xanghe

Minor cosmetics

2011-12-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been somewhat taxing so instead of sleeping early this evening I indulged myself in a little cosmetic work on the site. After implementing Google web fonts on several sites already, I'm convinced that it is the best combination of convenience/reliability to use alternative fonts quickly on the Web. My preferred method is to use free fonts and convert them to web formats and manually embed them, but only when time permits. For tonight, Google wins.

I chose EB Garamond for text and Open Sans for display for one particular reason, though I think the fonts do relatively well on screen: they are the only two Google web fonts that support the Unicode Vietnamese character set. Apparently, Vietnamese presents a special challenge due to the stacked nature of accent marks, which may be the reason why Google offers Vietnamese as its own character set filter while searching for fonts. Either way, I chose these fonts for now and so far it looks comfortable. I'm still smiling at using 300 weight on the headings instead of bold, it looks so clean :)

Perhaps that the most obvious change is that I increased the font size from 10.5pt to a whopping 16! Based on a couple of articles on the value of using the browser default font size and re-creating the printer's "paragraph" on the screen, I am experimenting with 16px to see how it works. I think my body width is out of proportion now, but that's a structural change that will have to wait until another day. And finally, I'm taking advantage of Blogger's built-in mobile framework with a stock template, so when the time comes for more major changes, I'm sure I'll switch to the custom mobile template and tweak it to my liking.

There it is, blogging instead of sleeping. Now I may drift in and out of consciousness at work tomorrow, but a little design dabble before bed is quite relaxing for me, and I needed it. Plus there's the feeling of accomplishment and refreshment, even after such small changes as these. For all who are keeping track, this minor cosmetic revision is version 4.1, with no foreseeable major release in the near- and semi-near future. Someday I will, though, mark my word. The crumpled-bag side bar must go.

Infographics and data visualization - two blogs of note

2011-10-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Happened upon these two blogs the other day in my newsfeed: flowingdata.com is created and curated by a Ph.D candidate in statistics and is filled with lots of data visualization fun, and ericson.net is the home of the graphics director at the New York Times. Just thought I'd share.

Be like Jesus

2011-10-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

Listening to this children's hymn the other day, I realized the import of the lilting words intended for children but applicable to all:

Love one another as Jesus loves you.Try to show kindness in all that you do.Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought,For these are the things Jesus taught.

How great the implications - and responsibility! - of such a simple message. I hope I can live up to these sweet words.

Web 2.0 Summit Map and Wooden Laptops

2011-09-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

Here are two awesome things I found today. First, the Web 2.0 Summit Map, which is absolutely ingenious and engaging. Click the image to navigate through the data layers of today's internet leaders.

And the second thing was a wooden laptop/chalkboard. I'm so getting one for church.

Two very random and inspiring things today - it's nice to see creativity at work, on both the digital canvas and natural medium.

Please pass the focus

2011-09-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

Whoa, blogger updated its interface. Definitely more simple. Definitely more Google.

It's fitting because I am focusing on focus now. As I ~~speak~~ type, I am printing "Focus: A simplicity manifesto in the Age of Distraction". I'm going to read this and see where it takes me. I'm starting here because, well, because the book is free and I just discovered it in my newsfeed. I already know what I need to do, I just need to get the momentum to do it.

He died that we might live... today

2011-08-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

Arise and sing to his great name,
Who died that we might live.

I’ve heard this phrase so many times that I don’t listen anymore, like hearing wind through the trees. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been astonished by the growth of my little boy and how “lively” he is becoming or because I read a sobering article today about a man’s last blog post before succumbing to cancer, but these words literally stopped my breath today while I listened to Rejoice! A Glorious Sound Is Heard in my drab little cubicle at work. It is not just referring to salvation from death and sin. It is talking about living, that thing that we’re doing everyday. Like right now. His death was part of a larger plan that certainly did not end at his death – but that was fulfilled because of his death. He died that we might live today, as well as in a future place beyond this mortal existence. He died that we be not dead to others, dead to ourselves, dead to the needs and wants of the neighborhood and community and world. That we might be infused with life through the Spirit, with vibrancy through the Light of the Son, with intellect and conscience and compassion instead of solely instinct and appetites and chemistry. That we might feel the sun on our skin and the taste the sweet fruit of the trees and see the rich colors of fall and hear the stream gurgling by. That we might love unconditionally and hate occasionally and experience the breadth and depth of emotions between. “That we might live” is not referring to the future but to this very moment, that we might experience the sensations of spirit and body in one coalescent being, from the bumps and grooves of the keys under our fingers to the enormity of thunderstorms and tsunamis and bad relationships. To live is to experience, defined as such in conversation and scripture, and this whole experience of living would never have been afforded to us without the willingness of One to plan it, create it, experience it, overcome it and eventually throw it all in the flames and raise it up again in a purified and perfect state. The beauty of the plan is that we don’t have to wait until that day of burning and rebirth to feel the power of life in our veins; He died that we might live today. That is the promise and blessing of the Gospel - that this life is the time to live and that heaven is already here. Being caught up in chariots of fire headed towards the sky will just be another day in the process of true living, if we but recognize and embrace the life in us today and the Source from whence it came.

We are losing our focus on Focus

2011-08-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

I just read an article in good ol' Mashable today about how multitasking is actually detrimental to our productivity - it's an illusion that we can do more than one thing simultaneously (in most cases). According to the article, multitasking is only possible when two conditions are met:

First, one of the tasks has to be so ingrained that no focus is necessary, and secondly, they involve different types of brain processing... We live in a culture that trumpets the value of doing many things at once — that multitasking is an asset or strength. As noted above, it only leads to decreased productivity.

The author centered her comments around our hyper-connected world of mobile devices, but I think that it's applicable to many other aspects of our life. It reminds me of a Harvard Business Review article I read a few years ago about managing our energy, not our time:

To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.

Multitasking falls into "energy-depleting behavior" if you ask my honest opinion. So I'm going to quit. I'm going to see multitasking for what it really is and just focus on one thing at a time. Needless to say, I'm feeling a little spent these days. I need to rediscover recharge exercises and re-energizing routines. And I need to be there and make the present my priority. But first I need a nap.

Wisdom and order

2011-08-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

I have always been a fan of Mosiah 4:27:

And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.

Maybe it's because I am was a runner, but the imagery is very clear to me. I hear this quoted all the time, as well: "don't run faster than you have strength" which surely stems from this verse. This has been on my mind a lot lately, as I feel my strength depleting, and the question as to whether I am running faster than I have strength is constantly at the forefront of my thoughts. Over the weekend, something hit me that made me rethink my interpretation of this scripture. All this time, I've understood this scripture to effectively say "slow down, you're movin' too fast..." but it actually doesn't say that at all. The directive here is not about running, but about seeing that things are done in wisdom and order. See that things are done, as in completed or finished, in the proper order and with prudence, so that over the long haul - hence the mention of diligence - we can win the prize. Running illustrates the concept perfectly; the things required of us in this life will be long and drawn-out, not a quick sprint and we're finished. We shouldn't run faster than we have strength, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't run fast, or even very fast. The verse ends with a reiteration of the concept all things must be done in order, allowing no leeway for complacence - aside from the well-understood in order, let us not miss the operative phrase here, that all things must be done. Period.

So this scripture, which once brought me comfort when I felt weak and slow, now motivates me to try even harder to work smart as well as hard. Wisdom and order trump speed, and diligence leads to the prize. My efforts though feeble now must move forward with more structure and discipline to accomplish all that is required of me - all things must be done - rather than claim I am running too fast and excuse myself to sit on the side awhile. I know that God will support me as I try, and I can take comfort in the thought that when I used to run, I was always last place at the beginning of the race, but somehow caught up in the end.

The geospatial revolution, or why I'm getting a degree in geography

2011-06-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

When I disclose to someone that I am working on my MA thesis in "Geography", I often get the lifted eyebrow and the "Oh." response, like when you excitedly ask about your friend's pet dog only to find out that it was hit by a car the night before. "Oh." Some venture a "Why?" but usually we fumble for a more comfortable topic.

This is not exclusively an outsider problem, either. I was sitting in a graduate seminar last semester and someone dropped the "relevance" question. Is geography still a relevant discipline? Is it a discipline at all, or just a quaint combination of many fields? If it's not relevant, how can we make it so? One student said with zeal, "We just need to make ourselves known so that more people know what geographers do!!" A seasoned classmate calmly replied, "But what do geographers do?" Beat. "Oh." We all quickly turned back to the original discussion subject and let the elephant take its seat in the corner.

