I launched a webpage to provide a space for the law school community to reflect on September 11, 2001. Some heartfelt recollections have been posted. Amy Sarina writes:

As a country, we vowed to never forget but America has forgotten. I remember a sense of unity and togetherness after 9/11. That’s not the America I feel today and the insurrection on January 6th reinforced my feeling of despair for this country. “We will never forget” – I feel so alone in those words. America has forgotten. Cognitively as a country, we remember for history’s sake. But it isn’t in our bones and in isn’t in our spirit anymore.

I have similar sentiment.

Last Friday, a new version of Loretta, designed by Abel Martins and Joana Correia, landed in my inbox. When I found out that the latest release supports Vietnamese, I was ecstatic. I have invested in a handful of typefaces from FutureFonts, but Loretta is the first completed family with Vietnamese diacritics.

Of course, I wanted to put Loretta to use and this blog is the perfect place for it. To complement Loretta, I immediately thought of Captura Now, designed by Anita Jürgeleit. Captura Now is also one of my recent acquisitions. When I combined them, they looked great together.

For this new design, I wanted to simplify the layout to just one narrow column with generous white space. But then I decided to bring in photography for a change. I played around with Unsplash Source to load random images that are related to typography. This direction brings back the good old days of web design, especially for blogs.

I hope you enjoy this new design and continue to read my rants.

My sprained knee is killing me. A tiny mistake has such a huge consequence. Now I can’t go rollerblading or ice skating until my knee recovers. Yesterday, my wife said she couldn’t wait to see the day I abandon both ice skating and rollerblading. Her words hit me like a brick. She made me realize the questions I had been asking myself all along.

Why am I doing these sports at forty-something? I am obviously not competing or anything like that; therefore, what am I trying to prove? Why am I putting myself at risk, especially rollerblading at the skate parks? Why don’t I just quit?

I obviously like the health benefits of these two similar sports. These are the only types of exercise I do these days. Walking, running, and even biking bored me. I just can’t see myself doing those activities to keep myself healthy. I needed a bit more fun and challenge, but there’s something deeper than that.

What rollerblading and ice skating give me are progression. I thrive on progression. Progression has become an integral part of my life. When I chose web design as a profession, I had committed to learn and to make progress. I read books and online articles everyday to keep up with the industry. I spent countless hours learning Flash and ended up abandoning it. So much time was wasted. These days, I have not followed the web industry as much as I should and I have been out of the game. I haven’t touched a framework. My interests had changed. I am focusing more on literature than technology. I turned to writing and reading.

With almost 20 years into blogging, I had made progress in both writing in English and Vietnamese. I am not a good writer, but the process of writing has come much easier to me. I used to dread writing. Now I can just write down anything on my mind. Reading has helped me write better. For example, I am reading a Vietnamese novel and the author writes in such a natural prose. She has reaffirmed that I can use plain and simple words to make my writing engaging. That’s what I loved about the simplicity of the Vietnamese language. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated.

When I enrolled into the graphic design graduate program at George Mason University School of Arts, I made progress with my design skills. I started to pick up typography and dived deep into its fascinating history as well as its current progression. After I earned my MA in graphic design, I needed to pick up something so I continued to progress and that was when I started ice skating and rollerblading. I don’t want to be a great skater, I just want to make progress. As someone who could barely stand on his skates, I can now drop into a half pipe at the skate parks or jump in the ice rink.

Taking ice skating lessons stressed me out. I had to put in extra time to practice because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my classmates. I had to do well on the tests and that put me under even more pressure, but I felt great after I had made some progress.

To make progress, I can’t seem to let myself relax. I constantly have to do something in order to make me feel like I am making progress. That’s the bad side of it. I fear that I will have a breakdown one day and just do nothing for the rest of my life. If I stop making progress, I’ll become useless and my life won’t have a purpose.

John Kehayias writes for Vice:

“Self-hosting” is a practice that pretty much describes itself: running your own internet services, typically on hardware you own and have at home. This contrasts with relying on products from large tech companies, which the user has no direct involvement in. A self-hoster controls it all, from the hardware used to the configuration of the software.

I need to look into this. Maybe I should start hosting my websites from my basement.

Jenny Liao shares her personal history in the New Yorker:

The struggle to retain my first language feels isolating but isn’t unique; it’s a shared pain common among first- and second-generation immigrants. This phenomenon is known as first-language attrition, the process of forgetting a first or native language.

Unlike Jenny who was born in New York City, I came to the U.S. when I was 11. At that age, I have learned a good deal of Vietnamese. I spoke Vietnamese with my mom at home, but I had to put the first language aside to learn English. As a result, my Vietnamese was slipping away from me. I misspelled almost every other word when I write. With Vietnamese books from the Fairfax public libraries and my blog, I read and practice writing Vietnamese again. It is such a joy to be reconnected with my first language.

