Before my trips began, I started researching how to record my travel stories. I’d always shoot photos on my phone and with the DSLR camera. This time, I wanted to do something different and shoot short videos to stitch together and make a short travel film. I don’t like vlogging, so the video would have no narration. It would complement blog posts where I’d write about the trips in greater detail.

I spent a lot of time researching video gear. My main camera now is the Canon EOS R, the company’s first real full-frame mirrorless camera. I’ve also accumulated a small number of native RF lenses -- which Canon made exclusively for the R series camera. However, the lenses I have aren’t that comfortable for video work, and because they are pretty heavy, I’d need a gimbal of some sort to record any usable shots. 

Also, I didn’t want to use the same camera for both photos and videos, even though they are perfectly capable of doing so. 

I looked at the Sony system for some time. Sony’s mirrorless line-up has a great selection of camera bodies and lenses since they’ve been around for longer. However, the upfront cost of entering into a new camera system swayed me. 

I decided a better smartphone camera would fit my needs perfectly. It’d always be with me, and I could just record some videos anytime I wanted without needing to use a gimbal. 

Meet the iPhone 13 Pro. With its fantastic array of cameras, their low-light capabilities, smooth stabilization, and not to mention incredible video quality, it was a no-brainer purchase decision for me. 

During the trip, I shot more videos than photos. I did snap many pictures to compare the Pixel 6 and the iPhone 13 Pro cameras (I’m writing detailed reviews, so don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already). Still, I mostly shot videos on both cameras (spoiler: iPhone 13 Pro shoots better videos than the Pixel 6). 

I use Google Photos, so all my Pixel 6 and iPhone shots are uploaded to the cloud. The plan was to come back home, create separate albums for the trips, download the photos and videos, and delete the videos from Google Photos. 

Why would I delete the videos? Well, at 4K resolution, they take up a lot of space. (To give you an idea, before the trip, I had used about 20-30 GBs of storage on Google Photos. After the trip, I have used up nearly 70 GBs of storage.) 

I don’t need to keep all those small video clips. Once I have them all downloaded locally, I’d create the video, delete the clips from the cloud, and upload the finalized video to the trip album. 

Unfortunately, things aren’t going as planned. 

I’ve created the albums on Google Photos, but the download is repeatedly failing for some reason (probably a large number of videos are to blame). I’ve been trying to download the gallery for the past three days, and they are constantly failing. After many attempts, I’ve managed to download one gallery, but the rest are still failing. I’m not convinced it’s my internet connection, but it very well could be. (It fails on my backup connection too).

I could transfer all media from iPhone and Pixel to the computer directly, but then I’d have to manually figure out which photos and videos belong to which location and spend another eternity organizing them. 

As if that wasn’t enough, I also have photos shot on the EOS R that are scattered across multiple SD cards. As you can guess, having to organize this whole mess of media feels like a full-time job on its own. Though I have nothing else to do at this time, I’m still procrastinating because I have this huge digital mess to clean up and organize first.

I’m now questioning my decision to do everything on the smartphone. On the one hand, it’s easy to shoot and forget. On the other hand, the post-trip organization is a tedious task. Plus, I run the risk of running out of cloud storage if I shoot too many videos. The bandwidth needed to upload and download all these media is another concern that I forgot to think about in advance.

If you have some tips for better organizing all these media from different smartphones and cameras, please share them with me. Until then, I will need to rethink how I organize the media files on the go.

The plan is to transfer the files from all three devices to their relevant folders on an external storage device every night so that I wouldn’t have all this mess at the end of several trips. 

Hopefully, I’ve learned my lesson and will do a better job organizing on my next trip.

📖 Interesting Reads

💰 How I got wealthy without working too hard

I liked many of the points discussed in this article. I’m not sure about the ‘easier than ever to become a millionaire’ claim, but the author has some great points that are worth reading, even if you don’t fully agree with them (like the part about not doing a start-up). 

However, it’s aimed at “software developers” (understandably so), which can be a bummer for some in other professions. I’m not a software developer either, so naturally, I don’t have as many opportunities as software developers do, but with the world embracing the remote-first culture, more and more jobs are going remote. 

