Received this email from my boss’s boss on the Studio Gallery site.

“You did a fantastic job with this site. I love it and am sure others on campus will too. You did a great job navigating the various complexities in putting this together. Anyhow, great work and thanks.” -Susan

It really makes my day. It’s encouraging to hear people appreciates my work. Thanks everyone for the positive feedbacks on the site.

Render Avenue V5

The new Render Avenue is clean but busy. The color schemes are pleasing and very similar to d3studio.

Macromedia Beta

The new Macromedia web site is clean and organized; however, it’s not as impressive as the previous versions.

My Linh web site is quite attractive. Little bit busy but nice use of colors. She’s actually really cute. I am not a big fan of My Linh however I really enjoyed “Phut Giay Lo Lam” she performed with Lam Truong.

Pac Joints

Bumpin’ 2pac joints all day today: All Eyez on Me, Makaveli, Are You Still Down, and 2pac Greatest Hits. When I had a bad day and needed to escape from all the madness, I just turn to 2pac. He was the realist and I could feel it through his troubled lyrics.

In his classic, Trapped, he expressed, “What do I do? Live my life in a prison cell. I’d rather die than be trapped in a living hell. They got me trapped.”

In Troublesome 96, he shouted, “Young, strapped, and I don’t give a fuck. I’m HOPELESS. I live the Thug Life, losin’ my focus BABY. I’m troublesome.” Damn, wish I could just don’t give a flying fuck anymore when I’m hopeless.

Changing Position

The search box is now buried all the way under the left side menu. Isn’t the search box is an important of the a site and shouldn’t it be prominent? Yes, a search box is absolutely important for usability; however, this site is fairly small and the navigation is straightforward. I don’t think users would have a hard time finding their way around the site. In fact, I encourage visitors to spend some time check out my work and read some of my thoughts. I don’t want you to come to my house, get some hot sauce then bounce out. Once you at my crib, I want you to spend a little time with me, listen to 2pac, play some Street Fighter, watch Jet Li in action or do whatever. Anyhow, the search box is definitely a nice enhancement to the site. It’s a great product from Atomz. It’s very easy to set up and extremely flexible with the design. Highly recommended!

Update!

Notice anything different on this site? A search box is added on the upper right hand side corner. Search results at D3studio.net are powered by Atomz search engine.

Haven’t heard from my aunt from Virginia for a while. She called me last night complimented on D3studio.net. I was flattered that she was inspired by my work and wanted to create a site for herself. She asked me to help her get started. I was so excited that one of my family member read my site. To be honest, I did not expect any readers to this site. The purpose of this blog was to put down my thoughts, inspiration, frustration, and most important of all, to improve my English skills. Being out of school over a year, I haven’t written any papers or essays, and my English is just getting worse and worse. It’s not like my English was good to begin with. There are tons of grammatical errors all over the site although I try to clean up as much as possible. I remembered back in the days when I first started designed my first site. I had a mentor from Upward Bound Program that would read my stuff and emailed back with grammatical corrections. Sort of of like going to a writing center to have an English professor proofreads your paper but it was better because the corrections came right on my computer and I didn’t have to go anywhere. Thanks Mrs. Tien! I never had a chance to take you out to eat. You were a great mentor. Please email me if you stop by my site. I really missed you and would like to keep in touch with you.

Love the elegant look and feel of Bowdoin College website. The Flash homepage is slick, attractive and usable. Furthermore, the random use of colors on the homepage is very clever. The secondary pages are clean and simple as well. Great job!

Elements K

The illustration is hot. The colors are cool. The layout is clean. Tunapuff is off da hook.

Great Movies

Chinatown is classically brilliant. I love Jack Nicholson performance. Similar to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (highly recommended), he knows how to go overboard. He convinced me to want to find out the truth. Who murdered Mr. Mulwray? He was in almost every scene of the movie; therefore, I only get to see his point of view. As a result, I think just like him. What shocked me the most is the woman role in this movie. Evelyn Mulwray is a beautiful and elegant woman who was raped by her own father then got shot through her eye at the end. Unlike most of other movies, the good girl died and the bad guy stayed free and wealthy. After she got shot, I was like, “Fuck no, that’s not the end.” I hated when director plays with your mind like that and Roman Polanski was good at it.

