The beautiful weekend has just flown by and I am exhausted from working on the house. We made some progress and I feel less stressed. Last week I was worrying that we won’t get to finish the house before the little guy sees the light. I was talking to a colleague of mine and she gave me the best advice: “Just work on the part were you can move in and continue later on.” If we don’t have enough time, I can still work on the basement later. Why didn’t I think of that?

Again, my sister-in-law and her husband had given us their unconditional support. We are very fortunate to have them around and we can’t thank them enough. Unlike me, my sister-in-law’s husband is a very skillful handyman. He could do pretty much anything around the house, yet he is so humble about it. My father, too, is very good at fixing around the house and he, too, is worrying about us not getting the house ready before his first grandchild comes out. He offers to help us next weekend since he will be off for President Day. I guess that’s family is for.

This weekend we had an electrician came in to hook up some lights for us. We originally was going to hired a friend of a friend, but he charged three times more than this guy who is recommended to us through our real estate agent. He has done a great job at an economical price. He put up all the lights we requested with minimal cut through dry walls and ceilings.

When he was up in the attic, he discovered lots of flies. Why would an attic have lots of flies? Does anyone know? Obviously it’s not a good thing. Could it be that the roof was left opened? We had the roof patched up but the problem already exist? Please let me know if you know any treatment. When he left the door open, the flies got into the bedrooms and these flies aren’t so active. I could just suck them up with a vacuum tube. Even with the loud noise, they couldn’t fly away.

Franklin & Marshall launched a new design. While the new version isn’t that striking, it sure looks much better than that previous one. The site has also accomplished the unified look and feel across the board, something GW is trying to do.

I am not sure when Harvard University launched its new homepage, but I really like the simple layout with such a minimal set of links.

Sign the letter telling the Supreme Court not to divorce 18,000 California couples.

We now have a fan page for simplexpression on Facebook. Thanks Joseph for pitching the idea.

The following excerpt is taken from the introduction of Ken Robinson’s The Element:

An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.”

The girl said, “They will in a minute.”

Lil Wayne told Katie Courics in their interview.

Paul Boag ‘s “10 Things a Web Designer Would Never Tell You“:

Working with web designers is a nightmare. You will never meet a more opinionated bunch of snobs. They are always going on about ‘white space’, ‘composition’ and how they went to art college (like that counts as a proper education!).

With his formal training in opera, The Son could hold a note longer than it needs to. On the title track of his unimaginative album, he does just that without even a rough edge could be heard. He has such a smooth, polished voice that when he sings a drunken tune like “Trai Tim Tat Nguyen,” he sounds like a sober guy.

The major problem with The Son isn’t just his voice, but he spends way too much of his time trying to make hits instead of carving out a niche for himself. He covers the most covered tunes including the exhausting “Lat Mat Mua Xuan,” “Ve Day Em” and “Khuc Tram Ca” with nada creativity. Thuy Nga’s mechanical productions aren’t helping either. Even on the bossa-nova remake of “Vet Thuong Cuoi Cung,” he stays so faithful to the melody that it just sounds strenuous.

Doi Toi Chi Mot Nguoi satisfies his fans, but not going to win him any newcomer. The Son needs to get out of his comfort zone and experiment new sounds. Covering hand-me-down hits just don’t do it for him. For the sake of change, put his training in good use. Cut an opera album or something.

I was in a two-hour meeting with a web design agency to take a peak at what to come at gwu.edu and all GW’s web sites. The direction will be a unified look and feel across the board to give users a better experience throughout GWU web sites.

The new site is nothing spectacular, but it does look promising in term of organization and structure. It will be powered by Vignette, a content management system. Since the new direction will be unifying all of GW’s web presence, the School of Business will have to follow the template. As much as I hate to work with a template, this move will make a much smoother experience for the users.

In addition, once the brand is established, the content could be concentrated on more. So even if I have to dismantle all of our sites and start over, I’ll be glad to for the benefit of the entire university web sites. I do hope that the university will stay firm with its direction. So far, I have not seen a university web site that has a look and feel across the board. As soon as you go into the academic programs, the sites begin to branch out on their own. We’ll see things go.