If your work can be done on a computer and delivered via the internet, there’s a high chance that you can do it remotely. 

📝 Writing In Public, Inside Your Company

This is a different topic, but it relates heavily to the remote work discussed in the previous article. 

Zoom calls may come and go, but remote work thrives on a culture of written communication. I understand that I may be biased as I prefer written communication (I find video calls exhausting and not particularly the best representation of the work that I’d actually do, which is via writing). 

But even then, a culture of writing can have significant benefits for your company, even when everyone isn’t a writer. 

At Automattic, for example, one of our main tools for communication is what we call P2. You can learn more about P2 as a collaborative communication tool here, but fundamentally, even outside of Slack, Github, and a myriad of other tools used by different teams, we all use P2s, and we all write. 

I highly recommend giving the post a read.

🎬 Noteworthy Watch

🚂 Murder on the Orient Express

I read Agatha Christie’s classic not too long ago. Because I didn’t spend my childhood reading English books, there’s a lot of classic books that I’m yet to read. I was glued to the book until the very end, and despite not understanding some of the intricate details due to language barriers, I enjoyed it a lot. 

I read recently about the real Orient Express in a National Geographic article (in which I also learned that the train truly did get stuck in the snow, so the book was written in the background of actual incidents). That’s when I found out that there were two movie adaptations of this book. I watched the one that came out in 2017, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I won’t get into the age-old ‘book vs. movie’ debate, but there were some changes in the movie. Detective Poirot’s personality in the movie felt quite different from the book, but I loved it.

When watching the movie, I kept wondering how Agatha Christie might have reacted to the improvisations made to the movie. She was still alive when the 1974 version was released, and she reportedly was not pleased with how the Poirot’s mustache looked. 

She might not have appreciated the changes in the story (and in Poirot), but if viewers (excluding die-hard fans) love the improvisations, does it matter what the author feels? 

As someone who dabbled in writing fiction a few times in the distant past, I wonder if any author ever owns a character or their storyline once it’s out in the world. 

It also reminded me of my belief that there’s always room for improvement in written material (not just fiction). 

The author has to feel like they’ve done their best and publish the material at a certain point. But someone can always edit and make it better.

Do I feel like this is the best version of this newsletter that I could have written? Honestly, no. But in pursuit of perfection, I fall victim to procrastination. So I tend to publish when I’m ready and not wait for perfection because it may never come.

Why? Because there’s always room for improvement.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this letter. Feel free to reply with any comments and subscribe if you haven’t yet. Quite a few Apple reviews are in the works! Don’t miss any of them!

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Thank you for reading, and see you soon in the next issue of Letter.

Automatticians get to take a 90-day vacation as soon as they reach their fifth anniversary. During this time, they are not only discouraged from working, but certain access is revoked so that it’s not even possible to work even if they want to. 

I was eligible to take this extended leave last year, but I had to take it a year later due to some planning issues on my part. It ended up being for the better, though, as 2020 wasn’t the year I would’ve enjoyed the time off. I’m fortunate that I had a job during a year that was brutal to many, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed taking an extended leave staying at home. 

I’ve written more about my first sabbatical at Automattic and how I plan on spending this time. You can find it on ais.blog at this link.

Sabbatical

Let’s get to other things I have for you this week. 

🍿 What I’ve watched

As it’s been some time since the last issue, there’s a good number of stuff I’ve watched. Here’s what I enjoyed the most:

Harry Potter - All Eight Films

I watched the first three  Harry Potter films when I was a kid. Of course, my English knowledge was limited, so I only enjoyed seeing magical things without a clue as to what was happening. I haven’t watched any of the other Harry Potter films since the one with the Knight Bus.

During one of the Automattic Grand Meetups (which used to be an all-company meetup typically hosted somewhere in North America), we got to visit Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. There’s a place inside there called The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Diagon Alley. The entire place was reserved for Automatticians. We got to walk around the place and get into any of the rides without any queues. 

I enjoyed the place a lot. But it wasn’t until last month that I truly regretted not watching the Harry Potter movies sooner. As I slowly transformed into a Potterhead, my willingness to revisit the Diagon Alley deepened. I remember some things from Diagon Alley, including the large dining hall, and the dragon atop the Gringotts bank, but I don’t remember the details simply because I wasn’t aware of them (having not read the books or watched the movies). 

