Last weekend I had to skip my usual practice hike since we were hosting guests. So instead of my weekend routine, I decided to head out for an evening weekday hike — and I'm so glad I did.

I had the entire Wadi Degla completely to myself. Even though I've explored these trails more than a dozen times now, the limestone landscape never fails to take my breath away. There's something magical about having this vast, ancient valley all to yourself.

This time I left my weighted backpack at home, which meant I could move much quicker along the familiar paths. Without that extra load, I managed to push myself up and down the hill seven times without completely exhausting myself — a personal best that left me feeling pretty accomplished.

And then came the reward for all that effort: one of the most stunning sunsets I've seen in weeks.

This was my second-to-last training hike before the big Kilimanjaro adventure. I'm hoping to squeeze in one final hike this weekend before I head out next week. 

The quiet evening, the solitude, and that incredible sunset — sometimes the best adventures happen when you least expect them.

This week mom had her birthday and we had planned a dinner with a view of the pyramids. We were then invited to a dinner that the new ambassador was hosting for a colleague who was leaving Cairo. We tried to excuse ourselves, but upon insistence we chose to attend.

To our surprise, they had bought a cake for mom and we had a full celebration around it. We were all touched by the very thoughtful and warm gesture. Mom was also quite moved, because over the years we have toned down our celebrations to quiet little cozy meals, and this was a good surprise for her as well.

#OhBoy had his own set of surprises for his Paati. He had made a birthday card for her and also a simple bead bracelet!

📽 Court: State vs. A Nobody, Netlifx ★★★★★

After a long time we got to catch up on a couple of movies last week. One of them was a Telugu movie called Court.

It is a very well written and acted court room drama. It was very a satisfying watch. The sensitivity and the tenderness of young love, the establishing of the nastiness of the villain character were all so well written, that they make you feel the characters.

The entire drama is very routed in the milieu. It is a wonderful watch and I highly recommend it.

🥾Hiking at St. Katherine Protectorate 📍

It has been two weeks, since I hike Mt. Katherine and Mt. Sinai at the protectorate. This was a preparatory hike for the Kilimanjaro trek that is coming up in June. My team mates were all doing weekly long distance treks in Malaysia and the US. I felt a bit left out and hiking loops at the Wadi Degla, didn't seem like I was doing enough.

Day 1 — Hike to Mt. Katherine

Since I was doing this alone and I had to be back at home for Easter, this was a quick in and out of trip to the Sinai region. We started very early in the morning and saw the beautiful sunrise on the way.

Once we crossed the Ahmed Hamdi tunnel, the landscape was so very different from the other side

After reaching Fox Camp, where a guide was arranged for me to take me up the mountains and bring me back. The hike was supposed to start at 10am, but guide had some transportation issues and we eventually started out at 11.45am. Not the ideal time to start a hike, but if I had to return the next day, this was the only option. Coincidentally my guide was named Musa (Moses) as well.

The terrain was very different and I huffed and puffed for a while until I found my rhythm. I had to remind myself that I need not race or do this fast. The aim was to do it and come back without an injury. And I think this would be the mantra for Kilimanjaro as well — Pole, pole (Swahili for slowly slowly)

Couple of hours later, we reached the valley where would be resting later in the night. The Wadi (valley) was a little green pasture were a few families were doing farming. The fertile piece of land was a welcome sight for the dry features around it.

We unloaded a lot of our stuff, took only water and snacks and started up Mt. Katherine after a very short break. The  way up was daunting to say the least, but I had to do this to see how I would be able to hold up in Kilimanjaro.

The way up was a rocky path, which made the hike a pretty slow and precarious one. The aim was to reach the summit by sunset and get back to the valley to rest of the night. After a couple of hours we were at the same height as Mt. Sinai.

By this time my shoulders were aching, which I later realized was because of me not swinging my arms. And walking 4h straight was causing cramps all over — quads, adductors, hamstrings. Musa, my guide, was very supportive and kept the spirits up. He even helped me stretch my hamstrings, when it was cramping real bad.

We finally reached the summit just after sunset. But the twilight was such a wonderful sight.

After a short 20 minute rest, we started walking back down again. Not sure whether it was the adrenaline from summiting or just gravity, the walk down felt refreshing and easy on effort. The knees and the ankles begged to differ though!

