Found out that a friend got canned. She was professional, down to earth and an excellent team leader. With such a positive attitude and superb communication skills, she’ll have no problem finding a new gig for sure. What I respected her the most was her calmness even under tremendous pressure. I can still picture a smile on her face even though she got it bad and it ain’t no good.

Even though we never really get beyond the professional relationship, I will always draw back to her as a mentor. She never gave me any advice, but I could learn from the way she treated and inspired the people around her. Think positive and keep moving forward. Hope someday, we’ll reconnect.

Daycare sent Dao home Monday afternoon for a high fever. I took off Tuesday to take care of him. He fussed and refused everything from food to milk to water. I had to take him to the shopping mall train to get him to eat. We sat in the food court and watched the train goes by. I made a deal with him. If he eats we would get to ride the train. If not we just go home. He screamed and screamed, but he knew he better eat to get on the train.

Tuesday night, he got better and could be back to daycare the next day, but grandparent drove down just in case he would still be out sick. He ended up staying home for the rest of the week and didn’t want to back to daycare. He loves spending time with grandma because she plays with him as much as he wants to. None of us could do that except for grandma and he knows it. He was sitting on he coach, watching Jay Jay, leaning on her and eating a cheese sandwich like a little king.

While grandma was occupied with Dao, grandpa fixed things around the house. The damn towel bar in the bathroom kept falling off the wall because I couldn’t nail though the wood. I put on compound and screwed it back in. It fell off again the next day; therefore, I just left it like that. I was just going to get rid of it, but I hadn’t have the time. Yesterday, I discovered the bar was back on the wall and tightly secured. I need to ask him how did he do it. He also made a holder for Dao’s bathtub. It looks pretty clever.

It’s always a great pleasure having the grandparent visiting us. They’ll off to Cancun with my sister-in-law and her husband for five days. I am sure they’ll appreciate the quietness and the relaxation after what they had been through with the little kid.

Like most marketable pop releases in Vietnam, Khánh Phương’s Nước Mắt Vì Sao Rơi is packed with catchy melodies, contagious hooks and chuckling lyrics. Just pick out any tune on the album and you can figure out the formula. The chorus on “Nếu Không Có Anh Ta” goes: “Nếu không có anh ta em có thấy buồn không? / Lúc trống vắng cô đơn hãy nhớ anh một lần.” Who wouldn’t get a giggle out of conversational lines like that?

But what makes Khánh Phương stands out is his charming, gruff voice combined with his carefree swagger in delivering the words. He’s a reminiscent of Tuấn Hưng in his “Tình Yêu Lung Linh” hey-days. (Tuấn Hưng sings like he had taken doses of Zolpidem nowadays.) Khanh Phuong, on the other hand, sounds energetic on a mid-tempo groove like “Lựa Chọn Một Hạnh Phúc” and so damn sincere on puppy-love, slow jams like “Đừng Hỏi Vì Sao,” particularly on the hook: “Lúc mới khi yêu sẽ buồn lúc mới khi yêu sẽ vui / Lúc mới khi yêu sẽ nhớ / Đến lúc con tim đổi thay chẳng biết được vì sao đổi thay / vẫn thương vẫn yêu vẫn nhớ nhưng nhớ thương chỉ trong vài giây.”

The album loses its strength when he gets too Chinese-sounding on “Người Ra Đi Vì Ai” and “Hãy Ra Đi Nếu Em Muốn.” Nevertheless Nước Mắt Vì Sao Rơi has its shining moments before fading away in the fast-changing pop scene.

As a new command-line user, I find Mark Sobell’s A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming an indispensable resource next to Google. I picked up a handful of Linux books, but this is the only comprehensive text that focused mainly on command line.

After reading the book from cover to cover, I have learned the power of using command line and how not daunting the black screen with white text appears to be. Part V, “Command Reference,” makes this book a must-have guide next to my office desk, especially with the cover of Mac OS X. Highly recommended.

Dao has a great memory and remembers most of the books we have read; therefore, I liked to do a bit of interactive reading with him. For example, when we read Dr. Seuss’s ABC, I said “A” and he said “alligator.” I said “B” and he said “bumblebee.” I said “C” and he said “camel.” When we got to “I,” however, he said “gai,” which means scratch in Vietnamese, but the actual word is “itchy.”

Another book that he liked to read is P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” He started out with, “A mother bird sat on her egg. The egg jumped.” The I read the next few lines with him filling in the sentences. When we got to page eight, he got up, jumped and yelled out, “the egg jumped. It jumped, and jumped, and jumped.” Then I said, “Out came…” He screamed, “the baby bird!” He also said, “I am too loud.” I replied, “Yes, you are.”

One of our favorite books is Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go. Here’s how we read it:

Me: Congratu…
Dao: lations!
Me: Today is…
Dao: your day.
Me: You’re off to…
Dao: Great Places!
Me: You’re off and…
Dao: away.
Me: You have brains in your…
Dao: head.
Me: You have feet in your…
Dao: shoes.
Me You can steer yourself any direction you…
Dao: choose.
Me: You’re on your…
Dao: own.
Me: And you know what you…
Dao: know.
Me: And YOU are the guy who’ll decide…
Dao: where to go.

It’s already three weeks. Time flies by so fast when you have so much to learn. Mad kudos to my predecessor for being so patience with me. He already took on his new job, yet he is still very responsive to my questions. He has been teaching me so much in the past few weeks. I wish he had documented all of these tasks so I don’t have to bother him, but I am getting more comfortable using command line and finding my way into the servers.

