ASM-Aetna Blog, a project I had involved as a developer, has been nominated for Connecticut’s Top Blog of 2012 in the following categories: Best Overall Blog, Best Health Blog and Best Business Blog. Congratulations to the ASM-Aetna team.

With last week’s three-day conference, I started eating out again. Check out the stack of Hoban’s Burger at James Hoban’s in Dupont Circle I had last week. The burger was pretty wicked.

On Monday I drove to Eden and had a plate of rice filled with roast duck, roast pig and BBQ pork at Cho Cu Sai Gon. Yesterday went back to Viet Royal for Sautéed Lobster in Shell with Salt & Pepper. I am now addicted to that dish. I think I can have it once week until I get tired of eating it.

Dana came over today to try out the burger at Wiinkys. We shared a double bacon burger and eight wings. Pretty good lunch, indeed. Now I need to get back to jogging as well, but that hasn’t happened. I had to take off my wedding ring because my finger is getting way too fat.

A friend’s wedding is coming up this weekend and then I’ll be heading to the Red Hat training all next week. It’s going to be more food and less jogging.

My initial intention for I Love Ngoc Lan was to bring the markups and CSS up to date and to make the layout responsive, but then I ended up with a redesign. The new layout has only one column because I wanted to focus on readability. Once users get past the homepage, which features a large banner, everything else is just clean text. The navigation has moved to the bottom instead on the right column to put the emphasis on readability.

The new design is responsive with mobile-first approach. The markup is based on HTML5 Boilerplate and dashes of CSS3 fanciness. I Love Ngoc Lan had been powered by WordPress since 2003. At the time, I didn’t know how the site would turned out and I used WordPress simply because it was the easiest solution. Now the site has grown into a very nice community and I am so glad that I picked WordPress. It has proven to be the perfect choice.

I was interested in the three-day conference for technology in library particular in the tracks on mobile trends and web presence. Sine my supervisor attended the latter, I went into the topic on mobile trends. The speakers covered mostly on mobile apps and designing a separate a mobile web site. The strategy is to offered only contents that mobile users would want. One speaker went as far as providing a device-detection javascript with a whole list of variable for every mobile device. The easiest way to make a mobile-friendly site is to provide a css file to hide all the big, unnecessary design elements on the desktop site. One speaker mentioned mobile-first design, but didn’t really give responsive web design its justice. While the conference was informative, the library folks need some catching up to do.

I also signed up for a post conference workshop on taking Drupal to the next step. Unfortunately the workshop was only three hours and the instructors spent the first half an hour install Drupal and modules on people laptops. We didn’t get very far and I wanted to see how to create a theme. It looks like the best approach is to take a base theme and modify it to meet your needs. I took a look at some of the starter theme and there are tons of php and css files to customize. I’ll take a crack at theming Drupal one of these days, but right now MODX seems like the best choice for really coding the site the way I wanted.

As my wife and I are trying to refinance our mortgage loan, I decided to give Susana, our realtor who helped us purchased our house, a call to ask her for a few tips. Her phone had been shut off so I called her office. The frontdesk guy told me that Susana had passed away a few months ago. Cancer claimed her life.

The chill ran down my spine. I was shocked. After a year of house-hunting together, Susana became more than just our realtor. We considered her as a friend. She was a hard worker who never said no to us when we wanted to look at the houses. She was such a lovely lady with two adorable twin girls and a very nice husband.

Even after we purchased the house, we kept in touch and invited her family over for dinner every once in a while. I actually was a bit sad that we didn’t get to go look at houses with her anymore. Then the last two years had been crazy for us. All of the sudden, Susana is gone. Life is just way too short.

Thật ngậm ngùi khi xem hình của ba nhận được hôm nay từ đứa cháu gái. Ba đã già đi rất nhiều. Trong trí óc của tôi ba cứ như ngày tôi còn ấu thơ. Khi nói chuyện với ba qua điên thoại giọng của ông còn rất khoẻ nên tôi không hình dung ra được. Thật ra ngoài những câu thông thường hỏi thăm sức khoẻ, giữa tôi và ba không có gì để nói cả. Khoảng cánh giữa tôi và ba thật đã quá xa. Xét lại thì chúng tôi đã cách xa hơn 20 năm. Thời gian trôi qua quá mau nhất là bây giờ khi tôi bận bịu trông công việc và con cái.

Nhìn những cằn cỗi trên khuôn mặt của ông làm tôi bàng hoàng xúc động. Có lẻ đây là lần đầu tiên tôi nhìn rỏ nét mặt của ông tuy hình không được rỏ cho lắm. Mổi khi nghỉ đến ba, tôi chỉ nghỉ đến ông trong giai đoạn tôi có ông. Vì chuổi ngày bên ba quá hiếm hoi hoi nên tôi nhớ rất rỏ những kỷ niệm ấy. Lúc xa ba cũng là lúc tôi xa quê hương và cũng là lúc tôi xa những ngày ấu thơ tôi quý nhất. Vì mất cả ba thứ quang trọng nhất đối với tôi lúc mới lớn, tôi đã không chấp nhận nổi thử thách mới. Bây giờ tôi đã quen xứ người và không còn nhỏ nữa. Cuộc sống mới tôi đã chấp nhận. Tuổi thơ cũng đã qua tôi không hề hối tiếc. Nhưng khi nhìn ba, tôi thấy xót xa. Tôi muốn ôm được lấy ông và nói những lời tôi chưa bao giờ nói với ông: “Con rất thương ba.”

