One day before Tamil New Year’s Day, actually just a few hours before midnight of 13’th I opened my Redbubble store, Quotes Nirvana. It currently has 12 designs and with merch carrying these  designs. Behind each of the design there is an inspiration and I hope I am able to pass on the good message to my customers who buy merch carrying these quotes. I’ll be happy to hear from you, who bought one or more of these items and if these products had enriched your lives. Feel free to share your comments. I would love to hear from you.

The link to my shop on Redbubble is here – https://www.redbubble.com/people/SubashSL/shop?asc=u

As the saying goes, “Better Late than Never”. I finally uploaded my Technical Writing Course on November the 19’th. Big Thanks to Covid for preventing me from continuing to teach the course with colleges I wanted to teach and also making me tired teaching it online. This time I went with SkillShare for two main reasons. 1. My course is not going to be sold for Rs.500 or US$6.71 on Udemy (if you opt for the “Deals and Promotions” option) and from which Udemy will just share 38% of the sale with you. 2. For a seriously made course I would certainly like to help my students with a little more interaction by working with them on a Project. Only this interaction would really help them. Skillshare has their own way of promoting by offering a free trial period during which the course can be taken for free but I was ok with that. Despite approving my sample video (I have the approval mail with me) Udemy kept rejecting some of my videos saying they weren’t in the 16:9 Aspect ratio. It was a blessign in disguise and I could eventually move to Skillshare. This was my second upleasant experience with Udemy. The first being the slashing of prices to as low as $20 for all courses sometime years ago. 

Anyway to sample my course or even take it for free for 30 days, here is the link – https://skl.sh/30yadg5

That’s the background image (one of several beautiful images that come shipped) of my laptop’s desktop after installing Manjaro 21.0 XFCE version called “Ornara” that I installed on my decade old laptop last Saturday. Yes, my laptop has been resurrected!  And yes, I am using the same laptop to write this. 

I am not sure why I deliberated this long to go the Linux way as I have been planning for years. Maybe it was some of those made for Windows only applications that I was using heavily that I kept postponing the event. But after struggling with a lagging Windows 10 on my laptop last Friday I decided to install Ubuntu Linux. By the way if you are installing Ubuntu Linux you do not even need to take a backup of your non-system drive i.e if you have partitioned your HDD or SSD into a c:(normally the system drive) and into other partitions such as D:, E:, F: etc., that hold the bulk of your valuable files. The system drive is of course where you can install Ubuntu and if you have anything to be backed up there you must do so. Of course there is no harm in backing up your other drives as well which I did anyway when I was installing Ubuntu. Also note that in Linux (as in Unix) your drive will not labelled as a C: or D:. Instead you’ll see something like /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and so on. How to find this? You can run Ubuntu off the flash drive. As you boot up from the flash drive you are given the choice to run it or install it. Run it to get a feel of the OS and check your drives for the various partitions and make a note of them and their sizes from which you’ll be able to tell if it was a C:, D:, E: etc., 

Ubuntu worked fine from the USB flash drive too but then I saw it lagging terribly after I installed it. Maybe my old laptop, an Acer, running 2’nd gen Intel i3 2310M CPU with 4 GB RAM wasn’t the perfect place for Ubuntu. So on Saturday 24’th I installed Manjaro XFCE. I was looking at other distros such as Mint LInux and the heavily praised Fedora but Manjaro LInux blew my mind away. Installation is not easy but not difficult either. Manjaro needs a GPT Partition table and it will prompt you to create the same. But in the process your entire disk will be erased SO DO BACKUP YOUR DRIVE before installing Manjaro. In the process you will have to delete existing partitions and then create them, i.e create space for a system partition (where Manajaro is installed, this has to be an ext4 type), and other partitions for your data which can be in the NTFS format. Please refer documentation if you aren’t aware of these terms or get a techie to install it for you. 

