Owners of the land... but papers awaiting

21:47 Pi is the new bitcoin 0 Comments

As usual, this past week has also been very busy. Lot more documentation signing and payments of various invoices. But this is just the tip of the ice-berg, there is still more to come.
And today we also did the payment for the plot where our house shall be built. Now we have become the official owners of the little piece of land. Well, we still await the actual papers of ownership to arrive, but it is safe to assume that we are the landlords now. Right? Right?...

Above is the panoramic view of the plot. As you can see, there are some construction machines standing on our plot. The spot where the orange excavator is standing is where our house will stand in a few months time. But for now these construction machines are using it as a parking spot while they are working on our neighbor's plot as their house arrived just last week. The house standing behind the excavator is our neighbor's house.

In other news, Linus (our younger son) completed three years last week. In spite of our hectic work schedule and all these things about the house, we managed to find some time to have a little family time to celebrate our son's birthday at our tiny apartment.











But no birthday is complete without a party, and Brazilians love to party (FYI... my wife is from Brazil). As the apartment we have moved to is small, we could not invite all our friends to have the birthday party at our place. So Linus' God-Mother and God-Father (Telma & Rogério who are also from Brazil but living in Sweden) were so grateful to let us have the birthday party at their house instead.
And did I tell you that Brazilians love to party... music, food and drinks, what else can one ask for. BTW, food was prepared by my lovely wife Ana.






It was a lovely and amazing evening in the company of our friends. All thanks to Telma, Rogerio and Ana for managing to throw such a wonderful party for Linus.

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Wi-Fi router died today, Life stopped and all hell broke loose...

23:51 Pi is the new bitcoin 0 Comments

Admit it, we are all slaves of the technology. And in this age internet is like oxygen, one cannot live without it. I never realized internet (or actually the loss of it) could cause so much havoc in the house.
Until today. Today was that unfortunate day when our WiFi router just died.

After coming home from work, things were normal as usual. Kids had come from school and were busy playing games and watching Netflix, Ana was finishing her course work on her laptop. Never did I realize how much data we were consuming every second. And guess who had to keep up with the demand... the poor little WiFi router which was already old and outdated.

I had purchased this WiFi router in the era (2006-07) when only IEEE 802.11a, b and g speed standards existed. IEEE 802.11n did not exist at that time and the devices using wireless internet were few and far between. And these devices of that era were not the data guzzlers like the devices of today. So I can obviously understand how that poor little chap felt when so many data hungry devices tried to connect to it. It had started showing signs of aging every now and then when it used to get hanged and I had to reset it to resume the internet connection. For comparison, today's latest WiFi routers support the latest IEEE 802.11ac speed standard which has expected multi-station WLAN throughput of at least 1 gigabit per second and a single link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (500 Mbit/s). Now compare that to the old and slow 802.11g which tops out at 54 Mbps. A lot has changed with internet speeds in these years and the latest devices have also excessively bumped up their data sucking capability. So keeping up to that kind of demand was too much for our little old router.

But today I think it had enough and just gave up. Like I said, when I arrived home from work, every thing was going smooth and then suddenly Aryan shouted... Netflix stopped working. Ana said she couldn't open any websites. Linus (the 2 year old... yes he also consumes data... a lot) was clueless as to what had happened and just stared at us.

I thought that it might be the usual router hanging problem, so I went to reset it. But there were no lights on it. I tried to switch it off and on again, nothing. Removed the power chord and plugged it into a different power socket, still nothing. It was dead.
Five-ten minutes had passed during this time and everyone started to get restless. Aryan kept bugging me to bring the internet back. Ana kept cursing the WiFi failure as she had a lot of work to finish. Linus joined Aryan in making sure that I was listening to them and kept asking when the internet would be back.

It was 19:30 when all this was going on. The shops would close at 20:00. The nearest shop to buy a new WiFi router was fifteen minutes drive away. Ana politely requested, "Get your ass out there and get the damn thing to fix the internet".

Next thing I know, I was in the car, hitting the gas as hard as I can to reach the shop before it closes. Just managed to enter the shop door like five minutes before closing time, picked up the new WiFi router, paid the money and out the door in less than 3 minutes. I think I made a personal record for shopping in so less time.

