Nicki Minaj’s Roman Reloaded jumps off so hard I almost “Come On a Cone” when she puts her dick in my face. With her wicked flow, sexy swag and cocksure braggadocio, Minaj holds no backseat to her male counterparts including Weezy, The Boss and Killa Cam. In fact, she can be no less ruthless when addressing her rivals: “If I had a label I would never sign you hoes / Take you bitches to school than I Columbine these hoes.”

As a rap artist, what makes Minaj stands out is that she has her way with the beats. She just doesn’t rap over them. She exorcises them. With Roman Reloaded, however, Ménage à Trois attempts to move beyond hip-hop and the result is quite unfortunate. Auto-tuning with Chris Brown on “Right By My Side” is hinting at the departure point, but the real plunge is on “Sex in the Lounge,” where Lil Wayne makes it clear: “I lay her down and kiss her neck / Talk dirty to her / Like I get that pussy wetter than a dirty sewer.” That has to be the worse fucking punchline ever.

Roman Reloaded is like one of those shows that the opening act is way better than the entire presentation.

My sister-in-law gave birth to a baby boy a few weeks ago; therefore, my mother-in-law had moved to her house to help out. My sister-in-law lives three-minute drive, without red light, from our house. Now each morning we dropped Dan off to her before heading to work.

Her day is filled with looking after Dan, helping out my sister-in-law and her kid, cooking for seven people and taking care of grandpa. If Dao gets sick and stays home, she watches him too. The best part is that she does all of that with a smile and not a word of complain. In my book, she’s a super grandma.

With my wife’s approval and my mother-in-law’s help looking after Dao, I’ll be attend the WordPress DC Meetup tonight. The topic is on Responsive Web Design. Definitely looking forward to it.

My wife brought the Graco DuoGlider for $37, the best bargain price for a stroller ever. I use it almost everyday after work to walk the boys around the blocks. Even though it is a bit clumsy to fold and taking up a bit of space in the trunk, I can’t really complain.

Yesterday morning, lil Dan work up around 6 and Dana woke me up also to look after him so she could crawl back to bed with Dao. The weather was around 40s, which was a bit chilly for a walk, but I took him out anyway. I just had to double up the blanket. We walked to University Mall for some Dunkin’ Donuts and Saxby coffee. He fell back to sleep after five minutes we left the house. I loaded up 5by5 for some geeky podcasts.

These days 5by5 has been visited on my iPhone quite often. I caught up all the episodes of The Web Ahead. Jen Simmons is a fantastic host with an awesome lineup. I also listened to some of The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman as well Content Talks with Kristina Halvorson. Both are excellent. I am also going through some The Talk Show podcasts with John Gruber. I am also listening to some of Shop Talk with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert.

Let’s get back to the kids. Around 3pm yesterday, neither of the boys wanted to take a nap. The quickest solution was taking them out for a walk. The boys got to take a nap and I got to do some exercise. It was like killing three birds with one stone. So I walked for almost three hours and the kids slept for three hours until time for dinner.

Everything was fine until Dao started coughing. He coughed until midnight before he could go to bed. I knew that the next day he wouldn’t be able to go to daycare. I ended up taking a day off work to be with him. I also took him to the doctor and turned out that he has allergy. The pollen got to him when we were walking outside yesterday. Poor kid. The little guy is doing fine though. He’s awesome!

Found this recipe in Reader’s Digest:

Author of Comfort Food Fix, [Ellie] Krieger tweeted that she spreads avocado on toast or with a slice of tomato and a sprinkle of coarse sea salt.

Here’s another good tip from RD:

By the time produce travels from its source to store shelves, it has lost many of its disease-fighting compounds. Buy fresh veggies locally or when in season. If not stick to to frozen, which is prepared at peak ripeness to lock in nutrients.

FTP

# service vsftpd status
# service vsftpd start
# chkconfig vsftpd on
# chkconfig vsftpd --list

httpd

# ll /var/www/
# ln -s /var/ftp/pub /var/www/html/pub
# cat > /var/ftp/pub/index.html

Summary: My Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) training is now completed. I took the skills assessment before I took the training and RH124 was recommended. Although the course was not the right fit for my job, which is server administration, I have learned the basic of Linux.