I came across a set of video presentations that demonstrate geography's position of relevance in today's world. For all those who ventured the "Why?" question, here's your answer. This is why I'm getting a degree in geography:

Here are the other episodes:

Unplugged

2011-05-24T22:21:00.001-07:00

A thought hit me the other day: what if I completely unplugged myself from society and lived on 100 wooded acres in Alaska, and just lived off the land and the work of my own two hands? And I mean truly disconnect from the world, to the point of recycling all the water on the property (I have a plan drawn up for a toilet-to-tap water distillation system) and plating the house with solar cells - nothing would connect me to society and I could live free from the weight of corrupt governments and extractive, exploitative economies. Oh, the dream... the Mrs isn't too fond of the toilet-to-tap idea, though.

In fact, the whole thing is a ludicrous idea. Not because it's impossible or the costs outweigh the benefits, but because when the end of the world actually DOES come, me and a handful of other weirdos would be left drinking our own water and fueling our own stoves. The rest of the world would be clamoring for help because the infrastructure on which they have come to rely would be demolished and they would be left to feed themselves, not knowing that wheat comes from seeds and beef comes from cows. It would be so sad, but I wouldn't be in a position to help because I would be hundreds of miles away and wouldn't have a car. I probably wouldn't even know the end of the world came because I wouldn't have Facebook.

We all have our callings, and mine is to serve. I can't move away from that, though when times get rough I sometimes want to. As joyful as it would be for me to uninstall myself from the machine, God wants me to be on the ground serving his children and he will cleanse me from this generation if I am faithful. He's not calling Noahs right now (Jonahs still beware), but he is calling Almas to stay where they are and lift where they stand. So that's that. No unplugging for me. Though I do think I'm going to install toilet-to-tap when my wife's not looking.

ps, I unplugged my blog from Facebook today. Let's see if I blog more regularly now.

Lead, Kindly Light

2010-10-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom

This line alone is enough to warm my heart and comfort my weary soul. The full song often brings me to my knees.

Learn the history of the hymn (with renditions of the hymn playing in the background), and listen to a recent performance. Newman, the author of the hymn's profound words, experienced a life full of strife and "providential illnesses," with intermittent emotional and mental breakdowns. This man intimately knows the gloom which the hymn eventually dispels. He has lived through the passage from dark to light, and shares the revelation with us.

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus,
nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path;
but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me,
sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,
till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

The Great California Shake OUt

2010-10-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here it comes again!

Is science the antithesis of faith?

2010-09-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

I wrote this essay for a seminar I'm taking on the philosophy of Physical Science.

Is science the antithesis of faith? This question always brings my mind back to the 1997 movie Contact, in which a staunch scientist seeking for extra-terrestrial contact has an out-of-world experience that she can’t “prove” but nonetheless in which she believes completely. This role reversal signifies that science and faith can co-exist, and that the traditionally dichotomous relationship between the two should be re-evaluated by both schools. I’m not saying that Hollywood is the key to bridging the gap between science and faith, but there is some credence to the point the movie attempts to make.
Traditionally, science is conceived as objective, factual and “real.” Western scientific thought has always assumed an “external reality independent of human perceptions” (Brown, p. 369), which has led many scientists – and most of the lay people – to the conclusion that the path of science is one that will eventually reveal all “truth.” This positivistic concept, though methodologically replaced long ago with a more critical approach to the world, still persists in the mind of the masses. I feel that much of the exaggerated debate between science and faith actually pivots around this mentality, rather than methodologies or definitions of either scientific exploration or religious experience.
But what if science is not objective? Scientific philosophy alludes that nothing can ever be proven as true, since an external reality in which the “truth” exists can never be reached by human perceptions. A theory can only be tested against falsification, and if it is not disproved, the theory is upheld until the next round of falsification tests – it is never true, but only not not true. In addition to this “negative nature” of science, the methodologies used to test theories can never be objective because the very fact that a theory is being tested creates a framework and context for the experiment that will influence the results. Inkpen refers to this as “world making” and states that scientists often ignore their world making because it “implies subjectivity in their world view.” (Inkpen, p. 84). He later goes as far as saying that science is not the rigid, fact-finding exploration of reality that most of us accept, but that “scientific thought and its change is strongly influenced, if not determined, by the society within which it exists” (Inkpen, p. 137).
I turn now to faith. Faith can be defined as belief without proof, but this is an overly simplistic view that begs for scientific scrutiny. However, criticizing the notion that faith is a "blind belief" belies the fact that faith and science share a common element: the inability to prove truth. Both science and faith espouse the assumption of unquestioned principles and the acceptance of a certain level of uncertainty. Viewing science and faith as dichotomous only illustrates a misunderstanding of the relationship between the two. Science claims a basis in proof, and some claim that faith can prove nothing (Comrie, p. 37). However, proof cannot be limited to things that are readily observable, as human observation is framed in social context and personal experience. In this sense, science can prove nothing either. According to one definition of faith in the New Testament, it is the "substance [basis or assurance] of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1). Is not theory an assurance of the hoped-for result of the scientific method? Are not data the evidence of phenomena which exist in a reality that in its purest form cannot be seen? A close examination of science and faith, in an atmosphere free of traditional debate, shows common ground at a fundamental level. The most divergent elements between the two may possibly be merely the terminology and constituents.
In light of the above arguments, I claim that science is not the antithesis of faith. Both require an acceptance of things not seen; both result in a near-complete belief in a reality that cannot logically be proven. Science views empirical data from observations as paramount; faith places personal experience of confirmation above all. In a way, science and faith can work together to make the world a better place – or perhaps they already do.

Another scam - Weekly Health USA: Tip of a Flat Belly

2010-07-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

Last year, I made a somewhat lengthy analysis of an internet scam ("Google Money Masters"), so I won't go into those details here (plus, I'm at work). But I thought this was too fun to pass up. I was looking for a grunge font for work at urbanfonts.com and when I clicked on the category name, my browser opened another window to "Weekly Health News" showing an article on the "1 Tip of a Flat Belly: A Surprising New Way to Burn Fat Quickly." I have to say, this is a pretty good looking scam.
The first thing that made me wonder is the picture of the supposed reporter lady person. I've seen her all over the web, in suspicious-looking ads. The second indicator was that the article supposedly originated in (guess where?) the city where I work, as well as the example of the woman losing 46 pounds. Try it out - go to the article and I'm sure you'll find that the article magically originated in the city in which you are currently sitting, too! My third source of suspicion came from the comments section. They were all from the last two days. Fantastic. Then last but not least, all of the links on the page lead to an advertisement for AcaiMax. Scroll to the bottom and want to read about football? Too bad, it's AcaiMax. How about Travel, or Racing (which is interestingly enough accompanied by an image of a mountain scape... I guess "mountain racing?")? Nope, AcaiMax again. Then I pulled up the source code and had a good laugh.
The article purports to have been published on July 13, 2010, two days ago. So I look at the code and find a little (messy!) bit of javascript that ends with this:
mydate.setDate(mydate.getDate()-2)See the "-2" at the end? Yeah, that says to set the date to two days before the current date and show it on the page. This happens several times throughout the page, and is obviously dishonestly reporting the date to make it appear as though the article (and comment section) is recent. Want to post a comment? Too bad, because based on the source code and script, there's nothing actually submitting your comment anywhere!
There's more, but I'll stop. I just find it incredibly entertaining to see how the "scam" continues to evolve. This one looks pretty real, if you ask me. But that's the idea - looks are deceiving, and now that we, the Web 2.0 generation, have such short attention spans, the marketers now that we look at the page for 5 seconds and then act. Try to make it 10 and I think you'll see a lot more than they're showing you.
PS To the authors of this page, may I suggest a faster way to build an array, since it looks like you were in a hurry:

var month = [
  'January',
  'February',
  'March',
  'April',
  'June',
  'July',
  'August',
  'September',
  'October',
  'November',
  'December'
];

Online Vietnamese language resources

2010-06-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

With the popularity of a previous post on Vietnamese Input Methods and the recent demise of dict.vietfun.com, I feel compelled to post a list of online Vietnamese language resources. This list is, of course, not exhaustive, so please add any other helpful links to the comments. As we so painfully realize today with the launch of an "not-so-improved" replacement for dict.vietfun.com, web resources are terribly ephemeral and therefore may not exist tomorrow. I compiled this list awhile ago (updated for now), and I'm leaving the now-defunct sites as an archive.

