Hi, I'm Chethan — a Cloud Architect writing about software, personal finance, telecom, and automobiles.
For my master’s project at NITK Surathkal in 2011, I tried to map arecanut plantations in Dakshina Kannada using only free satellite images and free software. Official area figures for the crop come from village land records, and I wanted to see whether satellite data could say something independent about it. I rarely look back at that report, but I did recently, and some of it holds up better than the rest.
We live about 35 km from the Karnataka coast, so a beach on its own has never been enough to make us pack the car. Goa, with its reputation for crowded shores and parties, was never on our list for that reason. Then we decided to see what else it had to offer, and drove down from Karkala in our Tata Punch with the kids for five days.
We based ourselves in a service apartment at Majorda and spent the days chasing forts, museums, forests, waterfalls and temples instead of sunbeds. Some of it was better than the reviews promised and some of it was a letdown. Here is the trip day by day, with the costs, the wrong turns from Google Maps and the honest verdicts.
In August I started cutting my portfolio down to a short list. Then the market fell before I had finished, and that list went on sale.
It’s my first time doing this, so read it as a log rather than advice.
For years my investing was a monthly SIP plus the odd stock I bought when something felt cheap. “Felt cheap” was doing a lot of heavy lifting there. When prices actually fell, I did one of two things. I waited for them to fall a bit more and missed the rebound. Or I bought early, watched the price keep sliding, and had nothing left when it got properly cheap.
This year I tried something different. I wrote the rules down before I needed them.
Commercial plastic extension boards are practically disposable. A couple of minor drops on a concrete floor, and the brittle internal plastic standoffs crack, leaving 220V live terminals floating loose inside a flimsy shell.
Electrical shops readily stock boards like the one that broke. A wooden one like this has to be made to order, but it fixes the durability problem outright. Real safety, though, comes down to mechanical details most basic diagrams overlook.
Past wiring jobs I’ve pieced together from whatever YouTube tutorial came closest to the job at hand. This time I worked through it with AI instead, which gave instructions specific to this box’s layout and a quick check of the wiring before anything went live.
Thomson Reuters just launched Thomson, its first proprietary large language model. Not a fine-tuned wrapper around GPT-5.5 or Claude. It’s a model the company owns outright, trained on its own compute, and it’s already live inside Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal, reviewing up to 10,000 documents against up to 100 questions at once, with every answer traceable back to its source. It’s exactly the kind of high-volume, judgment-heavy review where a purpose-built model’s edge is measurable, not just claimed, and Thomson Reuters has said this is only the first rollout, with more of the product line expected to run on Thomson over time.
That’s the headline. The interesting part is why, and it’s a pattern enterprise infrastructure has run through before.
