Obama gave an exceptional speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. He talked about democracy:

Tonight, I am asking you to believe in Joe and Kamala’s ability to lead this country out of these dark times and build it back better. But here’s the thing: no single American can fix this country alone. Not even a president. Democracy was never meant to be transactional—you give me your vote; I make everything better. It requires an active and informed citizenry. So I am also asking you to believe in your own ability—to embrace your own responsibility as citizens—to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure.

Because that’s what at stake right now. Our democracy.

Well, here’s the point: this president and those in power—those who benefit from keeping things the way they are—they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter. That’s how they win. That’s how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life, and the lives of the people you love. That’s how the economy will keep getting skewed to the wealthy and well-connected, how our health systems will let more people fall through the cracks. That’s how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all.

I deeply missed our Black President.

With COVID-19, we haven’t done much this summer. All vacations had been cancelled. To give our boys some activities, my wife bought two Intex Seahawk 2 Inflatable Boats. We took them to the lake and just let them paddled for an hour or two. The boys loved it.

With three air chambers, the Seahawk 2 is comfortable. Its high-output hand pump makes inflating the boats with ease—even my four-year-old son can help pump up the boats quickly. The two Boston valves make deflating fast and easy to store away.

What I enjoyed the most about the boating experience was just lying down on the boat and read a book. The Seahawk 2 is so comfortable; therefore, I just let it float away. It was such a great way to enjoy a book or take a nap. I can spend all day doing that. Of course, wearing a life jacket or a floating device is a must. I would not let my kids get on the boat without wearing one even the two older kids already know how to swim.

Michelle Obama gave another outstanding speech at the Democrat National Convention. She delved into empathy:

[W]henever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy.

Empathy: that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes; the recognition that someone else’s experience has value, too. Most of us practice this without a second thought. If we see someone suffering or struggling, we don’t stand in judgment. We reach out because, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” It is not a hard concept to grasp. It’s what we teach our children.

And like so many of you, Barack and I have tried our best to instill in our girls a strong moral foundation to carry forward the values that our parents and grandparents poured into us. But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.

Her entire speech is worth-watching.

I bought a pair of Jabra Move wireless headphones over a year ago. The design is simple, comfortable, and surprisingly durable. It still looks new after a year. What I enjoy the most is the sound quality: crisp tremble and pounding bass. What I am not so pleased is the weak Bluetooth connection, which gets static the further I move away from my phone. Nevertheless, the price and the sound quality beat the minor flaw of the Bluetooth. My two older sons will start online school next month and they would need a pair of headphones for their virtual classes. I repurchased two pairs since Amazon has a 41% discount for $59.13 each.

I really missed ice skating. The rinks are still closed. I wanted to pick up rollerblading, but it appeared to be dangerous. Falling on ice seemed less risky than on concrete, especially for my age.

This week, I finally tried out rollerblading after Đán, my second son, consistently asked for a pair of rollerblades. He made the transition from ice skating to rollerblading with effortlessness. He just rolled off naturally. His fearless personality seemed to help. I, on the other hand, felt uncomfortable and anxious. Unlike ice skating, rollerblading seemed harder to control. I hadn’t been able to glide my feet like I could on ice.

I am slowly trying to relearn the skills I made in ice skating. I started yesterday and it was a disaster. My feet hurt like hell in new rollerblades. Today, I made a bit of progress. I am taking my time with it to avoid falling. With my age and weight, falling would be really bad. With hills and uneven pavements, I need to learn to stop. I could not do the snowplow stop nor the hockey stop like I could on ice. Luckily, there’s plenty of YouTube tutorials to learn.

Back in May when we decided to redo our deck, I didn’t know that we needed a permit. After we ripped out the boards and the railings, my wife came to me and said, “We need a permit.” I said that’s ridiculous. We’re just replacing the boards. We’re not modifying anything. I emailed our county to ask and she was right. We needed a permit because we replaced woods with composites. I was like, “Oh shit!” So I started the application process and paid the fees. I followed the instructions and submitted my drawing for the deck I made in Illustrator.

While waiting for the permit, we continued to rebuild the deck. I couldn’t wait to get the permit because it will slow down the progress and I already took three weeks of vacation time to do the project. Every week, I received a rejection email from the county with a cryptic explanation: “You need to draw your deck on the plat. Your drawing needs to scale.” Week after weeks, I kept getting rejections. I gave up and asked my engineering wife to give it a shot. She did it one time and it was accepted. Our permit came when we already finished the deck.