Vietnamese Dictionaries and Glossaries

Hồ Ngọc Đức's Dictionary: Original dictionary by Hồ Ngọc Đức. The best interface for this dictionary was located historically at dict.vietfun.com, www.datviet.com:8000 and www.viet.net/~vietdict/ but are now defunct. A non-operational archived copy can be found here. Also available in downloadable form for use offline (with the optimal interface). See also Hồ Ngọc Đức's Vietnamese input program, Unikey.
VDict: Decent dictionary with translation. Forums very informative. Lots of ads.
vndic.org: Another dictionary showing adjacent terms. Ads.
Viet Dictionary: Fast and simple. Minimal ads, but a little buggy.
Webster's Online Dictionary - with Multilingual Thesaurus Translation: Very useful resource that finds phrases which contain the keyword you're searching for, i.e. I searched for "hát" and got 50+ entries, including "rạp hát" (theatre), "đầy tiếng hát" (songful) and "không được ca ngợi" (unsung). Takes awhile to figure out how to use it.
Multilingual Legal Glossary: A handy tool, though not extensive, for searching legal terms and phrases. It's a fairly recent project headed by Vancouver Community College, so I think it's probably still being updated.
Intel Term List - VN: In my experience, when most people are talking about computers, parts and software are referred to by their English name or some transliteration. However, Intel has a whole list of trademarks and brands that they've "officially" translated in Vietnamese, presumably to accomodate the growing hardware market in Vietnam. Very useful website, especially for those of you, like myself, who have always wanted to know how to say "Pentium® 4 Processor with HT Technology brand" in Vietnamese.
Business Electronics Dictionary: Another interesting glossary that gives extensive definition and explanation of English terms in Vietnamese. Not a large amount of entries, but several useful internet terms.

Vietnamese Language Resources

Learning Vietnamese Online: Great starting point for learning Vietnamese online. Hosted by Arizona State University.
EVietnam Group: Defunct. This place is full of interesting Vietnamese language stuff, including free Vietnamese courses, a cool cultural dictionary and a Vietnamese Language exchange forum. This is a good start for those interested in learning Vietnamese or learning more about the growing network of Vietnamese language groups who are making themselves available via this thing we call the internet.
Vietnamese Online Grammar: A detailed linguistic study of the Vietnamese language, but limited in completeness. It seems like the project is still in process because many links are looped to a different page or not even linked. Covers areas such as basic tones, lexicon and grammatical topcis (tense, aspect, negation).
Phrasebase Vietnamese Language: Defunct. An active forum with some useful threads for beginner Vietnamese terms, plus some cross references for other Vietnamese Language websites, if you're willing to dig that deep. It seems that detailed questions get answered pretty quickly (many the same day) which makes this website useful for colloquial terms and phrases.

Death of the BEST Viet dictionary

2010-06-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

It's gone. The Vietnamese dictionary that I've been using for years and years and years (well, at least since 2003), and has served as my homepage since the beginning, has finally gone the way of all the earth. Returned to the dust. Paid the final visit to grandma and grandpa. Gone back to the happy hunting grounds. :( I'm sad.

The dictionary of which I speak is the English - French - Germany [sp] - Vietnamese Dictionary once available at dict.vietfun.com. The genius Hồ Ngọc Đức created the dictionary software and the database of terms. He is truly dedicated to extending the Vietnamese language to the world via the Internet, and leads the ongoing effort toward developing VietWordNet, a "large-scale online lexical-semantic Vietnamese language net" (like the English WordNet developed at Princeton). His contribution to the Vietnamese language on the world wide web is perhaps the most influential, considering that apparently all current Vietnamese online dictionaries use large portions of his database, including the Vietnamese Wiktionary.

It thus saddens me to see the most intuitive and useful tool in accessing the above resource vanish from the Web. Why was this the best dictionary? Absolutely no ads. Simultaneous language lookup (a drop-down box is a terrible way to choose language!). After lookup, auto-focus to the input box and auto-selection of text (allowing user to enter the next term without having to navigate to the input and/or select the text). Right-click on a word in the definition to lookup that word. These features provided a seamless, speedy workflow that minimized the amount of lost time with keyboard-to-mouse-and-back hand movement. I remember countless times looking up a list of mixed words (both English and Vietnamese) without touching the mouse once. This functionality was in place before Web 2.0 and mobile interface concepts had emerged mainstream - truly a web app beyond its time.

All of the current online Vietnamese databases have some of these features, but most revert to a language drop-down, severely limited efficiency and doubling time when translating. I find the drop-down an eyesore that may conserve screen real estate but lacks functionality (in this application). In a subsequent post, I will list the dictionary resources that I will now have to use since my trusted site is gone under, grimacing each time I have to click for a language and see a gaudy ad.

I had noticed that the dictionary at dict.vietfun.com was quite fickle over the last several months, so I was relieved to see a message last week stating that major improvements were being implemented. Alas, I access the site this morning only to find the hated drop-down language selection! Mừng hụt! And what's worse? A gaping text box spanning half my screen, reserved for translation. Yuck. Lookup and translation should never be on the same page. I frantically clicked the About tab to see if Hồ Ngọc Đức is somehow involved with this remake (hoping that he wasn't). A 404 error - the page doesn't even exist. The site is due for completion on June 25, but judging by its current state, it will never be half the site it used to be. The beautiful simplicity has been compromised for Bleh and a Translation Box. And a drop-down.

This is a sad day. I don't know if I can function without this dictionary. Perhaps if someone were to re-create it... hmm, now that's an idea.

Organic Design and Internet GIS

2010-06-17T23:34:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot on my mind lately, so I'm going to distract myself for a moment by blogging about random stuff.

First, dad made a rock patio in his yard which intrigues me - I can stand at the door and stare at it forever. At a glance, it appears that the stones were nicely planned out before being placed, perhaps drawn out on paper like a blueprint. But it was actually placed stone-by-stone, starting with the big one in the middle and moving outward. That might not seem like a big deal, but it's a microcosm of organic design and a beautiful example how well generative processes work. More on organic design later (a lot more...)

Maps and geospatial data integrated into our daily life... it's been in the works for years and now it's evolving into the transparent appendage for which cybernetics gurus have been waiting. ESRI recently released an online GIS that looks promising, despite some controversy. That's on the map-making side. Now that our phones have GPS (and can be tracked by cellphone towers if no GPS is present) and we're addicted to constantly tweeting and updating our status, we've become easy targets for... well, whoever has the data. Fun.

Well, I think I feel better. Now, bed.

Photo album complete

2010-04-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

It's done. The project that has pervaded my life for 3 weeks now is finished. Well, I'm calling it "finished" or else I'll never be able to put it down. I remember listening to an interview with Cameron Moll, who said that there exists a point in design that we must call "finished," even though it's not finished and we could continue working indefinitely on perfecting it. That point is somewhere between satisfaction and the point of diminishing returns, and I think I'm there.
Now it's on to more important work, like my thesis proposal.
Come stop by, take a look, let me know what you think. Give me feedback on what can be improved. I'll add it to my list of fixes, reserved for an undetermined date in the future - Phase 2.
BMV Photos

The purging and the soul

2010-04-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I've realized that I need to organize my online life. I have so many accounts in so many online services that I don't even remember where I am. So the purging has begun. I started with mybloglog and snapfish. There will be many more to come.

In the meantime I am streamlining my online life by arranging each service into a certain function: web development stuff here, personal stuff there, networking stuff way, way over in the corner. This will hopefully stop the scatter-brained and inefficient approach to "staying connected" (I'm falling out of love with that phrase... I think I was "over-connected" for a time).

I just cleaned my back porch today, to follow along with my online endeavors (I should have been doing my homework but ohwellitcanwait). This cleaning and organizing is all part of a spiritual purge, in hopes of a tighter vision and more focused energy on tackling life. After the cleansing of the porch (despite my nasal passages full of dust), I feel the effects already.