I rushed back home as soon as possible. There were no incidents reported between the time I was out and had left Ana with 2 kids, without Internet. Ana managed to survive.

Then to the next task. Setting up the WiFi router. I started reading the instruction manual. As usual Ana showed her hate for the instruction manuals and just told me to "cut the crap and get the internet working". I still somehow managed to read the instructions and started setting up the router.
But then the next problem. The internet ADSL cable connector was at the entrance door. One of the reasons the older router was spotty was that it was placed at the entrance near the ADSL port. So the signal strength in the living room was very low. Who the hell thought that it would be a great idea to put the ADSL port at the entrance door?

So I decided to dig up my old junk to find a long LAN cable so I can place the WiFi router in the living room. Ana was already getting nervous with the lack of internet and the kids constantly bothering her, and this was just adding fuel to the fire. Before she could loose her cool, I found the long LAN cable and just laid it across the corridor and into the living room. Without bothering to arrange the cable in a neat and tidy fashion, I just let it lay there and focused on getting the WiFi working.



Once the WiFi was back, things got back to normal. Kids stopped shouting and back to their Netflix and games. Ana got back to her work and I got busy putting the LAN cable in place. In around half-an-hour everything was in order.


Then it was my turn to get online and check some news, social updates and write this post. While I was setting up the WiFi router I happened to notice that some one from the neighbors apartment was trying to connect to our WiFi. I immediately changed the password for our WiFi connection and I jokingly changed the name of our SSID (WiFi network name) to this.


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CSS and HTML... Never thought I will mess around with these things

01:18 Pi is the new bitcoin 0 Comments

This weekend started a little lazy. After sleeping till eight in the morning, I was awakened by Linus who literally jumped on me like a wrestler would do to take down his opponent. That by the way is his way of showing love to me... what a lovely child. So after being crushed by Linus in the bed, it was time to wake up and get out of bed.
After having breakfast I put the clothes to wash that had accumulated in last few days. During all this time Linus had been running and jumping around the apartment. God knows where this kid gets so much energy from. His older brother Aryan is more of a laid back kid, he is happy playing his video games. Aryan's rule is simple, don't bother him unless it is going to be the end of the world and he will let you live in peace. Disregard this rule and all hell will break in.
Anyway, it was time to take Linus out to play so he can spend his energy outdoors. So I took Linus outside.
Luckily the apartment complex is very big and has many parks for kids, so there was plenty of activities for Linus to drain his batteries. Then after an hour and a half outdoors Linus was tired and we headed back home.
View from the apartment

Map of where all we walked

When we got home Linus was tired so he joined Aryan in watching TV. Ana was in the kitchen trying to figure out what new food experiment she would try on us today. The clothes were still in the third or forth wash cycle and the washing machine was doing it's good job. So there I had some time to relax. So I sat down and opened my laptop and did the usual social network browsing and reading some useless news.
Then I started looking at the blog. Although it was OKish as it was, it felt too common and same as any one else's blog who uses blogger. So I got a wired idea of making changes to the blog to make it unique. So after reading up some material on the web and tweaking some settings I messed up the whole blog. I am not sure if anyone noticed the mess I was making of the blog while experimenting new things.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that to make the web page better and unique it needed some tweaking in the HTML code and the Internet Gurus in their guides on how to make a web page better, were talking about CSS. In the beginning I was taken back a little, as I didn't have a clue what CSS was. CSS by the way is  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and it is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language. So after reading a little more and understanding a little bit (not everything really), I decided to just go ahead and mess around some more in the already messed up blog page.

It took me a lot of time to figure things out, but I somehow managed to get back the blog in a better, well let's just say "acceptable" form. Better is still miles away. So finally I managed to change the look of the blog a bit, but there is still a huge amount of work to be done. But I hope this change will not make the reading of the blog worse (if anyone is reading this blog at all in the first place). I am still learning these new flashy things about web page editing, so gradually there will be improvements.

Ana also had been doing some studying as well later in the afternoon and in the evening we were little tired. Kids were as usual still full of energy, so we decided that we will go out to eat in the evening. Going out to eat is one of the kids favorite pastime.




By the time we were done eating in the evening the kids were tired as well. They did not even wait to reach home and were catching some Zzz's in the car already.