The class concentrated more on GUI than command line. I wish it was the other way around. Nevertheless, the instructor provided as much command lines as he could. Pete Davis was the instructor. He has great knowledge of the subject as well as a sense of humor, which helped making the class engaging.

I definitely recommend this course for absolute beginner to Linux. It would had been perfect for me if I took this course about four months ago when I first started my job. At this point, I wish I had taken Red Hat System Administration II (RH135).

Administer remote system including remote shell access, remote file transfer, using SSH keys

Managing physical storage including filesystem, partition and swap space

Install Linux with Anaconda.

SSH

# scp original-file new-file
# rsync -a /home/student demo:/tmp
-a=all

Archive

# tar -cvf target/to/archive source/to/archive
-c=create
-x=extract
-t=test (tell)
-v=verbose
-f=filename

Using SSH

# ssh-keygen
# ssh-copy-id example.com

# service crond status
# chkconfig –list crond

# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermissionRootLogin no
PassordAuthentication no
# service sshd restart

Summary: I am not really concentrating today. The subjects aren’t interesting and the installation process failed again.

Yum

# yum list (get the list of .rpm, which stands for RPM Package Manager)
# yum search kernel (kernel is the name of the package)
# yum install kernel
# yum update kernel
# yum remove kernel

Network

# ip addr show eth0 (eth0 is the name of the network)
# more /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
# service network restart
# system-config-network
# ip route
# host visualgui.com
# dig visualgui.com

Users and Groups

# useradd donny
# passwd donny
# vipw (let’s one user edit at the same time)

Manage Files

# echo $PATH
# pwd (current path)
# ls /home/{dir1,dir2} (show more two directories)
# ln file1 file2 (link file 1 to file 2)
# ln -s file1 file2 (symbolic link)
# su – username (change user)
# cp -av /dir/to/copy /dir/destination

Permission

r (view content)
w (change the content)
x (requires r to execute the content)

rw-rw-rw-
rw-r–r–
umask 002

u+s (suid=4: file executes as the user that owns the file, not the user that ran the file
g+s (sgid=2: file executes as the group that owns the file
o+t (sticky=1: no effect)

Summary: The best day so far of the training. Picked up many useful information. Hope the next two days will be even better.

Last Saturday I came back to Lancaster to attend an old buddy’s wedding and to my surprise Phong Le was in the house. He sang, rapped and hosted the reception. He still needed tremendous improvement as a host, but he was quite entertaining as a singer/rapper.

After introducing the bride and the groom family, Phong Le along with the Jam (a local band in Philly) kicked off a dedication to the bride with his own spin on “Nail Nail Nail.” Apparently there were quite a bit of nail owners in the audience. Nail salon is still one of Vietnamese thriving businesses around Lancaster. The guys I used to hang out with are now in the nail industry. Although the song is meant to be positive, it has become some sort of a joke. One can tell the crowd was not too pleased.

Then Phong Le rapped one of his signature tunes “Ghe Map” (Fat Chicks). A quick glance around the room, there were a handful of fat girls in the audience and they weren’t impressed either. I was surprised that no Heineken bottle was flying his way. Lancaster girls were on their best behavior.

Although Phong Le’s rap has yet to impress me, what I really liked about him was that he gave his all. His presence had made my buddy’s wedding very special. I appreciate and thank him for that. I also respect him for the fact that he was not one of those singers who think they are too good to sing at wedding. Fuck them!

Introduced to Bash

Commands entered at the shell prompt have three basic parts:

# chmod +x gedit demo.txt
[command] [options] [arguments]

Command lines:

# pwd (path you’re currently in)
# history
//Using the tab key (“tab” “tab”) for completion
# scp filename user@ip-address:/ (copy file from local folder to virtual server)

Introduced to managing physical storage using the graphical interface
Learned to manage logical volumes
Introduced to monitoring system resources

Summary: Even though the topics were interesting, they aren’t related to my job.