I rode the quarter pipe yesterday on rollerblades, slipped, fell, and sprained my knee a bit. Every time I straighten or fold my leg, I get a sharp pain. It is so annoying.

The day before yesterday, I got into a huge verbal combat with my wife. Yesterday we argued some more, but made up last night. With my sprained knee, I was in no mood to fight.

I was going to spend more time skating over the long weekend, but I am spending time in bed instead. I need to catch up on my readings since I haven’t read much.

I was thinking of registering for figure skating lessons next week, but I won’t be able to because of my knee injury. I checked the website last night and only two students signed up. They’ll cancel the class if they can’t get five students.

The kids started school for two weeks. I need to be more proactive with checking on their assignments and homework. I don’t want any surprises when their first reports come out. They spent way too much time playing video games. I am losing them over video games and it frustrated me.

I think of my mom often. I cried remembering the time we lived together in Poughkeepsie. I drove home from work at noon each day to have lunch with her. I took her to the Asian grocery store a few times a week. Life was slow but beautiful. I miss her dearly.

I need to reach out to family and friends more, especially during this challenge time dealing with Covid. I keep telling myself to do it, but I keep putting it off. OK, I am going to end this post so I can make some calls.

The following exchange between myself and an account manager at HostPapa had prompted me to migrate all my sites off HostPapa. If you are in a similar situation, you can take our sites elsewhere. I also hope that
HostPapa will back off its up-saling strategy. I am not revealing the account manager’s name because I don’t want to get them in trouble.

Hello Donny,

My name is GB from the HostPapa’s Solutions Team. I’m contacting you concerning the email storage of your web hosting plan.

As you know, LunarPages was acquired by HostPapa a year ago. All hosting accounts originally purchased with LunarPages have been migrated to our HostPapa servers. It now shares the same resources as all of our other shared plans.

As a hosting company, it is our main priority to provide a stable and secure server environment and make sure that the hosting accounts provided by us are not used for data archiving. To help you with the transition, we have provided you with a higher storage limit than our most basic shared hosting plans for the past year. However, because storing large volumes of email on your account has a negative effect on your account and the server, it is not feasible for us to continue providing unlimited storage for your email accounts.

That being said, our system administrators notified me that one or more of your email accounts has exceeded that limit allocated to your plan by using 1GB or more per account. You can learn more about the limits we have for our shared hosting plans here.

Please reply to this email with the best way to reach you (email/phone), so we can find a way to resolve this quickly and find a more suitable solution for your needs.

I look forward to hearing from you!

My respond:

Hi G,

Thanks for reaching out to me about my email usage. I actually don’t use any hosting email. I only use email forwarding; therefore, there shouldn’t be any issue with usage storage. If there’s mail on the server, please let me know how I can delete them.

Thanks,

GB replied:

Dear Donny,

Thank you for your reply. Our administrators have detected that the website regularly receives CPU faults and I / O faults (see below).

It can be due to many reasons, malware / viruses / bots / unoptimized scripts / heavy images etc.

When these spikes occur, it means that your visitors cannot access the website properly (for example, they may experience huge load times or a complete inability to open the site). It also destabilizes the system and may endanger other users.

In this regard, it is extremely important that we resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Option 1:

You can try to optimize your website scripts and traffic as much as possible to reduce your account’s resource usage and try to bring it back below the limits of your hosting plan. (1) Make sure your apps are updated to the latest version, (2) Remove unnecessary plugins and themes, (3) Review your traffic through AWStats and block IP addresses you deem illegitimate through IP Blocker.

How to minimize the use of your shared web-hosting server

Option 2:

If you prefer to deal with this issue transparently, I can also offer you a solution that will resolve your issues immediately, without you having to spend time reducing your account’s resource usage. Time is the most precious resource we all have, so if you want to go with a solution that ensures long-term sustainability, you can upgrade to a Business Pro plan that will better meet your project requirements. A Business Pro will provide dedicated resources, removing any limitations you face in our shared hosting environment.

I personally recommend an upgrade to Business PRO if you are looking for a long term solution that will provide you with the power and flexibility to grow your business. I have worked with clients who have faced similar issues in the past and they have found it to cost them more (short term patchwork) to regularly optimize their site than to upgrade to Business Pro.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need further help with this. If you are interested in upgrading to a BP, I would be happy to send you more detailed information on the pricing terms available and calculate the credit you would receive for the unused portion of your current plan.

Kind Regards,

I replied:

Hi G,

Thank you for following up on the issue. Is the email storage limit still an issue?

I use CloudFlare to help with the bandwidth. I only use a couple of plugins for WordPress. I am not sure where the spike comes from.

I am on vacation at the moment. I will take a look to see what I can do with option 1. As for option 2, I cannot afford a Business Pro plan because I only run a small personal blog and a few small personal projects.

