Let’s talk about selfishness. Yes, I am selfish as fuck and I know it. While I might be critical of myself, it is crucial to recognize my own flaws. At the very least, I won’t turn into a narcissist.

I am so selfish that I do not eat my kids’ leftovers. I have seen so many parents, particularly Vietnamese parents, load up their kids’ with so much food on their plates that their kids would struggle to finish.The father usually ended up eating his kid’s leftovers. Fuck that, I wouldn’t eat that shit; therefore, I only give them what I think they can eat or a bit less. They can always ask for more.

I am so selfish that I don’t give my kids a hand on everything. Learning to skate, for example, I let them fall so they can learn to balance themselves. After that, it would be a piece of cake for them to pick up. Now their skills have surpassed me. When I taught my second son how to swim, I let him jump from the pool down then try to swim to me. The first time, he struggled to float so I picked him up. By the fourth or fifth jump, he was ready to float all by himself.

I am so selfish that I do not let anyone take advantage of my generosity. If you’re generous with me then I am generous with you. If you treat me with respect then I treat you with respect. I demand fairness. Clear and simple.

At times my selfishness turned into pettiness. At that point, I needed to reevaluate myself. Selfishness has its good and bad. I am just trying to get rid of the bad parts. How do I figure out the difference? Look at the president of the United States. He is an example of the worst type of selfishness. He puts himself first at the time of the pandemic and puts everyone else at risk. If he could admit his selfishness, he could have had the coronavirus under control and he could save lives. Like a selfish person always says, “It is what it is.” Let’s hope this selfish president will be done with his job in one week.

Tôi vào nghề thiết kế đã gần 20 năm và thiết kế đã đưa tôi đến blogging hơn 17 năm. Blogging đã trở thành một sở thích mà tôi không thể nào thiếu. Cái đặc điểm của blogging là viết hay không bằng hay viết. Điều đó đã động viên tôi miệt mài viết gần như mỗi ngày trong mười mấy năm qua.

Giờ đây tôi viết rất nhanh. Chỉ cần ngồi xuống là chữ sẽ tuôn ra. Tôi có thể viết 300 đến 400 chữ trong vòng nửa tiếng đồng hồ. Chỉ cần nghĩ đến đề tài nào nho nhỏ tôi cũng có thể viết xuống được. Lúc mới bắt đầu, tôi viết rất chậm. Tôi viết bằng tiếng Anh để rèn luyện ngữ pháp. Sau này tôi viết bằng tiếng Việt để không quên chữ mẹ đẻ của mình. Lúc mới tập viết lại tiếng Việt tôi viết sai chính tả và đánh dấu rất cực nhọc. Dần dần rồi cũng quen. Chính tả vẫn còn sai nhưng khá hơn trước. Bỏ dấu cũng dễ dàng hơn một chút. Giờ đây tôi thích viết cả hai thứ tiếng. Anh hay Việt, tiếng nào tôi cũng bộc lộ được những gì mình muốn chia sẻ. Còn hay hay dở là chuyện khác.

Cái thú vị của blogging là viết gì cũng được. Nó ngược lại với những gì tôi phải viết lúc còn đi học. Ngày xưa tôi viết tiếng Anh rất tệ và rất hổ thẹn mỗi khi phải đưa bài viết của mình cho thầy cô đọc. Thậm chí tôi không dám đọc những gì chính mình đã viết. Nhờ blogging mà tôi trở thành mạnh dạng hơn. Tôi không còn e ngại ai chê bai cả. Từ sợ sệt không dám đưa những gì mình viết cho ai đọc đã trở thành viết lên chốn công cộng. Tôi viết để bộc lộ cảm xúc. Tôi viết để học hỏi. Tôi viết giải thoát. Tôi viết để biết mình còn tâm hồn.

Nhờ viết mà tôi đọc nhiều và đam mê hơn. Lúc nhỏ tôi chẳng bao giờ thích đọc sách. Giờ đây có rảnh rỗi chút thời gian là tôi đọc để vận động trí óc. Đọc để tìm hiểu những gì trong đầu của người viết. Như viết, tôi thích đọc cả hai thứ tiếng. Tôi cố gắng chuyển qua đọc tiếng Việt sau khi đọc tiếng Anh nhưng tiếc rằng tôi không có được nhiều sách tiếng Việt ở đây. Tuy nhiên, có còn hơn không.