Online life in a nutshell:

Batch IP Locator: my batch IP address geocoding test-site turned side-project that is garnering a respectible traffic, considering my marketing consists of a couple forum posts and a twitter account (112,755 geocodes as of this moment). Some day I may opt to retool it to bring in some side cash, and it would then officially be my "business endeavor" (everyone's got to have one, right?).
SnippetLib: since becoming obsessed with web design early last year, I've learned, then subsequently lost, tons of little snippets of code to achieve those most menial and mundane tasks that turn into a full-day of searching forums and head-banging-into-the-wall syndrome. So I built a wordpress blog (first one, and I love it so far) and threw them all in there. It has since transformed into my outlet for web development, which had been flowing into this xanghe blog and causing great confusion (for me).
vietmap.info: bought this domain name 2 years ago with the intent of creating something great... still haven't started yet. But eventually I'm thinking of a user-built database of Vietnamese stores and services. I really don't like forgetting about the wonderful little bún shop at the corner of something and something street. This would be my outlet for tinkering, if I ever get it off the ground. (Note: google maps now has metropolis areas in Vietnam to the street level - I'm glad I waited, because all the good food in Vietnam are the mom-and-pop stalls!)
benhamatake.com: I've come to terms with my ego. Currently this domain redirects to this blog, but there's much in store for this one.
Twitter: Random tweets. That's about it.
Flickr: Used to be the treasure trove of all our photos, but now my pro account has expired and we're putting the money into benhamatake.com. It's still there with our photos, but only 7 sets. We were sad enough about that to develop our own picture management application (coming soon).
xanghe: The blog that started it all. It really did, and has been the binding link between all of the above nonsense. It's on the fourth re-design. It started as a silly expression of Asian-American angst. It has been the depository of all kinds of thoughts and news and superfluity, all coalescing into a barely-recognizable mess of me. That's about to change.

Focus. Energy. Order. That's my new call. With all of the other online distractions I have going on, this will be the one that brings me back down to earth. In this blog will I write the things of my soul.

2009 - A lesson in expectations

2010-03-10T22:41:00.000-08:00

I felt an anticipation for 2009 right as Tết rolled around last year. My wife felt it, too - it was a tangible expectation, like the thick, humid air before a storm - and we both were convinced that great things would happen in the following months.
Then... nothing.
I started school, then had to drop out, then started again. Mai Vi started working a little more so our income rose a little. I got a new bike. She improved in managing all those little roudy Primary kids on Sundays. Very mundane events, or long-time plans finally starting to materialize, but nothing that fit that strong anticipation we felt last spring. I was slightly disappointed as Tết came and went this year and I did not feel the same anxious expectation, nor did I have anything to show for last year's. Expectations have a way of skewing our view of the present, but I was honestly trying to determine why my anticipation had been so far off.
One night after an especially-introspective bike ride home from work I was struck with a prompting, an idea formulating that felt important but evasively vague. It all started with wondering what to do with this blog, since I don't blog much anymore, but my thoughts lead me into much deeper issues. Like smoke from the camp fire, every time I grasped too hard - or even looked too directly to get a glimpse of the actual shape and form - it vanished and I was left wanting. Mai Vi went to bed, I stayed up doing homework and coding a project for a friend, while the ideas in my head slowly settled and finally grew silent. I brushed my teeth, turned out the lights and knelt at my bed to pray. Before my knees hit the floor I was back on my feet, head racing.
Lights on, pen lid off, old printout from last semester as my canvas, I scratched out the ephemeral thoughts even as they flitted away, no longer grasping for meaning but scrambling to manage the overflow of mental data. They were neatly processed now, folded and starched and ready for consumption after my evening activities allowed them room to self-organize. The past year made sense now, in the dim glow of my desk lamp, but it soon would not so I urgently disregarded spelling and grammar and any sense of order just to let these thoughts make their way to the paper before disappearing into a million ethereal pieces.
See, I grew up last year, and I'm still getting used to the rest of my life.
Here's my thoughts, as they are on the back of an old school printout:

Year of maturing - the prevailing theme - I felt it would be a big year but didn't have much to show for it except school - but I see now it's more of an internal progression, a growing up - xanghe represents the care free, blissful days of perpetual honeymoons - that phase has passed and it's now on with adult life - on the way home from work, I realized I'm approaching 30, which is not old, but it's too old to claim ignorance or innonence as I have been doing - recently I told my younger brother to be a man, but was I projecting? - over the years, xanghe has transformed from a silly nickname to a symbol of my continual search for meaning, depicted by the ubiquitous bee - time has passed for me to claim xanghe as my alias, but it will remain a reminder of my search - it's time to be a man

The future of online mapping... is Here!

2010-02-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on Blaise Aguera y Arcas' TED talk (which led to this talk) from Cameron Moll's twitter feed which opened up to me the world of Seadragon, Photosynth, and the new Bing maps. I guess I've been neglecting Microsoft to my own detriment.
Let's look at Seadragon, which revolutionizes the concept of image browsing, allowing users to pan and zoom hi-res iamges as easily and smoothly as they do an online map. I remember seeing an application that used the Google Maps interface to pan and zoom large photos, which I thought was really ingenious but it looked like it only garnered a niche following if that. Now the concept has gone mainstream under Arcas' touch at MS and the result is stunning. Here's an example of Yosemite. You'll need Silverlight to view it, but it's worth it (and I never advocate downloading non-standard components, but this is an exception).
The future is here. We as internet community contributors, sharing our thoughts and images and lives with a global community, are more and more able to recreate our experiences online to share with the world (and not through VR fluff which doesn't count because the idea is to escape reality in those games). Some call it augmented reality. I call it the reality, because that's the direction our world is heading.

Bánh?

2010-01-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

Bánh is one of those ubiquitous food terms in Vietnamese that seems to classify anything that is not soup. A look in the dictionary shows us that bánh can mean "cake" (for this discussion we'll skip the fact that bánh also means wheel), but this doesn't quite describe the sticky, translucent goo that is bánh bột lọc or the crisp, crepe-like heaven that is bánh xèo. Add a little suffix denoting an association with grain and you get bánh mì, the famous Vietnamese-French baguette that can be eaten stuffed with meat, cilantro and pickled carrots, dipped in sweetened condensed milk for a quick fix, or just enjoyed alone, as long as it's piping hot out of the oven.

I have yet to find a concrete description to encompass all forms of bánh, and maybe the Vietnamese language is not meant for that anyway. Context is the strongest factor in determining a word's meaning, whether "Anh nhớ lấy bánh nha!" means to remember the bread, remember the glutinous rice cake, or remember to pick up a wheel on my way home.

For a long list of possible bánh concoctions, take a look at the search results at vdict.com for "bánh" (caution, this site has been known to display scandalous ads, darn them!), and definitely pay a visit to the Banh Guide, a webpage I found today (hence this post) that gives a nice description in English of several types of bánh.

And now I'm hungry.

Annual Update

2009-12-22T23:22:00.000-08:00

I think this blog is becoming an annual update thing for me. Even blogger has changed its interface since I posted last. I'm way behind. So here's my conglomerate blog post for the last year.

Starting school again has taught me the value of time. It's priceless. If anyone's selling some good ol' fashion time, please let me know. I'll buy it immediately because I've used all of mine.

Music has once again saved me from complete ruin. I think the only thing that keeps me sane is an occasional good hour with my guitar. This year yielded two or three ok songs, after a dearth of several years, so I'm happy.

All of my goals for 2009 are still on the shelf, but I have accomplished some things earlier than I thought I could (like get a paying website project).

God is still prompt as always to answer my prayers, and I'm still slow as always to ask. But I'm learning, or trying to.

I teach youth sunday school again and I love it.

Top 50 Common Vietnamese Surnames

2009-11-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

I'm doing some research for a project at school and ran into this tidbit. Thought I'd share:

Nguyễn

Trần

Phạm

Huỳnh

Phan

Trương

Hoàng

Ngô

Đặng

Đỗ

Bùi

Dương

Lương

Đinh

Trịnh

Lưu

Đoàn

Đào

Thái

Văn

Vương

Phùng

Quách

Tạ

Diệp

Tôn

Thạch

Thanh

Đàm

Vong

Triệu

Bưu

Phú

Vĩnh

Quang

Tiều

Hòa

Trang

Giang

Lục

Banh

Nghiêm

Wikipedia has a nice post on Vietnamese surnames, but they're not all in order. I added the tones so they might be off. Let me know if I muffed your last name! I'll fix it.

This list is used by the US Department of Justice and is based on several sources:
Abrahamse A. F., Morrison, P. A. & Bolton, N. M. (1994). Population Research and Policy Review: 13 383-398.
Barringer, H. R., Gardner, R. W. & Levin, M.J. (1993). Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The Population of the United States in the 1980s.
Buechley, R. W. (1976). Generally useful ethnic search system: GUESS. University of New Mexico, Cancer Research and Treatment Cetner (mimeo).
Choi, B. C. K., Hanley, A. J., Holowaty, E. J. & Dale, D. (1993). American Journal of Epidemiology 138: 723-734
Kuo, J. & Porter, K. (1998). Health status of Asian Americans: United States, 1992-1994.

