broken, but several support posts totally rotted (and he wasn’t cheating at all – it was covered in mulch and it was not built to code). So now to fix that, the contractor had to remove all the boards, and once he removed it, obviously we discovered more joists that are just broken or rotted. So yeah, at this point we are almost close to re-building the fucking deck and I was like if the wood and Trex cost same, might as well replace it with Trex. Houses are such money sink.