Thanks once again,

GB responded:

Dear Donny,

Thank you for getting back to me.

I apologise about the confusion, the email storage is not an issue with your account.

The only issue is the resource usage.

Please look into the potential optimisations and I will scan the account afterwards.

The reason I’ve recommend the upgrade to BP is because it is similarly priced to your current plan.

You are currently paying $155 per year (or $465 for 3 years), while with the BP if you were to prepay the 3 year term, the price would be $466.20.

It would be roughly the same as you are paying right now, but with the benefit that it will provide you with more resources.

I look forward ot hearing back from you and if any questions arise along the way, I am here to help!

Kind Regards,

GB followed up:

Dear Donny,

I hope you’re doing well!

Have you had a chance to evaluate the situation and decide how you’d like to resolve this issue?

I wish you a great day and I look forward to hearing back from you!

Kind Regards,

I replied:

Hi G,

Thank you for following up with me. I have decided to move my sites to cloud hosting.

I paid HostPapa until January 2022. Do I get a refund on it?

GB replied:

Dear Donny,

I hope you’ve had a great weekend!

Unfortunately, a refund is not available, as it can only be acquired in the first 30 days after the purchase.

If you don’t mind me asking, why have you decided to move your websites to cloud hosting?

Kind Regards,

My last respond:

Hi G,

I understand about the refund not available. Would you please make sure that I won’t be charged automatically in January 2022?

As for my decision to move my websites to the cloud, I was concerned with the constant up-sale from HostPapa. I hosted my sites with Lunarpages since 2003 and I was satisfied with it until HostPapa acquired Lunarpages in 2019. My plan was increased from $8.99 to $14.99. Since two years with HostPapa, I had been asked to upgrade. With the recent spike of CPU and I/O usage, I was asked to upgrade to $23.99 a month. With the pattern of up-saling, I worried that I will be asked to be upgrading again in the future.

I tried to to solve the CPU and I/O usage by deleting all the mails on the server, compressed all my files, prevented hot-linking to my images, deactivated my WordPress plugins. Nothing seemed to bring down to 1G of CPU limit and 1MB/s of I/O limit; therefore, I think it was time to move on. Furthermore, my decision to migrate away from HostPapa was reaffirmed after reading similar complaints from numerous ex-Lunarpagers.

You have been patience and responsive and I respect that, but I can no longer be hosting with HostPapa.

Regards,

Today I washed all the windows for the first time after living in this house for 12 years. I started at 10 am and finished around 6 pm. Removing the windows was easier than I expected. I was also surprised that the windows weren’t as dirty as I thought.

Although washing windows was such a mundane task, it felt good to accomplish something. I still don’t like doing home maintenance, but I can’t afford hiring someone else to do it. A man knocked on my door and gave me a quote for $2,800 to fix my driveway. I am not going to spend almost three grants just to park my cars. I’ll patch it up myself. So that will be my next project.

Now that the kids aren’t into ice skating anymore, I might as well spend more time maintaining our home. I still enjoy rollerblading in skate parks. I am not sure if I will continue ice skating lessons. Will see.

Over the summer, I enrolled Đạo and Xuân to private lessons for ice skating. I wanted to see how they do with one-on-one coaching. From what I have observed, they have a lot to relearn. Their coach is detail-oriented and meticulous. She takes the time correcting their footwork and their posture. They spent five weeks working on basic crossovers, which they had learned in group lessons a year ago.

Despite the repetitiveness, they still wanted to do private lessons. The problem is that they don’t want to practice. When I wanted to take them to practice, they resisted and moaned. If they don’t practice they won’t get anywhere in this sport. If they don’t want to practice, they don’t have the passion for the sport. I am fine if they just want to do ice skating for fun. They can go skating once in a while or take group lessons.

Between the coach’s fees and the freestyle ice rink sessions, the private lessons are pricey. I wouldn’t mind paying if they put their heart into it. I do not want to pressure them into it. I want to offer them the opportunity. If they decided to quit, I would honor their decision. I asked both of them again and again, they both said yes that they wanted to continue private lessons. Maybe they do want to continue. Let’s keep them going for a bit longer to see how they do. Will they be able to compete?

As a voracious reader, I often ran into an issue called “too many books and too little time.” To help me figure out which book I should delve in first, I would read the first few paragraphs or pages. With Michelle Zauner’s memoir, she pulled me in right from her first sentence: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” Whether writing about her favorite Korean food or her complicated relationship with her Korean mother, Zauner’s prose is just impeccable. The story of her mother battling with fatal pancreatic cancer is heartbreaking. The pain and the suffering reminded me of my own mother who lost her life to Covid-19. I cried and salivated reading Crying in H Mart. It’s a beautiful, soulful memoir.