15 days to the 2009 Shakeout!

2009-10-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

15 Days to the 2009 ShakeOut!

Dear Participant,

At 10:15 a.m. on October 15, 2009, millions of Californians will “Drop, Cover, and Hold On” in The Great California ShakeOut, the largest earthquake drill ever!

September is National Preparedness Month, and you'll be hearing from many organizations about how to update your disaster plans and restock your disaster supplies kits. It's also time to register for the 2009 ShakeOut! If you participated in the 2008 drill or not, this is your once-a-year chance to practice how to be safe during earthquakes: Drop, Cover, and Hold On.

Over 5.4 million southern Californians participated in the 2008 ShakeOut. As a statewide drill in 2009, this number could be doubled... but we can only include if you register at www.ShakeOut.org/register. As of August 31, over 3.7 million participants are registered statewide!

There are many ways to participate in the ShakeOut in 2009. At the least, plan a "drop, cover, and hold on" drill involving everyone in your household. You can also discuss your overall disaster plan with your family or roommates, secure the contents of your home so they won't fall, and restock your supplies. The updated ShakeOut.org website is the central source of information for how to participate, learn about your area's earthquake hazards, and find local events, news, and participant lists for all California counties.

Everyone can participate! Individuals, families, businesses, schools, government agencies and organizations are all invited to register. Talk to your employer, neighborhood association, faith-based organization, or others about registering as well. Your involvement in the ShakeOut insprires many others to register and hold their own drills!

Register today at ShakeOut.org

Batch IP Locator - New Home

2009-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, just wanted to announce that my little project has a new home (because the other one is about to expire):

Batch IP Locator
Geocode or map multiple IP addresses - free

Batch IP Locator - Official Launch

2009-08-31T07:59:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, I launched the very-beta version of a new app I'm working on. Today is the "official" launch of a greatly-improved product. After a week of poring over code and markup, the back-end has been revamped, UI is more functional (and looks better, too!), and an API has been added (with documentation). Now I just need to add content. Ugh. Not what I want to do after a week of coding. If I can get homework done early I'll shoot for that at the end of this week.

Stop by and visit, and leave me your thoughts (feedback) on what needs improvement:

Batch IP Locator ~ Geocode and map multiple IP Addresses - free!

ps. I made a new twitter account for it, too. lol

Batch IP Locator - Beta!

2009-08-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for a service to geocode a list of IP addresses for awhile now, but to no avail. Well, for free anyway.

I just launched my version of a Batch IP Locator this morning, it will locate a list of IP address, returning the country, city and latitude/longitude coordinates. I'm hoping to fill a hole.

Years ago, I ran into "Map Multiple Locations" which opened my eyes to the power of data plotted on a map. As cheesy as it sounds, it was really a defining moment in my life (I am starting grad school on Monday, in Geography, after all). I hope to provide a similar service.

This beta is barebones for now. There is much in store (mapping integration, JSON output for ajax calls, etc), but for now I just have to settle with I've got.

Design inspirations

2009-08-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

I've had some positive feedback regarding the redesign (many thanks to my wife who is full of patience and kind words even when she wishes her husband would spend time with her instead of the computer :) so here's my reply.

I don't do designs for hire, yet anyway. haha I'm just starting school again so time is limited, but I think it would be fun to do a little project once in awhile. Let me know what you've got in mind and maybe I can point out possible ways to achieve it.

For those of you thinking about web design but maybe "dragging your feet," here's some inspiration:

Best of CSS Design 2008: The websites we use everyday seldom invoke an emotional response deep within out heart. Here are 50 that did for me late last year. Especially true for Viget Inspire (just beautiful!), Carrot Creative (smooth use of jQuery navigation) and Nine Lion Design (dark texture, bold contrast and warm ambiance)
Nature Inspired Painted Background: This was the tutorial that got me "painting" again (see my attempt above) and generally interested in art once more, this time in the digital sphere.
17 Techniques for Creating Designs Inspired by Nature: Interestingly enough, I started looking into my designer feeds (I subscribe to 15 rss feeds on design that provide constant inspiration) and found this article, posted one day after my redesign launch, that outlines many of the principles I used this time around. It's a great starting point for someone who's thinking about being interested in learning more about maybe playing around with design :), especially if you're into nature photography.
Web Style Guide 3: This book (yes, the entire text of the book in available for free online) is for those who already have design experience, but are looking into web standards and SEO and creating complex corporate websites. It takes a very conservative approach to web design, but is a good anchor and balance when your design needs to meet usability and interaction halfway.

A year ago, my wife started getting into food blogs, and I was blown away at how vastly enormous the food blog network is and how I had never seen a glimpse of it until then. Design blogs are the same - it's a whole new world out there and once you're in, you're in for good. Life just becomes one big design.

xanghe redesign! (yes, again)

2009-08-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

It started out as a sketch. I was bored at the fair so I scribbled up a little scene I had in my mind. That night I scanned it and played around with it in Inkscape and then the GIMP. That was last Wednesday. The 6 following days have been pretty much wasted with me in front of the computer, but I have to say, this is my favorite design yet.

Enjoy. I promised my wife I this one would last at least a year.

Still Learning

2009-08-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

The jasmine and bougainvillea I bonsai-ed are coming along beautifully. I think I prefer smaller trees. That has nothing to do with this post, though.

I'm still learning from my parents. I saw two characteristics over this past weekend that I guess I've always known, but for some reason hit me with more force this time.

My mom is an optimist. Not the blind kind, but the kind that takes lemons and makes lemonade. The active kind that pursues good out of the "bad." She's facing serious tests right now, mainly dealing with uncertainty and personal challenges, but she doesn't break. She calls them "opportunities" and "the perfect chance to prove what I've been believing."

This picture was taken 30 mins after getting out of the car, arriving home from a 3-day camping trip in the Uintahs. We had driven ("He" had driven, rather) for 4 hours to get home and everyone was very tired. It was 90ish degrees outside. I sat inside the air-conditioned house drinking water and eating cookies, thinking how it was so nice to be able to rest, when I looked out the window to see dad watering the garden (this is after he put away all the camping gear). Then I remembered that before our camping trip, he had been camping with the scouts for the week before that, and he had been the hiking advisor so did a total of 50+ miles hiking with little boys over the course of 4 days. Then I remembered that before that he went with a friend to climb Lone Peak - backpack in 7 miles, then climb the 700-foot vertical face of the peak. I recalled him saying that over the past 10 day period he had showered twice, even after all that physical exertion. He wasn't resting in his room or showering under cool water or even eating cookies before dinner... he was outside watering the garden, and teaching me something about priorities and work ethic.

Needless to say, my parents raised me well and are still teaching me by example the things that I should do. I guess no matter how old I am, I will always keep learning if I but keep my eyes open.

Google Money Master: The art of designing web scams

2009-07-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

"Google Money Master" - sounds cool, huh? And $5000 a month from home (working only 10 hours a week!) doesn't sound bad either. Oh, and this author is from Orange County, too! Great, where do I sign up? Obviously these underlined, blue words are links, so I'll click on one of these. Uh oh, this new page looks like a scam... but Mike Richardson from Orange County said it's legit!

Haha, that's what went through my mind this morning when I hopped on the article from the "Los Angeles Tribune" about a way to make $5000 a month. After sheepishly collecting my wits upon realizing that I had been scammed (no I didn't sign up), I turned back to the page to find out how I was so easily deceived. I looks like scammers (yes, those people capitalizing on unemployed people) are listening in web design class. Here are some ridiculously true principals that I should have caught off the bat, but that seem to catch me (us?) every time:

Localization
First and foremost, the scammers localize the content. The page was created in PHP, which means everytime it's served from the host, it can look at your whereabouts and figure out where you're located at the time of viewing. Mine says "Orange , CA" (notice the extra space after "Orange" - a sign of hasty coding) in two places. And the "Los Angeles Tribune" is not a real newspaper... I'm sure if you're in Houston it will say the "Houston Tribune." We are prone to believe something if it's happening in our back yard.

Content
They employed typical hoax content, using a fictitious name, realistic circumstances and a reputable entity (usually a media outlet or law enforcer, this time it's Google). It gives us a creditable source, or at least uses words that seem creditable. It even gives his email: "Tom Chilton@www.Financial-Weekly.com" - It's the first time I've seen "www." in an email's domain. lol This scam even holds true to form in its grammar - poor.

