I used to unable to drink coffee. I would get really shaky after a small cup and could not sleep at night. Those sign affects had gone the day my baby boy was born. I needed coffee to keep me up in the morning when he cried in the middle of the night. Now he sleeps through the night, but coffee has stayed with me and become part of my diet.

I don’t get coffee in the morning anymore because the line at Starbucks is insane. I wait until after lunch to enjoy a cup of grande bold with one or two rolled wafers from Pepperidge Farm. My homeboy Nate who works at Pepperidge Farm would bring over all kind of cookies whenever I go back to Lancaster.

Because I drink coffee at noon, I get really hungry by the time I head home from work. After dinner, I would kick back with a cup of iced Patron Xo Cafe Liqueur to unwind. The only problem is that the liqueur makes me sleepy afterward. If I don’t have to do anything else, I would just roll in bed with Dao. He can jump up and down all he wanted and doesn’t bother me at all.

Last Christmas, we received a Cuisineart’s Espresso Maker from Dana’s brother. Last month her sister’s husband brought back some expresso from El Salvador. My weekend joys have been waking up to a strong expresso and French baguette with fried eggs. I love my eggs sunny side up with black pepper, soy sauce and hot sauce. That’s all I need to start my weekend.

Lat weekend my sister gave me a dozen of American CDs I left at her house before I moved out. Unlike me who tend to throw junks out, my sister keeps everything. She drives me nuts sometimes, but I am glad that she still kept some of these old joints.

I went through the pile of CDs and spotted R. Kelly’s 1993 12 Play, which brought back so much memories even though I never liked the entire album because of the rap tracks. Let’s face it. R. Kelly can sing, but he can’t rap. He made a great choice of abandoning rapping altogether in his later releases. Except for “Sadie,” an emotional dedication to his mother, 12 Play was a booty-call soundtrack, especially with tunes like “Sex Me,” ‘Your Body’s Callin'” and “Bump N’ Grind.”

When I tried to tune my wife into 12 Play, I played one of the hottest hits in the 90s and she told me to turn it off. The bass gave her a headache. While I see nothing wrong with a little “Bump N’ Grind,” she doesn’t seem to “need someone, someone like me to satisfy [her] every need.” I guess that’s how marriage goes!

This is the forth time I have seen the white man in his 60s sitting in Starbucks pretending to talk on the phone. The first time I thought he did until he took his hand away from his ear without a phone in his hand. He was just rambling about the government, economy and some sort of CIA. I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but I hope that he doesn’t do anything crazy at Starbucks.

My golden ticket for VaultPress has arrived today and I signed up immediately to secure “At The Center of It All,” an active, engaging site for GW School of Business.

The initial intention for “At The Center of It All” was to replace our bi-weekly newsletters, but the site has evolved in such a short period of time. We now post news, events, publications and video on a daily basis. My colleague who is the associate director of media relations is doing a fantastic job of keeping the site fresh all the time.

When we launched the site, I have to use Lunarpages to host WordPress because the University server doesn’t run on PHP & MySQL. Since the University is not supporting us and we’re hosting WordPress outside of the school, I am responsible for the site. Although Lunarpages is hosting both Visualgui.com and iLoveNgocLan.com over eight years without any issue, I don’t want take the risk with the University’s web site.

Now that the site is being backed up by the WordPress experts, I don’t have to worry much anymore if something goes wrong. For $15 a month, peace of mind surely is VaultPress’s most popular feature. VaultPress is a great service and I am sure it will be successful. VaultPress is another reason I am strongly rooting for WordPress.

Heather Armstrong brings in quite a hefty income for blogging on Dooce.com about poop and spit up. New York Times reports:

[Heather Armstrong] is the only blogger on the latest Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Media, coming in at No. 26, which is 25 slots behind Oprah, but just one slot behind Tina Brown. Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

Wow!

People who cut through the malfunctioned escalator line at the Metro while everyone else waits in line. They just walk right up to the escalator as if no one is around.

Parents who don’t take their shoes off at the mall’s playground. What’s the point of taking off the kids’ shoes if the parents don’t? Adult shoes are less dirty or something? It makes no sense to me at all.

