As my boss is counting down to her retirement, she wants to make sure that all of her responsibilities are taken care of before she checks out. Although she is an associate dean, she has been very hands on. She is more technological savvy than her peers.

For instance, one of the tasks she took on was organizing and running the school calendars for over a decade. The program she had been using was no longer supported. She would have to pay $25,000 to get it upgraded to the cloud. As a result, she tasked me and the assistant director of technology to find alternative solutions. My first priority was to use the web to solve the issues. For public events, I turned to WordPress using the Events Calendar plugin. It worked out great. Instead of entering the events myself, I created accounts for stakeholders to post their events themselves. To solve class schedules and room reservations, we decided to use 25Live since the university already had a deal with the program. We just need to customize it a bit to match our brand. We saved the law school 25 grants.

Another item on my boss’s list was the TV screens around the building. She used a program that allowed her to display news via RSS feeds, weather forecasts, slideshows, and events. That program was also outdated and would cost $12,000 a year to keep it up to date. She assigned me and the director of technology to find a solution. In our initial meeting, I just asked if the screens could display the browser and the answer was yes. Once again, the web saved me. I recreated all the features using pages in WordPress. I created a page to parse RSS feeds, a page to display events, a page with slideshows. Once I had all the pages, I combined them together using the header refresh (via meta tag). We saved the school another 12 grants.

She was very pleased with the simple solutions we provided and they were free thanks to the beauty and flexibility of the web. She was also relieved that we took the weight off her shoulders. She has been an amazing boss and I wish she would continue, but she deserves her retirement. I will miss her dearly after she leaves. I am not sure what our future boss will be like, but I am not going to worry about it now. Que será, será.

Đán’s English teacher reached out to us because she was concerned about his expression of feeling sad and lonely. He drew sad faces on the back of his assignment sheets and often placed a sad face on his online profile. He made passing comments that he had never felt real happiness. He thought that no one liked him.

After reading his teacher’s note, my wife and I had a talk with him. He told us that he felt lonely during recess at school. When he played football with his friends, no one passed the ball to him. He sat at the “buddy bench,” but no one wanted to be his buddy. We didn’t even know about the buddy bench until he explained it to us. The bench was intended for any students who didn’t have anyone to play with and would like someone to play together. It seemed like an interesting concept, perhaps.

We asked Đán if he felt lonely at home and he said no because he had his older brother Đạo to play with. He also shared that he felt sad sometimes when we rushed him and raised our voices in the morning trying to get him to school on time. We promised him that we will make that change. Later on, when we were driving home from their ice hockey practice, Đán told Đạo that things had changed after Đao left for Robinson. He said that kids sweared a lot more. We had the impression that he missed having his brother around at school.

Now that we are aware of his emotions, we check on him more often. We should also give him space to hang out with his friends outside of school. We usually have family activities like scouting, learning ice hockey, going to the skateparks, and eating out.

We appreciate his teacher for sharing her concerns with us. It shows that she cares about his well being as well as his happiness.

Đêm qua thức khuya biên tập một quyển sách về gia đình dì út đã viết. Sáng nay cũng phải dậy sớm đưa con đến trường và đi làm. Thời tiết bây giờ đã trở lạnh. Những giọt sương đọng trên kính xe đã trở thành băng đá. Vào xe nghe nhạc phẩm “Một ngày mùa đông” của nhạc sĩ Bảo Chấn do Phương Uyên hát bỗng dưng thấy ấm lòng. Được đệm bởi tiếng đàn guitar êm đềm và tiếng bass sâu lắng, Phương Uyên hát như đang trải lòng tâm sự.

Tuy thiếu nét riêng, giọng của Phương Uyên khỏe khoắn, ấm áp, và già dặn. Tuy lần đầu nghe cô hát nhưng tôi cứ ngỡ đã nghe cô hát từ lâu rồi. Nghe đến lời kết tôi mới biết Hãy về bên em là album đầu tay của cô. Tôi ngạc nhiên là vì album này rất an toàn từ ca khúc cô đã chọn cho đến những bài hoà âm. Với một album đầu tay, tôi nghĩ rằng cô phải mạo hiểm một tí để chứng kiến được đường lối riêng của mình.