Layout
photo from Web Style Guide
Here's my favorite part. We as web surfers behave very differently in many situations, but in some ways we act exactly the same. Like how we scan documents. As the images above illustrate, our eyes spend a lot of time at the top-left area of the page, and the scammers capitalize on that. The bold, alluring title, the photo of a young work-at-home millionaire... look at the little social networking icons! Looks just like the real thing.

Reader Feeback
At the bottom of the page, as all news articles or blogs should, we see a bunch of user comments. Some are skeptical, some affirm our hope that Google will truly send us a check within 48 hours of signing up. What better way to include non-obtrusive peer pressure! Notice the date of the comments happen to be before the "Created At" date, and they all were posted at the same time. And "Created At?" Is that English?

Functionality
No no, this is actually my favorite part. Click on the news tabs at the top. Go ahead and login, or post a comment. Or reply to a comment or favorite it, or hover over anything that we web surfers know so well to be links or functional buttons. No little pointy hand, no subtle animation. Not a single link on the entire page, except the handful they want you to click that lead to their ~~trap~~ homepage. Ha! This should have been the first warning that this was a fishy site, but just like a skilled magician, they distract you from what they're really doing by directing your attention to a little trick.

And so it goes. The hoaxes are still hoaxing people. Especially when we are in a financial rut. Hopefully we can take a look at this page and laugh, then take a deeper look at what other imitations are designed specifically to deceive us. When designed well enough, we may just scan our way into a trap without even knowing.

Google Money Master: a bona fide folk tale. Pass it on. ;)

Oregon road trip 2009

2009-07-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

After plans to go to Vietnam, the Mediterranean or Belizé, we ended up going to Oregon. It was a very close second.

I finally got the pictures uploaded. Come take our road trip with us... from the comfort of your own chair!

Oregon Road Trip Pictures

4th of July Fun

2009-06-18T08:42:00.001-07:00

070905_UtahFamily02, originally uploaded by xanghe.

Haha, I found this picture the other day. I don't know why we used eclairs but hey, it worked. That's Ty in the background.

Here's the zoomed in version - looks even better!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xanghe/3600013123/sizes/o/

Life and Death - the Sudden Paradox

2009-06-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

This week has thrown me into a fit of thoughts, all racing through my head at once. Life, death, and the time in between are so closely related, intertwined in one fluid motion that neither constantly moves nor abruptly halts, but always carries away the old in the ebb and always brings in the new with the flow.

I spent the first three days of this week with an 83-year-old man in a hospital bed. He has lived a long life and has fulfilled the temporary needs of his family to the best of his ability. His memories are sharp and on occasion come hurling out of his mouth from somewhere before the war, if he can remember them. Many of his peers have moved beyond this life, but he only flirts with the invitation. This time in the form of an inguinal hernia, but there will surely be others. I wonder how he holds himself together, all 8 decades of him in that frail frame that shuffles when it walks. To him death seems natural, something that we never bring up just like we never bring up the sunset, only when it's spectacular but not just because we feel it coming. Of course the sun will set; that's just natural.

The next day I found myself in the company of an old friend whom I had not seen for years. He's married now and has a child, a little boy who cooed for us but cries for his mom. To feel his little weight in my arms and look into his bright eyes, I felt the newness of life, a light that had just been lit. Not like turning on a flashlight with year-old batteries or switching the light on in the bathroom at midnight, but like a brand new star that was just formed in the black emptiness of space by a great explosion of light and heat and power. Yes, I felt a power in that child. To him life seems natural, it's embedded in his veins and nerves and in every reflex and instinct in his body. Of course his star will shine; that's just natural.

The weekend finds me sitting in the emergency room with a man whose life dangled from a thread. It was nothing but the hand of God that plucked him from the furnace and left him breathing gently on the bed, waiting for sleep and a rest from the terrible night. I watch him looking at the ceiling and I wonder how life and death can come so close in a man of his age. The setting sun that seems so natural to the old and the morning light that radiates from the young met in a paradoxical dance in this man and left me reeling in their burning wake.

He's fine now, just as the 83-year-old and the baby, but I am left ruminating. How am I to comprehend this breach of the quintessential dichotomy? It leads me to ponder the significance of the relationship between spiritual life and death, the proximity of our souls with our Maker. I think this will take some time to mull over and study before I can put the pieces back together. In the meantime, I'll try going to bed before midnight.

Inglewood Earthquake: A Reminder to ShakeOut!

2009-05-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

Here's an email I received about the earthquake yesterday. Let's all do as we've been reminded to do time after time and prepare for this kind of stuff. Read the comparison of yesterday's quake and what a 6 or 7 magnitude quake would mean. That's scary.

View the email in your browser.

The Journey IS the Destination

2009-05-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Masters in Urban and Regional Planning This is the program I will be applying for next year to take that first step (FINALLY!) towards pursuing a career. The last time I wrote about this subject, I mentioned that I was leaning towards Environmental Science and Public Policy. Well, I left it at that and didn't delve into the deep history behind that decision. It all started on a dark and stormy night...

I realized early last year that my aspirations to pursue public administration would not lead to a satisfying career for me. Two important follies became evident: 1) I based my decision of Public Admin on the fact that I didn't want to take the GRE and wanted to pursue a grad program that would accept me as-is with my meager background in the Humanities; and 2) even though I tried to avoid sitting at a computer all day by pursuing community outreach instead of computer graphics, I now had a job in community outreach but I spent the day sitting at a computer doing graphic design (among other things). It became clear that I had fallen into the rut of basing my decisions on what I didn't want instead of did want. I realized that the more I didn't want things, the more they seemed to gravitate to me. So, I quit that. My criteria for finding a career changed to what I think I want to do with the rest of my life instead of what I want to avoid. This was a big step for me; remaining in that state could have been disastrous.

So I turned to Civil Engineering. I could still work as a public servant (I like working for the government) but I would be able to build things (something I've liked since I was a child). After a few weeks in that direction, I concluded that I would have to re-graduate with a degree in math or science to even dare apply for grad school, so I turned again. This time it was towards Environmental Science (see previous post). A few weeks later, I turned again to Geography, which emphasized more of the spatial relationship between people and the surrounding landscape. This meant a strong emphasis on mapping technology and GIS, which had become a favorite of mine as I built custom mapping applications at my current job. I applied for this program (twice!) and even enrolled in some deficiency classes, but it all hit the fan when the May 19^th election emerged because finals were on May 19^th. Awesome. So I watched another semester pass by eyes. Now, I'm glad I did.

One morning a few weeks back, I woke up remembering a grad program I had happened upon two years ago at my alma mater called Urban and Regional Planning. I had looked into the program then, but turned away when I saw that they required a GRE score (I didn't want that, remember?) Now, I revisited the possibility of returning to my school to continue my education in the grad program there. It felt good. I wanted it. It's the first time in the last two years that I've felt a genuine desire and motivation to jump back into school. I took that as a sign and contacted the grad advisor there. I missed the deadline for 2009 (what?!) so the earliest I can start is Fall 2010. Ugh. A full year and a half away. As disappointed as I was, I still didn't feel deterred. So that's that. I've found my direction. MURP. What a great acronym to represent my new life.

Ok, that's the just history, here's the moral. A few days ago I all-of-a-sudden recalled a conversation I had with my mom right before I left for Southern California. I had just returned from my missionary service and was ready to take on the world. We were sitting on the lawn at night, I think it was the night before I left.

"So what do you want to do? What's your plan?"
"I don't know yet. I want to help people, not sit at a computer all day."
"So what are you going to do?"
"... I want to make a better environment for people, to make neighborhoods and communities for people who can't afford it now."
"You mean multi-use housing?"
"Sure, whatever that is."

I replayed the memory a few times for nostalgia's sake, then it hit me. What did I say to my mom? I want to make neighborhoods and communities? Like developing housing tracts? Like ... urban planning?? I remember not knowing exactly how to articulate my plans back then, but I knew what I wanted and as I tried to put it into words it felt good. It felt like that was the direction I needed to take. That night, it was as if God gave me a glimpse of my future, albeit that I didn't know how to interpret it. And the next morning (maybe because I woke up at 2:00am to commence my 700-mile trip in my 1991 Eclipse) I completely forgot the experience. Whatever foresight I had gained that night was now gone and it was as if I had never received it. Interesting.

