Sinclair Target writes in Motherboard:

Regular people never felt comfortable using RSS; it hadn’t really been designed as a consumer-facing technology and involved too many hurdles; people jumped ship as soon as something better came along.

RSS might have been able to overcome some of these limitations if it had been further developed. Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. Maybe browser support could have been improved. But whereas a company like Facebook was able to “move fast and break things,” the RSS developer community was stuck trying to achieve consensus. When they failed to agree on a single standard, effort that could have gone into improving RSS was instead squandered on duplicating work that had already been done.

I still prefer RSS reader over social media for online reading. It is quieter and more focused. I do hope blogs will be coming back after people get sick and tired of Twitter and Facebook.

After listening to an interview with Hillary Frank on her childbirth injury, I am glad that my wife went under C-Section when Vương was sunny-side up. Although Frank gave her child a natural birth, the episiotomy issue took three years to heal. I have profound respect for mothers who give birth to their children. The image of the C-Section still haunts me.

I really love last week’s episode of This American Life, in which they talked about libraries. My favorite segment is the library for unpublished manuscripts.

Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi writes in the New York Times:

The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction.

I find clutter suffocating. Keeping the house tidy is quite challenging with for kids. The older I get the more irritate I become with cluttering. I need more time to reorganize and purge before it gets overwhelming.

Nicholas Bakalar writes in The New York Times:

Breast-feeding for longer than six months may lead to a smaller waist size for the mother, researchers report, and the effect persists for as long as a decade.

Now I understand how my wife has managed to keep her sexy waist without exercise.

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore writes in the New York Times:

Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.

Facebook is still a convenient place to connect with family members and close friends; therefore, it is so hard to pull the plug. I am, however, deeply concern with all of these privacy issues, especially my kids’ photos. I am seriously considering leaving Facebook by the end of this year. Leaving Facebook is difficult but doable. Google, on the other hand, is much harder. From Gmail to photos to Pixel, Google has me locked in. I guess, I can’t keep anything private as long as I am on the web.

Photographer Hoài Nam released not one but two stunning calendars this year. His work is consistently beautiful. You should definitely get them to support orphanages in Việt Nam.

He also launched a new, responsive website. Disappointedly, the new design is templated by Squarespace, but it makes sense. Áo Trắng is a charitable project with limited resource.

I wish him all the best and thank him for all the work he has done to give back to his homeland.

Jacey Fortin writes in The New York Times about the issue of the classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:

To some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape. The woman keeps protesting. “I ought to say no, no, no, sir,” she sings, and he asks to move in closer. “My sister will be suspicious,” she sings. “Gosh, your lips look delicious,” he answers. She wonders aloud what is in her drink.

Oh, come on!

Last Friday evening, a friend sent an old photo of myself taken when I was a scrawny, eleven- or twelve-year-old immigrant. My friend got the photo from one of our ESL teachers. He also sent me a picture he took with the two ESL teachers and his old classmates. I am so glad to see both of the ESL teachers who are in their late sixties and early eighties are still looking great.

I wanted to meet with them and to thank them deeply from the bottom of my heart for what they had done for the immigrated kids like us. In addition to teaching us English, they welcomed us with open arms. Their love and kindness helped us get through the early days of our lives in a foreign country. When the school closed because of the snow, they called each of us to make sure we did not go out in the cold. When we had after school party for ESL students, they drove each of us home in their own car. The little things they did beyond their teaching responsibility made a long-lasting impact on me.

At time when privileged white men claimed that immigrants make America dirtier and the current administration wanted to deport immigrants, I thought of white people like my ESL teachers. They are the reason I still believe America is a nation in which love trumps hate.

Chris, my friend and former colleague at Vassar College, started a very simple blog. He shares:

So for the moment, I’ve dropped the systems. I’m back to HTML5 Boilerplate, a few basic PHP includes, and standard HTML/CSS. It’s clunky and limited: no search, no tags, no categories, no archives, no plugins, no widgets, no templates, no nothing. HTML pages linked with PHP—that’s it.

I have been a fan of Chris’ works and his thoughts. I am looking forward to reading his blog.