From the opening title track to the closing “Hồn Việt,” (both written by Minh Châu), Chàng Trai Việt is indeed a patriotic album. With his charming, authoritative tenor, Công Lâm effortlessly navigated through epic-orchestrated pieces including Phạm Đình Chương’s “Tiếng dân chài” and Phạm Duy’s “Áo anh sứt chỉ đường tà.” Yet, the success of the album isn’t just his voice alone. It’s the combination of right song choices, strong supportive from backup vocal groups and excellent musical arrangements. Chàng Trai Việt is well-crafted and well-thoughtout. Definitely worth experiencing from start to finish.

Two new mix drinks I created this week I really dig. They both are simple to make and yet quite delightful.

Donny’s Limonata:
3oz Appleton White Jamaica Rum
6oz Sanpellegrino Limonata (sparkling lemon beverage)
1oz simple syrup

Pour rum into a highball filled with ice. Add sparkling lemon beverage. Stir. Garnish with some chopped fresh mint leaves. Voila.

Donny’s Peach Iced Tea:
4oz Popeye’s Cane Sweeeet™ Iced Tea
4oz Hiram Walker Peach Flavored Schnapps

Pour iced tea into a highball filled with ice. Add peach flavored Schnapps. Stir. Garnish with a slice of peach in the drink. Enjoy.

I felt in love with Stacey Kent a couple weeks ago and still do so with several more albums. Her clear enunciation combined with her no-nonsense phrasing makes her so damn pleasure to listen to during work and drive.

Raconte-Moi is my favorite album for the morning commute. Ms. Kent’s romantic French-singing and the tasty arrangements, particularly the bossa nova groove on the first two tracks (“Les Eaux De Mars” and “Jardin D’hiver”) are a perfect way to start the gorgeous autumn day.

The Lyric is a lovely collaboration with her husband, saxophonist Jim Tomlinson. The album kicks off with an instrumental cover of “Manha De Carnival.” While it is a beautiful, one would wish Ms. Kent lent her voice to the track because Mr. Tomlinson isn’t Paul Desmond nor Stan Getz. The ones featured Ks. Kent, including “I’ve Grown Accustomed To His Face,” “If I were A Bell” and “My Heart Belongs To Daddy,” are sensational.

Breakfast On The Morning Tram truly showcases Ms. Kent as a gifted storyteller. From “The Ice Hotel” to “Landslide” to “I Wish I Could Go Traveling Again” and the title track, Ms. Kent brought novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s lyrics to life like she was narrating to a romantic film with simple picking guitar. The album strangely ends with her straightforward reading of “What a Wonderful World.”

I still have a few more albums of her to get through, but these three are pure pleasure.

One of the challanges of setting up the Admissions Office Intranet is that I had no content to work with. The Admissions Office needed a site that is limited to just incoming law students. My responsibility was to come up with the shell that would allow the staff to fill in the pages.

I had three choices of CMS. Drupal would be too complicated for the project. MODX was my selection, but designing an empty site from scatch was not an ideal solution. The effort was not worthwhile for a restricted site. I needed something that is well thought out to kick off with. WordPress is the perfect choice because its default theme, Twenty Eleven, had everything that is required. I just needed to jazz up the design a bit to comply with the school’s branding.

I decided to experiment with WordPress’s child theme based off Twenty Eleven and ended up loving the idea of customizing the design without touching the parent theme. With a bit of CSS knowledge, one can create a pretty decent site. The child theme turned out to be a perfect solution for this particular project. The site is obviously restricted, but you can still get a sneak peak of the homepage.

Found out that a friend got canned. She was professional, down to earth and an excellent team leader. With such a positive attitude and superb communication skills, she’ll have no problem finding a new gig for sure. What I respected her the most was her calmness even under tremendous pressure. I can still picture a smile on her face even though she got it bad and it ain’t no good.

Even though we never really get beyond the professional relationship, I will always draw back to her as a mentor. She never gave me any advice, but I could learn from the way she treated and inspired the people around her. Think positive and keep moving forward. Hope someday, we’ll reconnect.

Daycare sent Dao home Monday afternoon for a high fever. I took off Tuesday to take care of him. He fussed and refused everything from food to milk to water. I had to take him to the shopping mall train to get him to eat. We sat in the food court and watched the train goes by. I made a deal with him. If he eats we would get to ride the train. If not we just go home. He screamed and screamed, but he knew he better eat to get on the train.

Tuesday night, he got better and could be back to daycare the next day, but grandparent drove down just in case he would still be out sick. He ended up staying home for the rest of the week and didn’t want to back to daycare. He loves spending time with grandma because she plays with him as much as he wants to. None of us could do that except for grandma and he knows it. He was sitting on he coach, watching Jay Jay, leaning on her and eating a cheese sandwich like a little king.

