Mood: happy, chatty, playful
Enjoy: Story time, outside

Notes and reminders: had fun during project of ripping paper and making balls. Fine motor skills. Very sociable. Great sense of humor.

I dropped you off to school today and noticed your painting posted outside your classroom. While your classmates splashed paints all over the canvas, you had three dots in yours. You must have picked up your minimalist style from me.

You’re using more Vietlish nowadays:
“fish an (eat)”
“chocho xe lua (train)”
“more nho (grapes)”
“mo (take off) jacket”
“red xe (car)”

You also learned to count: mot, hai, ba, sau (one, two, three, six)

People who cut through the malfunctioned escalator line at the Metro while everyone else waits in line. They just walk right up to the escalator as if no one is around.

Parents who don’t take their shoes off at the mall’s playground. What’s the point of taking off the kids’ shoes if the parents don’t? Adult shoes are less dirty or something? It makes no sense to me at all.

Guys, please pick up the toilet seat cover when you take a leak even if you have good aim. If you don’t want to lift up the cover, at least wipe off your own piss when you’re done.

Over the weekend, I reread John Allsopp’s Developing with Web Standards and found things John covered a year ago still work today. Highly recommended for web designers.

I will be in Tampa, Florida next week for the 2011 Building B-Schools Symposium. The last time I attended, Facebook and Twitter were hot topics for Business School and indeed they were exploded. I am excited to see where higher education is heading.

Our new 2011 Sienna clocks in over 5,000 miles in less than three months. Dao loves the van so much that he doesn’t want to ride in the old car anymore. He falls asleep in the van in less than 10 minutes of driving and he could sleep through four and a half hours straight.

This two-column design forces me to write longer than I normally do because the short sentence would look weird slipping up.

John Cloud points out an interest definition of hypersexual disorder from the proposed APA (American Psychiatric Association):

…you have an illness if you spend so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities. According to the working language of the diagnosis, “repetitively engaging” in sexual behaviors when you are anxious, depressed or stressed would be considered a major warning sign for the disorder.

The article goes on explaining several rehab methods including “chemical castration.” To keep your mind off sex, all you need to do is finding something you feel passionate about like blogging, designing web sites or spending time with your kid.

In a more serious note, aren’t most men addicted to sex? We just have different ways of dealing with it. Cheating simply ruins your marriage and marriage doesn’t necessarily go with sex. It took me quite a while to learn that marriage goes more with sleeplessness.

Dao and May hung out again over the weekend. We dropped by Linh’s place on Sunday for the kids to play together. As soon as Dao saw May, he yelled out her name, ran toward her, gave her a hug and kiss. We had lunch and stayed for about two hours before the kids were winding down for nap time. We drove back to m sister’s house and Dao napped.

Yesterday, we met again at The Playhouse Cafe in Harrisburg. Twenty minutes later the kids got bored so Linh suggested that we hit Port Discovery. What an awesome place for kids. There are tons of activities for them to do. I can’t wait to take Eric, my little nephew, to it. I am sure he’ll enjoy it.

We only get to know these cool places through Linh who discovers all these spots for May. The more time we spend with the Linh and May, the more we admire them and the more we enjoy their company. We’re very grateful to have them as friends and definitely looking forward to the future getting together.

After making Visualgui responsive, I changed Simplexpression to fit various screen resolutions. I must admit. I am a bit late in adapting this technique because I never liked fluid layout. I preferred the columns to stay fixed and the images to size exactly the way I cropped them, but the web is changing and designing for a specific resolution doesn’t cut it anymore.

Just a few hours before the new Visualgui.com went live, Andy Clark made a bold statement:

Today, anything that’s fixed and unresponsive isn’t web design, it’s something else. If you don’t embrace the inherent fluidity of the web, you’re not a web designer, you’re something else.

Then Jeremy Keith charmed in:

Increasingly, I’m getting that feeling whenever I visit a website that doesn’t respond to the size and capabilities of my browser. If I get handed a crawlbar, I try to understand the reason for it but more often than not, it’s simply a sign that the website has been built by someone with a non-web, print-based, fixed-canvas mentality. It feels …wrong.

I am not worshipping the ground these guys spit on, but I do recognize the changes in the web game. While desktops are getting larger and larger, we can’t ignore small mobile screens. The web is moving into two opposite directions; therefore, web design is no longer contained in a box. As a result, the site needs to adapt itself to whatever screens the users are browsing on. Thanks to the new CSS3 Media Queries, making responsive web design doesn’t take up too much effort. As a designer, I find it intriguing to see how a site flows to the browser window. My new guilty pleasure of surfing a site is to pull the bottom right corner of Safari to see if I get a crawlbar.

If you want to see examples of responsive web design, check out Media Queries. As someone who works for the University, I would love to see high-ed web sites adapting to responsive design. Big up to Sewanee for leading the effort. My future clients will of course benefit from this new technique. I think it will be an easy persuasion. Who wouldn’t want a web site to display perfectly on multiple screen resolutions?

After many months of itching for a new design, I spent the last four sleepless nights realigning instead of redesigning my personal site. My original intention was to revamp both the design and the codes, but I simply can’t escape the white background. Although the layout isn’t drastically different, I incorporated many new things I have learned in the past few months. So let’s walk through some highlights.