Như lời trong ca khúc “Đời có bao nhiêu ngày vui” (Châu Đăng Khoa), chúng ta phải nắm lấy cơ hội để bước lên, nhất là trên con đường âm nhạc Việt Nam có quá nhiều đơn điệu. Ca sĩ nào cũng lôi bài cũ ra hát đi hát lại nghe phát ngán và album đầu tay của Phương Uyên cũng không ngoại lệ.

In his memoir of 2020, D’Aguiar reveals in detail his battle against prostate cancer and the challenges he faced during the pandemic. Although his writing is engaging, entertaining, and enlightening, the book feels really long. Maybe I am more interested on cancer than other topics. Even when he waxes poetic prose on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, I just want to get back to the cancer result. It is definitely an informative book for me, God forbid, if I have to go through what he went through.

I love coffee and I love durian; therefore, I couldn’t resist the temptation when I spotted Ipoh Charcoal Roasted Durian Coffee at 99 Ranch Market yesterday. I had a cup in the morning and it became an instant favorite of mine. The durian fragrance was just wonderful, but I wished the coffee was a bit stronger and darker. In the afternoon, I went for another cup after lunch. The second time I added a bit of instant coffee and it tasted delicious. I was going to link it to Amazon, but the price is three times more than what I paid for at 99 Ranch.

Speaking of Amazon, thanks to those who had ordered products linked from the homepage of this blog. I use the big text to promote my work, but I don’t have any project at the moment. So I wanted to try it out Amazon Associates. I only earned a few dollars, but it isn’t intrusive. I am not tracking you and I am not using any third-party scripts. I just link the text directly to Amazon. Thank you for your support.

Highlights from JAY-Z’s 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction, including inspiring speeches from Dave Chappelle and JAY-Z himself. Worth half an hour of your time.

Dear Đán,

Today you have reached the first decade of your life. It has been a wonderful experience observing you grow in the past ten years. From the day you were born, I could tell you were athletic. The first time I put you on the ice rink, you just walked by yourself without me holding your hands. You fell a few times, but quickly found your balance. Now you skate as HAM.

I enjoyed watching you learn ice hockey. Even though I have been tough on your performance, I am very proud of you. Keep up the great work and you will join a hockey team soon.

I enjoyed rollerblading at the skateparks with you. You inspired me to go hard or go home and vice versa. For a while, I could drop in at the top of higher ramps than you, but you have excelled so fast. Now I can’t even catch up with you.

You were also excellent at skiing, but you had decided to switch to snowboarding. I can’t wait to see you snowboarding this winter. I want to join you as well.

As far as academics, you have made some improvements in the first quarter. I know you can excel in school too if you pay attention. You are a smart boy. All you need is some patience and concentration on what you do. Just like sports, you can progress through practice and determination to learn.

I love you very much. Happy birthday, my son.

Love,
Daddy

I took a break after redesigning this blog and to spend Thanksgiving with my family. Having eight boys from ages between two and thirteen together was hard to relax, but they sure made the time flew by. My brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and I tried our best to entertain them, but we had to rely on Steve Jobs to give us a few breaks. The only time we could relax a bit was when they were all on their iPad.

Big props to my wonderful wife for cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving and making sushi for Đán’s tenth birthday party on Saturday. I am so grateful for everything she does for our family and for me. At times, I feel as if I don’t deserve her. She is just too damn good for me and I can’t reciprocate. I don’t like to expose my weaknesses, but I don’t think I can live without her. I survived breakups before, but this is different. I promised myself to be independent, but the longer we stayed together the more I depend on her. My love for her is so deep, I am pretty sure she can’t see it. I have had many thoughts in my mind about our relationship for a while. I just need the time to express them.

