Celebrating Annaprashan

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #17, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Previous editions can be found here.

We celebrated Savya's Annaprashan today. This celebrates the first meal other than mother's milk that a child has. After this day, Savya can start eating. Usually this happens after six months.

I put a single grain of rice in his mouth. He spat it out. 😄

We had invited a few of our friends. It was the most number of people we had hosted till now. The preparations had started on Saturday in earnest. However, we had been shopping, cleaning since earlier.

From early morning, we had begun cooking. Aloo sabzi + Seeta fal sabzi + Poori for the main course. And vada pav for the starters. Our friends had helped us out and prepared Dahi Vada and Pulao.

The food was delicious. We had a great time.

We are getting better at hosting. When you start, and even now, to be honest, we are just about making it. We had asked for people to arrive at 1. I finished with the vadas by 12:30. There are nerves. How will things work out? How will we host 20 odd people in our small apartment? Where will they sit? Will the food be good?

Eventually, and every time, it does sort itself out.

We have a great time. We sit, eat and drink with our friends. While preparing, I always feel why are we doing this. After everyone has left we sit down on the sofa and think, let's do this again.

On Friday, as I logged into work, I was bombarded with messages around laptops rebooting and going into BSOD.

Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters

Crowdstrike had pushed a patch which messed up Windows systems worldwide. More than half of my team could not work because of this. Eventually we got workarounds and were able to get them working. But what a mess. I do not remember anything similar happening over the last decade.

And the funny thing is, Crowdstrike caused it, but it was reported as a Microsoft issue in almost all the reports.

Microsoft did eventually release a recovery tool.

/techStuff

Meta won’t release its multimodal Llama AI model in the EU

Sad stuff. First Apple not releasing its Apple Intelligence features. Now Meta piling on.

/reading

I started reading this because I wanted to get free wifi on the plane. Technically you can using this method, but, you shouldn't.

Here’s the basic idea: suppose that I logged into my airmiles account and updated my name. If you were also logged in to my account then you could read my new name, from the ground. You could update it again, and I could read your new value. If we kept doing this then the name field of my airmiles account could serve as a tunnel through the airplane’s wi-fi firewall to the real world.

This is a fun read, if you enjoy reading these sorts of things.

Big, beautiful goals – but can’t be bothered? 11 great productivity tips for lazy people

Some things I use already. Like putting everything you need to do or remember in a list. That takes 2 forms.

1. Things that I need to do everyday are added as checkboxes in my obsidian template.
2. At work I have a to do template. Nothing remains in my outlook or teams conversation. Everything goes in the list.
3. For the things like book recommendations, I use reminders. For other things (shared items with Prerna) apple notes.
   It is a slightly fractured system, but it works for me.
   Putting an elastic band around your phone sounds fun. Also the idea about saying I get to instead of I have to.

Until next week.