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A New Home ๐Ÿก

12 / 31 / 20

The past two months just flew by, I didn’t have a chance to mention that I turned 29, got a chance to move into a new home and finally took a bunch of vacation. The past few weeks moving felt like its own job of moving things from one home to another, purchasing furniture and then assembling said furniture. I’ve been busyyy. ๐Ÿ˜…

From setting appointments with Verizon to understanding pre-built smart home devices to enjoying a working oven. There’s been a surprising number of small nice to haves that I’m so grateful for. For example I haven’t been able to bake anything in the past 15 years, so feels amazing to be able to bake some cookies today. Our stove in our old home required us to start a fire each time we used it with a match stick or a lighter, this new stove just turns on when you turn it on. I have a door with a lock, which I also didn’t have for 15 years. In-home laundry units, is also a game changer, previously we had huge laundry bags that we would have to bring down 3-4 flights of stairs and back up again. Having deliveries just come to your doorstep instead of running down 4 flight of stairs – oh yea its a good feeling. I can go on, but these are the first that come to mind.

There’s still so many IKEA chairs to build and bookshelves to mount but I’m so blessed to be able to be in this home and just wanted to write a quick post on it. Who knew I’d be moving during a panasonic?! ๐Ÿ˜‚ It’ definitely been more difficult because of it. Still very grateful! ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿฝ

Fall 2020 Favorites ๐Ÿงก

10 / 11 / 20

I used to do a monthly favorites (on random stuff) back when I was blogging more frequently on my previous blog, thought I’d do one for some of my favorites for this season.

Girfriends TV Show: Started watching this on Netflix and cannot stop!

Among Us Game: Love this online multiplayer game, it’s fun and got me back into mobile gaming.

Dark Chocolate Peppermint Almond Creamer : Chocolatey, minty dairy free creamer always makes my cold brew taste like Christmas even though its October

TooMuchMouth Youtuber: Love her storytimes and makeup videos!

BannedGoodsNYC slippers: These are house slippers that look like ousside shoes, cute & comfy! ( I got the J11s)

SallyeAnder Green Tea Soap: Love how this soap smells & feels on my skin!

Spooky szn in Corona szn in Election szn! ๐ŸŽƒ

10 / 9 / 20

It’s October y’all! I’m on PTO today after some time so time for another blog post. There hasn’t been any major updates in my life since the last time I wrote, but I’ll share some thoughts and things that I did do in the past month or so.

I went back to Manhattan after ~ 6 months, it was to grab some of my stuff from the office. The MTA was charging again so I somehow found my metrocard and got on the bus (it was packed), got to the ferry terminal right when the doors were already open then I saw there were signs on every other seat in the ferry for social distancing. It was a nice ride, but I very immediately realized I completely forgot how bored I got on commutes, I was just scrolling through my Spotify and found some new tunes to listen to. Then I finally made my way to the subway, it wasn’t bad, not too many people at the time and I got to my office. They had masks available for those who needed them, and I saw it super empty except for a few others who were cleaning out their desks. I kinda missed my desk there and didn’t realize the amount of stuff in my little cabinet. I luckily had some random shopping bags in there and used it to carry out some of the stuff my small backpack was not enough. I honestly thought it was just going to be a funko and maybe a few notepads but no.

My home office setup

Sharing a little picture from my home office, usually I have 2-3 various drinks at my desk at all times, water / tea / coffee / cold brew, it keeps me going! The candle that’s lit in the picture was actually from work from a self-care kit they sent over, I like it a lot never knew of woodwick candles, love the crackling noise!

On Tv Shows/ Movies, I haven’t really been in a mood to watch any series or movies, it’s always random. The last tv series I watched was Moesha on Netflix (I was so excited!) and I recently watched Awkwafina’s show Nora from Queens. They were both fantastic. I usually just watch Youtube, its only 5 to 20 minutes on average and I don’t have to invest in it too much.

I did finally get a chance to hang out with some friends in the past month (safely with masks on), it definitely made me happy to see them again!

