Watched Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the classic TV short from 1966) with the girls and they couldn’t stop laughing!

The memories I have of my childhood are preserved in printed photographs and polaroids. Mom and Pops have around a dozen albums of such photos: right from my baby days, up until till my brother and I completed our schooling. They’re stashed away safely in a cabinet. Just like a time capsule.

Photos are great because they bring back so many memories! And the memories of events and experiences are the only things that really matter, specially when you have kids.

Now we’re just here to be memories for our kids. Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future.

Cooper, Interstellar

With some free time on my hands, I undertook a personal project to collect and preserve all the memories Vinnie and I have made — for the girls’ sake.

Since we live and breathe digital, it made sense to archive everything in the cloud. I chose Google Photos as Vinnie and I both use Android phones, and Google lets you save unlimited photos at 16MP, and video at 1080p — which I was fine with.

It’s taken numerous weekends and late nights, but I’ve finally brought it up to date. Nearing 50GB, it includes photos and HD video taken from every camera and phone we’ve owned since 2008.

So many precious memories!
Our days in college.
Our first jobs.
Christmas photos from when we were dating.
My reply to the toast at our wedding.
Our first dance as husband and wife.
Sasha’s first steps.
Sofia’s first day at Playgroup.
And who knows what’s to come!
They’re all in there.

The best part is that the entire archive is accessible on any device with Internet access, so I can even see it on my phone when I’m away on travel.

Just like a time capsule.

Mom & Pops celebrated 32 years of togetherness today with a quiet dinner at The Brasserie with all of us and the kids.

The way they love and care for each other, and fight to do the dishes even after three decades — they’re still takin’ me to school.

This blog actually started off on Textpattern circa 2012. Then came the microblogging trend and all the cool kids had tumblelogs, so that’s where I went.

After the Yahoo! acquisition, I was worried about what would happen if they decided to shutdown the platform. I looked at WordPress, Medium and other alternatives but couldn’t make up my mind, so the the journal lay dormant for a few years. During this time, I started spending increasing amounts of time on social media — Twitter and Facebook, and Instagram later on. But I couldn’t shake the thought of losing all my posts on these networks should they fold. So going the self-hosted route seemed like the best way forward.

Historically, I’ve treated WordPress like a stepchild. I always felt it was ​“cheating” by marketing itself as a CMS, given its origins as a blogging tool. Whenever I had to build websites — either for myself or for clients, be it for personal or work projects — I’ve looked to Craft, Expression Engine, Textpattern, Anchor, Concrete5 and others over the last 6 years.

But 6 years is a long time! I’ve since discovered that WordPress is solid as ever (for blogging), and the announcement regarding Gutenberg was what got me excited about WP again. I still think it’s one of the boldest moves the community has made in its history.

Given my recent resolutions regarding reduced social media usage, I’ve felt the need to start blogging again. Writing is an excellent skill in a designer’s arsenal; plus it’s a great way to keep a record of all the changes in my personal and professional life. And if what I write helps someone out there, that’s a bonus.

Over the last few months, I’ve been importing all my old posts from various platforms into a single WordPress instance on a new domain.

This domain.

Once WordPress 5 was announced, I jumped in and manually converted each post into the new Gutenberg Blocks format. It was a little painful, but it’s done and I’m happy with the result.

In 2019, I’m going to be blogging here a lot more.

Excited and humbled to announce that I join Unmetric tomorrow as Senior Designer. Unmetric is a social media analytics platform that provides insights into the activities of over 100,000 major brands on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.

New product.
New domain.
New problem space.

I’m really looking forward to contributing what I can.

This isn’t the first time I’ve landed a job indirectly through conversations on Twitter. In this case, I happened to reach out to Amrinder—who heads Design there. I’ve been following him on Twitter for years and have great respect for the work he’s done. There’s no denying that the prospect of working directly with him on product was a huge factor in helping me make the final decision.

Of course, it helped that Lux, Kumar, Tina and the other key people here are super smart and loaded with experience. The product itself looks great — and it solves a real problem for some huge customers!

The team is distributed across India, UK, Canada and the US; but I will work remotely out of Goa. I’ve gone remote before, but this is my first full-time remote design gig.

I’m off to Chennai next week to meet the team in person and complete my onboarding. I can say — with a fair amount of confidence — that this is the start of something special.

What a tournament this has turned out to be! I believe for the first time in history we’re having a World Cup semifinal round without Germany, Brazil or Argentina.

France have beaten Argentina and Uruguay, and have a devastating mix of pace and strength. Mbappe and Kante are playing the best football of their lives.

Belgium look super sharp on the counterattack with KdB, Hazard and Lukaku dispatching Brazil comfortably. I also read this interesting article on BBC that predicted Belgium to win the Cup at the start of the tournament.

Croatia’s famed midfield of Modric, Rakitic and co started very promisingly but seem to be running out of steam, just getting by a resilient Russia on penalties.

England are playing their first semifinal since 1990, going where their ​“golden generation” never did. They have had the easiest path in the tournament, but are displaying a calm belief and confidence missing in earlier editions.

So hard to predict anything further. I’m just going to sit back and enjoy!

Tale out of Sofia’s playgroup as told by her teacher today.

The kids were playing with the talking pen today. I told them to ask mock questions, and that the pen would respond.
Kid 1: Talking pen, what colour is this?
Kid 2: Talking pen, what animal is that?
Sofia: Talking pen, where is my sister Sasha?