One of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho is straight up psycho. The music score alone is creepy as hell. Of course, everyone knows about the infamous shower scene; however, the clean up and the car sinks were my two favorite scenes. After Norman Bates cleaned up the room and put everything in the car, I was like, “What about the money?” Then he came back to the room, picked up the newspaper and threw it in the trunk. I love little details like that. As Norman Bates was hoping for the car to sink completely, the car stopped at halfway through. The expression from Norman’s face was like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do now?” About a minute later the car sank completely and he was satisfied. Hitchcock is great at teasing his viewers. Hitchcock was also playing with psychological multiple personality disorder which reminded me of Edward Norton extraordinary performance in Primal Fear. I am wondering if Primal Fear stole Hitchcock’s idea. Sort of like Sliver stole the idea of peeping at others people privacy from Rear Window. Ooops, I am going off the topic here. Let me stop.

Made in Vietnam

My Linh latest album, which she has worked hard on for three years, might not be able to release due to the controversial of her album titled “Made in Vietnam.” They claimed her album title might misinterpreted the quality of the Vietnamese music. Big fucking deal. It’s only an album title. Imagine if Eminem made an album in Vietnam, his ass would have been locked up due to controversial lyrics. Better yet, they probably pissed the hell off to hear Heart2Exist expressed themselves in “25 Years, Who I am.”

Now the communist, are in control
The bloody flags are waving in the bitter cold
No freedom of speech, no right to vote
That’s why we left, in our fishing boats
No equality, no human rights
Forced to escape, we loss so many lives
So here we are, in the U.S. of A
To start a new life, it’s a brand new day.

Click here for full lyrics.

Spent my Friday evening and Saturday morning working on the nfsahc site. I was planning to go back to Lancaster to see my family but decided to stay at the last minute after recieved an email from my client. I was waiting for the contents for almost two weeks. I am very excited about this project because my client is very flexible and trusted me completely with the design aspects although we never met before. This project was refered from my past client (lfee). We only communicate through emails. I am pleased to established a trusting relationship with my clients. It makes my job much easier and the outcome is much smoothier. Ok, enough about work. let’s move on to something else.

My car was having a bad day yesterday. She was ticketed from Vassar. What the hell? I work for them and they ticketed my baby for parking violation. They expect me to walk to work or something. I will call off work next time if I can’t find a parking space for my baby. While parked her on the street infront of my apartment, some dumbass motherfucker hit her on the driver side mirror and drove off. Came out today and noticed the mirror was crooked and cracked. According to the Vietnamese superstition, something bad will happened if your mirror is cracked or broken. Since my whole life is a drama, will see what would be worse going to happened to me.

Finally got my lazy ass to the grocery store today after eating hot dogs and rice for the past three days. I am telling ya, ain’t nuttin’ better than burnt hot dogs dipped in Vietnamese spicy sauce with half cooked rice and finish off the meal with some Alize. Because of lacking of sleep for the past couple of days, I was passed the fuck out this afternoon after drinking Alize. It was a good deep four hours nap. After grocery shopping, I stopped by Barnes and Noble to check out some new books. Couldn’t control myself, I ordered a large Caramel Frappacino. Damn it was heaven but I will be up all night with all that caffeine. It’s all good though cuz I got three movies from Vassar library: Chinatown, Psycho and Platoon. Yeah! I am a classic freak.

It feels like my great neighbor just passed away yesterday. I used to watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood everyday with Samantha. He was such a loving man and incredibly talented individual. His messages to children were full of caring and loving. At the end of each show, Samantha would give me a big hug and mumbling, “It’s always great to have a neighbor just like you.” It’s so sad that you had left us; however, your wonderful works will be remembered and lived on forever. Rest in peace, Mister Roger.

Collaboration Project

MA Young website is a collaboration project between George and me. The site was initially intended for internal use only but they had decided to open up to the public. It is a great pleasure working with George. He is a graphic designer here at Vassar. His works have always inspired me, especially his type treatments.

Aesthetic Experience

Joy Harjo and her band performances at Vassar were phenomenal. With the integration of her astounding poetry and the musical elements of Native American tribal music, jazz, rock, and reggae, it was an aesthetic experience. I really enjoyed her soothing and breathtaking sax performance. It was inspiring to see the audiences just get up and dance so freely to her music. That was magical.