The navigation is completely reworked. As you might have already noticed, the inspiration comes straight from Apple.com. What can I say? I am a fan of Apple’s design. I can’t be a sleek as Apple so I settled for more colorful.

The layout is now much wider (940px). The design is based on a grid that inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design. Until I read his book, most of my previous designs based on improvised grid. Although the previous design worked out well with 800px, it’s time to move on toward larger screen; however, the new layout is also responsive and fits nicely with mobile devices. Big up to Ethan Marcotte for the invaluable tutorial on fluid layout from Dan Cederholm’s Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design.

HTML had been rewritten after many rereads of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. This site also uses some features from the rock-solid HTML5 Boilerplate. Paul Irish rocks!.

A big part of this redesign was for me to go through WordPress 3.0 and create a framework just in case my feature clients would like to use WordPress as a CMS. I wanted Visualgui to be a parent theme and than later on I can just build a child theme to meet whatever design the clients request. That way, I’ll have a based template to start off with. Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful is a great resource. I went through WordPress’s default theme Twenty Ten line by line and tried to convert it into HTML5 markups. I was half way through before I discovered ToolBox. That was exactly what I needed. So I went back to use Toolbox as a reference to build out a framework. For the purpose of this site however, I only use some basic functions.

As for typography, I am finally moving away from Helvetica, a font that works so well in term of clarity and supporting Vietnamese characters. The latter has been the reason I have been holding on to Helvetica for so long even my printed material was set in Helvetica. I am now switching to Cabin for the branding and headlines. I guess it’s time to print some new business cards to be consistent. For body text, I went for Goudy Bookletter 1911, my favorite classic typeface.

For CSS, I am playing with multi-column, which splits my blog posts into two columns. The new element doesn’t work on all browsers, but it doesn’t hurt. So yeah, that’s it for now. I am sure there are still tons of touchups need to be done. The screenshots on the sites and motion section need to be be resize. I’ll do that later. It’s time to catch some sleep. Work starts in a couple of hours.

Instead of following the Grammy, we watched For Colored Girls, a film that drags the colored boys to the mud. After the depressing ending, we tuned into the Grammy for a bit and caught Esperanza Spalding beat both Justin Bieber and Drake for Best New Artist. I was shocked that the Grammy was actually getting it right. The award went to real talent instead of commercial success.

I was glad that she won, but I was also speculating that the Bieber’s fans would be quite upset. I headed over Twitter and I could see all the hate tweets flooded. The little Beliebers attack, threaten Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding.

Up until this past Sunday, Ms. Spalding was probably only known to jazz fans. I listened to her 2008’s self-titled Esperanza two years ago. Her singing did not impressed me much, but her bass plucking was as strong as any big man. Her recent work with Joe Lovano on Bird Songs was hypnotizing. Esperanza Spalding is indeed a bass beauty.

From softwares, scripting languages to CMS’s, every web designer has his own set of tools. With so many choices out there, I find that focusing on a certain skill set is more valuable than trying to learn everything. With that said, I would like to share some of my preferred tools in designing and developing web sites.

Graphic software: Photoshop is still my choice even though I am still not sure how much I know about the software. All I know is that Photoshop helps me accomplish the tasks I want to do when creating photos for the web or making mock-ups. Even when I have the opportunity to create print materials such as business cards, flyers and book covers, I never even bothered to use InDesign. I just ask the print designers for the specs and I do everything in Photoshop. Firework is probably a better choice for making web graphics, but I never spend enough time to get to know the software.

Web editor: Yes, I am still using Dreamweaver and I am not ashamed to admit it. Many hardcore programmers seem to look down on Dreamweaver, but I find it to be quick and easy to use, especially when I have to maintain many pages. The copy-and-paste into the design view has improved tremendously in CS5. Dreamweaver no longer pulls in crazy codes from Words like it used to. Before CS5, I had to use an HTML cleaner my friend and former colleague had made to strip out tags and replaces quotes with unicode characters. It’s a great tool and I still use it from time to time.

Web technologies: I used to be a Flash fanatic, but I moved away from it and concentrated on HTML and CSS. I am glad I did. Flash is still a fantastic tool and I am still using it to create simple motion graphic projects, but I cringe whenever I come across a full Flash web site.

Scripting languages: I am not a hardcore programmer and PHP doesn’t seem so daunting to me. I can write simple codes and modify existing scripts to get what I need. Whatever I need to accomplish something using PHP chances are I can find something similar out there.

CMS: WordPress is the system I am most comfortable with. In addition, its flexibility and ease of use, specially the admin interface, are perfect for running small web sites. I experimented with Drupal in the past, but didn’t get into it far enough to see how easy I could create a theme. I will revisit version 7 in the near future, but for now, WordPress could handle most of the things I would like to do.

Valentine’s Day is coming and if you’re still looking for the gift that speaks from the heart, take a quick glance at Simplexpression. We offer two-day shipping so you still have a bit of time left. We also would like to thank our loyal customers for making the latest purchases. To show our appreciation, we will send along something special from us and we hope you will enjoy it.