I have not heard of Phil Wang until I watched his latest Netflix’s special, “Philly Philly Wang Wang.” Phil is half Chinese, half White. He covered topics including Covid, Asian masculinity, and accent. He has decent materials with one-liners to keep the audience entertained for an hour. I enjoyed his dry sense of humor. I wish he pushed it a bit further.
My RSS reader hardly has any notification. Most of the blogs I subscribed to aren’t updating anymore. Is blogging dead? On the other hand, I have been blogging consistently almost everyday, sometimes even two or three times a day. Writing 300 to 500 words about whatever is on my mind has become effortless to me. I could make a post out of something so mundane or so emotional. My posts have become more and more personal. I bare my mind and soul on the page.
I don’t write about politics anymore. I am not afraid of voicing my position. I am just fed up with alternative facts. People have their own facts. While I think they got their information from fake sources, they think I got brainwashed by the mainstream media. Whatever.
I write about music sparingly because I don’t listen to music much anymore. I could no longer get my hands on new music in Vietnam. Most Vietnamese music is being covered to death. New singers burst onto the scene everyday, but not too many new songwriters. They kept relying on the old repertoire.
I write about what I have observed around me. I write about the people who are close to me or who make an impact in my life, positively, negatively, or controversially. I want to take on a new challenge. I want to write about my internalization. There’s a voice in my head that speaks to me often. No, I do not have schizophrenia or mental issues. I am sure we all have that voice where you say things in your head that you can’t say out loud. Most often, my conscious voice drowns out that unfiltered voice. I wonder if I can bring out that voice without upsetting or targeting anyone. I am not even sure what I am getting at.
A new variable font family from Grilli Type that combined both sans and serif into one, GT Ultra:
GT Ultra dances between the worlds of sans and serifs, fusing calligraphy and construction. Achieving a balance between flair and function across a versatile typographic system, the design combines the centuries-old context of serif type with the dynamism of modern sans; challenging its own definition and questioning contemporary typographic expectation.
This typeface demonstrates the power of variable font. I wish it supports Vietnamese.
Lần đầu tiên tôi biết đến tiếng hát Phi Nhung qua ca khúc “Câu chuyện đầu năm.” Tuy cách hát còn thiếu nghiệm nhưng chất giọng của cô khỏe khoắn, cao ngút, và nồng nàn. Cùng với sắc đẹp tây phương dịu dàng của cô, tôi biết cô sẽ nổi tiếng. Hai mươi mấy năm qua, không ai còn xa lạ gì với tiếng hát Phi Nhung qua những ca khúc quê hương và trữ tình.
Tin Phi Nhung từ trần sau những tháng ngày chống chọi với Covid thật đau buồn và đáng tiếc. Phi Nhung chỉ 51 tuổi và trông cô rất khỏe nên tôi nghĩ cô sẽ vượt qua được biến cố này. Không ngờ cô đã vĩnh viễn ra đi như mẹ tôi đã rời khỏi cỏi đời này vì Covid.
Xin cầu mong cho linh hồn cô được yên nghỉ trong bình an.
Đán and Xuân’s school is raising funds for classroom projectors and outdoor learning spaces. Xuân kept asking me to sign him up and I kept pushing off until today. The Fun Run event is on Friday. If you can, please support them $1 a lap or a flat contribution. You can make a pledge on Boosterthon.
My dearest Vương,
It’s hard to believe you’re turning three today. My little boy is growing too fast. I love hearing you developing your verbal skills each day. You have to keep up with your three older brothers. It’s a joy for me to watch you play, dance, and argue with your brothers. They can be rough sometimes, but they always loved you. You’re the baby of the family.
At three, you still have the loveliest smile on your face. You cling to your mom because you’re still on her breast. Let’s keep smiling forever, but let’s end breastfeeding this year. Yes, you can do it.
With your three older brothers’ activities, I haven’t spent too much time with you. I feel guilty about it. I can’t wait for you to pick up ice skating and rollerblading so you can join us. I am glad to see you trying out the scooters like Xuân. Now that your brothers have school, you and I can hang out together.
You still have a whole life ahead of you, son. Take your time, explore, and discover. Your mom, your brothers, and I are here for you and we will always be here for you. I wish you a happiest third birthday.
Love,
Dad
In less than a month, I switched up the design of this blog again. I still keep the typefaces: Loretta, designed by Abel Martins and Joana Correia and Captura Now, designed by Anita Jürgeleit. I got rid of the random Unsplash photos. They made the website fun, but I got tired of them quickly. They overpowered my words.