Now, six years almost to the day since our conversation, I am pursuing Urban and Regional Planning and it feels good. Again. Six years that started as care-free, blissful schooling that taught me a lot about life (and my soon-to-be wife :) but nothing about practical work skills, and that ended with frustrating phone calls, discouraging stand-stills, and long nights full of unanswered questions. Six years later, and I'm back to the beginning. I've finally come around to what God intended for me to do. I don't regret the last six years and I don't mourn over the fact that I could be well on my way in my profession instead of a year away from even starting, but I do find it intriguing that I've journeyed for so long, and now that I'm here, I realize that I knew it all along. I thought I was looking for the destination, but I wasn't because I already knew where it was. I was made to journey (through the wilderness?) because I still had things to learn before "arriving." The real destination lies in the journey itself. It's the knowledge we gain along the way that concludes our journey. And my journey, at least this phase, has come to an end. I'm finally calm about this decision and I'm determined in this direction.

It's really a microcosm for life. I just got back from my aunt-in-law's funeral, and as I chanted along with the monk, I thought about how she was now with her husband who passed on three years ago. She had returned to the place from whence she had come, but now with knowledge and experience that only a lifetime on earth can provide. Before we are born, I'm sure we are debriefed on our earth life and what we need to do and where we need to end up. Then we're born as a baby and forget it all. We start anew. It's only was we inch our way through life that we start to see glimpses of our true potential and final destination. And as we pass through the veil between life and death, I'm sure we'll say to ourselves, much like I did upon remembering my conversation with my mom, "Duh, I knew this." But we will finally be able to arrive at our destination, only because we had "arrived" gradually by accumulating truth and experience as we made the journey.

For All Who Care - Viet Speaking Mission Website is Down

2009-04-07T00:10:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I like to pay my respects to an old website dedicated to Vietnamese Speaking LDS Missions around the world. It dates back to the 1999's and is very much so a 1990's website, complete with an animated Kokopelli tooting away on his flute (why Kokopelli, I do not know). The site contains a curious mixture of former missionary contacts, messages, games, articles and "Java-enabled" VietChat. I actually used some of the articles on the site for a project I did back in school, but that was the last time I had visited... until tonight.

The website is located here: http://members.aol.com/nomhawj/viet/mission.html Go ahead, click on it. See the circular logo and the totally rad sidebar and Mr Kokopelli tooting away? Probably not. You probably see a nasty dark page with some smokey header informing you that blah blah blah we shut down this page forever we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for the apology, but you shut down my page!

Well, it wasn't my page, per se. In fact, I don't know whose page it was, or is, or else I'd let them know that they've been shut down forever and request that they migrate the site to another host. Fortunately for all of us, there's a nifty web service called WaybackMachine, located at archive.org, which allows you to see webpages that aren't there anymore, like ones that have been "shut down forever" for example. Using this service, we still have a vestige of our wonderful Viet Speaking Mission site, a snapshot from 2006 which seems to be the last time the webmaster made a major update. Here it is (no nasty smokey header this time):

Viet Speaking Mission

Take a look through the Mailing List which provides a smattering of former missionaries' contact info reaching all the way to 1981. Or my personal favorite, the Missionary Corner, where you can find some Gospel-related Vietnamese-language materials, and make sure to follow the "Vietnam and the Church" link which leads to several articles about, you guessed it, Vietnam and the Church.

Now, we don't know when archive.org will decide to dẹp tiệm (which they probably won't but anyway), but in preparing for the worst, I would recommend taking a look through the archived site and extracting what info you want/need right now. Just in case.

Small print:I am toying with the idea of setting up a new site for former Vietnamese-speaking elders, but don't know when/where it will take place. Feedback?

Want to use a smiley outside of chat?

2009-03-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

Try this:

☺

Using that little mess of numbers (called an HTML character entity) in your online document will yield a cute little smiley:

☺

This little smiley (and all the other character entities) will work if your online document or page is using a standard font (the fonts in this post should all work) and is being displayed in a modern browser (more on this below). Here are two extensive and detailed lists of character identities: Character Entity HTML Reference and HTML Character Entities. Here's a quick reference of the ones I think are coolest:

Looks like	Character Entity	Description
☺	☺	Smiley face
☻	☻	Inverted smiley face
☹	☹	Frowny face
		Non-breaking space - like hitting the spacebar (ever noticed your double-spaces after a period don't work online? Use  )
¼	¼	Fraction one-quarter
½	½	Fraction one-half
¾	¾	Fraction three-quarters
•	•	Bullet
©	©	Copyright sign
®	®	Registered sign
™	™	Trademark sign
♥	&hearts;	Hearts suit (in cards)
★	★	Star
☂	☂	Umbrella (rain)
☮	☮	Peace sign
☯	☯	Yin & Yang
♘	♘	White Knight (chess)
♪	♪	Eighth note

How it works: Browsers are designed to read HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) documents (history of HTML here). Unlike plain-text or word-processing documents (static documents), HTML documents are built up with all kinds of tags and symbols and codes, telling the browser how to display the content. So you could be typing a sentence and mid-way decide to break into song "♪A whole ♩♬ new world!♫" Try it. Next time you update your facebook or twitter, throw a little ✄ or ☢ to really get your message across.

Sometimes the most common things are the hardest to do

2009-03-23T07:50:00.001-07:00

Life presents us with so many choices sometimes it's hard to do the things that are most important to us. Whenever I have a day off at home, I plan to do so much housework- all those things that I can't do during the week. But at the end of the day, I look back and realize that I actually accomplished nothing. Except maybe updating my facebook. That's my dilemma - doing the things that I don't need to do in place of the things that I should be doing.

Saturday night I had the hardest time deciding whether or not to go to church (it was stake conference, after all). I knew I wouldn't be thrust down to hell for not going, but there a dull nagging in the back of my head that I SHOULD go, that thing we call "conscience" or "duty" or whatever. I was so tired and had been out all day and hadn't done any of the home stuff I had planned and blah blah blah, I just didn't want to go. Finally, my wife convinced me to go (and came along for the ride!) and upon arriving I felt like I had actually done something right (or my wife, rather). The talks were good and I got pretty beat up by the spiritual 2x4, but the last speaker really drilled it home. He basically said "there are some of you here that didn't plan on being here, or didn't want to be here, but you showed up anyway and that's the important thing." Before I could give myself a pat on the back, he motioned behind him to the chorister and said "it wasn't easy for Sister Carlson to be here, but she made it." I later learned that her husband had passed away the day before.

There are so many things that we should be doing - that we must be doing - but somehow slip through the cracks. Sometimes we're too tired, sad, sick, or downtrodden to look beyond the bare necessities to those things that will help others or brighten their day. Of anyone in that congregation, Sister Carlson was the ONE who had a valid excuse not to be there, but despite the sorrow she came and did what she knew she must. Let's follow her example. Let's get up right now and do that thing which we know we should have done last week. Write that letter (email) to your loved one, apologize to your neighbor (or spouse), find the strength to forgive, pay that debt, clean that room, whatever it is that you've had on your mind for so long but haven't had the strength or the faith to do, go do it now. Really. Stop reading and go do it. Get out of here. Someone's waiting.

Vietnamese Input - A Few Methods of Typing Vietnamese

2009-03-20T08:07:00.001-07:00

Here are three ways of using Vietnamese characters in your workflow:

Vietnamese input method software that you install on your machine

Online service that acts as input method software

Online Vietnamese manual keyboard

Input Method Software

I'm partial towards one piece of Vietnamese input software, and it is called Unikey. Great open-source software (that means it's free!) that is incredibly small, efficient and mobile. Other software includes VNI, VPSKeys, etc, which includes dictionaries, spell checkers and a lunar calendar for goodness sake, but if you only need the ability to type in Vietnamese, I would recommend Unikey above the rest. I've used it for 5 years now and love it.

First, download Unikey (zip) here

Unzip the file and save the contents in some folder you'll remember

Open the file named unikey.exe, make sure the little icon at the bottom is a "V" instead of "E", and start typing

That's it! You're done! No installation, no registry changes, no library files to clutter your system32, nothing! Because it is so small and lightweight and doesn't require an installation to run, you can actually copy the contents of your folder to a USB drive and then plug it in to any other computer to start typing Vietnamese. If you want to make sure that the your Vietnamese characters are readable to the vast majority of viewers (ie webpage, email, Word document) then make sure that the Character Set in the Control Panel is set to Unicode and that you use one of the following fonts:

Arial

Courier New

Myriad Pro (Adobe)

Palatino Linotype

Tahoma

Verdana

There are a few others, but these are the main Unicode fonts that contain all the characters in the Vietnamese alphabet. A standard installation of Windows will include all of these fonts (minus Myriad Pro, which comes bundled with Adobe CS products).