The whole process was so stressful. We built the deck without permit. Although I followed the county’s specs and requirements, I worried that we might have to break down the deck if the inspection failed. For weeks, I kept pushing off making the inspection schedule. I finally made an appointment for yesterday. Because of the coronavirus, the inspection was conducted virtually through FaceTime. The process took about a minute. The inspector asked me what type of fastening we used and how high is the deck above the ground. That was it. He passed our inspection.

I was under stress for the past few months for nothing. The whole process was not bad at all. I should have just chilled out. I still am stressed the fuck out, but at least I can check one stressful item off my head. Let’s celebrate with dim sum.

When David Jonathan Ross sent out Pomfret on July 1^st to his Font of the Month Club members, I immediately thought of using it for Simplexpression.

Pomfret is such a beautiful, elegant titling face based on Bertram Goodhue’s Arts & Crafts lettering for The Knight Errant magazine. Unlike the original drawing, David increased the contrast between thick and thin to give Pomfret the extra edge.

In addition, David added over 175 ligatures. Simplexpression has always been about the hidden letter E. As a result, Pomfret is perfect for the Simplexpression brand. With the new wordmark, MP, EX, and EX are joined together. Although SS is a ligature, I wanted to make it extra special. I flipped the second S to form the heart shape. It also gives a sense of weaving strings together like when my wife created her pieces with her hands. I really love how the new wordmark turned out. Take a look.

My experimentation with advertisement on this blog is so far so good. Even though I haven’t had any clients coming to me to book a spot, I have ads in the lineup in the next couple of weeks. These ads are the result of cold emails. It felt kind of awkward reaching out to potential advertisers who I have known asking to advertise on my site.

The first email I sent out, I felt immediate regret. Would the potential advertiser think I am being greedy? Would the potential advertiser think selling ads on my blog is silly? I kept checking my email to see if the advertiser had responded. To my surprise, the advertiser gave a positive response and was willing to schedule for two to three weeks. That reply gave me confidence to reach out to another one, and another one, and one more. So far, they have been supportive of my advertisement plan.

Why am I selling ads anyway? Obviously, it is not about the money because the price is quite low. I like ads when they are done well, especially high-quality ads in print magazines. The web has a bad rep for advertisement from the start and it is just getting worse. Advertisement on the web has been intrusive, annoying, and just creepy. Ads on the web interrupt the reading experience, slow down the website performance to a crawl, and invade users’ privacy. I don’t want any of that and I want to change all of that. I do not use any tracking. I have no Google Analytics. The only analytic I can see is through CloudFlare’s web traffic. I want to bring high-quality ads to the web. I am glad someone gets it. Sophia Lucero tweeted about this week’s ad:

as one who has a site with a sorta similar split layout / image sidebar, this is a refreshing & honest take on promoting

Before I decided to sell my own ads directly, I wanted to join Carbon Ads. Based on my monthly pageviews, I seemed to qualify. Unfortunately, I have not heard back from them about my application. It could be that my blog is not specific to design or development. I blog about anything under the sun. My experiment with sell ads directly is inspired by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball’s weekly sponsorships. He’s pulling $7,500 a week and he has consistently done week after week for many years. I am obviously not shooting for the moon here. If I can make a third of what he is making, I would quit my full-time job in a heartbeat. I don’t think I can make more than 50 bucks a week, but that’s good enough for me to cover the hosting and domain renewal expenses. That’s all I am aiming for.

Fifteen years ago, Kanye West went off script on national television and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” He was mad the way Bush mishandled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, he is helping an idiot who is mishandling the pandemic that affected Black people the hardest. What even more dangerous is that Kanye is being used to help re-elect a racist who doesn’t give a fuck about Black people. He has not done anything about police brutality against Black people. He sent in military to sweep up Black Lives Matter’s peaceful protests. He sides with the white supremacist over the black community. If Kanye truly cares about Black people, he should not let the GOP operatives using him. The Kanye campaign needs to end immediately. This is not a fucking game.

I have the pleasure of working with Kristin Bair to promote all three of her novels: Thirsty (September, 2009), The Art of Floating (April, 2014), and now Agatha Arch Is Afraid of Everything (November, 2020). With the release of her new book, she wanted a new website. Her goal is to have everything in one place. I revamped her website to draw attention to her new novel and to simplify her online presence.

Read my write-up or check out her new site.