A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #49

Author

Amit Sarkar
December 10, 2024

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

Me and Rinat recently published two episodes of our podcast Tech Talk with Amit & Rinat. The first episode was on Datacentres and the second episode was on Enterprise Software. Please do listen and share your feedback.

We recently bought a carrom board from Uber Games. It's getting cold now, so it was better to buy a board game that both me and my wife enjoyed. Carrom is something that we both played while growing up in India. And we really wanted to buy a good quality board that we could use to play with our friends. We now have one 🙂.

I also went to the Ben Böhmer concert at Alexandra Palace with few friends. This concert was recommended by a friend of mine and since I've been listening to house music for a while now, I was excited to go and watch this concert in person. It was truly an amazing experience, and since this was my first concert in a very long time, I really enjoyed it. I normally listen to Ben Böhmer’s music, especially during my runs.

I recently went to the Vegan Runners social at The Duke of Cambridge which was hosting the monthly Supper Club organized by Plant Based Kitchens. This was an interesting concept because we just paid per person, but the menu was pre-decided, so we didn't have an option to select. It was a five-course menu with a starter, a main, two shared sides, and a dessert. The food was nice and it's always good to meet like-minded people who enjoy the same food as you do without explaining to them why you're eating this and not meat or something else.

I also generated a podcast with the help of Google's NotebookLM. This tool is amazing as it summarizes a document or an article for you in the form of a podcast. The podcast is spoken by two AI voices - one male voice and one female voice. In this case I uploaded my CV as an input source, and it created a whole podcast with it. I was quite amazed that it highlighted some of my skills which even I couldn’t highlight myself. There are certain inaccuracies and some repetitions but it’s a fascinating podcast to listen to.

I also started reading a book How to Argue With a Meat Eater by Ed Winters recently. I've been following him on YouTube for a while now and he's one of the vocal vegans out there who tries to argue constructively with people about veganism and why people should go vegan. And I think it's a great book for us, vegans, to put forth our points constructively to people and help them understand our choices.

I also changed my home broadband provider from BT to Community Fibre. I got a good deal from the person who was selling this product at my door. I asked him about the product and the speed, and I was quite impressed with what they were offering (first 12 months free). So, I immediately booked it, and it got installed in a couple of days’ time. It was one of the fastest installations I’ve ever seen. The connection was installed and activated on the same day. Normally in the UK, if you try to get broadband installed, they take some time to activate if they must put a new line first. So, I was pleasantly surprised with this.

I also moved my SIM only plan from O2 to giffgaff. I changed my mobile network because O2 kept raising their prices every year and I was not happy with them, so I moved. I got on a £10 monthly rolling plan that offers 20 GB of data with unlimited UK calls and texts with giffgaff.

In this edition

🏃 Cardiff Half Marathon

This was my last half marathon of the year and again a sub-2-hour run. Cardiff Half Marathon is part of the SuperHalfs series of which I have now completed three races.

I reached a day before the race and was quite pleased with my stay near the Mermaid Quay shopping centre.

I explored the local area near my AirBnb and walked all the way to the Penarth Pier.

During the run

The day of the race, the weather was quite cloudy but luckily it didn’t rain heavily till after we finished.

The atmosphere was electrifying with so many people out on the streets to cheer everyone.

With my medal

But I went out too fast during in the first half which cost me couple of minutes. Normally it’s better to do a negative split but since I went too fast in the beginning I couldn’t hold on to my pace till the end.

The course was also not very flat as there were few sections with some elevation but overall, it was a fast course.

I was also glad that I bumped into my personal trainer, Steve Caulfield, during the run and almost finished at the same time as him. He had just finished the Berlin Marathon a week before and to come and do a sub-2-hour half marathon was amazing.

With my trainer Steve Caulfield

Overall, I was still happy with my performance and was glad that all went well without any injuries.

Final race results

Doing a half marathon in any city is extremely exciting as you meet so many travellers from across the world coming together to participate in a race.

🌍 Cape Town, South Africa

Recently we visited Cape Town in South Africa, and it was an amazing visit for us.

Our itinerary looked like this. Thanks to ChatGPT for majority of the recommendations and helping us plan our itinerary.

I drove 1,866 kms during our trip with most of the mileage covered along the Garden route. We hired a Toyota Corolla Quest from Enterprise at the Cape Town airport and we got an incredibly good deal on it through Expedia. The car was powerful, comfortable to drive and had amazing mileage.

