I know I have said it before, but I am really sick of the political circus both on both Republican and Democrat. Further I am so fed up with that orange fuck. I already decided who I would vote for and that’s it. I am blocking out rest. No reading. No watching. No debating.

Woke up half way and still wondered what the hell they are doing with all these damn Lego pieces.

The weekend is almost over. The house is getting more cluttered. Piles of laundry need to be folded. Toys are everywhere.

I took the kids to a Đán’s friend’s birthday party at the park. The weather was beautiful. Then Đạo and Đán took their Taekwondo test. Đạo received a green belt and Đán received an orange belt.

My brother-in-law family came to visit. We had eight boys in the house. Needless to say, it was chaotic. Some played iPads. Some just watched. Some played together.

I am simply exhausted. I am still trying to just take things easy as we are about to face a new change in our home. Let’s just hope that everything will work out. I am optimistic.

I am taking the iPads away from the boys again. The weather is getting nicer; therefore, I want them to get out of the house and off the screen.

Last several weeks, we let them loose a bit. As a result, Đạo and Đán were out of control. As soon as they woke up they asked for iPads. Before they went to bed, they wanted iPads. Last weekend, their cousin had a birthday party. As soon as all the kids left, they hopped on their iPads for hours. When we came home, they didn’t want to take a bath or brush their teeth. They were drained physically and mentally.

These days, hanging out with their cousins means playing on their iPads. Even a two-year-old can’t eat his meal without YouTube glaring at maximum volume. Adults can’t talk. Older kids get out of their seat to watch instead of concentrate on eating. It’s irritating.

On our next vacation, I want us to be screen-free. It is easier to do when we go alone. It is much harder with extended family members. I tried to bring this up to other adults, but they can’t commit to it. Their kids need to have their screen fix.

Just wanted to jazz up this blog a bit with some small enhancements.

Added a dark mode switcher, which locates at the top right corner of the blog. The simple instruction is taken from Flavio Copes’s “How I added Dark Mode to my website.”

On the desktop layout, I am setting the body text to justify and using hyphens. I decided to give it a shot after reading Richard Rutter’s “All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS.”

I also added a bit of an embellishment to the end of each article after reading Jason Pamental’s “Of marks, ends, and middles: end marks, sections, and dead ends.”

I love these kind of tutorials on the web. They give me a chance to play around with this blog.

When Linh Dương, a graphic design student, asked my permission to use part of Vietnamese Typography for her final project, of course I said yes. She wrote:

I am an admirer of your work “Vietnamese Typography”. It has to be the most extensive, well-written and structured work into the Vietnamese language that I have known.

Hearing this from a Vietnamese designer made my day. I am glad that this book had reached student designers who are interested in Vietnamese typography. The book, which takes advantage of the web as a medium, made this possible.

Yesterday, Linh sent me some screenshots of her final products, which will be displayed at the end-of-the-year exhibition. They look lovely.

Nico Grant writes in Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Adobe has been working full crank to track every interaction a consumer has with a brand: tallying her visits to a brick-and-mortar store and what she buys; using cookies to monitor her web activity and figure out how many devices she has; analyzing her interest in emails about sales or promotions; and incorporating social media monitoring to see what she says about a brand. Adobe can combine all of this with other companies’ data about a person’s income and demographics to try to predict the triggers that would make her buy a new phone or pair of shoes. In essence, Adobe is trying to know a consumer’s decision-making process better than she may know it herself.

Adobe is getting too big; therefore, it needs to grow beyond designers. It’s sad.

Tejal Rao writes in The New York Times Magazine:

The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper. Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world. Kit Kat fixers buy up boxes and carry them back to devotees in the United States and Europe. All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status.

This article published last year, but I find it fascinating.

The mortise lock for our sliding glass door to the deck broke. Luckily, we did not have to replace the entire door. Here’s the instruction video I followed. When unscrew the lock, make sure you put the screwdriver at the bottom of the lock to secure it rather than the top, which showed in the video. When I placed the screwdriver at the top, the lock dropped. It’s a pain to take it out. The mortise lock bought at Home Depot.

Total cost: $13

I am retiring the good old MacBook Pro after seven years. I never had any problem with it until I upgraded to Mojave about six months ago. It took a long time to start up and crashed Adobe products as well as Microsoft Words. It slows down my production; therefore, I had to let it go.

I am starting fresh with a new MacBook Pro instead of migration over from the old laptop. It gave me the opportunity to clean up all the junks. I migrated email accounts, which were easy, and finally upgraded to Adobe Creative Cloud. I mainly use Photoshop and Illustrator. In addition, I just need to download a dozen of apps. That’s pretty much it. The process took the entire work day.

I am now rocking on a new MacBook Pro, which I hope to last me seven more years or so.