Insomnia

No, not the movie, I am talking about me. It’s 2:00 am in the morning and I can’t fucking sleep. It’s getting worse and worse each day. My head is pounding all the time now due to lack of sleep. I need some kind of drug that would put me in a coma for at least a week in order to catch up.

The Studio Gallery is based on the existing design of the Art Department. Unfortunely, the designer that worked on the Art Department site is no longer working for Vassar and the original Photoshop files were gone with him as well. Thanks to Fireworks MX, I was able to edit the graphics right in Dreamweaver MX. It was a big time saver.

Software Battles

Digital Web Magazine has an article on GoLive 6 vs. Dreamweaver MX battle. Of course, Dreamweaver is the winner. While we’re on the software battles subject. Here are my picks:

Fireworks MX vs. Photoshop 7. Here is a tough call because I use them both. No doubt in my mind that Photoshop is the industry standard designers tool. Everyone uses it either for print, web, photography and multimedia. On the other hand, Fireworks focuses mainly for the web and it does an excellent job at it. One of the benefit of Fireworks is its seemless intergration with Dreamweaver and Flash. As far as popularity, I think I am the only one uses Fireworks in our web studio at Vassar. Everyone else has his/her copy still wrapped up on the shelf.

Freehand MX vs. Illustrator 10. Here is another tough call because I rearly use either one of them. As a matter of fact, the only time I use them is when I work with graphic designers/illustrators who use Freehand/Illustrator and I have to covert their artwork for the web or Flash animation. Since I can’t draw complicated vector artwork, Flash simple drawing tools work fine for me with what I need to do. However, I know a lot of designers prefer Illustrator over Freehand. Ask Keisha, she’ll tell you why. She is an expert in Illustrator.

Flash MX vs. LiveMotion 2. Obviously, Flash is way a head of the game with ActionScript. LiveMotion would be great if intros were still hot. Unfortunately, intros are history now.

Window vs. Mac. This is not a software battle but operating system battle. Came from Window background and hated Mac OS. Came to Vassar and was forced to use Mac. Fortunately, Mac OS X rocks and I am loving it. Although I use both but I prefer Mac now. However, I prefer Mac OS X and above only. I still hate Mac older versions. It’s such a pain.

Congratulations to the great team at VnExpress.net for doing an excellent job at providing the fast online news in Viet Nam and around the world. Keep up the good work and happy two years anniversary.

Inspiration

Clean and smooth portfolio of Jonathon Yuen. Love the typographic experimental.

Great News

My sister is six weeks pregnant. Oh yeah! Another baby will be in the family. Sammie will have someone to play with. I was kind of worried that Sammie might get lonely if she doesn’t have any brother or sister. But now, I am so excited.

Sitepoint New Site

The new Sitepoint is clean, organized, and most importantly, fulfilled W3C standards. The sliding navigation is nice but it distracts the contents. As I scrolled down while reading the article, the navigation jumped down which caused me to look over and lost my spot where I was reading. However, it’s nice that they give you an option to turn it off.

Too Many Cocks

There is so much going on at db-db. The site is so much fun and I really like the pixels design. My only problem is too many cocks running around. Where are the punannies? Just kidding!

Eye Candy

For your viewing pleasures: Pixod and Hookerdust.

Unlike her past layouts, which were filled with dazing graphical visual elements, That Bitch is going back to the basic. Like she said, “Sometimes the simple shit is way underrated.”

.edu

Higher education web designers, here is a great resource. The PowerPoint presentations are very helpful. If you come across higher education web design resources, please share with me.

Weblog Wannabe

Love the clean and simple design of Weblog Wannabe; however, it doesn’t display correctly on Mac IE 5.2. The right menu dropped.

Dung Hoi Vi Sao (Don’t Ask Why)

My gosh! The piano performance for this song is incredible. Man, I wish I could play the piano. Thanh Thao sang this song beautifully.

“Dung hoi em vi sao vi sao! Hay quen nhau nhu da tung yeu nhau. De minh em lac trong hoang hon vang. Pho khong den tinh nhan chao nhau.”

“Don’t ask me why, oh why! Just forget each other like we loved each other. So I can be alone in a lonely evening. In the city without lights where lovers greet each other.” Does it make any sense? Well, it makes more sense in Vietnamese.

By the way, Thanh Thao new album “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is fantastic. She is very creative. There are tracks that make you get in the groove and tracks that make you blue.