I love coffee and I love durian; therefore, I couldn’t resist the temptation when I spotted Ipoh Charcoal Roasted Durian Coffee at 99 Ranch Market yesterday. I had a cup in the morning and it became an instant favorite of mine. The durian fragrance was just wonderful, but I wished the coffee was a bit stronger and darker. In the afternoon, I went for another cup after lunch. The second time I added a bit of instant coffee and it tasted delicious. I was going to link it to Amazon, but the price is three times more than what I paid for at 99 Ranch.

Speaking of Amazon, thanks to those who had ordered products linked from the homepage of this blog. I use the big text to promote my work, but I don’t have any project at the moment. So I wanted to try it out Amazon Associates. I only earned a few dollars, but it isn’t intrusive. I am not tracking you and I am not using any third-party scripts. I just link the text directly to Amazon. Thank you for your support.

Highlights from JAY-Z’s 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction, including inspiring speeches from Dave Chappelle and JAY-Z himself. Worth half an hour of your time.

Dear Đán,

Today you have reached the first decade of your life. It has been a wonderful experience observing you grow in the past ten years. From the day you were born, I could tell you were athletic. The first time I put you on the ice rink, you just walked by yourself without me holding your hands. You fell a few times, but quickly found your balance. Now you skate as HAM.

I enjoyed watching you learn ice hockey. Even though I have been tough on your performance, I am very proud of you. Keep up the great work and you will join a hockey team soon.

I enjoyed rollerblading at the skateparks with you. You inspired me to go hard or go home and vice versa. For a while, I could drop in at the top of higher ramps than you, but you have excelled so fast. Now I can’t even catch up with you.

You were also excellent at skiing, but you had decided to switch to snowboarding. I can’t wait to see you snowboarding this winter. I want to join you as well.

As far as academics, you have made some improvements in the first quarter. I know you can excel in school too if you pay attention. You are a smart boy. All you need is some patience and concentration on what you do. Just like sports, you can progress through practice and determination to learn.

I love you very much. Happy birthday, my son.

Love,
Daddy

I took a break after redesigning this blog and to spend Thanksgiving with my family. Having eight boys from ages between two and thirteen together was hard to relax, but they sure made the time flew by. My brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and I tried our best to entertain them, but we had to rely on Steve Jobs to give us a few breaks. The only time we could relax a bit was when they were all on their iPad.

Big props to my wonderful wife for cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving and making sushi for Đán’s tenth birthday party on Saturday. I am so grateful for everything she does for our family and for me. At times, I feel as if I don’t deserve her. She is just too damn good for me and I can’t reciprocate. I don’t like to expose my weaknesses, but I don’t think I can live without her. I survived breakups before, but this is different. I promised myself to be independent, but the longer we stayed together the more I depend on her. My love for her is so deep, I am pretty sure she can’t see it. I have had many thoughts in my mind about our relationship for a while. I just need the time to express them.

Right now, I am occupied with a family project. I am focusing on editing my mother’s youngest sister’s stories. I wanted to create a web book to preserve what she has written. I might blog even less in the next few weeks to get this book finished. My goal is to get it done before Christmas.

Welcome to the 2022 rendition of Visualgui. If you’re reading this from your favorite RSS reader, you might want to hop over to your favorite browser to see the new change. As a tradition, I try to do a major redesign of this blog for each year then I would follow up with several iterations throughout the year.

For 2022, the major change is typography. In the past few years, I had always drawn to a serif text face for reading content, but I am switching it up for this redesign. Forma DJR, designed by David Jonathan Ross, is not a new typeface, but it was recently updated with Vietnamese support. I am proud to have played a small part in it. When David sent me the test fonts to review, he was not sure if the straight horns (ư and ơ) were too unconventional for reading. I assured him that they weren’t getting in the way and I alway appreciated when designers like David pushed the tradition. I have no trouble reading Vietnamese texts set in Forma DJR.

