I am glad to see Ocean Vương’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made Corrigan’s list. I am adding the following titles to my to-read list:
Whitehead’s and Choi’s book are fiction. I might read them for a change.
Birbiglia’s latest Netflix Special runs for an hour and a half, which gives him plenty of time and space to tell his journey of becoming a dad. Although he was clear he didn’t want a kid, he went through the process, which included surgical sperm retrieval, to conceive a child. Birbiglia is a master of storytelling. He is calm, articulate, and taking pauses to give us a chance to digest his jokes. He sticks to his well-structured script except for one particular moment in which he addresses an eleven-year-old girl in the audience. Even though he uses profanity sparingly, his materials aren’t suitable for a young kid.
Our second born turned eight last Friday. He is a strong, sweet boy. He loves seafood, especially lobster. He loves his family, Vương in particular. He bonds with Đạo even though Đạo always cajoled him. He and Xuân are getting along better than before.
Although he doesn’t enjoy reading, he has made tremendous effort to read with me. Before bedtime, we would read a chapter together. As a result, his reading level has improved tremendously. We’re a third way through My Life as a Meme, by Janet Tashjian and Jake Tashjian. After our reading session, he would pluck my facial hair and white hair with a tweezer while I read my book. I love our time together on weekdays.
He got a few complains from his teachers for not following instructions, but he is a good student. He has his moments of emotional outbreak, but he has a kind heart. I am very proud of him.
Sebastian Modak writes in The New York Times:
[Đà Nẵng]’s main specialty is seafood. A seemingly never-ending chain of restaurants on the eastern side of the city, just across the [Hàn] River, serves octopus, crab, clams, squid, prawns and fish cooked in delicate sauces of garlic, tamarind, chiles and lemongrass. All meals come with a smorgasbord of optional additions.
I have to take my sons, especially Đán, to Đà Nẵng in the future.
The Times Book Review listed “The 10 Best Books of 2019,” but my interest is primarily on nonfiction. I am half way through Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises. It is a gut-wrenching read. I am adding the following titles to my to-read list:
Although Chiang’s book is a fiction, I am considering it.
Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker:
Beryl is the one and only still at 58 Gin, a small but purposeful firm, founded by an Australian named Mark Marmont, in 2014, and now tucked away down a mews in the East End of London. You go through an archway, and there, at the rear of the premises, stands Beryl, a steampunk dream in copper and steel. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would probably ask yourself why the brass, woodwind, and timpani sections of the London Symphony Orchestra had been moved to the lair of a Bond villain.
On the left is a pot, as bulbous as a genie and as big as an igloo. Polished to a blinding shine, it can hold four hundred and fifty litres. There’s a lockable metal hatch, which swings open, as if to admit a deep-sea explorer. (Marmont is a former dive instructor. He must feel right at home.) Down the hatch you tip your personal potpourri of ingredients; inside, they mingle politely with near-pure ethanol and demineralized water. Once heated, the mixture emits vapor, which steams out of the top of the pot and passes through a network of pipes, cooling as it goes, and eventually emerging, from a column on the right, as a clear liquid. This you dilute. And that, give or take a hundred adjustments, and a few perspiring years of practice, is how you bring gin—proper gin—into being.
I’ve always loved the distinctive taste of gin.
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions, and kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured in to replace the men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous, than ever. The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
This is a good reason.
A few months ago, I met up with one of the founder of Đẹp Designs over coffee. I casually pointed out to him that the images were heavy (about 2.5 mb a photo) and the dimensions were off. He told me that after I handed over the key and trained one of his employees to update the website, the employee had moved on.
When I relaunched Đẹp Designs two years ago, I gave specific instructions on the dimensions and optimizations in Photoshop. All that they needed to do was creating the images and upload them to the server. Kirby CMS will handle the rest. Unfortunately the images were huge and the sizes varied.
I made the suggestion that I can handle the update for them since they don’t seem to add new content too often. Because I would be doing the updating, Kirby is no longer needed. They would not have to worry about upgrading Kirby CMS. In my proposal, I offered to move the site off Kirby and rebuild it using PHP, audit the entire website, perform house cleaning to fix bugs, bring the codes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) up to date, add an SSL Certificate, and updated from PHP 5.4 to PHP 7.3.
After they agreed, I spent some of my Thanksgiving break reworking the site. Take a look.
Còn gì quý hơn trong những ngày lễ Tạ Ơn được bên cạnh gia đình. Thứ năm dành thời gian bên vợ và thứ bảy bên gia đình tôi. Thức ăn tràn ngập từ gà tây, tôm hùm, lẩu dê, cá hồi nướng đến hủ tiếu đồ biển. Còn chưa kể những món bánh như bánh cuốn, bánh kem, và đặt biệt là bánh bông lan trứng muối. Dĩ nhiên là không thể thiếu bia rượu.
Tạ ơn những bàn tay khéo léo trong gia đình đã làm ra những món ăn tuyệt vời để cha mẹ, anh chị em, và con cháu được những giây phút ấm cúng bên nhau. Cám ơn gia đình vợ đã tạo ra những giây phút thoải mái và nhẹ nhàng. Mọi người vẫn vui vẻ và hòa hợp. Không ai nhắc đến “con voi ở trong phòng.” Hy vọng rằng con voi không còn phát biểu thiếu suy nghĩ nữa.
Cám ơn gia đình mình đã tạo ra những giây phút tràn đầy tiếng cười. Chị em người Nam tôi nói chuyện bừa bãi quen rồi. Nhiều lúc say rượu tôi cũng phát ngôn tùm lum hết. Là em út trong nhà nên cũng không ngại bị mấy chị giận. Giận cũng phải bỏ qua thằng em út. Dạo này chị em tôi thân thiện hơn. Không gây gổ và giận hờn như xưa nữa. Chị em nên phải đùm bọc lẫn nhau. Giờ thì rất tốt. Cũng hy vọng rằng tôi sẽ không thiếu suy nghĩ mà phá hoại tình cảm chị em.
Cám ơn vợ. Sự nhẫn nại và sự kiên nhẫn của vợ dành cho tôi. Vợ đã phải đối đầu với những công việc tôi tạo ra. Mấy ngày vừa qua chúng tôi tâm sự với nhau không phải về những người khác mà về chuyện của chính mình. Tôi lạc quan về chuyện tình cảm của vợ chồng tôi trong tương lai. Sẽ viết thêm về chuyện này khi có thời gian thong thả.
Based on one of David Reinfurt’s graphic design courses at Princeton University, this book examines the history of visual communication through people who practiced design. Reinfurt focuses on typography, gestalt, and interface with brief profiles of practitioners, and highlights of their work. It is an informative read for students learning graphic design. Even though students can get hands-on practice with the assignments throughout the book, they will benefit much more in a classroom environment with feedback from their professor and peers.