I’m at the start of a full work week and managed to get a decent amount of work done during the morning… Since my work schedules are fully flexible (Love you Scrapinghub!), I tend to work more during the latter part of the day, leaving me with not much time to unwind after work. (But of course, due to my work hours being spread across the day like this, I have many little chunks of free time at my disposal during the day. This has helped me stay without getting too stressed and I think 9-5 work hours are so 1980s.)
I also have my biweekly meeting with Ken in a bit for catching up on work (and life, and all things in between)
Anyways, my plan is to get more work done during the earlier part of the day. So far today is good. This is just a 5 minute quick update so I apologize if it feels all over the place 🙂
I’ve been listening to “Waiting for My Moment” by Donald Glover (From the movie “Creed”) on repeat with some pink noise on the background while coding and absolutely love this track. =)
In other news, there are only 26 days until the Sri Lankan presidential election. I don’t think there was any other election in history that Sri Lankans were this much excited to vote against the ruling party than this one…
That says a lot about this failure of a government, doesn’t it?
If you’ve seen me on Facebook, you’d know how I am bombarding my friends with posts on the upcoming presidential election in Sri Lanka.
If you haven’t decided to vote Gotabaya yet, you probably will once you read the following piece published back in 2010 in The Manila Times print edition. Be sure to watch the video of the BBC interview once you finish the article.
Also Did you know that Gotabaya used to be a Unix/Solaris Administrator back in the U.S.? How amazing is that? =) Ok, enough listening to me. Go on read The Manila Times article and be sure to vote early in the morning on 16th of November. ~SeeJay
Lisbon won “Europe’s Leading City Destination 2018” award and guess where Scrapinghub decided to hold our next meetup?
Yes, You guessed it right, We met again in Lisbon, Portugal back in November 2018 at the Scrapinghub annual get together. And we all spent about a week in one of the coolest hotels in Europe, Hotel Palácio Estoril!!! (Take that, Mr. Bond!)
The very same hotel where Ian Fleming found his inspiration for the plot of his first novel Casino Royale. The Hotel Palácio was also James Bond’s hotel in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
So I prepared for days as usual… trying to find that balance between bringing enough stuff to cover a trip which is supposed to take about a week…
…and failed miserably and ended up packing a luggage full of cloths.
My travel companions.
As usual I was driven to the airport by my little sister. My parents were there as well.
I jumped on an airplane as one should, and landed in Dubai…
…where I had to run across the airport to catch another airplane that flew me to Lisbon, Portugal.
No matter how busy I was trying to not miss my next flight, I did not forget to take the occasional selfie…
Priorities, people!
So I landed in Lisbon and the guy who was driving me to the hotel said there’s another Scrapinghubber coming at the same time… Turns out he had thought my five part name as two different people! 😐 (Yes, I have 5 names in my passport… Yes I know! “The Names Bond, James Bond.” Not going to be me.)
Can’t believe I ruined this shot! I thought my Nokia X6 (Nokia 6.1 Plus) Would be capable of handling the low light situation there, I was clearly wrong! 😐
Next morning I went to the four seasons restaurant at the hotel and joined Pablo, Daniel, Agustin and Alexander for breakfast.
Yes, you read it right! After almost 3 years of working together totally remote, I finally got to meet my awesome colleagues at Scrapinghub back in November 2017 when we had our first ever company get together in Estepona, Spain.
Estepona Sunrises are to die for.
So my flight was around 10:30 pm and I was driven to the airport by my little sister two hours before. She has staff access there and knows everybody so I got the total VIP treatment and the whole process was super comfortable for me. (Of course It did help that I had all the documents in proper order, as airport security is no joke, no matter how important of a person you are :D)
City of stars forever!
I was just about to step outside of the window for some fresh air when I saw the warning sign =)
I was driven from Malaga airport to Estepona by this wonderful gentleman with a BMW… BMW’s are somewhat of an elite vehicle in Sri Lanka and I had not been in one until this so I was pretty thrilled to have that experience. It was a comfortable drive; took about 45 minutes to the hotel.
Finally we came to Elba Estepona! It looked just as magnificent as I imagined!
Main entrance was this really cool rotating door which kept the inside of the hotel away from the cold air outside.
To be continued…
As I came out of the hotel, my ride to the airport arrived and the chauffeur put all my luggage into the back of the vehicle. I turned around and took one last look at the magnificent main entrance of the Gran Hotel Elba Estepona, where I had both the most wonderful time with awesome people and also indulged in the luxuries of solitude and quiet with a view that is absolutely out of this world, and whispered to myself “Until next time!”
And then I jumped into the vehicle that was going to take me back to the airport, This time, another Sri Lankas’s favorite, a Mercedes…
Just stumbled upon this for the millionth time and thought I’d just have a backup of this here in case the Vogons are serious about that intergalactic highway.
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but this is the best time I’ve manage to track so far.
One of the most useful things for me with the Xiaomi Mi Band is the sleep tracker. I check my sleep data pretty much every morning and it helps me decide if I’ve had enough sleep the previous night and what to do if when I haven’t.