Right now, I am occupied with a family project. I am focusing on editing my mother’s youngest sister’s stories. I wanted to create a web book to preserve what she has written. I might blog even less in the next few weeks to get this book finished. My goal is to get it done before Christmas.

Welcome to the 2022 rendition of Visualgui. If you’re reading this from your favorite RSS reader, you might want to hop over to your favorite browser to see the new change. As a tradition, I try to do a major redesign of this blog for each year then I would follow up with several iterations throughout the year.

For 2022, the major change is typography. In the past few years, I had always drawn to a serif text face for reading content, but I am switching it up for this redesign. Forma DJR, designed by David Jonathan Ross, is not a new typeface, but it was recently updated with Vietnamese support. I am proud to have played a small part in it. When David sent me the test fonts to review, he was not sure if the straight horns (ư and ơ) were too unconventional for reading. I assured him that they weren’t getting in the way and I alway appreciated when designers like David pushed the tradition. I have no trouble reading Vietnamese texts set in Forma DJR.

In addition to language support, David turned the Forma DJR family into variable fonts, which offered so much flexibility for a typographic system. I love the ability to play with font weights and optical sizes with just a few lines of CSS and see the immediate results in a browser. I can set large headlines, body copy, and small text from just one variable font. Variable font is not only convenient, but also a huge time saver. If I have the option between static and variable, I would go for the latter every time.

For the layout, I wanted to bring back the sidebar. A blog isn’t a blog without its sidebar companion. For large screens, I wanted to fill up as much space as possible; therefore, I brought back not one but two sidebars. CSS Grid makes responsive grid-based layouts fast and easy and this redesign gave me the opportunity to implement it. Even though the grid system was drawn from print, CSS Grid is native to the web. I could change from one to two to three columns depending on the screen size.

Finally, I got tired of gray text on white background for light mode and white text on black background for dark mode. I wanted to bring in a different color. I don’t even know the name of the color I am using for this new design. I pulled it from a text file that contained a list of my favorite colors in hex values I had found and saved in the early 90s. Back then websites were much more colorful than now.

I hope you like the new design.

With this blog, I have carved out a space for me to write about things that no one cares about except for me. Case in point, I do not know who reads this blog. For almost two decades of daily writing, I am failing to sell ads. With 7.62k unique visitors a month, I received financial support from three generous readers. I am not complaining at all. I understand my writing is not good and my topics aren’t interesting to anyone else other than me. I have a passion for writing and I only write for myself. If I make money off my words and I write for others, my love for writing would die like my love for design.

When I first started designing, I designed for myself and I loved it. As soon as I became a professional designer and made money off design, I killed my own passion. I no longer design for myself, but for the people who paid me. Many times, I did what they wanted to get the work done and over with instead of what can contribute to the project. Each time that happened, my love and passion died a little. Now design is no longer personal unless I work on my own projects. At my workplace, I no longer fight for design. I just delivered what they wanted.

I don’t want that to happen to writing. I have worked so hard to free myself. I went from being ashamed of my writing to just writing my life away. The emancipation of writing whatever the fuck I want is priceless. My blog is an open book of my life. It is an ongoing memoir as well as documentations of my memory. For example, I had referred back to the maintenance category countless times to remind myself what I had fixed and how much I had spent.

I don’t know if my grammar and my prose have improved over the years, but I can tell that writing has become much easier for me. What I can’t articulate in speech or conversation, I can do with ease in written communication. When I started writing music reviews, I was not interested in the techniques behind the music. I wanted to communicate what I heard and how I felt. I approached music from an outsider perspective; therefore, I was not caught up in the technical details. That’s the job of the musicians. I was free to write without having to be afraid I would upset anyone. These days, my interests have shifted to other activities such as ice skating and rollerblading. I don’t know what the next few years of my boring life will bring, but you are more than welcome to follow along my journey.