HBO Max has all the eight Harry Potter movies, and I absolutely loved binge-watching them. If you haven’t watched them or if you feel like rewatching the series, head over to HBO Max

9/11: Inside the President's War Room

This Apple TV+ documentary was one of the best things I’ve watched recently, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has even a remote interest in the 9/11 incident. You may have opposing opinions of the Bush administration’s handling of the 9/11 events, but seeing the Bush side of the day is fascinating regardless.

Probably the first of its kind, this documentary gives us a unique perspective of the president’s day as it unfolded, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Old

M. Night Shyamalan is back, and if you know and like his style, you might like Old as well. 

There will always be different opinions about movies and TV shows, and these are art forms, and different people will always see things differently. 

Old kept me glued to the screen until the end. It has the typical M. Night Shyamalan flavor, and I couldn’t stop feeling the subtle life lessons injected throughout the film. 

One of the most prominent is realizing how little time we really have and how mundane most of our lives really are. 

Some movies tempt me to launch an entire blog dedicated to my in-depth movie observations because they bring a buffet of thoughts to me, and Old is one of them. But I never end up doing that as movies are an art form, and when someone doesn’t like a movie, they generally have strong opinions of that. So it might not actually be the best use of anyone’s time. 

In any case, I recommend giving it a watch. 

📖 Long Read

💉 Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right 

The title is self-explanatory. It might be an excellent resource to share with your family and friends if you see them misusing some of these terms (and that’s not their fault, as the governments themselves aren’t often straightforward, as the article illustrates). 

🏝 When It Comes to a Travel Restart All Vaccines Are Not Equal 

I spent a lot of time looking through various news, travel, and government websites trying to understand what kind of vaccine will be allowed for international travel. (This was mentioned as a verified source by many sites.) As you know by now, I have three months off from work and I wanted to travel internationally. But there isn’t a way to choose which vaccine you get in Bangladesh. 

If you work or study abroad, you can get Moderna or Pfizer, but otherwise, it depends on which vaccination center you chose. There’s no way to know which center will use which vaccine, and there isn’t a way to change the vaccination center once you’ve registered for the vaccine. 

Because I saw that they were administering Moderna vaccines in the center closest to my home, I registered for the vaccine there, and as luck would (not) have it, they stopped the first dose with Moderna a few days before I got the appointment to take my first jab. 

They had started giving Sinopharm at that point, and all my “research” led to this unpleasant truth that Sinopharm wasn’t accepted in most countries that I was willing to travel to (including the United States). 

The Bloomberg article paints an accurate picture of the vaccine politics going on around the world. I can’t blame our government for not giving me Moderna or Pfizer because Sinopharm and others are WHO-approved shots, and it’s up to the other countries to accept them.

There are many horror stories on Facebook groups by people traveling abroad (either for work or study) and failing to get an approved vaccine. It is getting better, but tourists still can’t take a vaccine that’s approved in the country they’re traveling to. (Since you can’t choose which vaccine you get.)

I ended up taking Sinopharm, but the frustration is still there. News says the US will soon accept travelers who have taken two doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, so one can hope that the rest of the countries will follow suit. But it’s still mind-boggling how bad the world bureaucracy is when it comes to things like this. 

Until Next Time

That’s it for today! Expect to read another issue in two weeks. Until then, if you’d like to follow whatever I’m doing during my sabbatical, make sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already.

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You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. 

New here? Consider subscribing. :)

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The title, “This is not how you procrastinate,” suggests that there is a right way to procrastinate. I don’t know about that, but I can talk about the destructive type of procrastination that had me in trouble many times. 

When I was in school, I’d often skip classes to go do other things. My entire career with computers (that is, blogging/writing) started at internet cafés I’d frequently visit instead of attending classes. The problem was, it wouldn’t be just a day or two. If I skipped classes one day, somehow, it would end up being days and even weeks before I returned. 

It would go something like this: After I’d skipped classes two days in a row, I’d think to myself, well, it’s been two days, so I might as well take another day. Two more days later, I’d think, well, the weekend is here, so I might as well round it up and return to classes the following week. 