For me Manjaro works literally out of the box. Unlike Windows I didn’t have to install even one driver and the laptop is flying with the drivers that Manjaro installed. Audio, video, internet connectivity, file searching, OS updates all work perfectly fine and at blazing speeds my laptop never knew before.  Best part, for every common Windows program out there (not the proprietary ones such as Help + Manual for example) there are similar and even better programs in Linux. For instance I use Foxit reader heavily on Windows for my .pdf documents. The equivalent in LInux is Okular which I find even better than Foxit. You do have a Foxit version for Linux but it is buggy and very slow. For ages, even on Windows I had already migrated to Libre Office. And for every issue you have with Linux and its software there is a solution. All you have to do is search. All these for free! 

Another amazing part is the command line interface (it’s a translucent beauty on the XFCE environment) where you can run commands and you will not believe how you can install software with just a few commands unlike Windows where you need to search, then download the software, then run it to install it. As I keep using the OS and discovering more software it only gets better by the day. 

I am only wondering how much companies can save if they only moved to Linux. Even individuals can. I knew someone who became a Linux and Open-Source Evangelist years ago and I am sure he has helped many an organisation save valuable time and money by migrating to Linux. Unless you have Windows specific software (that will run only on Windows) you must consider Linux. By the way, you can run Windows applications inside Linux too though I am yet to explore that. There are a plethora of distributions to choose from (I am seriously considering Garuda Linux form India, for a newly built system) but I highly recommend Manjaro that comes in three popular environments. Extensive documentation and YouTube videos exist explaining how to install Manjaro. Try, use and enjoy. 

That’s Achan in 2013 at the Red Fort. Had he been alive, My Achan (Father) would have turned 80 today. He left us on January 14, the holy day of Makara Sankranti at Brahma Muhurtham 3:30 AM. It was also a Thursday, the Holy Day of the Gurus and particularly Baghwan Sathya Sai Baba. Coincidentally 15’th day ritual also fell on a Thursday (January 29’th which was a full moon day) and today too happens to be a Thursday. We console ourselves that he has moved on to a Greater Life considering the auspiciousness of the day and the time of his departure but the void he has left behind can never be filled. The only other big consolation I have is that I was there during his final moments and could even give him the Holy water from The Ganga I had brought from my trip to Varanasi a couple of years ago. All said, there is never going to be a fraction of a moment when I can have him back, for a small chat, to take Paada namaskar, give a hug or a kiss or even have an argument. How in a flash all differences petty or big were forgiven at the moment he departed from this world. He and Amma (Mother) are the Gods who are responsible for the very breath we breathe and yet in how many ways (big and small) I have hurt them. In the initial days after his passing away I could even imagine what the starving sisters of Noida were going through during their depression after they decided to lock themselves up after their father’s death.

When you consider the good things he had done and the good examples are principles he lived by it seems like an endless list. Impeccable when it came to presentation, he never went out without a shirt or pants that weren’t ironed and pressed properly. Most of the people who knew him remember him for this attribute. People who didn’t know yet of his passing express shock and wonder be it the photocopy shops where I go to take copies of his documents containing his photographs or the vendors who pass by in the streets. Even yesterday I met an old school friend and he was asking why he hasn’t seen my Father going on his usual rounds of walking these days. Always dressed sharp his shirts and pants were all custom stitched (Achan never wore any ready made shirts, Tees, Trousers or Pants) he was always a pleasant sight. Going over his list of good habits would read like an over indulgence of mine and so I will not be going into the same though I very much want to. This IS an Eulogy afterall. However among the several wonderful attributes, his observance of the strict rules for fasting and prayer for the Sabarimalai pilgrimage was legend having been on the Pilgrimage 22 times of which most of them were by the long route. Thank God, I had the privilege of accompanying him on 4 of those trips. Achan would cup his ears when he would pass by a Television set that would be playing. I could simply go on and on and on. 

Even his passing away wasn’t in vain. He left me a changed person in many ways I cannot describe them all for now. Will I ever stop grieving? May your soul Rest in Peace, my dear Achan. You remain forever in our hearts.