After replacing the steps to the deck on Saturday morning with my handyman father in-law, Dana, Dao and I headed to Lancaster to visit my mom and my sister for the long weekend. Later on that night, after giving Dao a bath and sending him to bed with his mom, I went out with my cousin. He took me to the grown-ass man’s club.

We walked in and greeted by about a dozen of Vietnamese grown-ass men (30s and up) and one woman. My cousin who is in his early 50s seemed to know everyone. They were sitting at a table, drinking Heineken, and singing terrible karaoke. I sat in had a beer and couldn’t take it anymore so I went over to the three-ball billiard table. The two tables that looked exactly like the ones I used to play in Vietnam many years ago. Back when I was eight or nine, I spent all my morning allowances on billiard instead of food. Rather than buying a bowl of hot and savory noodle soup, I bought 15 minutes worth of pool time. If I were still living in Vietnam, my billiard skill would have been pretty good. I probably wouldn’t have to college and go to work. I could make money shooting pool all day. But now, my skill is just horrible. I couldn’t even make a gio ga (chicken thigh).

About half an hour later, a few more fellows walked in. One of them was Dung Lai who is half Vietnamese and half white. I haven’t seen this guy over ten years, but he still recognized me. I also remembered him. His mom and him used to stay at one of my boys’ place. She was something else. She smoked, cursed and watched Chinese TV series all day and night. He was nutty, dusty (bui doi), but with a good heart. His ex-girl who has two kids with him used to go to my middle school. I still remember walking home with her. She biked to school, but she would stopped her bike and walked with me when she saw me. One year after the summer, she never returned to school. A couple years later, I found out that she was pregnant with Dung Lai. I haven’t seen her since.

An hour or so later, another dude walked him. This guy is actually a couple years younger than me. We never hung out but seem each other around when we were in high school or at some clubs. We caught up on each other’s life a bit and he informed me that him and his girl broke up last year. He’s now a “single dad” and “taking care of his three kids.” I thought, “Why the hell are you here? Aren’t you suppose to be home with your kids?” Lancaster sure is a small place. His ex-girl and I used to catch the bus together way back in elementary school when I first arrived in the States. She was smart and sharp. She used to translate for me when I didn’t understand a thing. She stood up for me when the Spanish kids made fun of me. I thought that this girl would go far in life. We went to separate middle school so I didn’t see her until we went to the same high school again. Unfortunately she hung out with the wrong crowd. First she dated his best friend, then him then got pregnant before she could finished high school. Not sure what she’s up to now.

In any rate, the place seemed like a hang out place for Vietnamese guys who were either have nothing else better to do or who were out of a relationship and have nothing better to do. I was so glad that my cousin got so drunk that I had to drive him home. Three hours of smoke and terrible singing gave me a headache the next day. I am not really sure how the owner makes money out of these guys. Time will tell when will the place will be closed down since it only opened for a week. I hope that I won’t end up spending my lonely nights like that in the future.

They say when you married someone you’ll married her whole family. I am grateful to be part of such a loving, bonding, harmonizing family. Make no mistake. I am now inseparable from the clan, but looking from an outsider point of view, the week-long annual reunion is a remarkable effort, something my side of the family hasn’t been able to organize for over ten years. We had one back in 1997 and it was the most memorable gathering yet.

What makes the annual event successful is the commitment from the elders. They show us the value of family’s bonding time. Despite their frail health and hardship of mobility, they managed to attend every year. The youngsters, on the other hand, are the ones that need to step up our game and do our part. We need to cherish these invaluable moments.

For me, seeing Cu Dao playing and laughing with his cousins he might only get to see once a year melted my heart; therefore, my wife and I will make the family reunion our top priority when planning our vacation time.

If you have seem some funkiness on Visualgui in the last hour or so because I was updating the markups to HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0. I am getting into a habit just doing it on the live site rather than on my local copy purely out of laziness.

The design shouldn’t have changed much except for some paddings and margins because Boilerplate 2.0 uses normalize.css instead of reset stylesheet. I also wanted to incorporate respond.js for IE6-8 support and point to the new Modernizr as well as the latest jQuery library.

Big prop goes out to Paul Irish and the rest of the HTML5 Boilerplate folks for sharing this invaluable default template, which I have been using as a starting point for all of my projects.

My first class will start tomorrow and I know for sure that I won’t have too much time to dedicate to this site; therefore, this is the last thing I can do so that I won’t feel so guilty for neglecting it.

Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV is finally here and well-worth the wait. Weezy is still at the top of his game. His flows are impeccable and his punchlines are as vivid as ever. Tha Carter IV boasted an impressive guest list from Rick Ross, Drake, Nas, Jadakiss, Bun B to Cory Gunz, but Weezy is still in the spotlight. Because even when he rhymes at ease, his guest stars have to push themselves hard to keep up with him. Weezy has his way with the beats on highlights including “Blunt Blowin’,” “MegaMan,” “President Carter,” “John” (featuring Rick Ross) and “So Special” (featuring John Legend). “How to Love” is the weakest track on the album. Weezy needs to get off the Auto-Tune singing.

Dana, Duke and I had lunch at Roti. We felt the booth shaking. I thought the other folks at the end of the booth were shaking it. Dana thought the Metro was running beneath us. Then all of the sudden everyone ran out of the place. The workers told us to evacuate. I grabbed Dao and we ran out. My work place closed down after I sent Dana and Dao home. The Metro is now crazy crowded. So I am stopping by Starbucks waiting for the traffic to calm down.

