Year in Review - 2017

This has been a pretty good year for my blog, I think(??). Of course, the metrics that I use are rather subjective and might not bear even a semblance to the truth. In my head, 2017’s quick recap would definitely feature these things:

• I started 100DaysOfWriting on the 18th of February. That was also my first post on the blog in 2017, and in almost a year!
• SHA-1 was broken for the first time with some binary padding data, two PDFs had the same SHA-1 even though they were different!
• I watched a little bit of Veep, but then gave up after the 4th season! Selena was just about to become president. I wish I could continue where I left off, unfortunately, it’s too late for that now.
• My git patch was ejected (not merged into master), but the patch made it as far as pu. I had a really good time reading the code that powers so much of software today. It was fun, I will pick it up again sometime in the next year.
• I updated from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS After a nerve wracking few hours of guess work, I was able to get encrypted ext4 partitions to work! (+ auto-mounting on start-up
• I watched and absolutely loved Big Little Lies S1. Season 2 is going to be absolutely epic!
• Homeland’s 6th Season lived upto the mark and then some. Quinn’s resurrection is on the cards, I hope
• Cloudfare faced Cloudbleed and the buffer overflow error reared it’s head once more! Thankfully, GoLang is here to solve all the problems. (Right?!)
• I struggled with a weird bug on Ubuntu where my mouse would simply stop working now and again. I am still facing this bug, but it has reduced to a much more acceptable number of occurences. The modprobe fix works for now.
• I started reading Austen! I read Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Her other three novels are on deck for next year.
• Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) took the spot of “The Dystopia I fear most”, displacing 1984.
• Demonetisation was an eerie reminder of the power that the state wields in this country
• The internet came together on r/place and did something to a canvas that boggled everyone’s mind and captured my imagination. Oh, I LOVE the Internet!
• I re-watched about 10 seasons worth of Seinfeld. I am not exagerrating.
• United Airlines dragged a passenger through the cabin and everyone was hysteric about it. Ended up reading a book written by a flight attendant and developing a lot of empathy
• I taped my webcam, updated my RSA keys to 4096 bits and enabled ufw to close all ports, all the time. Go Privacy!
• I found the Nautilus update irritating but didn’t switch and am now quite happy about it!
• I watched Masaan, Lunchbox, Contagion, and Another Earth for the umpteenth time
• I interned at Elanic for 2 months! I learned a lot and it helped me get Node.js!
• WannaCry happened, MalwareTechBlog stopped it, then MalwareTechBlog got stuck in the US (and is still there!)
• I stayed with Chrome and then, switched to Quantum two days after it released. Quantum is the best browser I have ever used in my life till now!
• I had a tweet blow up (to some extent).
• I was stranded in Koramangala for a couple hours and then we waded through a feet of water at around 1 am to get home!
• I started listening to Podcasts and I haven’t been able to go back to my way of life before. They are only getting better and more popular, so that’s one of the good things that happened this year!
• I watched the 19 episodes of My So Called Life! That show did not deserve to be cancelled right in the middle of a season
• I watched 2 seasons of Downton Abbey and I am absolutely in love with Sybil’s character
• I read parts the TLS 1.2 RFC and wrote an overview. Considering that this came in handy in an interview I had later this year, this has been a very worthwhile use of time. Much more so than I had anticipated it at the beginning
• I spent Durga Pujo in Kolkata and saw first-hand how chaotic a city can be!
• I raved about NPM’s abrupt change to their download-stats API which got some attention
• I obsessed over Primer (2004) and managed to untangle most of the mysteries. This is going right up there on the shelf of my favourite movies of all time.
• I watched Arrival and fell in love with time travel, aliens, Amy Adams, science and language. All over again!

And here we are. 1st January, 2018.

P.S This post ended up using the pronoun “I” a lot more than I expected it to. I didn’t know how to phrase what I wanted to say appropriately without doing that. The excessive usage does make me uncomfortable, but I guess it can’t be avoided. Casey Neistat did the same thing when he made a review video. His videos are SO GOOD.