Weekly notes 27/2024
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: Pic of Agam performing.
What’s been happening #
It’s been a busy week
- I’ve been preparing for my PTE Academic test by watching a fair bit of YouTube videos on how to prepare and what sort of questions are expected. PTE Academic Test is required to demonstrate my English language proficiency for my upcoming Australian PR application, and I must admit I am a bit intimidated by this. I haven’t done any tests in a long time, and PTE Academic is a completely automated way of grading your answers, even though the answers can be subjective and the tests cover Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. Jo will do her test on Sunday afternoon, and I will have mine on Monday. Hopefully, we will both pass the test with the required scores.
- After a long time, I’ve spruced up my tech blog theme, as well as cleaned up some of the older articles. There are a lot of the older articles that are simply not relevant anymore, with many links being dead so I removed the links, and moved the older posts to an archives section so that they don’t show up when navigating via the previous posts, but direct links to them will still work.
- A busy concert weekend -
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Agam at Roundhouse, University of NSW. I’ve heard of Agam for a long time but have never listened to any of their songs. Overall, I enjoyed the concert. The concert started about 20 minutes late, but once they started performing, it was quite sublime. Harish is really good in crowd management, getting the audience to sing with him, or keep it down. The entire band was terrific. T Praveen Kumar, the lead guitarist was bringing out violin-like sounds from his electric guitar. Jagadish, the rhythm guitarist’s superb prog rock/metal riff was glorious. The unsung heroes were the bassist Aditya Kasyap and Sivakumar Nagarajan on the Indian percussions. Their subtle touches added an amazing depth to the entire performance and elevated it to the next level. I would highly recommend watching them live if they perform in your city.
Agam Concert
Agam Concert
Agam Concert
Agam Concert
Agam Concert
Agam Concert -
Zakir Hussain, Kala Ramnath, and Jayanthi Kumaresh in Triveni at the Opera House. I have no words to describe how awesome this was. This was about a 100-minute nonstop instrumental masterpiece and we didn’t even realize how time went by here. They didn’t allow any photography or videography so I don’t have too many photos.
Zakir Hussain Concert
Zakir Hussain Concert -
With this, we’ve completed 12 concerts this year, more than what we saw all of last year! We don’t have any concerts planned for the later part of the year since most of the major concerts are happening in November, and we will be in India then. I will keep an eye out for some interesting artists coming up and see if we can get to see them live!
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What we ate #
Trying out this section since we try out food from different restaurants and Jo does some awesome food too!
Egg Puffs: A staple food from my childhood that I miss the most, so asked Jo to make it and she did!
Koli Saaru: Jo wanted to do this and her quest to find the right recipe meant listening to all the videos that were playing in the background made my mouth drool and I was badly craving Akki Roti/Raagi Mudde. We had it with rice instead.
Pasta & Chicken Parm with Salad.
Jo wanted to try out fresh pasta we got from Coles, and had some chicken so she made this. Turned out pretty good, I even cleaned out the salad (or “ghaas phuus” as I like to call it).
That’s for some of the interesting food. Will try to keep this section running!
Music of the Week #
One of the things I love the most about going to live gigs is to go back home to find other live versions of them performing to see what improvisations they did. So here’s a relatively old series of videos that I had no idea existed - Agam’s A Dream to Remember live sessions. I love that there’s a background choir with voices, strings, sitar, or other instruments. Wonderful series of videos.
Link of the week #
Retool has a fantastic article, with some great visuals talking about the history of Yahoo Pipes.
I remember reading about Yahoo pipes back in the day and was fascinated with web technology, with pipes, with RSS. In today’s world, IFTTT and Zapier exist and for those who want self-hosted equivalents - n8n and Node-RED are good equivalent tools.
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