After listening to Link, Hoàng Thùy Linh’s latest release, I wrote down hilarious lines just to amuse myself. I also revisited her previous album, Hoàng, released in 2019, which I like a bit more. Then I had the idea of creating a sample page for Vietnamese Typography based on these two albums.

My initial concept was to create a three-column grid layout for each song with image, lyrics, and pull-out quote in each column. I abandoned the concept because I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. Then I simplified it to just pull quotes and lyrics. I created the first song right in the browser and didn’t like the result. I cut out the lyrics and just put all the quotes together in one running text.

For typography, I selected Canicule Display, design by Kostas Bartsokas. Even though Culicule is still a work in progress, it comes nine weights and supports Vietnamese, which makes it usable for this project.

For photography, I went with a screen captured from her “Tứ phủ” video. I like the simplicity of this photo as well as the shades of pink, which is great to use as a background. To add a twist to the design, I flipped Hoàng Thùy Linh upside down as if she was hanging off from the top of the screen. Then I laid the quotes from each song over her.

The result was quite striking and different from what I had done before. I head toward a typographical exploration rather than a readable presentation. Even though this tiny project ate up more of my sleep time than I had anticipated, I found it gratifying. I want to experiment with more playful typography for the web. Take a look at the final design.

It has been hot as hell driving the Toyota Sienna 2011 in the summer since the A/C no longer blowing out cool air. The dealer wanted to charge me $189 to fix the issue. I recalled someone told me about AC recharge, but I could not find anything on YouTube. On Saturday, my wife told me about the product called A/C Pro ACP-100 Ultra Synthetic R-134a Car Refrigerant Kit, 20 oz and I picked it up at Walmart for $37 yesterday.

Then I found the official video on YouTube on how to recharge your car A/C. The process took about two minutes and I had my A/C back. The kids and I were rejoiced. We went to the skate park to rollerblade and Tea Do for boba teas and Street Fighter. I am not really a fan of Tea Do, but it has some classic arcade games for free. The kids loved Street Fighter.

After the summer hiatus, I stepped back into the rink for the first time last Wednesday. Needless to say, my chops have become rusty. I went back to the basics and tried my loop and flip jumps. I still need a lot of practice, but I am just taking my time. I am not in any rush. As long as I don’t lose interest like my kids, I’ll just keep going.

Aggressive skating is going well for me. I hit the skatepark everyday. I haven’t done anything too crazy, just learning to stall on the quarter pipe and to grind a bit. The progression is slow, but I am enjoying it. Aggressive skating is a good exercise for an old man like me. The skatepark is always free and if I come at the right time, I get the whole part to myself. My sons joined me sometimes, but their hearts aren’t in it like they used to. My second son is such a natural skater. Even though he doesn’t practice everyday like me, he surpasses me. He can just skate with effortlessness.

I can’t wait for the winter to come so we can hit the slopes. Fortunately my sons are still interested in skiing and snowboarding. We already bought the Epic pass for the three old kids and myself. My youngest is still free and he will be reusing his skis from last year. Xuân is all set with brand new boots and a pair of twin-tip skis. We’re still searching for a snowboard for Đán and a pair of twin-tip skis for Đạo. My wife isn’t sure what she wants to do yet.

For me, I bought a new pair of ski boots, Lance RX 120, to replace an old pair of Lance for junior I bought last year for $40. I’ve worn them out already. I also bought a pair of Head XENON Xi 5.0 for $50. I didn’t know what the heck I was purchasing. It turned out to be such a fantastic pair of skis. I went from green to double black diamonds in them. I only started to do some research yesterday and this pair was made in 2008. It is still in great shape after 14 years.

Over the summer, I bought a pair of K2 Apache Sabre (119-72-103) for $75, which came with poles and a bag. I thought it was a good deal. It turned out this pair was also made in 2008. As much as I love my Head skis, I wanted to let my wife use it to learn on the bunny. It might be a bit too long for her. I tuned up both my K2 and Head skis; therefore, they will be ready to hit the slope in the winter.

Two months ago, I picked up a used Burton White Collection snowboard for $35 for my second son, but it is a bit too big and heavy for him. I am thinking of giving snowboarding another try. I didn’t do too well last season, but I gave up after I bruised my thumb when I stuck my hand in the magic belt. Đán, my second son, took the lessons together with me, but he advanced so quickly. He went from the bunny slope to double black diamonds in a month or so. My hope is to get to the blue slopes on snowboarding.

This morning, I was scheduled to participate in a professional group photoshoot to celebrate my 10 years of service at George Mason University, but I couldn’t make it because I was exposed to Covid over the weekend. When our third son didn’t want to get out of bed, he complained that he felt tired. We decided to give him a home test and the result showed up positive immediately. We tested everyone, including myself, and our results were negative.

Nevertheless, we notified our sons’ school. Our third son who tested positive needed to stay home to quarantine. He slept in the same bed with me last night, which meant I would be affected as well even though I hadn’t shown any symptoms. Covid had finally caught up to me after it killed my mother. Before I succumbed to Covid, I went to the skatepark to just ride it out. The park was completely empty during school hours. I hopped onto the highest pipe and looked up at the sky. I talked to my mother and asked her to protect me and my family. I knew she had been looking out for us since she had gone to heaven. We had dodged Covid up to this point because she had kept us safe, and this unfortunately exposure was no exception. I have faith in her.

After I picked up my first son from school, we went to CVS to pick up more Covid test kits. We went home and tested our first son. His result was negative. I took the test again and I was still negative. Our third son who tested positive in the morning asked us if he could take it again. We hesitated, but then why not? This time his result came back negative. We used a different kit to test him again and the result was still negative. Either these home tests were unreliable or my mother had done her miracle. I believe the latter.