In other news, it is the "waiting patiently" phase going on these days as all the action is happening behind the screens, i.e. production of our new house is going on in the factory which we cannot really see. No big changes/updates worth mentioning are currently happening. So we continue to wait.


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Valentine's day... Washing clothes has never been so much fun.

22:46 Pi is the new bitcoin 0 Comments

It's Valentine's day and this year it was like none other. To begin with I would like to give you guys a little piece of advice, Always read the instruction manual before operating any kind of machine.
But we will come to that later.

Yesterday evening we got the new washing machine and like I mentioned we had a huge pile of clothes accumulated over the last two weeks, waiting to be washed. I had unpacked the machine, but had not setup the machine yet. So my lovely wife decided that she would just fire up the machine this morning and start washing the clothes. I am not sure what is it with some women that they really don't care about reading the instruction manual first before using any thing. And Ana is one of those women who think reading instruction manuals is for rookies. Her thought, "It's just a washing machine, and I know how to use one". So without giving any shit about what is written in the manual, she just dumped the clothes in the machine and fired it up. Nothing went wrong immediately, but suddenly after a while there was a big rumble and it felt like the washing machine was jumping around in the bathroom.


We got worried as it was seriously a loud rumbling noise that the machine was making as it was vibrating heavily. So I quickly went and tried to hold the machine in place. After a while it calmed down and we started laughing at the situation. Ana jokingly said, "see, this is what happens when you buy a cheap washing machine", and laughing again at the whole situation. When suddenly it started rumbling our of control again. I got into action again trying to hold the machine in place again, while Ana kept laughing and making video of the whole situation.



The rumbling became so loud and the vibrations on the machine became so intense that two of the screws on the machine came off. This time I was laughing on the situation, thinking of what the neighbours might be thinking of all the noise. "Oh, some one is enjoying Valentine's day" they may have said.

But then the engineer's voice inside me spoke to me. I said to myself, "Don't be stupid, something is not right". Ofcourse, something is never right if suddenly a couple of screws just drop out of a machine that is vibrating like crazy. So I did the first thing that any good engineer would do in such a situation. I opened the instruction manual.

There is a reason why all the companies provide an instruction manual with their products. There are some important instructions given in it about how to operate their product in a safe manner. And in our case, my lovely wife had just ignored that part as she thinks instruction manuals are just useless pieces of papers.

As it turns out, the washing machine had a metal strip screwed on it's back side. This is done inorder to keep the motor and the washing drum locked in place when the maching is being transported from factory. And the first thing the instruction manual says is that this metal strip on the back MUST BE REMOVED before using the machine. As Ana had ignored the basic step of reading the instruction manual and just fired up the washing machine with out removing the metal strip behind it the motor and the washing drum were locked in one place which resulted in the huge vibration and rumbling. And the two screws that came off were actually from the metal strip, as that was the first thing that should have been removed.

I quickly removed the metal strip. Now we just hoped that the first rumbling round of washing had not caused any damage to the new machine. Luckily there was no damage. So we fired up the maching for the second time and this time it didn't make a sound and operated as smooth as velvet.

The whole situation was full of fun and we laughed it off. But moral of the story is RTFM (read the fu**ing manual) before using any machine. We now have a lot to look back and laugh at.

Later on we went out to eat and tried to enjoy the Valentine's day like normal people. But after all these events happening I know that me and my wife are a crazy bunch. But that is what makes her special and I like her the way she is, a little crazy.


Happy Valentine's day everyone!!




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Two weeks in the temporary apartment... and counting

20:52 Pi is the new bitcoin 0 Comments

Now it has been two weeks in the temporary apartment, so its time to give an update on how things are going. Well, things are going better than expected. Initially I thought that the kids would not like it and will take some time to adapt, but surprisingly they got used to the new environment pretty soon. And the place is not too shabby either. It has got a nice view of the town and has market nearby too. Ana is not complaining either, as she is busy with her cooking course. In fact she also made a nice pudding and a chocolate cake this week.
View from the apartment balcony




The only problem that is still pending is the huge pile of clothes that have accumulated over the last two weeks. Once the washing machine that we have ordered arrives, we have a lot of washing to do. I guess the weekend will be spent on washing clothes.


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