Places we visited -

  • V&A Waterfront - This was our most visited place during our stay in Cape Town since it was the safest part of the city during the night.

  • Two Oceans Aquarium - Our son loved seeing all the fishes, sharks, and penguins here.

  • Time Out Market Cape Town - We kept coming back to this market to eat the dosa at Kapoochka and ramen at Ramenhead.

  • Boulders Penguin Colony - An amazing location to see the South African penguins in the wild

  • Robben Island museum - A place filled with stories of the political prisoners kept there, with the most famous being Nelson Mandela.

  • Vrede En Lust - Our first wine estate visit in Franschhoek. Beautiful place.

  • Babylonstoren - What an exquisite lunch we had here. All food on our vegetarian platter was grown on the estate. Met Fabio Jakobsen here.

  • Boschendal - Our last wine estate in Franschhoek and the wines and the location were amazing.

  • Tokara - Our first wine estate visit in Stellenbosch. Stunning views and we said hello to a peacock here.

  • Delaire Graff - Our best lunch here in the wine region. Absolutely finger-licking food.

  • Rust en Vrede - Our last wine estate visit in Stellenbosch. Small but warm feeling.

  • Cape Agulhas - Southernmost point of the African continent.

  • Bloukrans Bungy - It’s the highest bungy jump on the African continent and the fifth highest in the world at 216 metres.

  • Knysna Elephant Park - We walked with the Elephants here. Truly a glorious experience.

  • Botlierskop Village Lodge - The best game drives where we saw Cheetahs, Rhinos, wild Buffaloes, Deers, Ostrich, Giraffe, Elephants and many more animals.

  • Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden - A visit to the best botanical garden in South Africa to finish off our trip.

Places we ate at -

Cape Town

Franschhoek

Hermanus

  • Platō Coffee - Cozy coffee shop and they took extra care to prepare our coffee

Cape Agulhas

  • Zuidste Kaap - Good place to eat after visiting the southernmost point of Africa.

Mossel Bay

Knysna

  • Delhi Darbar - The best Indian food in our whole trip

  • île de païn - One of the friendliest cafes we went to. The staff were nice.

  • Piza ē Vino - Great Italian food with amazing views.

We did the following activities as well

The game drives were our most expensive item on things to do but it was worth every penny. The helicopter ride was the second most expensive item and again was worth every penny.

Overall, we packed a lot of stuff and created amazing memories. We met some incredible people and heard remarkable stories. Our AirBnB hosts were extremely good. There was a concern regarding safety in the night, but we managed around it and luckily nothing happened.

💼 Portfolio website

I recently created a complete website using ChatGPT highlighting all the small projects I have created. This website is hosted on Github and built and deployed using Netlify. It uses plain HTML and Tailwind CSS. Website screenshots are taken through a Puppeteer script generated using ChatGPT. The whole website was built and deployed in less than 1 hour. Some of the projects like AI Tool Crawler, Jobs Lever and Investa were also created using ChatGPT.

AI tools are getting really powerful, and I have been exploring them lately. I will keep posting about interesting tools that I have used and played with.

❤️ Things I enjoyed

This section has been inspired by Ali Abdaal’s wonderful newsletter.

🎬 Video - ₹16,000 vs ₹10,00,00,000 In India | The Real Game Of Wealth is a very well made about the different classes of wealth in India and how a person in each class lives.

📝 Articles - What's so special about the human brain? and Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise are must-read articles. The first article focuses on how the human brain compares with other animals and why we have been so successful. The second article focuses on the story of how Deep Learning evolved into the GenAI boom we are now seeing.

📜 Quote - Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. - Frank Zappa

📱 App - Vanguard UK finally has a mobile app. I use Vanguard to invest in index funds.

🎙️ Podcast - Eric Schmidt in The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett is an eye-opening podcast on the emerging landscape of AI. He talks about AI, start-ups, founders, Google, and many more.

📺 TV show - WeCrashed is the story of WeWork from how it started, how it grew to more than $40 billion in valuation and how it ended with its founder, Adam Neumann, stepping down from his role as CEO of the company.

🌐 Website - GeoGuessr is a game you can play with your friends to figure out who can guess the location based on a single Google StreetView image.

Once again, thank you so much for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

If you want to follow me around the internet, then please do so here.

Until we meet again next week, stay warm, drink lots of warm water/mulled wine, enjoy the Xmas decorations and enjoy time with your family.

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