Hôm nay dành trọn một ngày với cu Đạo và cu Đán.Tối hôm trước thức khuya dọn dẹp nhà để hôm nay ba cha con tha hồ lê lệt. Đêm lại mệt không ngủ được. Tuy hôm nay khá mệt nhưng rất mảng nguyện.

Bây giờ cu Đán cũng nghịch tay lắm. Thấy gì cũng chụp lại bò lung tung. Có những lúc tôi chỉ ngắm nghía và cố giữ lại những hình ảnh vào trông trí nhớ. Chỉ có thế kỷ niệm mới bền lâu. Có những lúc tôi tự ôn lại những nét mặt và cử chỉ của cu Đạo vài năm trước rồi tự cười thầm. Rồi đây cu Đán cũng sẽ thế. Chỉ mới bắt đầu đi học trở lại mà tôi đã cảm thấy mất đi thời gian của hai đứa. Cũng may tôi không làm việc xa nhà. Nếu bắt tôi phải đi xa và chỉ gặp con trong những ngày cuối tuần chắc tôi đã không làm việc nổi.

Cả tuần nay cu Đạo được nghỉ ở nhà. Cũng hên là bây giờ hắn đã chịu bỏ tả. Lúc đầu thì làm số 1 và 2 đầy nhà nhưng bây giờ đã có tiếng bộ. Khi đáy xong thì tự đem bô đi đổ.

Vì đang tập cho Đạo bỏ tả và đồng thời nhiệt độ cũng khá nóng nên ba cha con quấn quýt với nhau ở trong nhà.Cu Đán thì ngủ có giờ giấc còn thằng lớn thì ham chơi không ngủ. Có lúc thật rất thèm một vài phút yên tỉnh nhất là thèm được chớp mắt nhưng không thể nào có được.

Giờ mà được yên tỉnh nhất nhu lúc bây giờ tình đầu óc cũng quá mỏi mệt. Định làm bài vở cho xong tuần tới nhưng đầu óc không cho phép. Thế mà cũng rắng ngồi viếc. Bà xả nói có lúc ông viếc tiếng Việt tôi chẳng hiểu ý ông muốn nói gì. Lúc tỉnh ma còn vậy. Lúc mơ mơ màng màng như bây giờ thì chắc là bó tay luôn. Thôi đi ngủ đây nhé.

I took off work yesterday to do my homework and I spent the entire day working on one assignment. I still have to write an essay for another class. This week had been insane. When not working fulltime, I am catching up with freelance projects and doing my school work. I hardly have time for the boys and that’s just killing me. I tried to wrap up everything today and then spend the next few days with the kids, but I am still not done what I needed to do. I am also trying to rebalance my time and make a few changes to my priorities. As much as I love to follow the election and writing about it, I am going to put the blog on hiatus once again. Since I have to write an essay for my class every week, I am going to post those instead. We’ll see how things go.

Grab a cup of coffee and read this piece by Matt Taibbi. If you’re in a hurry, however, just read this portion:

Here’s how Romney would go about “liberating” a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it’s called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company’s management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here’s the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it’s the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let’s say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company’s bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

“That interest,” says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, “just sucks the profit out of the company.”

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company’s costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in “management fees.” Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company’s upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn’t really “helping,” of course – and it wasn’t new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the “bust-out,” in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. “That’s all it is.”

I started my freshman year at La Salle University. I came in as a communication major. I actually didn’t even know what communication major was. My cousin advised me I should go into it because I liked music and movie. After the first semester I knew right away public speaking was not for me. Then I decided to switch to the major that almost every Asian guy went into: computer science. But when I looked at the curriculum I knew computer since was not for me. Fortunately, the computer science and art department decided to create a brand new major called Digital Arts and Multimedia Design. Without knowing what it was I switched to it simply because it sounded cool to me.

With my first Pentium II PC my mom bought with a loan from my cousin and the Adobe and Macromedia programs the computer lab technician at La Salle hooked me up, my career was born. Fifteen years later I still love what I do. Throughout my professional career I learned most of the things myself including design. Today I am starting the next chapter of my education. Actually I started last year in Information Systems Technology, but had to drop within two months. For one, I decided to move on to a new position. For two, the real reason, I was not into the business side of it.

Graphic design is a much better fit for me. Most of my web works in the early days were drawn from graphic design. Now with the explosion of web typography and high quality retina display, learning the established design principles from print makes a whole lot of sense. I am very excited to broadening my design sensibility.

Saxby’s cafe crema is one of my favorite drinks this summer. The first time I had it (early in the summer), I fell in love with it right away. Although it was way too sweet and way too creamy, I loved the boldness of the coffee. After watching the barista making it, I made a few tweaks to the original recipe for my own taste. Here’s the instructions:

1. Fill the large up (20oz) with ice even over the top
2. Add 2 (instead of 5 in the original recipe) pumps of vanilla syrup
3. Add 5 fresh-brew shots of expresso (the extra ice helps cool down the expresso)
4. Add a bit of Half and Half cream on top

Voila! Delicious.

