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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jessica Lee wrote the following line in her high school yearbook:

Fluorine uranium carbon potassium bismuth technetium helium sulfur germanium thulium oxygen neon yttrium.

The quote appears to be a list of chemical elements, but putting the symbols together and they spell out: “Fuck bitches get money.” The line came from “Get Money” by Biggie Smalls and Jr. M.A.F.I.A. I am impressed that a young girl like her knows that joint from Biggie. Read more

For a while now, my RSS reader gets only a few updates a day. Most of the “friends” and personal blogs I had subscribed to either shut down or don’t update anymore. Even the tech and design news, in which I followed to stay up to date, have moved to Twitter.

Blog shows its age even though WordPress is still popular. At the core, WordPress is still a blogging platform, but it is also being used more as a content management system more than a blog. It’s a nostalgia for me to see blogging going away. It has become a part of my digital life. Blogging was never meant to be a popularity thing for me. Proof is that this blog has peaked years ago even before I closed the comment section. I hardly check who visited the site or who read the blog. It doesn’t matter as long as I still have my own space to write, design and learn. It’s the place where I don’t have to please anybody or follow anyone’s instructions.

I disconnected my blog from my Twitter and Facebook. You’ll have to visit this site to see the updates unless you have subscribed to my RSS feed. The blog is not even prominent on the homepage. You have to get past the large banner to get to the blog. The reason is that I don’t want the blog to be the main focus on the homepage and only those who want to read would scroll.

I am not sure how long my blog will last, but it is still alive and kicking for now.

Mason Online highlights the project we did for Advanced Web Design: “Mason Students Create “Ideal” Online Course.”

As usual, my morning routine started off with dropping Cu Dan off at grandma’s place then driving to work and listening to some podcasts. I am so glad that my car stereo is resuscitated. A couple of months ago, it went dead completely and I had to listen to the podcasts through the iPhone speaker, which was quite annoying. About a month ago, the stereo just powered back up again all by itself. It was just like a miracle.

In any rate, I was listening to two fantastic TEDTalk podcasts today. The first one is from Paola Antonelli on “Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA.” She gave an insightful, entertaining talk about interactive design. Obviously, designers should listen.

The second piece from Andrew Solomon on “Love, no matter what” is quite powerful. He touched on the progression of gay from “illness to identity” from the 60s to today. He also shared stories from parents whose kids were down, abnormal and criminal. Highly recommended.

Along the way, I also stopped by Burger King to pick up its ice coffee. I always had a love-hate relationships with its ice coffee. I loved its smoothness and richness, but hated the extra sweet even when I ordered a plain one. Its ice coffee is also very inconsistent from place to place. In this one particular location, I had a sweet cup three days ago. Yesterday I ordered the same thing and it was simply plain. Today it had just a tad sweetness, which was perfect. I loved it. I wish I had a couple shots of Kahlúa to spice it up, but then I would be an alcoholic.

Last week when I was vacationing at WildWood, my wife made some killer coffee in the morning with the help of Kahlúa’s hazelnet flavor. Those were the best intant coffee I ever had. I need another vacation.