I found out about this game Among Us from work, it’s really fun, I haven’t played mobile games in awhile but I definitely enjoyed this one. I also started playing games at home with my mom, she has a rotating version of tic tac toe from her hometown we usually play that after we get home from work, I wanted to buy Jenga but I didn’t know if I should wait or not. Feel like I just need something to look forward to in the immediate time, usually its a vacation or at least going somewhere new in the city :/ Bleh, until next time โœŒ๐Ÿฝ

My Thoughts From 5 Months Into The Pandemic

8 / 22 / 20

Hello! ๐Ÿ˜ƒ Just got some cold brew with almond milk and a bit of oatmeal cookie oat milk creamer, it’s so good! Time to reflect on the past five months of this pandemic, it’s definitely been …something. I’m going to focus on the positives first, because I really have been very blessed in the fact that my family & I have not gotten COVID to my knowledge, and we all still have been working throughout the pandemic.

I started off in March watching a lot of TikTok videos and learned to actually cook ๐Ÿ‘ฉ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿณbecause of it, which is still going strong. Making my own meals made me a lot healthier overall, it also inspired my father to make healthier choices as well. I’m happy we both are losing weight, thanks TikTok! But also I was spending way too much time on it and saw too many threads on its personal data grabbing and deleted it.

I got into was the idea of “timelessness” ๐Ÿ•ฐ in regards to fashion ๐Ÿ‘— and design ๐ŸŽจ, it’s a way to divert from fashion trends but just really trends in general. Trends constantly change with time, so you have to be choosy and create design, fashion anything really that will still look good far into the future. I want to stop getting awe-d by fashion trends of the season and choose pieces that I know I will like even 20 years down the road (but also sustainable!).

Productivity and working from home during the pandemic, is very different than working from home and productivity when there is no pandemic. There isn’t an option to just go to a restaurant with friends after work, or anywhere really unless you want to risk it. This lack of face to face interaction made me a bit sadder. I’m used to being alone a lot, I enjoy it. But I do also like seeing people when I do see them, it’s just not even an option now.

On hanging out, I have hung out with a few close friends mainly 1:1 in the park ๐ŸŒณor just to grab a Starbucks drink or Bubble Tea and just talk and walk which really energized me and made me very happy (more than I thought it would). I would want to do it more often but I just feel a bit scared to be honest.

One actual highlight is that I got promoted at work! ๐Ÿ’ซ The CTO acknowledged it too which was pretty cool! ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

Pigeons. ๐ŸฆThey love taking over your balconies. A pigeon laid two eggs in a planter. We didn’t wanna move it so it ended up hatching the eggs. The baby pigeons were so cute, but ended up dying early in infancy while the other was strong and lived on, until it didn’t. We left the birds alone and didn’t interfere. The mom would come and feed her baby everyday. I used to watch that little pigeon just live, it was a chill little pigeon. But it couldn’t fly even when it looked like an adult and it passed away randomly. I was really sad. I liked watching it when I passed by the balcony. The mom was somehow identified me (maybe because I fed it some organic grapes before she started hatching the eggs?) not sure, but she flew up to my balcony and tried to attack me. Good thing I was inside, totally understandable that she would be angry, but damn. I took pictures of the bird as a baby and I need to not look at it, it was only with us for like maybe a month and a half or a bit longer but I loved just watching it. ๐Ÿ˜”

Listening to Coolio at the moment and just turned on my little usb desk fan, need some breezy tunes and some breeze because it is very warm even though my thermometer is tellin’ me its 72 degrees inside the house. Okay onto some of the negatives (?!). Politics and also the fight for social justice, economics and the actual health and well being of everyone in the world whew! It’s extremely exhausting looking at the news and see what’s happening outside. ๐Ÿ˜“Being inside with both my parents and not leaving my house is important to me. It’s hard to help families without being there face to face, I think the best way for us inside to help is to enable others who can be outside with finances to do what they need to help families either to get them food or whatever they need to survive. So just been donating to charities on that front, same goes for social justice. As Americans we need to stand up for making sure everyone gets the same equality.

