Who could care about the probability of love when brought, like us, to this
world under endless darkness? A great mountain engulfed

by a greater ocean, we formed, ever so slowly, from tectonic plates colliding, one mounting another, riding the way time rode

sunlight and moonlight across the icy surface of the water. We learned, with time, to view and invent this life from the depths

where beasts, now extinct, bellowed and belted their brutal songs. All that remains of them, and of that time, are the bones we buried, burnished

beneath beds of sandstone and limestone, made unknown and then known

like a restless sculptor pacing around a slab of marble, imitating God with a hammer and chisel. In the Garden of the Gods, we endured

when the waves and the darkness dried up. The wind whittled us

the erotics of erosion. Loss. Change. What we couldn’t change and what we lost to time made us more fully ourselves

and full of ourselves. We fooled around and made a fool of God. We, in our faulted and faultless glamour, became a brand-new home

for the bighorn sheep and lions, the canyon wrens and white-throated swifts
swinging low below a cloudless sky. We drank the sky and threw up

acres of wild prairie grass, piñon juniper, and ponderosa pine from the remains of ancestral ranges and sand dunes. Maybe this was love

after all. We remained. We reinvented ourselves. We let the weaker parts of us go

and decided, despite our egos and the tests of time, to test time and show

how miraculous it is to exist. To live beyond survival. To be alive twice and thrice, and countless times to find one with and within another.

What are the chances of that? One in a thousand. One in a million. One in love

proves and is living proof that anything and everything is probable

through seasons counting on rain to come down like a downpour of stars.

Seasons of Never This Again. Seasons of This Could Last Forever.
Paul Trần

I have been lugging around the 960-page A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925 – 2025, edited by Kevin Young. Even though I am not a poetry reader and I don’t understand most of the poems, I find reading poems relaxing.

Most of the time, I just read words. I even made Xuân and Vương dropped their iPad to read a few poems with me. They didn’t like to read and they didn’t understand what they read either, but their reading had improved. Whenever I came across a poem that I liked, I posted it on my blog so I can reread them later.

In the introduction, Kevin Young reveals that The New Yorker has 13,500 poems in the database. He also points out the lack of diversity, “Imagine my surprise when I pulled down the 1969 edition from my Zoom-ready bookshelf and found that in its 900 poems and 835 pages, no people of color appear.” In this 2025 edition, which has about 1,000 poems, and yet I only came across three poems from three Vietnamese-American poets: Hải-Đang Phan, Paul Trần, and Ocean Vương. I am sure Young could have included more than just 3 out of 13,500 poems.

By chopping the serifs off their slab family, Mortise, Seán Mongey and Max Phillips created Tenon, a sans family that not only complements its slab sibling, but also stands on its own. With open counters, a generous x-height, and wide proportions, Tenon offers versatility in setting type across print and digital environments. Tenon supports many languages, including Vietnamese. With combined diacritics,Tenon’s acute, grave, hook above, and tilde stack consistently on top of its circumflex. For a geometric family, the hook has a subtle but discernible tail. Take a look.

Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,

and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.

So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.

I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,

until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread.

It was pouring by then,
spilling, as they say in Ireland,
people splashing across the lot to their cars.
And that is when I set out,
walking slowly and precisely,
a soaking-wet man
bearing bags of groceries,
walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.

I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head.

I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,

plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.

Billy Collins

Thinking of how much my father loved flowering plants
And how much my mother still does.

And of how unfathomably hard it must have been
To clothe and feed ten children

With the most meagre of salaries for tending to citrus orchards—
For shovelling and irrigating and shovelling again.

How he groaned when I removed his work boots
At day’s end, an exhaustion deeper than any well.

Mom says his boss was a jerk, nothing ever good enough.
On top of everything, that empathy of her for him

Who’d never listened to her pleas because the priest said
All the children God will allow, the priest

Who never saw her afternoons slumped by the kitchen table,
A blank stare into somewhere

My voice could never reach.
Nothing to do but walk away. I swear

This is not about the unwanted child,
Or what a therapist called embodiment of the violation,

But about the strength and will to cradle the plants
Outside—the pruning, the watering, the sheltering

In found tarps and twine against the coldest nights.
To lean into the day’s hard edge,

And still find that reserve of tenderness
For the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the blue morning.

José Antonio Rodgríguez

Some useful directives for .htaccess

Turn on Rewrite:
RewriteEngine On

Configure the base path
RewriteBase /

Forces HTTPS and without WWW
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^visualgui.com
RewriteRule (.*) https://visualgui.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect everything file in a directory
RewriteRule ^old-dir/(.+)$ /new-dir/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect old URL to new URL
Redirect /old-file/ /new-file/

Custom 404
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Prevent directory listing when index file is not present
Options -Indexes

Mỗi câu tràng hạt Phật là Tâm
Phật rõ là Tâm uổng chạy tìm
Bể Phật dung hòa Tâm với Cảnh
Trời Tâm bình đẳng Phật cùng sanh
Bỏ Tâm theo Phật còn mơ mộng
Chấp Phật là Tâm chẳng trọn lành
Tâm, Phật nguyên lai đều giả huyễn
Phật, Tâm đồng diệt đến viên thành.

She brings us water, not intending harm,
And now a drier throat cannot confess
My praises for the motions of this waitress
And for the oneness of her uniform.
I know already that I lack the charm
For that; with her, there’s nothing counts for less
Than thoughts which fall as readily as a dress
And yet as finally as a severed arm.
The truckers at the other table try
A CB raunchy line to make her stay,
But I can only smile and order pie
To slow her in the cession of her tray,
Until I’ve tasted all that I could say
And swinging doors have swallowed our goodbye.

Anthony Lombardy

In a stunning move, George Mason University’s Board not only sided with President Gregory Washington, but also gave him a 1.5% raise to $823,000 a year. I am glad to see George Mason fights back while other universities folds to the Trump regime. As higher institutions, we need to stand up. We can’t let the government involves into our education. We need to stay independence. We need to give them the middle fucking fingers. Raise them up.

WordPress’s Site Health recommended that I should upgrade to PHP 8.3. I didn’t even realize that I was running on PHP 8.2. I googled for tutorials on how to update PHP on my DigitalOcean’s Droplets. Of course, I took a snapshots of my Droplets. Unfortunately, none of the tutorials I found worked. I had to restored my snapshots a couple of times. After about two hours, I almost gave up. Then I came across my own write up how I upgraded to PHP 8.2. All I had to do was replacing 8.2 with 8.4. I skipped 8.3. I also removed all old PHP packages and only leave 8.4. I was so glad that I documented all of the things I did. It definitely came in handy.

At work, I documented as much as I could as well on our Web Design & Services blog.