In addition to language support, David turned the Forma DJR family into variable fonts, which offered so much flexibility for a typographic system. I love the ability to play with font weights and optical sizes with just a few lines of CSS and see the immediate results in a browser. I can set large headlines, body copy, and small text from just one variable font. Variable font is not only convenient, but also a huge time saver. If I have the option between static and variable, I would go for the latter every time.

For the layout, I wanted to bring back the sidebar. A blog isn’t a blog without its sidebar companion. For large screens, I wanted to fill up as much space as possible; therefore, I brought back not one but two sidebars. CSS Grid makes responsive grid-based layouts fast and easy and this redesign gave me the opportunity to implement it. Even though the grid system was drawn from print, CSS Grid is native to the web. I could change from one to two to three columns depending on the screen size.

Finally, I got tired of gray text on white background for light mode and white text on black background for dark mode. I wanted to bring in a different color. I don’t even know the name of the color I am using for this new design. I pulled it from a text file that contained a list of my favorite colors in hex values I had found and saved in the early 90s. Back then websites were much more colorful than now.

I hope you like the new design.

With this blog, I have carved out a space for me to write about things that no one cares about except for me. Case in point, I do not know who reads this blog. For almost two decades of daily writing, I am failing to sell ads. With 7.62k unique visitors a month, I received financial support from three generous readers. I am not complaining at all. I understand my writing is not good and my topics aren’t interesting to anyone else other than me. I have a passion for writing and I only write for myself. If I make money off my words and I write for others, my love for writing would die like my love for design.

When I first started designing, I designed for myself and I loved it. As soon as I became a professional designer and made money off design, I killed my own passion. I no longer design for myself, but for the people who paid me. Many times, I did what they wanted to get the work done and over with instead of what can contribute to the project. Each time that happened, my love and passion died a little. Now design is no longer personal unless I work on my own projects. At my workplace, I no longer fight for design. I just delivered what they wanted.

I don’t want that to happen to writing. I have worked so hard to free myself. I went from being ashamed of my writing to just writing my life away. The emancipation of writing whatever the fuck I want is priceless. My blog is an open book of my life. It is an ongoing memoir as well as documentations of my memory. For example, I had referred back to the maintenance category countless times to remind myself what I had fixed and how much I had spent.

I don’t know if my grammar and my prose have improved over the years, but I can tell that writing has become much easier for me. What I can’t articulate in speech or conversation, I can do with ease in written communication. When I started writing music reviews, I was not interested in the techniques behind the music. I wanted to communicate what I heard and how I felt. I approached music from an outsider perspective; therefore, I was not caught up in the technical details. That’s the job of the musicians. I was free to write without having to be afraid I would upset anyone. These days, my interests have shifted to other activities such as ice skating and rollerblading. I don’t know what the next few years of my boring life will bring, but you are more than welcome to follow along my journey.

Back in June, I attempted to drop in from the highest ramp at the Wakefield skatepark. I fell backward and hit my head on the ground. The impact cracked my helmet and had me blacked out for a few minutes. After that incident, I would never go near that ramp again.

Last month, I switched from the Zetrablade (by Rollerblade) to the Flying Eagle Enkidu aggressive skates and I felt more confidence dropping in since the Flying Eagle is much more stable. This afternoon, I revisited the ramp and faced my fear again. From the top looking down, the height and the curve were still intimidating. What would happen if I fell? Since I won’t have ice skating class next Thursday, I would still have two weeks to recover. I didn’t have much to lose.

As soon as I stepped my left foot on the coping, I knew I could not back out. With a bit less hesitation and a bit more confidence, I went for it. Thanks goodness, I made it through without breaking my bones or blacking out again. Having the right skates helped tremendously. I had a much better control with the Flying Eagle Enkidu aggressive skates.