This would keep happening, and before I knew it, I’d missed weeks of classes. Then I’d go into full-on anxiety about going back to school, essentially delaying my return to classes even further. 

This, thankfully, hasn’t followed me into my professional life (if it did, I wouldn’t have a remote job since success at a remote job depends on your ability to ‘show up’ at work even when you’re in your bedroom). But it still affects me in some areas. 

“Showing up”

This newsletter is a prime example of that deadly kind of procrastination I’m talking about. Before I go into that further, let me clarify what I mean by showing up. 

‘Showing up’ at work, in a traditional office environment, means literally just showing up at your workplace. (I’ve learned firsthand that it doesn’t necessarily mean working.) 

Showing up at a remote work also means something similar, but instead of physically showing up somewhere, you show up at work remotely (by joining Slack or whatever mean of team communication your company uses) and start your “workday.”

The third kind of showing up is when you spend time working on something for yourself. This could be for learning a new skill, dedicating time to your personal projects, etc. That’s what I’m talking about today. 

What happens when you show up consistently

This article, “The unreasonable effect of just showing up everyday” by Kishore Nalan got me thinking about it first. I’m sure we all heard the advice about consistency. If you are working on a goal, no matter how small your everyday tasks are, if you keep at it consistently, you’ll achieve your goal.

The article is a living example of how that can be true. And the author puts it nicely. If you just “show up” every day and put some time into your goal (whether that’s learning a new skill or working on a side project), you’ll achieve great things. 

The important thing here is that it doesn’t have to be a large chunk of your day. Even if you’re spending a tiny amount of your time, as long as you do it daily, it’ll amount to something. That’s what Lorenzo Gravina emphasizes in his article, “The Value of Doing a Little”.

He writes: 

When we see advice telling us to do something small consistently, we usually scoff. After all, we are serious about what we do; we want to dedicate an hour, not five minutes to it. And we will definitely never skip a day. That’s until you realize that it’s not you talking, it’s the highly motivated version of you. A month from now, you’ll be past the honeymoon phase.

And:

We think the choice is between doing something big or something small. But really, it’s between doing something small or nothing at all.

Also:

Years ago, a well-gilded Reddit comment put it elegantly: no more zero days. A zero day is a day in which you did absolutely nothing towards your habits, not even a tiny bit.

Those words from the two articles struck me hard. It reminded me of my school days. I don’t regret missing classes (I don’t think highly of the traditional education system), but when I think about all the personal projects I didn’t finish, it becomes clear as day that the only thing common among all of them is those zero days. 

Lots and lots of zero days. 

Coming back to this newsletter: The plan was to start writing the newsletter 3-4 days before the expected day of publication. But I’d be collecting interesting links to share with you throughout the week. I would keep a list of those links and plan to write all about them when I’m writing the full newsletter. 

What if, instead of saving the links for later, I wrote a little bit about them every day? Needless to say, I’d have published a few more newsletters by this time. And my writing would have improved, however tiniest, with all the practicing.

Moral of the story? Avoid zero days. (I’d say avoid it like the plague, but we’ve learned from the pandemic that people don’t really avoid or even believe in plagues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

When learning a new skill or working on a personal project, dedicate even 10 minutes a day if you can. The result, weeks or months later, will surprise you. 

🍿 What I’ve watched

Friends Reunion

I finally watched Friends Reunion on HBO Max. I didn’t grow up watching Friends. But when I did start watching it a few years ago, I binge-watched the whole series over just a few weeks. And when I was done, I could seriously feel a kind of personal connection to all of them and their fictional life. I could also imagine how stronger that connection must have been for someone who watched the same thing spread over 10 long years -- they practically grew up with them!

I know that there are a lot of people who say Friends is overrated and think it tries too hard to be funny. I don’t go into an argument with them. I believe movies and TV shows are a form of art, and art is always subjective. But you can’t objectively dismiss the truth about the effects Friends has on many, many people around the world.

Friends Reunion, throughout its 1.5-hr runtime, highlights some of those for whom Friends had a long-lasting impact. I enjoyed watching it!