After all these years of staring at the InDesign icon on my dock, I can now open it up and maneuver my way around the software. Thanks to Rae Ouellette and Ramla Mahmood, art students at George Mason, for the informative whole-day workshops.

Some notes:

Preflights: shows errors
Paragraph styles: Similar to CSS
Text Frame Option: Change texts
Place: import texts and images including Word, TIFF (Photoshop), EPS (Illustrator)
Package: ready for printing
Put open quotation mark outside texts: story > optical margin alignment
Insert page number: type > insert special character > markers > current document number
Hyphenate: uncheck in paragraph window to clear hyphens at the end of the line.
Select objects: control click

I haven’t shared much of my parenting experience lately. Time is the obvious reason, but also the motivation and energy. I am simply exhausted.

Cu Dao is still giving us grief, but he could be quite joyful at times. He never ceases to make me laugh when I am not expected. He talks like a train. Last Saturday, him and I raced to the parking lot. He ran, stopped and said to me, “Daddy, I ran out of puff.” I said to him, “I thought you’re supposed to be fast.” He replied, “I am not fast. I am express.” I was a bit amazed at how he applied what he had heard to real-life situation.

Our lil Dan continues to attract most of our attention. He smiles and responses to almost anyone who interacts with him. Unlike Dao who rejects things immediately, Dan is a much more observing. When my cousin sang and clapped her hands to him, he stared straight at her for good five minutes before he decided to join her. He started clapping, smiling and kicking his feet after he thinks she’s ok to play with. I took him on a carrousel ride the other day and he just sat there, looked up, down, around and then at me as if he was questioning me, “Is this suppose to be fun?” He was not excited but he was crying either. Dao, on the other hand, simply refused to go on the carrousel.

Nowadays, we spend a lot of time together, especially on the weekends, but we don’t do much activities. Back when we first had Dao, we signed him up for all sorts of activities including Gymboree classes and children museums. He actually didn’t like any of it. He didn’t want to participate and he didn’t want to anything. All he wanted to do was playing table train, riding train and playing mini golf. Now instead of trying to think of things for them to do, we just spend time together. We ride around town to get breakfast. We drop by the mall to play indoor if the weather is too hot. At home, we just fill the bathtub with water and splash around. I like this simpler parenting approach. It makes my weekend a bit more relaxing while spending time with the kids.

I finally read Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things because the book is recommended for my upcoming Graduate Design Seminar class. I must confess, this book is not as enjoyable as I had expected. In addition to the dated examples of everyday things (since the book is published in 1988), the design of the book itself is not too pleasing. The page numbers and the headings are bled to the edge. A few times I couldn’t figure out if the text belongs to the illustration or the main content. The most disrupting reading experience is paragraphs after paragraphs of italics. Nevertheless the book has many principles that I agree with, especially on the balance of aesthetics and usability:

If everyday design were ruled by aesthetics, life might be more pleasing to the eye but less comfortable; if ruled by usability, it might be more comfortable but uglier. If cost or ease of manufacture dominated, products might not be attractive, functional, or durable. Clearly, each consideration has its place. Trouble occurs when one dominates all the others.

Haven’t blog for just a week and I really miss it even though I was able to catch up on some readings and freelance work. I now have a few drafts in my head and will write them down in the next couple of days.

As I said many times, I still love having my own blog even though social media has taken over the space. I am glad that Jeremy Keith shares the same sentiment:

But there’s a more fundamental difference between posting to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+, and posting to your own blog. Unless you’re using a hosted service, your blog belongs to you.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, said the same in various interviews when being asked about blogging. At the end of the day, your blog belongs to you. As WordPress continues to grow, I am positive that blogging won’t go down like Flash had any time soon.

Every time I think of taking a break, I ended up blogging more than usual. Yesterday was the proof. School will start in two weeks and I am very excited. Next Tuesday I will be taking a full day workup learning InDesign. The workshop is free and will be taught by two graphic design students. I peaked at their work and very impress. Hope I can learn something from them. I never thought that I would InDesign, but I better get myself prepared since I am going to learn about graphic design.

My goal before attending school is to focus on getting my freelance project finish and catching up on readings. The freelance gig is coming along well. I am very excited and can’t wait to share it with everyone. My list just keep getting longer and longer, but here’s are the books that I hope get through:

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman: This is recommended read for my seminar class.
• Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice by Janet H. Murray: This is a required reading for the seminar class.
• Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design by Helen Kennedy: I picked this one up at Mason Library. Didn’t realize it costs $95. Wow.
• Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke
• The New Typography (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) by Jan Tschichold
• Anatomy of a Typeface by Anatomy of a Typeface (94) by Alexander Lawson
• Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books by Jason Godfrey.

I still haven’t gotten a response from my professor for the books I need for the Advanced Typography class. Well, hope you all are having a great summer. Enjoy it while you can.