Double Meaning

To prove how important diacritics are in Vietnamese writing, here’s a conversation I had on Facebook that started out with a haircut, but could mean totally something else depending on how dirty your mind is:

John Smith Ban thich cat ngan hay cat dai?

Donny Truong Writing Vietnamese without “dấu” is quite dangerous.

John Smith And sometimes so confusing that it makes people ask you over and over for clarification. You answer and answer but they keep asking, asking. Cu hoi, cu hoi, cu hoi hoai! Until you get upset and want to chui lon!

Donny Truong Du roi, du roi. Dung chui lon nua.

GW School of Business Dean Gets the Boot

Message from the Provost:

Today, I am informing the George Washington University community that Doug Guthrie is no longer serving as the Dean of the School of Business. Fundamental differences about financial and operational performance were significant enough to warrant a change in leadership.

Damn!

Typography, Design and Git

I just started reading Butterick’s Practical Typography and really digging it. I am half way through Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design and liking it. Scott Chacon’s is Pro Git is highly recommended to me from a former colleague and I’ll get to it eventually. You should read them too because they’re all free. Do support the writers though.

The Important of Sleep

Neuroscientist Penelope Lewis talks to Terry Gross about how sleep affects memory from her new book The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest. Also worth listening is TED talk from circadian neuroscientist Russell Foster in which he shares three popular theories about why we sleep.

Parents’ Hardest Hours

Eric Meyer shares the “77 Hours” that led up to the diagnose of the tumor in his five-year old daughter’s brain. It’s heart-wrecking to hear something like this happens to a little girl. I hope she’ll make a speedy recovery.

Cám Ơn Bác Lan

Bác Lan viết:

Từ cuộc reunion đầu tiên, qua những góp ý kiến, bác đả thấy ở Donny có thật nhiều tình cảm gia đình, nhất là bác đọc qua trang web của con, với những dòng chữ chân tình đối với con cái gia đinh và nhất là đối với các dì trong gia đình con. Trong khi mọi người thích ồn ào, nhưng đôi khi, con vẫn thích sự tĩnh lạng riêng tư. Cám ơn trời Phật đả cho con vào đại gia đình họ Nguyễn Khắc.
Mến, bác Lan

Đọc vài dòng của của bác khiến tôi rất cảm động. Lần đầu gặp bác tôi rất mến và yêu quý bác lắm.

Aunts’ Obituaries

We’re currently in Lancaster to attend my aunt’s funeral service. Within two weeks, we lost two beloved aunts: Anh K. L. Huynh and Thanh L. Risser.

2013 Conference & Reunion

Next week is going to be awesome. I’ll be attending An Event Apart in D.C. on Monday and Tuesday. After two full days of soaking in all the information, I’ll be joining my in-law’s family for their annual reunion at Lake Anne to relax for the rest of the week. I am not so sure about the relaxing part since I have to look after the two loud, energetic kids. Still, I can’t wait.

Client Support

About a week ago, one of my recent client sites got hacked. After I received the client’s notification, I checked out the site immediately. I couldn’t find any obvious code so I reinstalled WordPress, but that didn’t do it. I immediately called Lunarpages, which is the host I recommended to my client, and luckily my client did purchase the Premium Restore Service for $1.50 a month. A few hours later, the site was restored and it was back in business. I went in and changed all of the passwords for him. The previous ones were so weak that it was so easy to crack.

Lesson learned: Please, please make your password strong and purchase a restore service. Again, Lunarpages rocks.

A few days ago while I am spending time with my family, a really long time client contacted me to get me to help him upgrade MySQL 4 to 5 because his hosting provider is no longer supporting MySQL 4. When I logged into his WordPress admin, he was still using WordPress 2.7. The reason was that his host was still on PHP4 and MySQL 4.

My first task was to create a brand new MySQL 5 and then imported MySQL 4 over. The only problem was that the Vietnamese character was all messed up when I import via UTF8. It took me awhile to figure out that I needed to import Latin1. After the import was successful, I upgraded PHP 4 to PHP 5.4. I then upgraded WordPress from 2.7 to 3.52. He’s now able to upgrade WordPress automatically with just one click. I really hope that he’ll do it in the future.

Lesson learned: If your site is running on WordPress, please, please upgrade whenever you see the new version available. 99.9% of the time, it would upgrade successfully. This is one of WordPress’s awesome features.

Obama and the Numbers Game

Coincidentally, I listened to two podcasts this morning that talked about the digital strategy that helped Obama got reelected in 2012. Daniel Ryan shared his experience on the Non-Breaking Space, one of my favorite podcasts on web design, when he was the director of front-end development for President Obama’s 2012 election campaign. Likewise on Fresh Air, journalist Jonathan Alter explained how the Obama campaign revolutionized more than just politics by focusing on the numbers game. Both podcasts are worth listening.