Personal Updates: Hello 2022!

Ahoy there, Rhino from the future! You’re probably the only reader of this blog. To give you company, I have decided to revive it and start writing more often! As is often tradition, I’ll start 2022 with a list of what I have been up to since my last blog post…

I moved out of Bangalore.

I now live in Goa! Urban Goa is extremely cosmopolitan, sort of like what Bangalore, Madras, or Bombay is, minus the cultural stagnation. You can jump between the various towns within Goa depending on the sort of vibes you are looking for – whether you’re in it for pretty roads (Canacona), smelly hippies (Arambol), or chic urban vibes (Panjim).

I changed my name.

My online handle has always been @wingedrhino. I’m now officially Rhino Maximus even in the offline world. It feels a bit like being reborn.

I got hooked onto embedded systems.

It’s been a decade since I last monkeyed with microcontrollers. COVID-19 related travel restrictions meant that my own home had to be my primary source of entertainment. So I converted it into a lab! My current favourite chips are the Raspberry Pi Pico, and the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Don’t expect to see either of these in project blogs though! I have plenty of older hardware I am yet to use up before moving on to newer toys.

I resumed working for someone else.

It’s been a tiring few years hustling startup after startup with an obese, broken body that’s barely capable of taking care of itself. I decided to spend some time working on myself, and building my mind and body up to a level where it’d be a lot higher in performance, before I resume hustling.

I got into music once more!

I have never been anything close to a genius musically. Everything I enjoyed listening to was a bit too hard to play, and beginner level lessons taught styles I absolutely loathed. But blues, swing, and stoner rock changed everything. I am now back to playing the guitar! I’m still a beginner after ~15 years of playing, but this time I’m a lot more motivated learner.

I’m finally giving frontend development a go.

This is mostly down to how awesome Syntax.fm has been to listen to. After years of building distributed systems and exclusively writing backends, how hard can it be to display a few boxes with colours, gradients, text, and images?

I don’t feel averse to writing anymore.

I had something of a writer’s block for several years. I’d feel stressed, unmotivated, or just extremely dark, and feel unable to express myself in words like could when I was younger. Furthermore, my vocabulary and grammar regressed quite a bit. This year though, I feel confident enough to ignore all that and just write for the sake of writing. What I lack in expressiveness can easily be made up by the usefulness of the information presented within this blog!