• It's been more than a week now since I have cough and general fatigue. I am able to work, but I do not feel 100%. The drive to and from Ocean City on New Year's Eve and Day, and the cold wind, got me bad. Fortunately, I have not had a fever so far, but overall, I feel dull. I don't like getting sick; it's not the sickness itself that bothers me, but having my whole house shut down because so many things depend on me.

• Today, I saw on Mastodon that India will soon require all the messaging apps to bind to a physical sim card. This is to curb fraud happening in India using WhatsApp and other messaging apps. It's all good from a fraud prevention point of view, but such decisions always hurt the innocent more than the perpetrators. I still use my Indian WhatsApp number in the USA on the same phone as my US WhatsApp number. Soon, I may not be able to do that. Either I will have to carry two phones, with the Indian WhatsApp bound to its physical SIM card, or give it up altogether. It's not the end of the world for me, but it will be an inconvenience. Right now, I have a neat setup for tracking both groups' numbers. We don’t even know whether such measures work in the long run. I think, instead of restricting and banning things, the government should spend more on educating people about how to stay safe online.

I am having home computer issues. All my home laptops are old now, and one by one, they're dying. I don't want to buy a new computer yet, but I will need to find a solution soon. I have just converted my home server, a Lenovo ThinkPad, into my everyday laptop, as my Dell Inspiron is unreliable when starting up. I did a fresh Linux Mint install on the ThinkPad and installed all the tools I need for my hobby project development and video editing. I don't know if I will use the same system now for Plex and back up my phone photos. I may have to go back to my old Raspberry Pi setup. I still have my Raspberry Pis, which I can revive again. I will think about it before making everything so complicated that it's hard to maintain.

I had nothing else to write today, but I wanted to test if my build system for this journal is working on my ThinkPad with the fresh installation, hence this late-night rant.

We returned home from Ocean City on January 1, 2026, but before we left, we went to the beach and the boardwalk after checking out. It was extremely cold, but the kids loved their time on the beach playing with the sand and then in the arcade on the boardwalk. Since Ocean City is a summer destination, it was a ghost town when we went, which is understandable. I have no complaints, as all I wanted was to get out of the house after a week-long staycation during the Christmas week, and I can never get enough of the ocean, no matter what time of the year it is.

The journey was tiring, and it will take me this weekend to get out of the fatigue and the sore throat I developed before I can be back to normal.