📖 Long Read

📝 The Future of Blogging

I’m in the habit of Googling every now and then to find out what other people think about the future of blogging. It doesn’t help that most of the articles come from sites that want to promote blogging with their own affiliate links, but every once in a while, I find something that truly adds a new perspective to the question. 

Linked above is a pretty old article I found the other day that was strangely still showing up within the first few pages of the SERP. Although it doesn’t give you a straight answer, I found it thoroughly enjoyable to read because it documents how some early blogs have evolved -- like TechCrunch and Mashable -- and what we can learn from them. 

If you’re interested in the topic, I think this will be an interesting read for you. 

👨‍💻 Personal Updates

📹 I started a company-sponsored training from BetterOn in an effort to improve my video presence. The goal isn’t to become the next hit YouTuber. I wanted to challenge myself and go into uncharted territories to see what it’s like. I’m determined to finish the training and see how I come out on the other side. Best-case scenario, I’ll finally be able to turn some of my blog posts into YouTube videos. Worst-case scenario, I’ll be more confident in speaking up at Zoom calls. So it’s a win-win situation either way!

💼 I’ve never thought of myself as a leader. Although I enjoy reading about leadership skills from the likes of HBR, I don’t think I have it in me to manage people. However, we have access to a leadership training program in-house at Automattic. And I’ve decided to try that out. I’m still undecided on whether leadership is for me, but I’ve looked at the things that will be discussed and I’m confident that those learnings will be useful for other areas of work. I’ll probably post my learnings periodically on ais.blog.

📱⌚️💻🎧 Work is in full swing on my new Apple blog. I wrote about it on a blog post earlier, but in case you missed it, I’m working on a brand new blog where I write about my experiences, reactions to new releases, and hands-on reviews of all things Apple. I don’t think I’ll replace the likes of 9to5mac 😝 from your RSS feed, but if you like personal takes on things, you might enjoy it! 

Currently, I’m working on writing reviews for AirPods Max, HomePod Mini (in stereo), and a late review of the M1 MacBook Pro. 

👋 Until next time

This issue of the newsletter about procrastination arrived late because of procrastination on my part. The irony in that aside, I will strive to follow the twice-a-month routine for sending out new issues. 

Please feel free to reply with your thoughts, subscribe via email if you haven’t already. You can also tweet @aisajib to share feedback, ideas, and suggestions. 

Until next time, stay safe, healthy, and get vaccinated if you can. 

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I thought a lot about what to name my first newsletter, and I struggled to come up with any. I started with AIS Newsletter as that's kind of my thing. But I researched and found many newsletters share one common trait: They use common words and don't follow the same naming pattern as that of a website/blog. 

It makes sense. Unlike blogs, you don't write newsletters for SEO. I think that's a big part of the rising popularity of newsletters. They are just personal and have a lot more value than something pumped out for Google. So, people name their newsletters something their audience will remember. 

For example, Craig Mod calls his newsletter Ridgeline. MIT Technology Review has multiple newsletters I subscribe to, such as The Download (one of my favorites) and The Algorithm. Ali Abdaal calls his email newsletter Friendzone. I could go on, but you see the pattern. 

For me, Letter made the most sense. I couldn't constrain the newsletter to one specific topic because I really wanted to grow a community of friends and followers who share at least a few common interests. I have a broad focus on remote work, writing, tech, and life, but as you can see, almost anything goes here. I sure hope it doesn't annoy people away! (If it annoys you, please let me know. I welcome feedback.)

In this issue, I'll go through a few things. Some words for the disaster our neighboring country is going through.; a few tech articles from the last two weeks with my thoughts; and some recommended readings, movies, and fun facts for you. 

⬛️ One for the Fallen

They say, the longer you're in a disaster, the less you feel its intensity. 

I remember last year when the pandemic first caused countrywide lockdowns. There were skeptics, but people were genuinely afraid for a while. They followed health guidelines, wore masks, avoided crowds, and washed hands. 

As the number of death continued to rise for a while, people's concern and safety practices surprisingly kept declining. Granted, towards the end of last year, it felt as if the nightmare was ending. 

But it didn't. Every day, I read heartbreaking news from just across the border. The healthcare system in many populous Indian cities seems to be breaking. 

