After four days of eating healthy, I decided to treat myself to Eden Center. Headed to Viet Royal for Sautéed Lobster in Shell with Ginger and Scallion. The lobster is a bit small, but not bad at all.

My wife is heading back to work next week. Her maternity leave is up. To cheer her up, I’ll invite her out to lunch next week, maybe next Friday, to try out Sautéed Lobster in Shell with Salt & Pepper. I’ll probably like that better.

After launching the web site for Renew Body Contour, I am so tempting to get the treatment myself. Thanks to a week straight of Eden Center’s diet (usually a bowl of noodle soup or a big plate of rice with avocado or durian smoothie), I now tipped over 150 pounds, which is the weight I thought I would never exceed. I know I am fat when I weight more than a pregnant woman. It’s definitely not a good thing to work so closed to a vibrant Vietnamese food area. I need to stick to my mixed greens, chicken, tomatoes and grapes. I also need to get back to jogging again. The weather is too damn nice.

I broke so many resolutions already. My wife just sigh when I tell her that I need to stop eating recklessly. On Tuesday, I went to James Hoban’s with a few of my closed former colleagues. After a few gin and tonic, I went for a big bacon burger. Man, it was heaven-sent. I couldn’t resist the temptation because I was so happy for one of them for taking on a new job four months after me. We worked together and the circumstand and the situation pulled us tighter together. That’s something to be pondered in another post.

If nothing else, the boys take after me their loud farts. Nowadays Cu Dan trumpets really loud when he poops, but the funny thing is that Cu Dao immediately blamed on me, “Daddy dit (farted).” I was like, “No, I didn’t do it. Your lil brother did it.”

We got complaints from Dao’s teachers that him and his best buddy played together as well as fought against each other. Grandma asked him why he got into the fight with his best friend and his reply was, “Aidan quay qua (acted naughty).”

I rolled out a major update on George Mason Law last night to improve the user experience on small screen devices. The massive amount of links on the header and the navigation take up the entire screen on the iPhone. When users clicked on a nav item, they couldn’t tell that the page is being loaded below the screen. I have pondered upon the issue for a while and finally figured out a solution.

I made the logo smaller and moved the entire header and navigation to the bottom of the page for small screens. I added two links at the top of the page: “skip to content” and “skip to navigation.” Users can get direct to content or navigation with just one click or tap. With the smaller logo and navigation out of the way, the content is now moved up higher on the small devices. For large screens, I moved the entire header back to the top of the page using CSS absolute positioning.

What I really like about this approach is the improve in accessibility and SEO. Users with screen readers don’t have to go through all of the nav links to get to the main content. Search engines could also get to the information much faster because the content is higher on the page.

The beauty of the web is that we can still make changes after the site has launched.

My father-in-law is advocating 70 Năm Tình Ca Trong Tân Nhạc Việt Nam (1930 – 2000) to his friends and family. I started to listen to the first part on my way to work this morning. My commute is probably the only quiet time for me to focus on the program. I find it informative so far.

Our previous client who we worked together on United Green Solutions returns to us for a small site design to advertise his new business: Renew Body Contour. Even though the site only has a few pages, we didn’t take the shortcut because we value every customer’s project.

We made sure that the site is fully developed and functioned properly on all devices. Since the site will also be used as a landing page for ads, we want the site to be optimized for mobile phones and tablets. We made the design responsive using HTML5 and CSS3. We also used HTML5 Boilerplate and customized Modernizr for backward compatibility.

Có những niềm riêng làm sao nói hết.
Tôi viết rồi, rồi tôi lại xóa tôi ơi.
Tiến thoái lưỡng nan, đi về lận đận.
Tình không xa nhưng không thật gần.
Rừng xưa đã khép, rừng xưa đã khép.
Tôi lần mò leo mãi không qua được vách nghiện.
Để gió cuốn đi, để gió cuốn đi.
Hãy cố yêu người mà sống.
Và như thế tôi sống qua từng ngày.

What makes Stacey Kent so damn addictive is that I can enjoy the art of reinterpreation and the craft of enunciation simultaneously. Out of her nine albums, which being shuffled frequently on my iPhone, In Love Again stands out as an exceptional reimagination of Richard Rodgers’ music.

With her fresh approach, relaxed technique and warm intimacy, Kent has managed to escape the shadow of great jazz singers before her like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday who had put their own signiture on Rodgers’ composition. Kent comes out swinging in such an easy-going manner on “Shall We Dance?” then retreats to late-night sophistication on “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

Her mood swings up again on “My Heart Stood Still” and then quickly settles down on the sensational “It Never Entered My Mind.” The rare gem and my personal favorite on the songbook has to be the playful “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair.” She skillfully makes the transition from light swing to dark blues and the quintet, which made up of her husband and tenor saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, guitarist Colin Oxley, pianist Dave Newton, bassist Simon Thorpe and drummer Jasper Kviberg, knows exactly what to do behind her.