I have been reading vigorously on Linux and Apache and trying to learn as much as I possibly could. The experience has been daunting and rewarding. In addition to server administration, I have redesigned a new layout for the main site and it has already been approved. I am now in the process of turning into HTML pages. I am also rewriting the front-end codes from scratch using HTML5, CSS3 as well as making the layout responsive. ModX looks very straightforward to switch out the templates. I hope that’ll be the case, but will find out when I get to that point.

I am very happy so far with the new gig. I started out being fearful to gaining confidence, thanks to my new awesome supervisor for her support and encouragement. I feel very lucky to be in such a great environment learning new stuff as well as doing what I like.

These past few weeks, I have been watching with Dao one favorite movies, The Little Engine That Could, and the lines that stuck to me was, “If you think you can, you will. If you think you can’t, you won’t. Either way you’re right.” That’s my inspiration. I think I can.

My mother was discharged from the hospital on Sunday. She’s recuperating. Thanks to all of you who sent her love and prayers. When she was taken to the hospital, the first thing came to my mind was that please don’t let her ended up like her sister who had a stroke more than a decade ago and has been in bed ever since. Friday night when I visited her in the hospital, she was murmuring some words while sleeping and she looked so much weaker than two weeks ago when we were in Mexico.

When I went back to Lancaster last week, Dao and Dana didn’t come with me. I didn’t want a pregnant woman and a little kid to be around the hospital. Saturday I was sitting by my mom’s side watching the snow fell and I missed them so much. I missed hearing the little one talks. I missed hanging around with him. I missed reading our favorite book together (Oh! The Places You Go). Heck I even missed the moments that he drove me to the wall like brushing his teeth and getting him to sleep. Yes, I had those moments when I said in my head, “Go the F to Sleep.” I didn’t see him for three days and it seemed like forever. Then I realized that the last time I saw my father was in 2001. Damn, time goes by so fast.

I also missed my wife even though we only communicate with each other on the basic level. These days if we go any further than that, we would ended up arguing. If we talk to the point where I started to feel comfortable, I would bring up my problems and she is sick and tired of hearing them. I am sure you’re pretty tired of hearing them too if you follow this blog. Carrying the baby is already hard enough; therefore, I try my best to keep my own issues to myself and not giving her anymore burden.

Over the weekend I stood up wordPress, Drupal and ModX on my laptop using MAMP while sitting by mom’s hospital bed. The installation process for each system took less than five minutes. WordPress’s default theme is Twenty Eleven. Drupal’s default theme is Bartik. ModX’s default theme is blank.

ModX claims to give the designers total creative freedom. As stated on its web site:

Ever wanted complete freedom with your HTML and CSS? Tired of hacking existing systems to get your design to work the way you comp’ed it? MODx does not generate one single line of HTML – it leaves the front-end design up to you.

After reading through the documents. I am very impressed with the way ModX handling the template. The designers do indeed control all the HTML, CSS and jQuery and ModX’s placeholders handle all of the dynamic codes. This is the biggest different between ModX vs. Drupal and WordPress. With Drupal and WordPress, a designer would need a base theme to begin. Creating a customized theme from scratch for WordPress and Drupal takes tremendous amount of time and when it is time to upgrade, a designer has to also upgrade the theme. The nice thing about WordPress is that the theme would still work without upgrading. The designer just won’t be able to take advantage of the new functionalities.

What makes ModX an ideal CMS solution is the template variable, which is a custom field. A site can have as many custom field as it is required. This is one of the areas that ModX is stronger than WordPress.

With all that said, I haven’t built anything with ModX. I need a simple project to get it rolling, but I can’t think of any at the moment. A client site would be a great project for ModX.

The whole week, Stacey Kent was the only voice playing on my commute trips. She helped me relaxed in the morning and eased the traffic jam in the evening. After listening to each indivudual album, Hushabye Mountain, The Boy Next Door and In Love Again, I put all three on random and still loved every song she sings.

Ms. Kent has a very soothing voice with both angelic and child-like tone. She swings in perfect phrasing and she sings ballad in its purest emotion. She has the style of both Billie Holiday and Norah Jones rolled in one. Yet what makes me so addicted to her singing is the way she articulated each word. The clarity in her pronunciation is simply amazing. Each word is so crisp and effortless that she makes you pay attention to every intimate sound she makes. If she was to sing a dictionary, I would have still listened with undivided attention. I can’t wait to set my ears on her French record, Raconte-Moi, even though I only know a few French words.

I just made the idiot mistake ever. I have two external hard drives for back up. One is a WD and one is a Maxton. They both contain almost the same contents in case one is screwed up. I wanted to transfer my latest work folder from the Maxton to WD. So I deleted the work folder on the WD and brought the latest stuff over from WD. My Mac stalled and nothing copied over. I got impatient and force quitted my Mac.

When I restarted my Mac, the Maxton didn’t mount. I was like there goes another Maxton. The thing was all of my work had just been lost. I started to panic and thinking of cracking that piece of crap open after wasting an hour trying to get it to work. Then I started to Google and found this advice: “I had a similar problem, then I tried swapping the Maxtor’s USB cable with my digital camera’s cable and the Maxtor started working again.”

That can’t be it, but I tried it any way. I plugged in my camera’s USB cable. The first time the light blinked but still no sign of the hard drive. I took out the USB cable and plugged it back in again and voila. The icon appeared on my desktop. Holy moly, that’s the best freaking advice ever.