Tomorrow I will take our third son to CVS to get tested again. Let’s find out if indeed my mother had made another miracle to keep us Covid-free.

In his latest video, Type Designer Stephen Nixon spent 40 minutes sharing his approach for designing Vietnamese diacritics—something I had always wanted to see since I started to do research for my thesis. Even though I don’t know anything about Glyphs and RoboFont, the process looks intriguing. The best part of the video is when Stephen walks through a book called Vietnamese Typography by yours truly. Of course, I am biased.

As Stephen pointed out, designing Vietnamese diacritics seems to be intimidating at first, but with my website as a reference and some practice, you will do just fine. I am always available to review if you need feedback on your Vietnamese diacritical marks. If you’re designing a Latin typeface, you should have no excuse not supporting Vietnamese diacritics. You have all the resources you need at your fingertips; therefore, you should plan to incorporate Vietnamese diacritics early in your process.

Watch Stephen’s video for technical details. Reach out to him if you have any technical questions. Get in touch with me if you need help with your diacritical design. I charge a small fee, but we can also negotiate if your budget is tight.

Nguyễn Du’s Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kiều) is recognized as the masterpiece of national literature. Structured in lục-bát (six-eight) couplets, Truyện Kiều, which consists of 3,254 lines, is not only a literary bible but also a national epic that has inspired political debate, social critique, and revolutionary spirit.

Last Friday, I typeset Truyện Kiều in Portada to showcase Vietnamese Typography. With Portada, ​​Veronika Burian and José Scaglione set out to create a serif family that’s as clear and readable as a sans family in digital environments. Portada is designed specifically for user interfaces as well as long reading online. Portada has extended its support for Vietnamese. In working with Vik and José on Vietnamese diacritics for Portada, I caught a glimpse of how the two talented designers collaborated. They lived up to their foundry’s name: TypeTogether. For the title, I chose Water Brush, designed by Robert Leuschke, which has a hand-drawing vibe, to give the cover a paper quality.

When I published and launched the online version of Vietnamese Typography, I created a few samples just to give type designers how Vietnamese diacritics were being applied to different applications and publications. The samples, however, have turned into small design projects for me to experiment with Vietnamese typography. In addition, they have become my collection of Vietnamese art, culture, and literature. I hope you enjoy glancing at them or reading them if you can read Vietnamese. Take a look at Truyện Kiều.

The restructuring is inevitable. I will be taken out of the library and reporting to the Assistant Dean of Strategic Communications and Marketing. I have been part of the library staff for ten years and have always enjoyed working with my colleagues, but it makes more sense that I will be part of the communications and marketing department.

My new supervisor is also new to the school. His position was just created recently and he needed a team to support him. Both myself and my web content specialist will be on his team. He will also be hiring a Director of Communications to work on external communications.

I have been working with him for a few months and he is great as a coworker. I hope he will be an easygoing supervisor as well. I stayed around for a decade because my supervisors were flexible, understanding, and hands-off. I hope those things won’t change. I am looking forward to the new change.

In attempt to upgrade one of my Droplets from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, I kept run into the usbmuxd errors. I reached out to DigitalOcean and they suggested migrating to a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 server rather than upgrading in-place (sudo do-release-upgrade). The process seemed quite time-consuming. As a result, I tried a different method.

To begin, I updated to the latest versions of all packages for the current release of my Droplet:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt dist-upgrade

In DigitalOcean’s web interface, I powered off my current Droplet, took a snapshot, then created a new Droplet from the snapshot. Once the new Droplet was created, I ran sudo do-release-upgrade. To my relief, the upgrade succeeded without any error.

I have a handful of sites on this Droplet, but they all PHP files and no database. To check and see if my websites worked, I edited the Hosts file in Terminal:

sudo vi /private/etc/hosts

11.111.111.111 donnytruong.com

To edit the Hosts file, type i for insert, then :wq to write and quit. After using sFTP to make sure that the sites were indeed working correctly, I went into Cloudflare’s DNS interface to update my A records to point to the new Droplet.

I am pretty darn proud of myself for figuring this one out.

From compelling writing to gripping story lines, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot keeps you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. It’s a masterpiece of fiction. I don’t want to give the plot away; therefore, just read it for yourself if you’re into novels.

I was up late last night upgrading Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. I have two Droplets in DigitalOcean. One just for this WordPress blog and one for my other sites. The Droplet for my blog upgraded smoothly. Unfortunately the other one didn’t upgrade successfully. I restored and tried three times. I even tried to diagnose the issue, but I couldn’t get through usbmuxd. Here’s the error:

Errors were encountered while processing:
 usbmuxd
Exception during pm.DoInstall():  E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

*** Send problem report to the developers?

After the problem report has been sent, please fill out the form in the automatically opened web browser.

What would you like to do? Your options are:
  S: Send report (434.0 KB)
  V: View report
  K: Keep report file for sending later or copying to somewhere else
  I: Cancel and ignore future crashes of this program version
  C: Cancel
Please choose (S/V/K/I/C): c

Could not install the upgrades

The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

Setting up usbmuxd (1.1.1-2build2) ...
usbmuxd.service is a disabled or a static unit, not starting it.

Upgrade complete

The upgrade has completed but there were errors during the upgrade process. 

Even though the upgraded seemed to fail, my sites loaded fine and everything seemed to work, but I revert back to Ubuntu 20.04 just to be safe. If anyone has any experience with this sort of thing, please help.