Once upon a tech-time, I was just a curious teen in the USSR, learning BASIC on a Soviet school computer in 1988 and dreaming of a future run by science fiction. That early obsession quietly snowballed into a decades-long love affair with tech — from my candy-colored Macintosh to running marketing ops (and last-minute edits) for our family business.

Fast-forward to 2020: I joined the University of Auckland as a digital marketing lecturer (cue happy dance). I taught, mentored, researched, and kept our business marketing engine humming. It was a good ride. But recently, something shifted. No burnout — just a good old-fashioned life plot twist. So, I stepped off the lecture hall to give some long-postponed projects the spotlight. One of them? This blog.

Here, you’ll find thoughts and tools from an academic gone a bit rogue: part diary, part digital marketing toolbox, part travelogue. I write about:

• Tech I’ve tested (some amazing, some… not so much)
• Career transitions (planned or accidental)
• Marketing insights with a human touch (including AI)
• The occasional Gen-X nostalgia trip
• Teaching, just not in a classroom (webinars and short courses are work-in-progress)

Oh, and it’s all purely qualitative and occasionally biased — just the way I like it.

I’m not ruling out a return to academia someday. But for now, I’m somewhere between airports, ideas, and Wi-Fi signals — still teaching, still learning..