A few stories from the nightmare have gone viral — a woman begged the authorities for an oxygen canister. But, before her turn in the queue, she received news that her mother had died. A few days ago, a desperate wife tried to resuscitate her husband inside a three-wheeler, only to witness his death moments later.

People shared these news. People talked politics. People blamed governments. And maybe, people cried, too. 

Many failed to realize that behind every single one of those deaths, reported or unreported; there's a tragedy just like those two. 

On official count, nearly 3,500 people died of Covid in India yesterday (never mind that the actual number might be several times higher than that). 

Even at the count of 3,500, that's 3,500 lifetimes of stories, hopes, dreams, and heartbreaks. 

Gone, in one day.

If just a couple of pictures with stories touch our hearts, why doesn't the thought of over three thousand such stories make us realize the severity of the situation? 

I wake up every day and sincerely hope and pray for such suffering and death to end -- on both sides of the border, on both hemispheres, on the whole planet. 

I also do my part and follow all health guidelines when I go out (which hasn't happened in the last four weeks). 

I hope you’re doing your part too in ending the pandemic.

🖥 Ugly iMacs

Apple announced a bunch of products at its Spring Loaded event. If you're an Apple fan, you already know about them. I was looking forward to a redesigned iMac. 

At first glance, I loved the design and aesthetics of the new iMac. It's colorful, vibrant, and impossibly thin. Granted, it looked like a giant iPad. But there's a giant chin at the bottom just so you don't mistake it for one. 

That chin...that's the dealbreaker. 

To Apple engineers' credit, pretty much the whole computer (logic board, speakers, thermals, etc.) is on that chin. To my distaste, it's ONE THING I didn't want carried over from the old design. 

I was excited and had thought of ordering one as soon as they made it into Bangladesh. But the more I looked at it, the more ugliness of the iMac (albeit subjective) began to pop. 

Chin aside, I don't like how the new iMac looks from the front. The colors are washed out (a design decision, one that I disagree with). I also realized that that 24" display was...too small.. coming from the 27" display I had on my previous iMac (with a higher 5K resolution) and the current 27" LG display.

It also dawned on me that Apple wouldn't stop after replacing just the 21.5" iMac. It must have something better up its sleeves to replace the outdated 27" iMac.

That's what I'm going to wait for. There's a chance that the 27" iMac replacement will come with the next generation of Apple Silicon chip, either M1X or M2, but even if it ships with the M1, I'm still game. All I want is a better, larger display with a non-obnoxious chin. 

With the iMac out of the shopping bag, I'm now waiting to get my hands on AirTags and iPad Pro 12.9". I'll write my justification for upgrading from an 11" iPad Pro to a 12.9" in a future post. But if you have questions, send them my way. 

😲 Fun Fact

A tiny marine animal, often called pistol shrimp, can shoot bubbles at its prey that displaces water at 105 ft/second. 

Even more interestingly, "the collapse of the bubble generates, for a split second, temperatures of 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit." For reference, the surface of the Sun of 9,941°F. Of course, the Netflix film "Project Power" taught me that. ;) I love movies that send me Googling as the show ends!

If interested, read more at Wired. 

🔗 Recommended Reading

→ 🤖 Humanity is not ready to accept robot overlords. This story made me chuckle a bit. Even though Boston Dynamics' video from not too long ago had an obvious agenda of making robots feel funny and cute, people can, still, sense something's not right about robots policing human beings. Do you attribute this fear to Black Mirror and every sci-fi dystopian/cyberpunk movie out there? I'll leave that up to you. [Wired]

→ 💼 You don't have to want what everyone wants. This article felt very close to heart. While entrepreneurship is glorified and jobs are seen as nothing but slavery with respect and killer of dreams, there's a point to be made about not everyone enjoying whatever apparently everyone else wants. 

Sure, I don't have a successful business as the author does, but I never feel that I have entrepreneurial traits. This article gives me some validity that I'm not the only one, and it's okay not to want what everyone else wants. [HeroPress]

If you haven't read HeroPress before, you should. It's a place that tells the human story of the people of WordPress. 