Guys, please pick up the toilet seat cover when you take a leak even if you have good aim. If you don’t want to lift up the cover, at least wipe off your own piss when you’re done.

Over the weekend, I reread John Allsopp’s Developing with Web Standards and found things John covered a year ago still work today. Highly recommended for web designers.

I will be in Tampa, Florida next week for the 2011 Building B-Schools Symposium. The last time I attended, Facebook and Twitter were hot topics for Business School and indeed they were exploded. I am excited to see where higher education is heading.

Our new 2011 Sienna clocks in over 5,000 miles in less than three months. Dao loves the van so much that he doesn’t want to ride in the old car anymore. He falls asleep in the van in less than 10 minutes of driving and he could sleep through four and a half hours straight.

This two-column design forces me to write longer than I normally do because the short sentence would look weird slipping up.

John Cloud points out an interest definition of hypersexual disorder from the proposed APA (American Psychiatric Association):

…you have an illness if you spend so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities. According to the working language of the diagnosis, “repetitively engaging” in sexual behaviors when you are anxious, depressed or stressed would be considered a major warning sign for the disorder.

The article goes on explaining several rehab methods including “chemical castration.” To keep your mind off sex, all you need to do is finding something you feel passionate about like blogging, designing web sites or spending time with your kid.

In a more serious note, aren’t most men addicted to sex? We just have different ways of dealing with it. Cheating simply ruins your marriage and marriage doesn’t necessarily go with sex. It took me quite a while to learn that marriage goes more with sleeplessness.

After making Visualgui responsive, I changed Simplexpression to fit various screen resolutions. I must admit. I am a bit late in adapting this technique because I never liked fluid layout. I preferred the columns to stay fixed and the images to size exactly the way I cropped them, but the web is changing and designing for a specific resolution doesn’t cut it anymore.

Just a few hours before the new Visualgui.com went live, Andy Clark made a bold statement:

Today, anything that’s fixed and unresponsive isn’t web design, it’s something else. If you don’t embrace the inherent fluidity of the web, you’re not a web designer, you’re something else.

Then Jeremy Keith charmed in:

Increasingly, I’m getting that feeling whenever I visit a website that doesn’t respond to the size and capabilities of my browser. If I get handed a crawlbar, I try to understand the reason for it but more often than not, it’s simply a sign that the website has been built by someone with a non-web, print-based, fixed-canvas mentality. It feels …wrong.

I am not worshipping the ground these guys spit on, but I do recognize the changes in the web game. While desktops are getting larger and larger, we can’t ignore small mobile screens. The web is moving into two opposite directions; therefore, web design is no longer contained in a box. As a result, the site needs to adapt itself to whatever screens the users are browsing on. Thanks to the new CSS3 Media Queries, making responsive web design doesn’t take up too much effort. As a designer, I find it intriguing to see how a site flows to the browser window. My new guilty pleasure of surfing a site is to pull the bottom right corner of Safari to see if I get a crawlbar.

If you want to see examples of responsive web design, check out Media Queries. As someone who works for the University, I would love to see high-ed web sites adapting to responsive design. Big up to Sewanee for leading the effort. My future clients will of course benefit from this new technique. I think it will be an easy persuasion. Who wouldn’t want a web site to display perfectly on multiple screen resolutions?

Instead of following the Grammy, we watched For Colored Girls, a film that drags the colored boys to the mud. After the depressing ending, we tuned into the Grammy for a bit and caught Esperanza Spalding beat both Justin Bieber and Drake for Best New Artist. I was shocked that the Grammy was actually getting it right. The award went to real talent instead of commercial success.

I was glad that she won, but I was also speculating that the Bieber’s fans would be quite upset. I headed over Twitter and I could see all the hate tweets flooded. The little Beliebers attack, threaten Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding.

Up until this past Sunday, Ms. Spalding was probably only known to jazz fans. I listened to her 2008’s self-titled Esperanza two years ago. Her singing did not impressed me much, but her bass plucking was as strong as any big man. Her recent work with Joe Lovano on Bird Songs was hypnotizing. Esperanza Spalding is indeed a bass beauty.