Google Fonts

Fonts and typography have a fascinating world of their own. A lot of thought and effort goes into creating a new font family. In the era of pen and paper, the handwriting gave an insight into the personality of the writer, perhaps the same is conveyed through their choice of fonts in the digital era.

My initial days in IT started with Verdana - the font looked clean, nicely spaced and easy on the eyes. However, it wasn't quite the right choice for technical documents, which was the real of Arial and Times New Roman. These two fonts were --and I guess still are -- so ubiquitous by their presence, they were considered as workhorse fonts.
Another font that caught attention was Helvetica, it's an elegant font, and it looks best in the titles or headers.
Around 2007, Calibri became the default font in MS-Office products and it became the new de facto standard. Although it still remains the default font, Microsoft later came up with Segoe UI, and it has been one of my favourite fonts for the past 4 years.

Recently, I have been experimenting with IBM Plex font family, and loving it. It is functional as well as aesthetic, and provides a much wider range of styles and a better support for Unicode.

If you love typography, and enjoy trying out different fonts, the Google Fonts site offers more than 800 free typefaces.

https://fonts.google.com/

Boot Loader

As a kid, my morning routine was rather messy, doing things haphazardly, out of sequence, wasting the time. Very inefficient. 


Then, I read about boot loader, the program that loads operating system when you start up the machine. It performs many tasks in an elegant sequence, an orchestra of files being executed in an optimal manner. I was fascinated to see a machine working so logically and rather embarrassed about my own booting up process every morning.


Since then, for the last 20+ years, I have tried to stick to what works best for me. Of course, marriage has added some subroutines like PREPARE TEA, but otherwise it remains unchanged.