We reached our stay for the night at about 9.30p. Our hosts were waiting for us to eat dinner. So after a quick change of clothes and wash up, I had a simple of meal of rice cooked with lentils and a basic salad. It was a simple and nutritious meal. We decided that instead of starting again at 3.30am to summit Mt. Sinai and view the sunrise, I will take rest and start hiking a little later.

They had provided me a room with just a mattress on the floor and some blankets. I was more than happy to have it in this wilderness. I just crashed after a few quick stretches.

Day 2 — Hike to Mt. Sinai

The next morning, I was well rested and felt that I have a new pair of legs. 

We started the hike at 5.20am and reached the summit in about 2h without a stop. I think the body was getting used to the rhythm by now and I realized that walking slow in Zone 2 heart rate, helped me walked longer without gassing myself at the end of the hike.

By the time I summited, the tourists who had done the night trek to view the sunrise had left and I had the summit all to myself. We had some nice breakfast at the top. I was able to do a video call with the folks back home. 

After resting for about an hour, we started walking back down to Fox Camp.

My guide said he had a different path planned for me, instead of the usual ones that tourists took. We stopped by Elijah’s garden and crossed a mountain from there to join the path we took the previous night.

Finally after 3.5h, we reached Fox garden at about the same time we started from there the previous day. Mission accomplished!

After a quick shower and a quick lunch, I started back to Cairo.

Got myself a new pair of Hiking boots for the upcoming Kilimanjaro trek! This one is Altra Lone Peak 9 Waterproof Mid. And along with it is a new pair of Darn Tough 1466 socks.

It is a school holiday here today, due to a dust storm prediction. #OhBoy is having a good time lazing around reading books, eating ice cream and playing with this toys. The latest book that has caught his fascination is Gaving Aung Than’s Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks

I loved this post from Ashley Willis-McNamara, on writing about on the internet. As she rightly guessed, I was nodding along as I read it. There are so many parts that resonated with me. I have changed too. I used to be prolific on Facebook, then Instagram and then Twitter. But along the way, life happened, things changed. I switched to Fediverse and finally decided to setup a home at jrr.digial, running on Micro.Blog.

For a while, I was active, then I have just been reading but not writing. But Ashley has convinced me to write again. Glad to have reminders like this once in a while. Thank you Ashley!

I don’t know exactly when that changed. There wasn’t one big moment, just a slow fade. Something dimmed. I started second-guessing myself more. Started holding back more.

ashley.dev

And if you’re reading this and nodding along, just know: you’re not alone. You don’t have to write every day. You don’t have to have the hottest take. You don’t have to prove anything. You just have to be real. That’s enough.

I’m starting here. And if you’re trying to find your way back to something too, I hope you’ll start with me. 🩷

ashley.dev

What a way to put things in perspective. Funny and damn incisive!

www.youtube.com/watch

The Atlantic has shared the details of the signal chat messages. While the leak is highly sloppy and silly, I think it could happen to anyone. The conversation though is a faux pas diplomatically, to me it sounds like a good discussion on the reasons and expected outcomes. That is much of a surprise to me, than anything else!

www.theatlantic.com/politics/…

While the actions themselves may be shocking, it is this pattern that The Guardian points out that is worrying. It is not new. Elon has been doing this Twitter for a while, but the scale at which he operates now is what is concerning.

He could have done what he wanted, without this engagement on Twitter, but he chose to do it!

The 18F episode fits a common pattern of how Musk appears to ingest and amplify misinformation online. It is also a window into the influence of rightwing media and activists on Musk as he attacks and disbands parts of the government he believes don’t fit with his ideological worldview.

theguardian.com

Last weekend, a bunch of women officers from the Embassy of India in Cairo joined us in our weekly hike of Wadi Degla. Lots of fun conversations and chats along the way. Here is all of them after the hike.

Hardly a month passed by, #OhBoy came back from school a week ago with another tooth that fell off during lunch.

After my Merrel Glove gave in, I have been on the lookout for another barefoot walking/running shoe. Finally narrowed in on Xero HFS II and got it last month. I am absolutely enjoying them.

Last week got to do a 10k run at Wadi Degla that was organised by Ultra Ibex.

I stopped running more than a decade ago due to lower back pain. And then the disc tear in 2022 happened. With a lot of rehab and support from the coaches at The Quad, I have been slowly building up strength. I am really pleased at this milestone. As the famous poem goes, miles to go before I sleep…

That minds that decided to add ASMR to the title of this video is what I would call vileness. That it was done through the official account of a government, just makes it uncouth too. But I guess we are past that threshold now.