Been reading about US politics as well. Hearing different views, perspectives and stories on people’s points of views on different stances was eye opening to me. There is so much mis-information floating around. I have been using fact checkers these days regarding what politicians and political commenters have to say.

Interior design, been obsessed for a few months now. I really wanna just redesign and redecorate every damn room. But I wanna look into moving first then doing all that whenever that is (will keep yall posted). But going through the home owning process for new first time home owner was a lot for me, I’ll maybe make a separate post on that later, but yea just half my feed is now Restoration Hardware but I feel this post is already goin on pretty long so will continue on my Interior Design stuff on a seperate post as well. Just wanted to note that here, and with that I’m off til next time โœŒ๐Ÿฝ

The Top 10 Websites I Check the Most

5 / 2 / 20

While writing my blog post on the software of my daily life, I thought I could make a post on the websites that I use the most (that don’t include utility/local sites). So here they are:

Hacker News: It’s a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. This is usually the first website I go on everyday, it keeps me up to date with the current state of technology and how it affects various matters in the world, such as policies, finance, business, research, the people, and their thoughts.

The Verge: It’s an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, and podcasts. I’ve been visiting this site for as far back as 2012/2013. It’s my favorite technology news website, their podcast (The Vergecast) is something I have been religiously listening to since 2017. I mainly like their coverage on consumer technology but also on (Tech x Policy).

Last.fm: I have been using this website since about 2008. I mainly use it to see what music I’ve mainly been listening to in the past week/month/year/years. It’s like Spotify Unwrapped but not just for the end of year. You can use it with Apple Music or Spotify.

ProductHunt: As someone who loves to test out random apps for fun, this is definitely one of my favorite websites to discover new apps. It lets users share and discover new products. The site, which was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013, is backed by Y Combinator. Users submit products, which are listed in a linear format by day.

One Page Love: As a sucker for pretty static one page websites, this is definitely one of my muses. It showcases wonderful single page websites.

CodePen: As yet again a sucker for beautiful front end experiences, I love looking at other people’s designs. This website is dedicated for testing and showcasing user-created HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets.ย 

Officelovin: I love interior design especially for commercial businesses, I love to see how offices are designed all over the world, this website displays modern offices and their design.

Design Milk: More muse for viewing beautiful interior design. Design milk is a design blog featuring interior design ideas, architecture, modern furniture, home decor, art, style, and technology .

Dribbble: It’s one of the largest platforms for designers to share their work online. No, I never did one of those challenges to get drafted on to Dribbble but I do have an account and love to view what people are working on.

Classycleanchic: A lifestyle blog that I follow mainly for seeing what trends are popular in suburban fashion, (so I can avoid it….or secretly like).

The software of my daily life

4 / 17 / 204 / 17 / 20

I love software. I download apps for fun and test them out. How did they design the app? How is the user experience? Is it easy to use? Does it provide me more value than other similar apps? Why does it exist? Who are the users? Why is it popular/not-popular? Although I’m constantly downloading apps and going through them (yes, I’m a frequent user of ProductHunt!) I only end up using a subset of my downloaded apps on a daily basis. There are some I use weekly/bi-weekly, some I forget that I even have, til I try to download it from the App Store and realize I already have it. I’m going to list out some of my absolute favorites that I use on a daily basis, followed by a few honorable mentions that I use weekly/biweekly separated by type of app.

Mac Apps

iTerm : My go-to, of course we all have our terminal, but I always just liked using iTerm a lot more. When it comes to themes, my favorite has been the Dracula theme for the past few years now. I use it with oh my zsh.

Bear : I love using Bear for writing notes. It’s clean, easy to organize and you can access your notes from anywhere.

Sublime Text : It’s my favorite app to copy, paste, edit any text. It’s like notepad but way better. There’s probably an easier way to do this, but I love pasting in Sublime because I know it’s going to give me any text in plaintext.

