After college, I had a temporary job at a local web shop in Lancaster. My main responsibility was taking a Photoshop file from the designer and turned it into HTML using Dreamweaver. I remember slicing up the design and dropped it into the table. The text inside Photoshop looked funny to me, yet I didn’t even realize it was dummy text. I spent time carefully copied and pasted the text into HTML. I read every line, bolded and italicized a certain words just like the original design. After I did all of that, the designer told me it was just fill-up text.

Fooled me once and I hated Lorem Ipsum ever since. Whenever I look at a design with Lorem Ipsum I cringe. The text annoys me and gets very distracting. Since then I never used dummy text on my design. My policy is that I won’t start until I get some content from my clients. I need something to work with because I don’t want to waste my time with texts that don’t make any sense.

When I was asked to redesign something, I would take the contents from the current site to do my design. Without the contents, I can’t do anything. It’s a waste of time to create a blind design. I always ended up reworking the design simply because I have no idea what I was doing from the beginning.

Every time I start a new project, I always stress the important of contents before I start. If you hire me to do the job, you have to care enough about the project to do your part. When I was a still a student, I worked for a guy who had a dream of starting up an underground entertainment site. He didn’t have any content, but hired me to do the job. He sounded passionate about the project so I designed the layout for him. All that he needed to do was providing me the contents. He never did and the site never went live even though he paid for my work.

Six months or so ago, I also landed a contract, but I haven’t started on the project yet because the client never give me any contents. He did paid me the deposit, but I haven’t worked on the site. The guy sounds really nice when he writes me telling me he hasn’t forgotten about the site. He will provide me the contents soon. If this is going on for a long period of time, I’ll just give him the refund and call the whole thing off. We’ll see.

In any rate, this post was inspired by “Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs.” It is so true.

Dressed up as a woman, Ly Tong approached Dam Vinh Hung to give him some flowers as well as some pepper spray. A clip has been captured and posted on YouTube. As much as I dislike Dam Vinh Hung’s music and wouldn’t paid to see him perform, I sympathize him. He’s standing a very thin line between the two political parties. He is more than just an entertainer. He’s a controversial figure. Still that’s not the reason to be attacked in public. Ly Tong, please stop your stupidity.

This year’s Memorial weekend, we went to the beach and I took Samantha and Eric along. They love water so as soon as we arrived, they wanted to go the beach right away. Since they only got to stay for two days, I wanted to make the most out of the trip even though I was so tired from the five-hour drive.

The water was cold so I let them played for about half an hour. When I told them to wrap it up, Eric didn’t want to. I had to repeat several timed before he would obey. As we were walking back, I called my sister to give her status on the kids. I told her that they were being very good except that Eric didn’t do what I instructed him to a minute ago.

After we hung up the phone, Eric got mad and cried. I asked him what’s wrong and he told me that I said the “F” word to his mom. I was like, what are you talking about? I didn’t say any “F” word. He asked me to come closer and whispered something in my ear. He didn’t wanted to say out loud because he didn’t want Samantha to hear. He whispered several times and I couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell me.

I tried to guess the word, but nothing was right. Of course, I didn’t guess that “F” word. So finally he said that I said “pha” (misbehaved in Vietnamese) to his mom. He demanded me to call his mom back and say that Eric was not “pha.” So I called up my sister and told her that, “Eric is a very good boy and I didn’t use the ‘F'” word.

I asked one of the salesmen if Sears carries Discman. The guy didn’t even know what I was talking about. I had to explain to him I was looking for a portable CD player. Sears doesn’t carry discman anymore and the salesman probably thought I came from the stone age or something.

As much as I love my iPod Touch, I do not have the time to rip 72 CDs from Miles Davis’s The Complete Columbia Album Collection . In addition to time, it would take up too much a space on my hard drive. I want to be able to jog while jamming to Miles Davis and the easiest way is to get a Discman, but it seems like it is obsoleted. I gave my mom a really cool one from Sony a few years ago. I might have to ask her to get it back since she is no longer using it.

I just can’t believe the Discman is already dead. Man that was fast. RIP the discman.

After hanging out at the mall and had lunch at Cheesecake Factory with Cu Dao, Dana and my sister-in-law, I couldn’t stay awake for the match between Germany and Uruguay. Both Dana and I got knocked out on the couches while my sister-in-law looked after Duke. Besides, I was not too excited about this game. I am looking forward to the final game tomorrow. I pick Holland simply because I had been so wrong in this World Cup. One more wrong doesn’t make much difference. In any rate, I wish both countries best of luck.

It’s amazing how a month of World Cup already over. After tomorrow, things will be back to normal again. The World Cup category will be disappeared on this site as well.

After the disappointment of Argentina’s performance, let’s hope the Spain will give Germany a heck of a game.

After getting back from my vacation last month, I haven’t jogged again. Work is still overwhelming and the rising heat (above 100 degrees) is blocking my motivation. I just stay inside and eat more. When I look at life, she depresses me. Fortunately whenever I look at Duke, he keeps me going even though I can hardly keep up with his energy.

I’ll be surprise if Uruguay could send the Netherlands home. Then again, I was so dead wrong about Argentina.

The World Cup this year has been quite unpredictable. Even Brazil lost to the Netherlands. The next match, Argentina vs. Germany, should be one of the best games in this World Cup. In fact, it could have been a final match. My prediction is that Argentina will advance. Then Spain will advanced over Paraguay. The Argentina will beat Spain to go the the final. On the other hand, Netherlands will have an easier win over Uruguay to get to the final. So next Sunday, the final match will be between Netherlands vs Argentina and my prediction for the 2010 World Cup will belong to Argentina.

I am still in the process of transitioning to a new Mac laptop. I migrated everything except for CS5, in which I am still waiting for the eligibility variation. I sent in both my GW’s ID and pay stub, but I was rejected. Now I have to wait for HR to write Adobe a letter to state that I work for GW in order for me to get the serial number. If I knew that I had to go through all these troubles, I would have stayed with CS4. If this is how Adobe continues to do business in the next release, I will not upgrade to CS6.