Đối với tôi, được viết là được tự do. Được viết là được tiếng nói dù cho bất cứ đề tài gì. Từ đời sống đến đời thường, từ âm nhạc đến ẩm thực, từ chính trị đến chính mình, từ tình cảm đến tình dục, không có gì là không thể không viết được. Chỉ có dám viết hay không. Với tôi viết là sở thích chứ không phải để kiếm sống nên tôi không bị gò bó hoặc sàng lọc. Trong công việc nhiều khi phải làm theo xếp hoặc cấp trên cho dù mình không thích. Còn viết thì thoải mái lắm. Mỗi buổi sáng thức dậy đầu óc tỉnh táo là lúc viết rất tuyệt vời. Không cần cà phê không cần điểm tâm. Chỉ cần mở Google Docs lên là viết. Cái cảm giác được ấn nút publish thật sảng khoái vô cùng. Và như thế tôi viết lên từng ngày.

I don’t pay much attention to Vietnamese celebrities on politics, but I am surprised and impressed with Như Loan’s view on how she voted. She posted on Facebook:

I voted for women to have the right to choose whether or not they should have a baby. Just like everything in life, there will always be exceptionally bad cases where people make poor choices but those should be the choices they get to make. #herbodyherchoice

The entire post personal, honest, and well-reason. I respect that.

For iteration 5, I changed the typesetting to Bitter, designed by Sol Matas. In the previous version, the body text was set in Harriet, by designed by Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh. Although Harriet is beautiful, its serifs appeared a bit too busy for reading on the web. I wanted something simpler and less busy. Bitter fits the bill. Bitter is an open source typeface and it is also a variable font.

In the past few years, I tried to avoid using open source fonts. Because they are open source, anyone can use them. I wanted to have a bit of a selective typeface, but I can’t resist Bitter. Unlike what its name might suggest, Bitter is such a friendly text face. It is so much easy on the eyes. It has distinctive serifs, but not too overwhelming. I wish its black weight has more contrast, but it is still pretty good-looking for headlines. Since it is a variable font, it would be a waste not to use it.

Google Fonts has been putting out so many high quality typefaces with Vietnamese support. I am very impressed with its dedication to typography. I still don’t want to let them host the fonts on its end. I am hosting all the fonts on my own server. If you want to use Bitter, go check it out on Google Fonts.

After watching the final U.S. presidential debate on Thursday, I checked my RSS reader instead of going straight to bed. I saw a notification from MODX releasing 2.8.1. I was a bit surprised because I just upgraded to 2.8.0 only a few weeks ago. MODX usually takes at least 6 months to put out a minor release. It must be some security issue that they needed to patch.

MODX is the content management system that powered the Scalia Law website. Since it was midnight so no one would be logging into the CMS to make any updates; therefore, it was a good time to do the upgrade. It would only take me about 15 minutes to complete. I followed the procedure like I had always done in the past. Something didn’t go right when the files which were supposed to be merged had prompted me to replace. When I allowed the files to be replaced, the website went down. The files that used to take 15 minutes to merge were now estimated about 55 minutes.

I started to panic, stopped the upload, and tried to figure out what went wrong. I went into our daily backups and re-uploaded the directories I had made the upgrade. The process alone took about half an hour. The website was still down. At this point, I re-upload the entire site as well as the database from two days before. This process took a couple of hours. It was already three in the morning and nothing worked. I called GoDaddy, our hosting provider, to see if there’s anything they could do. The first time I called, the technician recommended that I try to re-upload the site from a week old. If that would also fail, I could request a disaster recovery.

I went on Twitter and tweeted for help from the MODX community. I received no response. Its community is way too small. Around six in the morning I started to get messages from colleagues telling me that the site had been down. I explained the situation to my supervisor and her supervisor. They completely understood. Since I could not get any help the last resort was to ask GoDaddy to perform a disaster recovery. The site remained down until around 4:45 pm on Friday. The site went down for 16 hours and I feel horrible. It was all my responsibility alone to bear. I did not sleep that night and kept checking my phone for a miracle to happen.

Although the website is now backed up working, we are set back 3 weeks. GoDaddy only keeps a snapshot every two to three weeks. Now I have to restore what was missing and it is a pain. I am also causing other people to redo some of their work as well.