VS Code : The only code editor I use when working on side projects. It just satisfies all my needs.

Postman : When I’m lazy to think of API calls and to write out a curl call, Postman comes to my rescue.

RescueTime : I love seeing how I’m spending my time at home, was I being productive this week or did I watch a lot of lifestyle Youtubers? It helps me understand my habits and set limits to commentary Youtubers on Beauty Guru Drama!

Mobile Apps

I’m going to skip out on the obvious “essential” apps for emails, social media and focus on some that are just slightly-less popular. I also have a huge list of photography and photo editing apps that I use based on the type of picture I want to take/ edit, I’ll probably reserve that for a separate blog post, but I’ll link some that I use the most here.

Pacer : I use this app as my pedometer. Gotta get my steps in! iOS | Android

SuperImpose : I like making random memes, this app helps me with that by allowing simple masking/erasing/layering functions. iOS | Android

Flora : Helps me stay off my phone and be productive. It’s just like the Forest app but it’s free. iOS (Also check out DonutDog for both iOS & Android)

Musi : Although I use Spotify Premium, sometimes I just want to stream songs in the background from Youtube like “Stolen My Heart” from KadhalViruz. iOS

LoseIt! : Tracking my health/weight, have been using this for about a decade on and off, my favorite in terms of data visualization of my progress. I like to enter what I ate when I’m not too sure of how many calories something takes up. iOS

TimeHop : I like seeing where I was 7 years ago, or what I posted 4 years ago on twitter. It aggregates social media posts from places like Swarm, Instagram, Twitter and lets you know your “memories”. iOS | Android

Web Apps

Remove BG : I make memes a lot, I love this web app it removes backgrounds from images. It’s hella fast.

JSFiddle : When I want to test HTML/CSS/JS out real quick, this is my go to.

JSONMinify: I like my JSON minified, so it doesn’t take up madd room.

JSONLint: For linting my JSON without npm/yarn and doing all that.

Pixlr: When I need a computer to have Adobe Photoshop and it doesn’t this saved me.

Polarr: For when I need to edit pictures and need something equivalent to Adobe Lightroom.

Well that’s been my daily software lineup. I might make one for websites I visit daily/weekly next! Hope you guys found at least one software you can add into your life. ๐Ÿ˜Š

COVID-19 & WFH

3 / 30 / 20

It is March 30, 2020. I have been working from home since March 6, 2020. I only ever went out for groceries and went to a nearby Thai place on March 14 to eat for Nush’s birthday. The first week of working from home I also went to the park daily. The parks got crowded once the colleges and public schools closed and I stopped going. I started working out at home too.

I think the best thing for me during this time was finding a routine and sticking to it. It gave me a better control of my eating and exercising habits. I ended up experimenting with food a lot incorporating a lot of vegetables into my meals. I also have a variety of smoothie ideas now. Got myself a big bag of supergreens, flaxseed, cocoa nibs, almond butter, walnuts and a bunch of frozen and non frozen fruits. Smoothies have been my go-to breakfast. Just a cup of any smoothie honestly has helped me become more happier. I also am now in love with Stok’s Cold Brew with Vanilla Oat Milk. I also tried out the Oatmeal Cookie Oatmeal Creamer and I love putting a tablespoon of that into my cold brew! Exercise got me goin back to low intensity stuff walking/yoga/dance and it’s actually helped a lot more than high intensity ones.

Tik Tok, an app I never thought I’d get into so much. This quarantine got me making Tik Toks every few days. It’s fun because you can be silly with it and the video editing is super simple once you do it once properly. It also got me making whipped coffee for my mom. She absolutely loves it! I ended up getting an electric frother, makes it much easier to make it then whisking it with a spoon for 10 minutes.

I’m not sure how long we will be doing this, but the last three weeks have been feeling like forever.

Change is coming

1 / 20 / 20

There is a lot of change coming into my life, fast and hard at this very moment. I’m embracing it, trying my best to try new things, it’s difficult but must be done in order to improve myself.

