Pandemic Chronicles

My blog posts while being in self-quarantine/isolation during the time of COVID-19 Pandemic

Reinterpretation (of self)

Reinterpretation of old images is mostly a futile exercise. All it does is expose you to your shortcomings. On the other hand, you are suddenly made aware of the progress you have made as a photographer.

When I look back, this is one of the images that proved to be crucial in my development as a photographer. I didn’t quite know it at that time, but when I made this image in Japan in 2017, I was creating a template of color and composition. And it was also a point in time when I realized that, for me, making photographs meant listening to my emotions and feelings.

So another way to think about the reinterpretation of an image is that it reflects your inner self on a shifting scale of time. In an earlier time, the same image was a bit more brooding and darker, perhaps capturing something of my

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Musings, On Photography
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The New New Working From Home Set-Up

I shared my new work from home set up a few days ago. Well, I ended up making some adjustments.  The double giant screens — iMac Pro and XDR Display are not for me — I need a single screen. The folks at Apple are letting me keep the XDR Display for a few more weeks — can’t pack and ship this thing without leaving the house — so I packed up my iMac Pro. For now, it is sitting in a corner, waiting to be called back to duty. 

I have it paired with my MacBook Pro 16-inch  with an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M  8 GB graphics card and 64 GB of memory, and is powered by 2.3 GHz  8-Core Intel Core i9 processor. The machine is a screamer and is ideal for what I like to do most — editing photos. The XDR Display is sublime when helping

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Musings
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Currently Enjoying

Staying at home is a good opportunity to really savor things – you are not in a rush, and as a result, you can linger over words, images, sounds, and senses. At present, I am enjoying: 

  1. Mémoires du Sapa – Jun Miyake  I discovered Jun Miyake a year ago, and his body of work is simply astounding. The global music influences in perfect pre-pandemic bliss. The new album is about 35 minutes, and I have listened to it multiple times thus far.  My favorite tracks on the album are Stranger’s Dreams and Tango Amnesia. But his entire body of work is worth exploring. I recommend visiting his website and stream his music. 
  2. Cage by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, an Icelandic crime-writer, is just a brilliant way to lose yourself and go back to a different crisis. Well, this is third in a trilogy, so you might as well read Snare and Trap. 
  3. The Test:

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Musings
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This made me very sad

On an early morning walk, I walked past a big window and saw this plant starving to death, much like its neighbors who are desperate for a drink. The shutdown has many such silent victims. I don’t know why, but this image made me incredibly sad. (Made with my iPhone 11 Pro.)

On Photography
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#50

It just might be the worst kind of milestone to note — today is the 50th day of my isolation. What started on February 29 as a precaution, is now become a way of life. I have not had much contact with the outside world. Three friends have dropped by and said hello from their car. One of them brought me a cookie, while another helped out with some coffee beans. And the father of my goddaughters brought them so I could see them through the car windows and talk to them.

This morning, I woke up thinking about the present reality. Like others, our current state causes me a lot of distress. And like everyone else, I have bad days. But that is no way to live, and as Dalai Lama says, “We have to make a sustained effort, again and again, to cultivate the positive aspects within us.”

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Musings
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[Podcast] Stuck@Om with Paul Kedrosky

In this episode of Stuck@Om, I chat with my friend Paul Kedrosky, an investor, blogger and a deep thinker. He was very quick to recognize the potential threat and ramifications of the coronavirus as news was emerging about the strange flu in Wuhan.1

In our conversation, Paul notes that he’s pretty happy with the way he’s constructed his reality. He jokingly states he’s been preparing for self-quarantine for the last decade. This is his time to shine. Aside from missing coffee and sushi, he’s enjoying being at home with his wife and children. 

When our conversation takes a deeper turn, we chat about how the implicit assumptions on which we base our lives are changing — we are more fragile than we ever imagined.

Paul’s been studying the Black Plague and realized that the diaries of that time could’ve been written yesterday in a blog post. The way we deal

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Podcast
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#47

I am calling this one #47, because that’s how many days I have been stuck here. I am too tired today to coming up with a more clever headline for another dispatch from my home office.  When I woke up, I learned((learned)) about the passing of Toni Lane, a crypto-currency enthusiast. I met her once — in Oslo, Norway — before I embarked on a journey northward. She was a lively soul, energetic and filled with ideas. It was such a great conversation. No emails were exchanged. No text messages went back and forth. Just a few hours over coffee, dinner, and company with some other friends. All that remained was a memory. 

The sadness of her passing is only compounded by the general malaise I feel. Last night wasn’t the most comfortable, as an old ailment got the better off me. I woke up more tired than I have in

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Musings
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Adventures in standing in place

For the past 42 days or so, I have been working on my MacBook Pro 16 while sitting at my dining table or on the couch. I recognized from the outset that it wasn’t the most ergonomically efficient way to work, but I thought I could make do. After all, the only other table in my tiny apartment is a custom writing table, which I use to write in longhand when I’m working on my daily journal or notes to friends. It is not meant for typing on a computer.

Still, I kept using these tables. And to make matters worse, when I am sitting, I’m usually slumping, a posture not conducive for long stretches of work. After more than a month, I recently realized that working from home is here to stay, and I need to do something about the growing aches and pains in my wrists and shoulders.

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Musings
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My Morning Speeds vs Evening Speeds

I am fortunate to live in a building that is serviced by WebPass, an SF-based, internet provider that is now owned by Google Fiber. I have been a customer for over a decade, and can’t live without their rock-solid gigabit per second connection. And it is way cheaper than whatever Comcast is charging for its offering.

That speed has come in handy as during this pandemic-induced isolation. Working From Home is made more effective if my Zoom calls are of the best quality. I love that I have really robust upload speeds, which is what you really need when doing video calls from the apartment.

That said, it is good to chill and have robust bandwidth for streaming music and videos. By the way, the whole building seems to be in chill mode in the evening, as shown by the sharp disparity in my day time and night time connection speed.

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Technology
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