For the fifth iteration, I refocused on the typography.I increased the font size and made the layout wider. Nothing is groundbreaking, but lots of whitespace to breath with an imageless design. I hope this is the last iteration until 2022. With that being said, I always make changes this blog. It’s my personal playground where I get to experiment quite a bit. I am glad someone noticed:
I like how @visualgui handles this: he updates the fonts on his blog frequently … like once a month, I think?
I hope you like this new layout.
While waiting for my kids to take their ice skating lessons, I asked Eric who is the director at Fairfax Ice Arena who will be teaching Freestyle 2 for adults starting next Thursday. He checked his computer, but he was not sure if he would start the class with only three students. He needed a minimum of five students, but he doubted that there will be any more registrations since not too many adults take this level. He told me if I sign up, he would start the class.
I hesitated at first, but caved in. I handed him my credit card. Why not? I looked at the curriculum and I have been dappled with the ballet jump and the half lutz. I can do the one-foot spin and two arabesques, but need more practice. I don’t know what the jump sequence and dance step sequence are, but I am ready to take on the challenge. I wanted to see how far I can level up with ice skating.
Compared to rollerblading, ice skating is much safer. I injured three times from rollerblading, but none from ice skating. The skate parks with ramps and bowls are a bit dangerous, but thrilling. I don’t focus on techniques with rollerblading. I just wanted to ride the ramps. With ice skating, the techniques are more important. I tried to transfer what I have learned in ice skating to rollerblading, but I didn’t have much success. Transferring the other way was a bit easier. My kids preferred rollerblading more because they liked the excitement of skating down the ramps.
I am looking forward to taking Freestyle 2. Eric told me that the instructor might be Kim Nguyễn. I had seen her teaching private lessons. She is very young and talented. I liked my previous instructor, but I am ready for a change.
When a reader recommended that I should look into moving my sites from the terrible share hosting HostPapa to the cloud hosting DigitalOcean, I hesitated. Setting up the Droplets seemed to be overwhelming. Fortunately, DigitalOcean has excellent tutorials to guide me through the entire process.
The command line is still daunting to me, yet it is so awesome at the same time. I moved six static (somewhat dynamic) sites into one Droplet and this blog, which powered by WordPress into a separate Droplet. Setting up WordPress is a bit more complicated. Although DigitalOcean offers a one-click install for WordPress, I did the long way to have more control of the environment.
Here are the tutorials I used to setup my Droplets:
Once SSH in, look for the number of updates can be applied immediately. If updates are available, shut off the Droplet power:
sudo poweroffor
sudo shutdown -h nowThen take a snapshot of the Droplet through the control panel on DigitalOcean. Once the snapshot is taken, turn the power back on, SSH back in, and follow this tutorial: “How To Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.”
Here are the steps to update:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade
To check for a new Ubuntu release:
sudo do-release-upgradeRemove unused packages (Don’t run this on the WordPress Droplet):
sudo apt autoremoveTo automatically install security updates, the “unattended-upgrades” package was installed:
sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades
sudo dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low unattended-upgrades
Last month I migrated all of my sites off HostPapa and onto DigitalOcean. Since ilovengoclan.com is on a different account, I was not planning on moving it, but HostPapa kept trying to make me upgrade. I am not sure how it keeps reaching its CPU and Input/Output usages when iLoveNgocLan.com has been inactive for years. No one has written any new post and no one had made a comment for a long time. I had done all that I could to optimize the resources, but it was not enough.
HostPapa warned me that I have to resolve the issues by the end of the week or upgrade my plan from $9.99 to $23.99 a month. That’s almost 240% increase. My solution was to migrated to DigitalOcean as well. I no longer had the time and the resources to deal with WordPress anymore; therefore, I used SiteSucker to turn the entire site into static HTML files. For years, ilovengoclan.com has not been active. Keeping it in WordPress is just too much maintenance and time-consuming. I have thought of just either shutting it down completely or keep the legacy online. I settled on the latter. The site is now read only. It can no longer be updated or added comments.
Now I am completely off HostPapa. Both accounts (visualgui.com and ilovengoclan.com) had been paid to HostPapa until February of next year, but I rather take the loss than hanging in there. If you are hosting with HostPapa, you should consider getting out. My sites were fine with Lunarpages for years until HostPapa scooped them up. HostPapa is greedy as fuck. They all about forcing you to upgrade. Server technologies are cheaper now and they should offer more resources for our money, but they want to go the opposite direction so fuck them.