--

📖 Long Read

🔍 A Mysterious Suicide Cluster

Long articles that focus on American events often require some understanding of the cultural context that comes with it. For example, I know what a fraternity is, but I won't have the same feeling reading about it as someone who has lived it. 

That's why many featured articles from renowned sources don't feel interesting to me. However, this one did. In fact, credits to the author and the editor, reading this article almost felt like watching a psychological/crime thriller movie. The non-chronological order of events as described adds twists to the

I won't give away too much of it, but if you like that kind of thing, and you've got about an hour for it (roughly the same time as an average TV episode), I strongly recommend reading it. 

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👋

Craig Mod, on successful newsletters, loosely said you've got to do this thing for at least a year before you figure it out. 

I'm still in my infancy, so I appreciate your feedback. What did you think of this issue? Do you like the sections? Is there anything you'd like me to add? You can reply to this email with your comment. 

Until next time, stay safe, don't go out unless necessary, and wear a mask.

Writing for the sake of writing didn't make sense to me (although, strictly speaking, forcing oneself to write regardless is the best way to practice this craft — but whether they are worthy of publication is another matter entirely).

Let's get right into today's issue! If you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe! I write about consumer tech, remote work, writing, and how it all ties into life.

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This newsletter is now powered by Substack

The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed that the email is now coming from Substack instead of Mailchimp. I've moved all subscribers from Mailchimp to Substack for a variety of reasons. I've researched and tried quite a few different tools over the past few weeks — namely Substack, Buttondown, Twitter-owned Revue, and even the WordPress competitor (to some degree) Ghost.

After weighing in all the pros and cons that those different newsletter options, I've decided that for the type of newsletter that I'm going for, which should focus only on content, subscriber-building, and some simple analytics, Substack is the platform of choice.

Side note: Facebook is coming up with its own newsletter publishing tool too, but I don't trust Facebook to run this newsletter through them. So that's out of the picture. (But I will test this and may run a separate Bangladesh-focused newsletter there. So if you're interested in finding out how that works once the platform is launched, let me know and I can share insights.)

Mailchimp is an excellent option for anyone building a newsletter. I think their free tier is the best in the business, offering a generous 2,000-subscriber limit before you need to pay them anything. While I don't think I could ever reach that number with this personal newsletter of mine, I did the move for one main reason: simplicity and ease of use when creating content.

I really disliked how complicated Mailchimp's interface was. It had a ton of features, yes, but I didn't need most of them. More importantly, Mailchimp's email writing tool really didn't inspire joy in writing. Although I write the first draft outside of any of these tools (I currently use Notion), it felt like a chore navigating all those things around on Mailchimp. That's what compelled me to look for alternatives.

Mailchimp itself has a great alternative, believe it or not. It's called Tinyletter. It's free, and it offers an even more generous 5,000-subscriber limit before you are required to move to a paid subscription on Mailchimp itself. But Mailchimp seems to be neglecting this platform. And I suspect it won't be too long until Mailchimp calls it quits on this tool.

I didn't try Tinyletter. Instead, I went for something that was thriving and had a promising future.

Substack seemed to be the best although Ghost and Twitter-owned Revue also have a promising future ahead. I created accounts on all three platforms, and my preference landed me on Substack.

Why? That's the topic of a detailed blog post of its own, one that I will write and publish on ais.blog soon. As a subscriber, you can rest assured that you'll get a link to that post shortly after it's published.

But if you have any specific questions or want me to run any tests, feel free to reply to this email.

A Diabetic Life

In October last year, just a week before I was preparing for the longest road trip in Bangladesh (~1000 km), driving by myself, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

As some of you may know, I had a long episode of pain in my hands last year. When I went to a doctor, he first gave me several tests, including a blood test. When the test results came back, they showed very high blood sugar levels.

The doctor was pretty surprised that I was showing no other symptoms of diabetes at that time (like lack of sleep, overly thirsty, etc.). He asked for a liquid profile test, and the result was just as surprising. My blood sugar level was 16 mmoL/l (288 mg/dl) when fasting and 22.5 mmoL/l (405 mg/dl) two hours after breakfast.

Of course, he then wrote further tests to zero in on the pain in my hands (none of them zeroed in on anything, so it's still a mystery what happened, but I got to know I didn't have Arthritis). He also referred me to an endocrinologist whom my parents were already seeing. He prescribed me one month's medication for diabetes, and of course, told me to halt further sugar intake.

