So I have been listening to Norah Jones’s …Little Broken Hearts in the past couple of weeks and I was not planning on writing a review, but then the album started to grow on me. Now I can’t seem to get it out of my brain, particularly Jones’child-liking phrasing in “Say Goodbye” backing up by melodious keyboard licks and groovy beats courtesy of Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton. I even started singing in my head lines like, “She’s 22 and she’s loving you.”

While Jones has never been an energetic singer, what makes this collaborative project with Danger Mouse exciting is that the talented producer knows how to nudge Jones up a notch. In the title track, he provides the right tools, midtempo beats mixed in the 60’s psychedelic electric guitar, for her to take revenge: “Beautiful soldiers in their beds / Making love inside their hands / With no chance to defend / Tonight could be their end.” The drama escalates on “Miriam.” Once again, Danger Mouse sets up the cinematic backdrop for Jones to do the Quentin Tarantino’s style of killing: “You know you done me wrong / I’m gonna smile when I take your life.”

From the bouncy “Happy Pills” to the heavy “4 Broken Hearts,” Norah Jones and Danger Mouse offer some of the sweetest revenges ever heard on record even though it takes some times to sink in.

After a decade of working on the web, I am still fond of simplicity. With each redesign, my goal is to simplify the layout and the markups. The new Visualgui is no exception and the focus is on readability.

To accomplish the new goals, I had taken the content-first approach. The layout is reduced to one column and the sidebar is dropped to make the content front and center. Typography is the most crucial part of the redesign, but I actually don’t have too many choices because I want the site to render appropriate Vietnamese characters. Google Web Fonts only has three Vietnamese types and I used two out of three. Headers and logo are using Open Sans by Steve Matteson and body text is using Noticia Text by JM Solé. The two types are quite decent and I am satisfied with the pairing.

In the previous design, the homepage always had to have a banner and the width had to be 940px. With the new design, I want the banner to be optional and flexible. I don’t always have to have one and I can crop the banner any size I want. As for the background color, I am moving off white a bit for less glaring. The color choice is inspired by e-reading devices like Kindle and Nook.

With one column, the markup is now much lighter. HTML is streamlined and modified to not depend on Shiv or Modernizr for IE6-8. CSS is also simplified by hand. I must confess, I have not wrapped my head around LESS or SASS. Of course the new site wouldn’t be completed without responsive design.

When I went to pick up Dao from daycare yesterday, he was placed on the changing table. As I walked in his classmates told me that Dao was in trouble. I asked the teacher what did he do and she reported that he has been hitting his friends and teachers all day. When it was time to clean up, he didn’t want to. When his friends tried to put his toys away, he hit them and even scratched one of them.

I literally didn’t know what to say. I told her that I talked to him, spanked him, but nothing worked. He is now getting worst. I asked the teacher if any other kid in class does it too. She said, “There are two more, but he’s the leader.” She went on, “Whenever another kid hit a teacher, he would say, ‘Hit Ms. J harder or yell at Ms. G louder.'” I shook my head in disbelieve.

When we left the building, I asked him why he hit his friends and he replied, “They are not nice. They took the toys away from me.” We went straight home and I made him some corns. He requested it. He ate the entire bowl and then we went to take a shower. He wanted more corns, but I told him that I would make him some something to eat. We shared two bowls of rice with eggs, hotdog, soy sauce and ketchup. He behaved well for the evening.

“American Idol” closed out its 11th season yesterday with yet another pretty white guy with guitar winning the contest. How unpredictable was that? Good thing is I didn’t follow this season like I did with the last. Haley Reinhart who came in third in season 10 was a winner in my book. She has a sultry timbre when she goes low and a big-ass pipe when she goes high. Her sexy appearance is a bonus to the eyes as well.

Reinhart showcased a variety of styles on “Idol,” noticeably jazz and blues, but her debut Listen Up! offers classic pop-soul flavors, which sandwiched her between Amy Winehouse and Adele. “Wasted Tears” has Winehouse’s contemporary pop combined with Motown spirit, but Reinhart puts her own spin to it. “Undone” is a big ballad with keyboard and strings that immediately draws some resemblances to Adele’s “Someone Like You.”

Listen Up! features easy, groovy hits including “Now That You’re Here,” “Hit the Ground Runnin'” and “Keep Coming Back” to satisfy the mainstream as well as 19 Entertainment/Interscope Records. For Reinhart, let’s hope that Listen Up! is just a commercial obligation.

From An Alphabetical Book About Nokia Pure:

Body copy leading

9pt on 11pt (2pt leading)

Headline leading

36pt on 40pt (optical line spacing), 36pt on 44pt

Indent text

The first paragraph does not have an indentation. In successive paragraphs the first line is indented.

Full line break

Instead of indenting, use a full line break to separate paragraphs of texts.

Line length

Efficient reading depends on a comfortable line length between 40 and 75 characters.

Hanging punctuation

We recommend using hanging punctuation, or exdentation, in which the punctuation or bullet points are set in the margin so as not to disrupt the text alignment.

Wow, it’s already been nine years. Here’s the first post I wrote nine years ago. I must admit, I have not been active on the site, but the fans are still around and they are still loving her. I am still maintaing the site and occasional giving it a new design, which I had done not too long ago. Mad props to my partner who is in charge of everything else on the site and he has been with me since the beginning. Without him, I couldn’t do it myself.

Fresh out of college, I worked with talented graphic designers who graduated from Kutztown University Communication Design. Hung Nguyen, an alum from Kutztown, was one of my early mentors when I worked briefly at Triple Strength.

When I picked Mastering Type: The Essential Guide to Typography for Print and Web Design off the shelf, I was excited that the author, Denise Bosler, is the professor of communication design at Kutztown. This book is a pleasure read. It starts out with a brief history of type, then progresses to letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page and screen. From kerning, tracking, leading, word spacing, aligning to legibility and readability, the book provides insightful guides and the best parts are the good-vs.-bad illustrations. Well done!

As I am doing my work from home, a meat truck pulled up and the doorbell rang. The guy tried to sell me some meat. I told him that, “We are vegetarian and we don’t eat meat.” His replied was, “Do you cheat some time.” I told him, “No way. Thou shalt not cheat.”

For this site and Mason Law, I dropped the dependency of respond.js for IE8, 7 and 6. Since supporting these legacy browsers isn’t necessary, I used conditional comment to server a style sheet specifically for IE8 and below. The IE-specific CSS is the same as the blocks of media queries from the main CSS, but without the media queries.

The solution is not perfect because IE8 and below would have to download two CSS files, but it is still better than depending on respond.js. A more ideal approach would be to hide @media blocks from legacy browsers within the main stylesheet. I have been searching all over, but haven’t been able to find a hack for that. Does anyone know how to hide blocks of media queries in IE8, 7 & 6?

The past few weeks had been a hell of a ride. The roller coaster has subsided, but the journey only begins. There’s tremendous hope for the strong body and soul. It’s up to the mind to decide.

I am going through all of George Carlin’s standup specials available on Netflix. Was Carlin really like that in real life or that was just his stage persona? I can’t tell because he sounded so real. His takes on religions, politic and subtle things in mundane life were so damn spot on. I usually can separate the art from from the persona like when listening to hip-hop, but Carlin’s routines are kind of blurry. In any rate, I could careless. Carlin is still one of my favorite comedians of all time.

Can one really get past envy and jealousy? I have try my hardest to not get those two things get to me, but it is so damn hard. It’s probably already in my gene. Sometimes I don’t like somebody simply because I don’t like him. The more I try to like him; the more I dislike him. It’s a horrible trait, but I simply can’t stop. I recognize it, but I can’t control it.