I felt rejuvenated after making this small accomplishment. It proved that I can still keep myself challenged. When I first started out, I never thought I could do this one day. I still believe determination and practice paid off. I am old now and I have to take this aggressive sport much more careful than the youngsters. My second son, Đán, is so natural at aggressive skating. He can drop in with ease, but I am glad that he is also being cautious. He wouldn’t do it unless I would’t go first. If I could do it, he knew he could do it. I knew all along he could do it, but he wanted me to go first. Of course after I did, he dropped in successfully. As a father, I have to pave the way. Why not? I rather put myself at risk first than putting him at risk first. Then again, if he went first and succeeded, I might just chicken out.

Last Thursday my copy of James Edmondson’s Some Tips on Drawing Type from A to Z arrived in the mail and I read it immediately. The book is thin and beautifully typeset. James provides invaluable tips for anyone who is new at type design. As I reached page 8, which covered letters A and B, the book skipped to the letter F. I didn’t realize that the pages were also out of order; therefore, I continued to read from the letter F to letter J. Then the pages went back to the letter F. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. I had to flip back to make sure the pages were duplicated. The pages continued from F to T, but then went back to Q again. I contacted James immediately to notify the issues. I had not heard back from him. I am sure my copy wasn’t the only one misprinted.

Whenever we rode in the car, like heading to a skatepark, Đạo, Đán, Xuân, and I liked to jam to Kanye’s music. His beats drew them in even though his lyrics were inappropriate for their age. One of the albums we often tuned into was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

They enjoyed the orchestration for the interlude of “All of the Lights.” The keyboard-playing and the cello-bowing relaxed us. The production for the song was pretty dope and ​​Rihanna’s vocal on the hook was just soulful until Kanye kicked off his first verse with these bars: “I slapped my girl, she called the feds / I did that time and spent that bread.” Like the title of the next song, “Monster” was such a monster of a track. Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj dropped their signature verse on it. I was shocked when Đán asked me, “What is a sarcophagus?” I didn’t know what it was then he told me what it was. They also like the opening of “Runaway,” in which a single piano key was pounded for 40 seconds.

The productions on Yeezus were solid from the beginning to end and the lyrics were filthy from the start to finish. Đạo’s favorite track was “Black Skinhead.” Although I warned him about the lyrics, he assured me that he had heard all the cuss words in school from high school students. I took his words for it. Đán’s favorite track is “New Slaves,” which had a killer production from Swizz Beatz. He asked me the meaning behind “New Slaves” and I explained to him based on what I observed from Kanye’s lyrics. He opened the track with:

My mama was raised in the era when
Clean water was only served to the fairer skin
Doin’ clothes, you woulda thought I had help
But they wasn’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself

Old slaves were the ones that picked the cottons to make clothes, whereas new slaves were “spending everything on Alexander Wang.” When he asked me about the refrain, “But I’d rather be a dick than a swallower,” I didn’t know how to explain to him the word “swallower.” He also reassured me that he blocked out the lyrics and only focused on the beats. I doubted it.

The only Kanye album that we could enjoy together without having to worry about explicit content was his 808s & Heartbreak, which was his breakthrough-singing album. When the album was released in 2008, I thought Kanye was just riding the Auto-Tune train, but I am surprised it still holds up today. Đạo’s favorite track was “Heartless” and Đán’s favorite was “Amazing” simply for the “uh” sound at the end of each bar. Xuân’s and my favorite track was none other than “Coldest Winter,” which was a touching tribute to Kanye’s mother. When Xuân sang along with Kanye, “On lonely nights, I start to fade / Her love’s a thousand miles away,” he made me miss my mom so much. Next month will be her first death anniversary. Time had flown by so fast and not a single moment I hadn’t thought about her.

In his previous Netflix Special, which was filmed five years ago, Che was all over the place. This time, Che is sharped and focused. His materials are on point. As a Black comedian, he goes to dark places and offers his views as a Black American. On race, he compares the national anthem to an R. Kelly song. On gender, he uses the pronounce “This Nigger” or “That Nigger.” On vaccination, he punched down the unvaccinated. Che is provocative but brilliant. Definitely a must-watch special.