Sick, stressed, sleepless and secluded. Those are the four words describing my state of mind. I don’t want to be trapped inside these moods, but I can’t seem to emancipate. Each day I feel the deterioration in my strength. Each day I feel extremely exhausted, lack of motivations and guilty. I no longer have the desire to communicate. Writing down these words is my only therapy.
For a while now my wife has been telling me that my RSS feeds take almost twelve hours later (from the time I posted on my site) to arrive to her email. I knew something’s up with FeedBurner, but I didn’t want to let it go because I have 113 subscribers. Now’s the time to make the move because FeedBurner APIs will be shut down next month. FeedBurner is redirecting back to my WordPress’s original feed for 30 days. So if 112 of my loyal readers would like to continue to subscribe to my feed, please update to this address: http://www.visualgui.com/feed/
Thank you for reading.
These past few weeks had been crazy. I am back to 3-5 hours of sleep. The kids were sick over the weekend and throwing up all over the house. Dao got Croup and Dan got a little cold. My graduate classes are exhausting. My days had been going to work, going to class, eating dinner, putting the kids to sleep, doing homework until 1 or 2 in the morning. I feel bad that Dana had to look after both kids while I attended classes and had to do most of the work around the house while I spent time on the computer all the time.
I talked to my mom yesterday and I apologized that I haven’t called much or visited much on weekends because of my workload. Her first respond was “If you can’t handle school just quit. You have two kids and a full time job. Besides, what is that degree going to benefit your career? You’ll still do the same thing you do now.” I was like, “Thanks for the encouragement, mom.”
In the Advanced Typography class tonight, we presented a bunched of existing restaurant menus for a redesign project. One of the menus I selected was from Hủ Tiếu Mì Lacay Chợ Lớn. The professor looked at the menu and said “Lacay Cho Lồn.” Me and another Vietnamese girl laughed our ass off. The professor looked at me and said, “What did I say?” I told him, “You don’t want to know.” But he insisted so I told him, “You said, ‘give me pussy.'” The entire class laughed. He asked me to say the proper name as well as the one he pronounced. He couldn’t believe just a slight change of sound could change the entire meaning.
Trịnh Công Sơn’s “Mưa Hồng” has been translated to Chinese and it sounds quite Chinese.
My hosting provider Lunarpages notified me that they will be upgrading default PHP 5 instance from the version 5.2 to the version 5.3.16 on Wednesday September 12th. Not sure if the upgrade will take Visualgui offline, but the server migration, which will happen on October 8th at 5:00 PM PST, will for about 4 hours.
We have a few plumbing jobs include replacing the water pressure valve and the main water valve. If you know any good plumber with reasonable rate around Fairfax area, .
I took off work yesterday to do my homework and I spent the entire day working on one assignment. I still have to write an essay for another class. This week had been insane. When not working fulltime, I am catching up with freelance projects and doing my school work. I hardly have time for the boys and that’s just killing me. I tried to wrap up everything today and then spend the next few days with the kids, but I am still not done what I needed to do. I am also trying to rebalance my time and make a few changes to my priorities. As much as I love to follow the election and writing about it, I am going to put the blog on hiatus once again. Since I have to write an essay for my class every week, I am going to post those instead. We’ll see how things go.
Haven’t blog for just a week and I really miss it even though I was able to catch up on some readings and freelance work. I now have a few drafts in my head and will write them down in the next couple of days.
As I said many times, I still love having my own blog even though social media has taken over the space. I am glad that Jeremy Keith shares the same sentiment:
But there’s a more fundamental difference between posting to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+, and posting to your own blog. Unless you’re using a hosted service, your blog belongs to you.
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, said the same in various interviews when being asked about blogging. At the end of the day, your blog belongs to you. As WordPress continues to grow, I am positive that blogging won’t go down like Flash had any time soon.
Every time I think of taking a break, I ended up blogging more than usual. Yesterday was the proof. School will start in two weeks and I am very excited. Next Tuesday I will be taking a full day workup learning InDesign. The workshop is free and will be taught by two graphic design students. I peaked at their work and very impress. Hope I can learn something from them. I never thought that I would InDesign, but I better get myself prepared since I am going to learn about graphic design.
My goal before attending school is to focus on getting my freelance project finish and catching up on readings. The freelance gig is coming along well. I am very excited and can’t wait to share it with everyone. My list just keep getting longer and longer, but here’s are the books that I hope get through:
I still haven’t gotten a response from my professor for the books I need for the Advanced Typography class. Well, hope you all are having a great summer. Enjoy it while you can.