While the melodies and the lyrics are familiar, Kent makes them sound new again simply by singing from her heart and soul. In Love Again can be summed up in one line and she has done so flawlessly: “It’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget.”

In my freshman year in college, I had a young professor for my first English class. One of our weekly assignments was to read any piece in the New Yorker and write a summary about it. At the time, I knew nothing about design and marketing. I didn’t take the New Yorker seriously because of its cartoon illustrations. Furthermore, I didn’t understand a single thing I read in the magazine. The articles were so long and I got bored just looking at the pages I have to go through.

The young professor was really helpful though. Because she lived on campus, sometimes she invited me to her place to correct my massive grammar mistakes, something I don’t seem to overcome. I was in her class for two semesters in a row and I loved them both. Another assignment I enjoyed doing was keeping a daily journal. She then collected the journal on Friday, read them and wrote back her comments. Come to think of it, she is responsible for my addiction to blogging.

Even after I graduated from college, I never enjoyed reading, but I forced myself to read tech books to learn computer skills. I started getting into reading around the time I began my interest in blogging. I read mostly non-fiction books because I thought that if I spend time reading, I better learn something out of it. I read jazz books because the subject interested me. Then I finally figured out that reading is the best way to kill time like when I get stuck in a doctor office or riding on the train; therefore, I try to take a book with me whenever I go. I just hate waiting.

To find interesting topics for my blog, I started reading online. New Yorker then became one of my favorite sources. I read most of the articles posted online, but a year or so ago the New Yorker limited its online publications to its subscriber. I knew it was time for me to get the print edition. I kept pushing it off until late last year when my niece had a fundraising for her school. If I subscribe to a magazine, the school will get 40% (or something like that). Killing two birds with one stone, I couldn’t refuse. Since then I have always looking forward to Wednesday to read the New Yorker.

What I like about the New Yorker is that I read and learn something new every issue in addition to its political coverage and music review. I appreciate the level of detail in the pieces. I should have subscribed to the New Yorker a long time ago and I don’t think I ever want to cancel my membership. Then I read Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration” last week and realized is it good to know all this information?

The excellent piece details the process of transplanting a face to a young man who was shocked by high-voltage power. He was burnt so bad that the doctors had to cut off his mouth, eyes and nose. They had to put temporary pig skin on his face to help him heal. Then there’s an account of a woman who took too much sleeping pills then collapsed. After she woke up and tried to smoke a cigarette only to find out that her whole mouth had been eaten by a dog. This is one of the reasons we will never have any pet in our house.

Sometimes I feel like ignorant is a bliss. The less I know the better. Being a parent every little thing makes me paranoid. What happen if something like that in the article happened to my kids? I was doing the dishes the other day and I turned on the food-waste disposer. Then something occurred to me. What if one boy tells the other to put his hand down there then turns on the switch?

When we bought the house, one of my favorite features was the laundry shooter. It’s great because we can just throw dirty clothes down to the basement. I was holding Cu Dan on my arms the other day and staring at the laundry shooter for a minute and thought what if Cu Dao decided to give his little brother a slide from the top floor to the basement? It’s damn near impossible to do, but the thought occured in my mind.

Then there are sharp toothpicks found around the house. What if one guy decided to poke his brother’s eye out with the toothpick to see what happened? Then the door to the basement, which hardly shut tight. What if one decided to push the other down the basement?

I talked to Dana about my paranonia and she felt the same way, especially about the toothpicks. I am really glad that I am not the only one. Still, reading things that happened to other people give me a chill. That’s also one of the reasons I don’t watch the news. It just creeps the shit out of me.

It’s quite rare to hear an entire Vietnamese album with only original tunes. Quái Vật Tí Hon (Lil’ Monsters) is an experiential rock group that does just that with its debut Đường Về. Yet what makes the album so attractive (even to none-rock listener like myself) is the combination of skillful storytelling and clever incorporation of Vietnamese traditional folks melody into modern rock.

“Vì Đời” is easily one of the highlights from the album, or at least to me, because I can related to the lyrics: “Vợ mình đẹp nhất hành tinh / Người tình đẹp nhất lúc bình minh / Vì đời có tài nên thường linh tinh.” Công Hải, lead vocalist who penned all the lyrics, knows the important of clear communication; therefore, he keeps his singing simple and stays within his raspy range. “Ô Trống” takes me back to my childhood years. I can’t recall the words, but I can hum to the melody.

Minified down to just acoustic strumming guitar, Công Hải pours out his drunken soul on “Vợ Ơi, Anh Sai Rồi.” Elsewhere, “Kẻ Lạ Mặt” recounts an incident in which he walked into his lover making out with a stranger. Đường Về is worth listening even if you aren’t into rock. Then again as much as I find the personal narrative to be engaging, the rock guitar riffs are too much noise for me to return for more.