That was the first time I felt the earthquake. I didn’t really know what it was. Thank goodness nothing happened.

Dao’s summer camp ended last Friday. His teachers sent some photos of him singing, dancing and playing with the water. Dao made some impressive progression over the summer.

Dao no longer cried when we dropped him off in the morning. He could sing the entire “ABC” song and six bars of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He also mastered “The Wheels on the Bus.” He could count in Vietnamese from 1-8 and 10 (he still leaves out the 9). In English, he counted “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16.” I am sure he’ll fill in the missing numbers one of these days.

What impressed me the most is his manner in communication. For example, when he wants to play with the iPod, he would ask, “Ba, ba cho Dao muon iPod, please” [Daddy, daddy, let me borrow the iPod, please]. As much as I try to restrict him from using the iPod, I cannot say no to that. When I handed over the iPod to him, he would response, “Thank you, daddy.” We no longer have to reminded him that.

Whenever one of us sneeze, he would say, “bless you.” When I coughed, he said, “Ba, ba, be careful.” Earlier today, Dana expressed some pain and he asked, “Mommy, are you ok?” I rested my leg against the table, he said, “excuse me,” as he tried to walk by. Whenever he needed me to do something for him, he would tell me, “Ba, ba, help Dao.” The other day I spilled milk on the floor. He ran into the kitchen, picked up the towel, wiped up the milk and said, “Dao help daddy clean up.” The only thing I could do at such moment was held him tight and gave him a big kiss. What a sweet boy.vSure there are sweet moments like that as well as not so sweet moments that I just wanted to spank him, but kids are kids.

I am really glad that he’s picking up quite a few good manners over the summer. I also think that he’ll be a great big brother. He gets along well with other kids and has not have any problems like fighting for arguing with his peers. As seem in this video, his treated his six-month cousin with love and kiss.

Spent the whole morning attending student orientation. I sure felt like being a student again. I only have one more week until classes begin. The good thing is that I’ll start out with foundation courses: “Introduction to Structured Programming” and “Database Design and Applications.”

About two weeks ago, I met with the chair and she is super wonderful. She looked at my transcripts and told me that she doesn’t see any of my undergraduate classes that are equivalent to the foundation courses for the program. I quickly told her that I don’t have a problem taking the prerequisites and then she enrolled me into the foundation courses.

I am going to have to put my design aside and concentrate on the programing side. Looking at the core and elective courses ahead, I am actually very excited because they seem to complement well with my current direction in web development. So I am definitely looking forward to going back to school. One of the perks of working at the school I am attending is that my colleagues who work in the program are looking out for me. Awesome!

Update: My professor uploaded the syllabus on Blackboard. The book for the class, Modern Database Management (10th Edition), is $190. Back in my days (10 years ago), books were about $60 on average and I thought they were too damn expensive. $190 for a book? Holy smoke.

New to Drupal? Ric Shreves and Brice Dunwoodie’s Drupal 7 Bible is a perfect starting guide. From the painless installation process to all the core features to customizations, Shreves and Dunwoodie make Drupal seems less intimidating than it appears to be. By using Drupal, one can set up a solid, powerful content management system without touching the codes.

I am fairly new to Drupal simply because most of the work I have done could be accomplished using WordPress. While both WordPress and Drupal are content management systems, they serve different purposes. The choice to implement one over the other is up to the web designers and developers, but to have both for us to use for free is a huge advantage.

Column count is one of my favorite CSS3 properties. If you’re using modern browsers, you can see that I am using it right now on this site. Each blog post is divided into two columns. The big headings separate each post. Column count works well with long posts, but not for shorter ones. The one-sentence post would look awkward with one line being spread out into two columns.

After digging around, I found a simple solution that allows me to set a limit number of words before making the split. So now the post will remain one column if the text is less than 100 words. Isn’t that sweet? Another reason to love WordPress.

We had a blast at my in-law’s annual family reunion last week. We booked an eight-bedroom house at Indian Beach, NC. More than thirty of us from Canada, Texas, California, New Jersey and Virginia gathered under one roof for a whole week. Dana, Dao and I only stayed for half of the week and that was way too short.

The day started out with breakfast including banh bot loc (vietnamese clear shrimp and pork dumplings), xoi lao Xuong (sticky rice with Chinese sausage) and green (avocado) eggs and ham. After breakfast, we headed toward the beach, which is about 10 feet from the house, then back to the swimming pool on the deck and then the jacuzzi.

Everyone gathered around the house for lunch, which included bun bo Hue (Hue’s vermicelli soup), roast pig, and pork chops with rice. Each individual family prepared a meal a day. After lunch, some folks took naps; some went back to the water, some played pool and foosball in the basement. Most of the women gathered into the entertainment room to watch kdrama.

Then we returned once again for dinner, hung out, watched TV or just chatted. On Thursday night, I bought a bottle of Patron and thought that not too many people would drink it. We only ended up with 2 and a half shots each. I should have gotten two bottles.

Dao had a lot of fun hanging out with his cousins, particular Aiden who is a couple months older than him. They chase each other around the house for Thomas Train, but then sat together to watch “Curious George” on my iPod. Dao loved both the pool table and foosball. Everyday he made me play with him. He didn’t like the water, yet the last day he wanted to stay in the pool.

Last night, I put together a video with various clips I filmed.