On food, I was pretty consistent the first two weeks then I kinda had a few cheat meals & snacks the past few days, which is gonna definitely set me back but overall I have been cooking for myself and am definitely better off than I was before. It’s easy to avoid sugar, but its’s hard to avoid chocolate when it’s in my fridge. ๐Ÿซ I ended up eating an entire chocolate bar, its too addicting for me and I just am gonna throw it out on sight or give it away if I see it again. The only positive is that I did lose weight from the start of the year, I hope to keep it up moving forward.

On shopping, I had to literally hold myself back from buying stuff, which is something I never thought I’d have to do. Currently my Youtube suggestion videos are all mainly centered around beauty and fashion, there are way too many “haul videos”, “what’s in my bag videos”, “Amazon favorites” and “my best 2019 purchases videos” out there right now and I am an absolute sucker for pretty packaging, little hacky gadgets and cute dupes ๐Ÿ˜…I end up window-shopping and adding stuff to my cart then going through my list of questions I promised myself to think about when it comes to purchases like (“Is this from a sustainable brand?”, “How many times will I wear this?”, “Is this made from plastic?”) it helped me avoid all the purchases. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make any purchases at all but I did avoid all the unnecessary ones. I did buy a 2020 wall calendar and some skincare, but avoided all the clothes and jewelry yay!๐Ÿ’ฅ

Pongal (เฎชเฏŠเฎ™เฏเฎ•เฎฒเฏ) ๐ŸŒž๐ŸŒพwas a few days ago, it’s one of my favorite holidays. I got to celebrate it and attend the local festival celebration filled with bharathanatyam, parai and an authentic Tamil dinner on banana leaves and payasam dessert. It was wonderful to see the community locally driving this right here in NYC. My heart was so happy to feel home.

It’s MLK day today, I always like to take the day to reflect on the role many African Americans like MLK have done for justice and equality in this country. It’s a reminder that we all have to continue that fight. Like MLK said:

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Martin Luther King Jr.

On that note, I’m off to bed. ๐ŸŒ™

2020, A New Year!

1 / 1 / 201 / 1 / 20

Happy New Year y’all! I’m back again blogging on the internet after a short break, I tried to blog again last year and failed miserably, but it’s a new decade and I’m ready to blog again. I always had a fun time blogging in junior high/ high school/ college so here’s me now — a working gal bloggin’ again because I need an outlet to write nonsense on the internet in long-form because twitter threads are no longer cutting it for me. I usually made blog posts originally on my daily life, rants, book/movie reviews and I wrote out my monthly/bi-monthly favorites. I might do the same on here but might add some tech and design into the mix!

2019 was a good year for me – a few highlights included getting compensation raised twice, moving to a new team to work on building internal tools, going to Paris, France (including Disneyland Paris) two of which were ultimate dream bucket-list items for me since I was a kid, learned a lot more about my relationship with food when I was on Whole30 (also lost some weight – bonus!), tried poutine, Japanese cheesecake and Onigiri for the first time in Toronto, saw my second Broadway play (Wicked), and most importantly finally really understood sustainability and is in the front of my consciousness now.

2020 and moving forward I have a lot of goals. A few I want to focus on and want to keep track of on this blog is reducing sugar, reducing the use of plastic and single-use items as much as possible, and will try to go on an almost no buy in terms of clothing/accessories/books. I will only purchase clothing that is sustainable and that I can get a lot of use from that is high quality – no more fast fashion.

It’s almost midnight, but I really wanted to write this post before I head off to bed. It was a good new year’s day my cousins from Switzerland came over and we had dinner together while watching “Kaappaan”! A great start to the decade! ๐Ÿ˜Š

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About Me

Hello! I'm Thulazi (เฎคเฏเฎณเฎšเฎฟ), I'm currently a software developer in the advertising technology sector. I was born and raised in the Big Apple (NYC Baby!). I love all things tech and design. This is my blog, where I post my daily ramblings, reviews and commentary on trends about the tech and design world.
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