Something I always knew for a long time is that I’m usually not having enough sleep at night, and I’m not entirely proud of it either. I find it much easier to concentrate at night because it feels much more peaceful and calm. While some of you “early to bed early to rise” types would struggle to understand this, I’m sure the night owls would totally get this.
But whatever your sleep preferences are, there’s one thing that we should all agree on; there are some serious health concerns when you are not having enough sleep. Seriously, Google it right now! You’d find a ton of research that explains how damaging lack of sleep can be… I was actually going to include links to some of the articles I read regarding this in the past, and googling to find those floodedmewitha bunchmore. I read a couple of those and it was so scary, that instead of finishing this post last night around 12am, I went straight to bed!
Anyway, I’ve been tracking my sleep for a few weeks now and I now know that I need to improve. Don’t get me wrong, I always knew that I’m not having enough sleep, I just didn’t have the numbers… or I was just lazy to actively measure my sleep durations. This is why the Mi Band is so much helpful. It does everything for me and now I know that I usually sleep between 3 to 5 hours at night. Around 3 if I stay up too late… and just over 5 if I come to bed a little “early”.
Now that I have some clear idea about how much sleep I get and what to do to improve it, I have one less thing to worry about in life. And honestly, if you see my numbers you’d see that I don’t really have too much to do to fix my sleep habits. Since I work from home pretty much all the time, I have the freedom to sleep anytime I want and get up anytime I want to. Some of you who has to get up at a certain time because you have to commute to work would think that It’s harder for you to improve your sleep, trust me, it isn’t! I can argue that it’s actually harder for me because I lack that push to have a fixed sleep schedule. And I tend to stay up too late and for some strange reason, get up earlier than I should.
My point is that whether you have the freedom to choose when you wake up, or you don’t, you’d almost always have some way to allow yourself to have enough time to sleep (If you don’t, You should change whatever you are doing. Because you are probably better off alive) This is something I’ve personally been neglecting for a long time and something that I am planning to change.
So how do we do this? Simple, just have a way to measure your daily sleep habits and act accordingly, that is to get your daily schedules sorted out until you have a minimum of 6 hours (Maybe 7 depending on how you feel about it) for sleep. I highly recommend you getting some sort of a sleep tracker because it has helped me so much. I’ve tried a few android apps sometime back and it wasn’t very helpful for me. Part of it because I don’t feel too comfortable keeping the phone so close to me on the bed, and I’m also not so certain about their accuracy. So get yourself a proper sleep tracker (after all, $20+ for a chance at good health is a killer deal =) )
Once you know how much sleep you get (or how little, in case you are like me) Decide how much more you need to get in order to have a healthy amount of sleep and prepare a schedule.
And most importantly, try to stick to your sleep schedule as if your life depends on it because it most probably does!
I’m a huge fan of the Telegram Messenger. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it’s nothing short of amazing. I have it installed in almost every device I use. I kept trying to get Randy and Chanux to switch to using it and even managed to finally get Chanux to set it up on his android but I don’t see him using it much. Randy kept disappointing me as he usually does these days and simply refused to try it (he also refused to watch Star Wars, so yes, my dear Internet, I think we can safely give up on the guy now).
Anyways I didn’t really write this blog post only to talk about Randy and his awful tastes. About a week ago I noticed that Telegram stopped working in the background while on mobile data and only started working while I’m connected to WiFi. This was really annoying because more than a couple of times I missed all my messages while on the road only to realize that Telegram was offline during my travels. When I get back on WiFi Telegram would notify me about all the messages that I didn’t receive during the day.
This obviously looked like a problem with my data settings that would restrict Telegram from using any mobile data and to my surprise it was all set to normal. Then I thought it was a restriction from the Power saving mode in android and that was also not the case.
A quick search on google led me to a bunch of forums that showed this is not just a problem with Telegram but also happens to be a problem common to a lot of apps that uses background data. And none of them seem to have solved the issue.
I kept looking through the threads and found one suggestion that finally worked for me. It was to reset all app preferences in android. This looked crazy at first but after trying everything I gave up and just did it, and guess what! Telegram now works well on mobile broadband.
So if your messenger app is not working and nothing else works you can do the following:
Go to Settings -> Applications -> Applications manager
Select Reset app preferences from the “MORE” menu and you’re done.
Be warned though. This would reset the preferences for all the apps in your android phone. So only do this if nothing else works for you.
This trick should also fix apps like Slack, Snapchat, Viber or any other app not working on mobile data.
So yeah, I’m tired of not having a proper place to post my rants. And I certainly don’t believe I’m accomplishing anything by posting stuff on Facebook (twitter, I’m still in love with, but there’s only so much you could do with 140 characters).
So a few months back I decided to blame on Blogger for my laziness and decided to change my blog platform to something better. I went with Pelican because it was written in Python and also it was really good. But after a few weeks, I realized that having all those moving parts (Static site generators, how ironic!) really gets in the way and you end up managing the site rather than posting anything. And I decided that I needed to get back to the one true blog platform!
And today I’m rocking the super cool WordPress installation on my blog. I imported all the content from the old blogger site and fixed the URL structure. I’ll be hunting for a good theme in the next few days and hopefully keep this blog up to date again, just like the old days.
SeeJay Online! 