After this incident, I now determine that we will need to get off MODX. This CMS is dying. It could never get beyond a couple of thousand enthusiasts. I should have called the shot a long time ago, but I held on the hope for it. Now it has become cleared that I need to make an exit strategy. It’s time to migrate to WordPress.

My recreational exercises these days are ice skating and rollerblading. Every Wednesday, I take ice skating lessons for half an hour and practice for half an hour. I am still an amateur, but I enjoy learning the techniques. I encourage my kids to take lessons as well, but they are not interested yet. Đán could benefit from having some structures to grow his skating skills as well as to help him learn to follow instructions.

As for rollerblading, I hesitated at first because it seemed dangerous. Falling on the concrete seemed more serious than falling on ice, especially for someone my age and weight. Then the pandemic hit, which forced all ice skating rinks to close. The alternative choice for skating was rollerblading. Đán and Đạo made a much quicker transition from ice skating to rollerblading than I did. It took me a while to get used to, but now I really am enjoying it. I didn’t even know about skate parks until recently. They are everywhere and we love to discover different ones close to where we live. The kids enjoy rollerblading; therefore, I drag them out to the skate park whenever I have some free time and to get them off the screens. It has been a fun activity I love to do with the kids.

I used to prefer ice skating more than rollerblading, but now I enjoy them both. Although they are similar, ice skating is smoother and rollerblading is much more rugged. One is for the arena and one is for the street. I am glad that I have fostered Đạo’s and Đán’s interest in both. Now I need to work on Xuân and Vương as well.

My wife has informed me that ski resorts will open this winter. I am not sure if it will be safe yet to come back, but I am not ruling it out yet either. We’ll see what will happen. When my wife organized a ski trip for the first time, I hesitated to join the kids for lessons. Skiing is an expensive sport. With ski lift and equipment rental, a day for skiing is around $140 for one person. I gave it a shot and it has also become my favorite winter sport.

I need to stay active and these sports are more exciting than jogging and walking. I am still a noob, but I enjoy discovering more techniques. As long as I can keep myself balanced, I am good. Of course, I have full guards and a helmet to protect myself from head to knee. At this age, I am not taking any risk.

The day that I have been fearful the most being on my watch has finally come. It’s a disaster and I don’t know if I can recover from it. The whole thing has collapsed from a tiny error. The responsibility is all on me. I am fucked.

Bill McKibben, writing at the New Yorker, makes the case for a remarkable presidency if Biden doesn’t care about his reelection in 2024. McKibben argues what Biden can accomplish in four years without looking ahead at his second term:

If Biden’s not guarding his approval ratings for a second run, he could, for instance, demand that his new majority give him a lot of stimulus money to work with, and simply not worry about the G.O.P. and the pundit class as they start warning about deficits. (The fact that the Republicans ballooned the deficit just to give the rich yet more tax breaks takes the sting out of their arguments, anyhow.) At this point, getting rid of the filibuster seems all but certain, but Biden could push to expand and reform the courts. He could embrace the Green New Deal, moving money from the Pentagon to the national-security task of building out solar and wind power and setting irrevocably in motion an industrial transition that would transform our economy over the next generation. He could take millions of undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. He could make sure that we have a commission to examine and recommend reparations for Black and indigenous Americans. And so on. The key things that need to happen if America is ever going to get past its stalemated and sickly status quo are as obvious as they are politically difficult. But, if Biden decided that the next four years were all that mattered to him, he could get to work.

This paragraph from the Atlantic sums up the Trump presidency:

Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus. Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.

Retired Admiral William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, voted for Biden. He writes in the Wall Street Journal:

This week I went to the polls in Texas. Truth be told, I am a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, small-government, strong-defense and a national-anthem-standing conservative. But, I also believe that black lives matter, that the Dreamers deserve a path to citizenship, that diversity and inclusion are essential to our national success, that education is the great equalizer, that climate change is real and that the First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy. Most important, I believe that America must lead in the world with courage, conviction and a sense of honor and humility.

If we remain indifferent to our role in the world, if we retreat from our obligation to our citizens and our allies and if we fail to choose the right leader, then we will pay the highest price for our neglect and shortsightedness.

I voted for Joe Biden.

Well-said!