The next day, I drove ~500km to Cox's Bazar, the world's longest sea beach.

I've been avoiding sugary food since then. I found it's not that difficult once you get past several weeks without sugar. As per the most recent check on the Glucometer, the blood sugar level is now under control. The good news is, I'm not a foodie, so I don't miss food a ton, but I dearly miss soft drinks.

I was a heavy soft drinker. Mostly, I would drink lemon juice and other fruit punches with a lot of sugar. I guess that's one of the main things contributing to such high sugar levels in my blood. Of course, the fact that diabetes runs in the family, and it was a matter of time before I too would get it, was well known in advance.

Today, I miss juices/soft drinks the most. My friends and colleagues have suggested alternatives — like making homemade juice with a hint of salt instead of sugar or using a sugar substitute like zerocal — but let's be real, nothing tastes as good as sugar. 😅 NOT-A-THING.

I try to avoid zerocal because there doesn't seem to be any unanimous opinion about whether it's harmful or not. I only take zerocal when drinking tea or coffee. But I'm not a heavy tea or coffee drinker, so I'm not taking zerocal regularly either.

But in this heat, reaching temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius almost daily, I could really use a glass of lemon juice when breaking fast at sunset (It's the month of Ramadan when Muslims around the world fast from dawn to dusk). And frankly, even zerocal tastes bitter with lemonade.

In short, I miss sugar. 😒

Pandemic Phase 2

Everyone warned that a second wave was imminent. It wasn't a matter of if, but when.

Many of us didn't want to believe that the pandemic could take a turn for the worse. With the arrival of vaccines and the government's widespread vaccination program underway, we thought, or should I say, we hoped, better days were on the horizon. The tide was turning. The terror that was the year 2020 was finally vanishing into the rearview mirror.

Little did we know, around the same exact time as last year (the second half of March), we'd be back exactly where we were a year ago, only this time, things would be much deadlier.

I don't trust the government's data on how many people are contracting the coronavirus and how many are dying from it. I think, their daily count is far lower than the actual number. But these days, even the government's official count is now frighteningly high.

For four days in a row, more than a hundred people are dying from Covid-19 infections, daily.

Of course, if you're in India, that is a small number compared to the enormous death toll that seems to be still rising. But I'm in Bangladesh. And we never saw the number of Covid-19 related deaths this high, not even the first time around.

After a week of what can only be described as a ridiculous parade passed as 'lockdown' at the beginning of April, the government enforced stricter measures beginning on April 13. However, that doesn't seem to be helping. People's movement has definitely been reduced by a huge margin, but the coronavirus spread is not following suit. Instead, it's rising at an unprecedented rate.

And recent reports suggest that with the lockdown in place, people can't get tested, so the number of people getting tested daily has decreased, proving the earlier point that the actual number of infected people could be several times higher than what's currently being reported.

We've had a lockdown for months last year. We really can't have the same length of stay-at-home this time around. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want the lockdown to be lifted so I could at least move freely in my own car (therefore maintaining social distancing).

At the same time, I can't neglect the fact that the pandemic is far from over. I don't think the lockdown will be lifted anytime soon, but even if it is, that could bring even more disastrous consequences.

What all that means is we're really stuck this time around, and at the rate people are dying left and right, I'm feeling far more hopeless this time than I did when the pandemic started.

On new year's eve, there was a general vibe among people that with 2020 over, things would get better. I told a friend I had a feeling that 2021 was going to be worse. I didn't have that feeling thinking the coronavirus outbreak would get worse. I just felt it wouldn't be the unicorn year we were hoping it to be.

For the first two and a half months, I thought, man, was I wrong! We really seem to be getting better. Even the vaccines are here in this third-world country. Perhaps, I was hopelessly pessimistic for no reason.

As days go by, I can't help but think about my gloomy prediction at the turn of the year.

Perhaps, I was right.

How is the coronavirus situation in your country? How are you personally coping with it if it's getting worse where you live? If you have something to share, feel free to reply. The least we could do is support each other in times of a crisis like this.