Oh, I do understand that some find joy in the misery of people who they consider as “others”. But terming is as ASMR, related to something positive and soothing is just sinking to a new low.

In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country.

kottke.org

Having said that, I feel such things will keep coming, so that we take the eye off something else they are slipping in through the day!

🥾Hiking at Wadi Degla Protected Reserve 📍

Well since the movement from Kuala Lumpur to Cairo, we have been looking for hiking spots here. And except for the Wadi Degla the city has no other place to offer. Wadi Degla is a limestone valley which seems to have formed from water flowing — whether river or sea is unclear, as people have different stories.

As you can see from the photos below the landscape is the exact opposite of what we had in Malaysia. But it has its own charm. You are exposed to the elements — wind and sun. On a winter morning, the cold air is bone chilling. But it also makes the sun bearable. The walk in the valley makes you humble in the vastness of the landscape visible in front of you. It is a form of meditation.

We intend to make the most of this space (also it is the only one 😋) and make it a weekly routine to explore new trails here.

So well put by Ezra, but I doubt the ones in power will let the tide turn against them so easily. I so want to believe Ezra and hope!

www.youtube.com/watch

In this post of Sam Altman, the cynical me can only see that the 3 key takeaways seem to be a cover to seed FUD for the upcoming unpopular changes that he seems to be hinting at.

While we never want to be reckless and there will likely be some major decisions and limitations related to AGI safety that will be unpopular, directionally, as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy.

blog.samaltman.com

While I find the 3 observations he makes very mundane, particularly coming from a person like him, I find this analogy of AI agents to transistors a very nice framework to think about things coming in our future.

In some ways, AI may turn out to be like the transistor economically—a big scientific discovery that scales well and that seeps into almost every corner of the economy. We don’t think much about transistors, or transistor companies, and the gains are very widely distributed. But we do expect our computers, TVs, cars, toys, and more to perform miracles.

blog.samaltman.com

An exciting demo from the Apple Machine Learning team on a companion tabletop lamp robot. As much AI developments has been exciting in the part weeks, this demo brings about a lot of joy to me!

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/elegnt-expressive-functional-movement

In the commentary of John Gruber on the renaming of Gulf of Mexico for US map users, I really like the below quoted line. What an envious club to be a part of!

There are three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system as their official units of measure: the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I expect there will be fewer — namely, one — who go along with calling it the “Gulf of America”.

daringfireball.net

Feels like yesterday when #OhBoy was teething and he would be itching to gnaw at things. And now he had first teeth fall off. They grow up so fast!

Lovely to see cleaning and keeping places clean deeply embedded in the culture of Japan!

PS: I know there is a lot of feel grief about Japanese culture, but that should not stop us from celebrating where they are good at.

📺 The Rookie, Netflix ★★★★

When we moved to Cairo and were in the processing of settling down and we would want to wind down with some TV series that would take our brain off the crazy days we were having. That is when I came across The Rookie. We love Nathan Fillion from the days of Castle and so we started with the pilot episode.

And soon we got hooked on to it and soon we became fans of the show. The writing was sharp, the woman characters has a strong personality, the show had a good moral compass and the jokes were 🤌🏽.

Soon Netflix let us know that they have the show only till Dec 31st. We didn’t want to let go of what we had and binge on all the episodes we could lay our hands on. After years, we were back to binge watching 2-3 episodes a day! The cold winters in Cairo helped too in us cozing up in the TV room!

And do we finished 5 seasons in a record time. The last we watched a TV series in such a record speed was for Spooks.

📚 Project Hail Mary ★★★★

Finished reading: Project Hail Mary: A Novel by Weir, Andy 📚

It has been a while since I last read a full book. I have been dropping books mid-way mostly or have kept them pending for years now. 🙈

In that sense, this happened pretty quickly. Apart from the wonderful storyline it was mostly because it was loaned from a library. The added pressure definitely helped. Hope this turns out to a reading streak. 🤞🏼

An very level headed take on the WPEngine and Matt Mullenweg controversy. I am also a little disappointed with Matt and where this is headed, but this post is a good reminder that we are all human and mistakes are a part of us. Mistakes alone should not define us. I too hope Matt does better on this issue and in the future!

I support the mad king manton.org