I had a blast watching Religulous because I have the same questions that Bill Maher had regarding to religion. Why do many so many people believe in something that has yet to be proven to be true? In the film, many hardcore religious freaks couldn’t defend the irrational biblical images such as a talking snake, a man who lived inside a fish and the inconsistency story of Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus.

When I first came to the States, my aunt persuaded me to go to a Vietnamese church and I did. I wanted to learn more about God and I wanted to find out what made these people believed in him. I dragged my ass to church every Sunday for about six months or so. The people at church were very lovely. They tried everything they could to get me to accept God, but I couldn’t do it without real evidence; therefore, I quitted going to church.

I have a cousin who has a PHD in information system. He’s way smarter than me and I always looked up to him as a role model. He showed me the value and the respect you get with an education. I get that and I followed him on that. He never smoked; therefore, I believed smoking is bad so I never did it. I get that. What I don’t get, however, is that he accepted Jesus so blindly. There are things that he has been praying to God for many years and obviously God hasn’t given to him yet, but he still thinks that one day God will.

After watching Religulous, it helps me understand why many rational people could be so irrational when it comes to faith. Religulous is a hilarious, eye-opening documentary on organized religion.

With a sleepless night and many hours of converting Flash to Quicktime movies, the motion pieces are now residing on YouTube. The process took much more time and effort then I had expected. Why am I making the transition?

Flash has become a legacy program and not supported on mobile devices, particularly on Apple products. I have been thinking of abandoning the entire motion section altogether, but then again I have invested tons of time in the pieces. Although I don’t do Flash motion graphic anymore, I still want to keep them for prosperity.

I only brought over the ones that I still have the original Flash files. The earlier pieces that I could no longer find the source are now gone.

When I met with a student to discuss about moving his organization web site into an open source content management system, I suggested WordPress and his face lit up. He was glad that he didn’t have to work with Drupal anymore. My predecessor set him up with a Drupal 6 installation for him to experiment with and yet he still has not quite learned how to create a simple Drupal theme.

My first approach was to intall WordPress on our server and then to provide him administration access to create the site himself, but then what happen if other student organizations, which scattered all over George Mason servers and some hosted themselves, would like to come on board? I would have to create individual WordPress. That didn’t sound like a scalable plan so I decided to experiment with WordPress’s multisite. It turns out to be a great solution and this is my first time using multisite feature.

Now I only have to maintain one installation of WordPress and creating new sites is just a clicks away. One of the advantages of using multisite is that the students can create their own design if they want to, but I have to install the theme. That way I can check the codes to make sure they are safe and secured.

I created a default theme, which is a child theme of WordPress’s Twenty Eleven, for the student organization main site. The students can use it just as it like this one or they can come up with their own theme.

I am also in the process of creating another network of sites just for the faculty so they can update the content themselves without having to know HTML. Multisite is another reason WordPress rocks!

So I got through 94 episodes of 70 Years of Vietnamese Ballad (1930 – 2000) produced by Hoai Nam. While the program is informative, Hoai Nam makes so many careless mistakes like introducing Lam Phuong’s “Bai Tango Cho Em” but played Hoang Nguyen’s “Bai Tango Cho Rieng Em” and explaining bolero but played the chacha arrangement in “Tau Dem Nam Cu” performed by Thanh Thuy.

After making his apology he went on to defend how the rhythm is the structure of a song. He stated that a songwriter picked out a rhythm that would best fit for his lyrics; therefore, an arranger or producer should stick to the written rhythm. Making the change in the tempo would consider disrespectful to the songwriter. With that kind of thinking no wonder Vietnamese singers who covered ballad make no attempt in reviving old songs. I rather hear an old song with a creative, innovative makeover than just singing straight from what was written.

While I understand that Hoai Nam has limited resource and budget to produce such a broad program, he should put more efforts into the third segment, which is from 1975 to 2000. From late 1930s up to 1975, he has done a decent job of introducing many Vietnamese songwriters at that time. In the third segment, he reintroduced Tram Tu Thien, Ngo Thuy Mien, Lam Phuong, Anh Bang and Tu Cong Phung and yet never even mentioned Duong Thu who is in my opinion one of the renowned ballad songwriters.

Nevertheless I have to give Hoai Nam the credit for attempting to do quite a daunting task of covering 70 years of Vietnamese music. Listen if you have a chance or if you’re interested in learning about a bit of history about Vietnamese music.