While grandma was occupied with Dao, grandpa fixed things around the house. The damn towel bar in the bathroom kept falling off the wall because I couldn’t nail though the wood. I put on compound and screwed it back in. It fell off again the next day; therefore, I just left it like that. I was just going to get rid of it, but I hadn’t have the time. Yesterday, I discovered the bar was back on the wall and tightly secured. I need to ask him how did he do it. He also made a holder for Dao’s bathtub. It looks pretty clever.

It’s always a great pleasure having the grandparent visiting us. They’ll off to Cancun with my sister-in-law and her husband for five days. I am sure they’ll appreciate the quietness and the relaxation after what they had been through with the little kid.

Like most marketable pop releases in Vietnam, Khánh Phương’s Nước Mắt Vì Sao Rơi is packed with catchy melodies, contagious hooks and chuckling lyrics. Just pick out any tune on the album and you can figure out the formula. The chorus on “Nếu Không Có Anh Ta” goes: “Nếu không có anh ta em có thấy buồn không? / Lúc trống vắng cô đơn hãy nhớ anh một lần.” Who wouldn’t get a giggle out of conversational lines like that?

But what makes Khánh Phương stands out is his charming, gruff voice combined with his carefree swagger in delivering the words. He’s a reminiscent of Tuấn Hưng in his “Tình Yêu Lung Linh” hey-days. (Tuấn Hưng sings like he had taken doses of Zolpidem nowadays.) Khanh Phuong, on the other hand, sounds energetic on a mid-tempo groove like “Lựa Chọn Một Hạnh Phúc” and so damn sincere on puppy-love, slow jams like “Đừng Hỏi Vì Sao,” particularly on the hook: “Lúc mới khi yêu sẽ buồn lúc mới khi yêu sẽ vui / Lúc mới khi yêu sẽ nhớ / Đến lúc con tim đổi thay chẳng biết được vì sao đổi thay / vẫn thương vẫn yêu vẫn nhớ nhưng nhớ thương chỉ trong vài giây.”

The album loses its strength when he gets too Chinese-sounding on “Người Ra Đi Vì Ai” and “Hãy Ra Đi Nếu Em Muốn.” Nevertheless Nước Mắt Vì Sao Rơi has its shining moments before fading away in the fast-changing pop scene.

As a new command-line user, I find Mark Sobell’s A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming an indispensable resource next to Google. I picked up a handful of Linux books, but this is the only comprehensive text that focused mainly on command line.

After reading the book from cover to cover, I have learned the power of using command line and how not daunting the black screen with white text appears to be. Part V, “Command Reference,” makes this book a must-have guide next to my office desk, especially with the cover of Mac OS X. Highly recommended.

Dao has a great memory and remembers most of the books we have read; therefore, I liked to do a bit of interactive reading with him. For example, when we read Dr. Seuss’s ABC, I said “A” and he said “alligator.” I said “B” and he said “bumblebee.” I said “C” and he said “camel.” When we got to “I,” however, he said “gai,” which means scratch in Vietnamese, but the actual word is “itchy.”

Another book that he liked to read is P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” He started out with, “A mother bird sat on her egg. The egg jumped.” The I read the next few lines with him filling in the sentences. When we got to page eight, he got up, jumped and yelled out, “the egg jumped. It jumped, and jumped, and jumped.” Then I said, “Out came…” He screamed, “the baby bird!” He also said, “I am too loud.” I replied, “Yes, you are.”

One of our favorite books is Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go. Here’s how we read it:

Me: Congratu…
Dao: lations!
Me: Today is…
Dao: your day.
Me: You’re off to…
Dao: Great Places!
Me: You’re off and…
Dao: away.
Me: You have brains in your…
Dao: head.
Me: You have feet in your…
Dao: shoes.
Me You can steer yourself any direction you…
Dao: choose.
Me: You’re on your…
Dao: own.
Me: And you know what you…
Dao: know.
Me: And YOU are the guy who’ll decide…
Dao: where to go.

It’s already three weeks. Time flies by so fast when you have so much to learn. Mad kudos to my predecessor for being so patience with me. He already took on his new job, yet he is still very responsive to my questions. He has been teaching me so much in the past few weeks. I wish he had documented all of these tasks so I don’t have to bother him, but I am getting more comfortable using command line and finding my way into the servers.

I have been reading vigorously on Linux and Apache and trying to learn as much as I possibly could. The experience has been daunting and rewarding. In addition to server administration, I have redesigned a new layout for the main site and it has already been approved. I am now in the process of turning into HTML pages. I am also rewriting the front-end codes from scratch using HTML5, CSS3 as well as making the layout responsive. ModX looks very straightforward to switch out the templates. I hope that’ll be the case, but will find out when I get to that point.

I am very happy so far with the new gig. I started out being fearful to gaining confidence, thanks to my new awesome supervisor for her support and encouragement. I feel very lucky to be in such a great environment learning new stuff as well as doing what I like.

These past few weeks, I have been watching with Dao one favorite movies, The Little Engine That Could, and the lines that stuck to me was, “If you think you can, you will. If you think you can’t, you won’t. Either way you’re right.” That’s my inspiration. I think I can.