Online service

Although there is no service that I can find that is specifically intended for this purpose (I have one on the back burner but it's really beyond me right now), if I'm stuck at a computer with no Vietnamese input software and I left my USB drive at home, this is my next best option. We will basically be using a Vietnamese dictionary site that facilitates Vietnamese input then copying the text and pasting it where we need it.

Navigate to a dictionary site that provides online Vietnamese input (my personal favorite of all time: http://dict.vietfun.com/)

Make sure Output Format is UTF-8 and Input Mode is VNI or VIQR

Start typing your content in the search box

Copy the text and paste it where you need it

This method works well for single words or short phrases. It also can be used for mobile devices, except the iPhone which can't copy and paste (yet. OS 3.0 should).

Online Vietnamese Keyboard

My last option, if all else fails, is to use a manual keyboard (one that gives you all the Vietnamese characters and you click on the one you want). I found a nice one today for this article, here at Incks.com You can type the standard English letters, then click on the Vietnamese-specific letters as you come to them. Huge impediment in the typing process, but better than nothing. Also has the option to zoom in/out, save as a text file or view and print.

Hope this has been helpful. Let me know your thoughts, and if you use other methods of typing Vietnamese please add it to this post in the comments! It would be cool to see how everyone else does it.

One last thing: A huge player in the open-source world of Vietnamese input is Hồ Ngọc Đức. This man is the master-mind behind both Unikey and the dictionary I mentioned above. He is a professor at Universität zu Lübeck in Germany and has made substantial contributions to the Vietnamese input method community. Visit his homepage here. And, if you really need a lunar calender but don't want to pay for VNI, he has one of those, too.

Update: Just remembered, my friend developed a tool to convert between different Vietnamese character formats (Unicode, VNI, VPS, VIQR). This could also be used to type Vietnamese characters, if you're familiar with VIQR, which can be typed with any keyboard. Read up on VIQR and then type your content into the tool and hit Convert. Here is Nguyễn Trí Minh's Vietnamese Conversion tool.

Change of Direction

2009-03-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

I've been MIA for the last little while. Work is picking up, and after my last blog redesign I've kind of pulled away from the computer at home to make way for some other things (ie. planting blueberries!). Actually, I've turned more towards Facebook and Twitter and Flickr as vehicles to keep in touch with friends and stuff, because it's so quick and easy and I'm lazy. Anyway, I am going to start a new topic on this blog, namely Tips and Tricks for computer stuff. Just a series of short posts regarding things I've found to speed up my workflow. Today is the first article and it pertains to inputing Vietnamese characters.

Tết Pictures In!!

2009-03-11T22:40:00.000-07:00

Better late than never. Here's my coverage of the festival this year. I was mostly caught up doing what I do best (running after my wife) but I was able to capture a few fun moments. My favorite was going behind the food vendors' booths and sneaking shots while my wife told them how they can sell their wares more successfully.

Click here for the slideshow

[images hosted by flickr]

Taking Notes Helps!

2009-02-24T18:13:00.000-08:00

An article in Pistachio today informs presenters on presenting while people are Twittering. Quite an interesting phenomenon, and this article gives a nice perspective. The author lists the reasons why Twittering during a presentation is positive, and I'd like to point out the first of these reasons. I quote from reason number 1:

The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content the more engaged and ultimately the more learning happens.

This concept has been pounded into my head since childhood, and I always find it perfectly true in every instance. Whether I'm sitting in a class or reading the Bible or trudging through a meeting that I really don't want to be in, taking notes always - yes, always - yields strong results in the end. Here's what happens:

I have to listen to take notes, so I start off more engaged
The more I take notes, the more questions I ask what I'm hearing
The more questions I ask, the more I use that thing between my ears (brain?) to try and figure out the answer
Inevitably, after a series of questions and answers, I subconsciously start to draw the content out of the abstract and into my own ballpark
This is when one piece of that content takes on a life of it's own and starts to mold to fit my current situation and other, unrelated questions start to be answered by what I learned here
Now the meeting/presentation is over and I can hardly believe it because I feel like I just started taking notes, even though I have ten full pages

Wonderful, huh? There's nothing as enlightening as having a good note-taking session. Except maybe choosing idleness instead of taking notes, which is what I usually opt to do. :)

A Wealth of Data Visualization Links

2009-02-22T23:00:00.001-08:00

Thanks to a friend, I've been introduced to a truckload of data visualization links. I don't know if there's enough time in my whole life to thoroughly read through them all, but just a peek was enough. Hope you enjoy as much as I did (and will!):

Edward Tufte - the da vinci of Data

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits

visualcomplexity.com

Swivel Preview

The Best Tools for Visualization

Graphic Design - My 2009 Hobby

2009-02-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

I've always loved art. I remember painting landscapes for my friends one year for Christmas. I remember listening to Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid and furiously drawing
characters from Final Fantasy or Metroid, or whatever Nintendo Power was highlighting at the time. I remember sitting for hours in my room carefully studying each page of my Michael Whelan or Alan Lee books, wondering how in the world did he get so much detail on that spaceship wall, or how did his stroke void of any detail at all still capture exactly the form of the dragon. I remember sitting in the basement at the computer for days on end, scrupulously writing and rewriting POV-Ray code and patiently watching as the the rays were traced one by one and my screen became a three-dimensional parallel universe. I loved it, but over the years other priorities have taken - well - priority, and I've lost a lot of the experience I built up as a child and a younger-than-I-am-now person.

I've lost so much ground in my technical drawing skills so I get easily frustrated when I'm trying to draw or paint freehand anymore. Luckily, over the last several months and because of my deepening passion for web development and design, I've been re-introduced into the world of art. Art infused with information and seamlessly presented on a canvas of HTML and CSS. Moll's clean vintage look with just enough texture to make you feel like you're reading a book; Spooner's mixture of bold vectors and calm browns; Inman's striking minimal mathematical approach; Nick La's explosion of motion and flow and contrast - it's all amazing and delightful to me, from the markup to the stylesheets to the javascript to the polished, shiny finished product it's all beautiful to me. So, I'm re-applying myself to art, this time in the form of graphic design which allows me to be creative without getting stuck on the fact that I still can't draw an anatomically-correct tree (so I borrow someone else's).

Want to see my new favorite site? This changes by the day, but at least for yesterday and today I'm submitting Viget Inspire as the most visually appealing blog in the whole world wide web (or "WWWW" for short). Isn't it nice? Well, it was this blog and a tutorial based on that blog that pushed me over the edge last night. After an hour of homework and a handful of Dove Blackberry Carmel Dark Chocolates, I plugged in my wacom and downloaded some watercolors and trees and GIMPed up a painting (the one at the top). It turned out ok, but more importantly, it's my start. From today until 11:59pm December 31^st 2009, I am officially... ummm... doing more art stuff. I'll post it to my flickr so stop by occasionally and take a gander.

Thanks to mom and dad and Morgy and Jennie and Harmony for being my inspiration.

Discussion Forums are Frustrating

2009-02-11T12:26:00.001-08:00

I've learned all of my measly scripting skills from one of two sources: documentation and discussion forums. As riveting those documentation pdfs are, I have to say that discussion forums are even more frustrating because it starts out with the exact predicament you find yourself in, then halfway through they're talking about their own project or some other post they posted or their neighbor's dog.

Today I found a discussion forum that yielded the one piece of information I have been lacking for the last two weeks. I'm about to publish a test suite of a document management system and the core functions are still buggy, including uploading which is like number one priority. Long story short, Yoda showed me the way and as I am not a member of that community and therefore cannot reply to skeeter1jd to express my heartfelt gratitude, I'm going to do it here.

Thanks.

Why I Miss "Real" Winters

2009-02-09T10:15:00.001-08:00

Do you believe in coincidence?

2009-02-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

Is it entirely due to chance that on my way home from work yesterday, while dodging cars and trucks on my bike, my mind was drawn back to an old, dead project I've had on the shelf for a year to host user-created maps of Vietnamese restaurants, shops, doctors, etc and build a social network around such a service?

Or that as I drove to Target to drop off my wife's subscription, a break-through concept - the "missing key" as I coined it - crashed into my brain about how to bring such a service out of the mass of mashups and into a unique niche that would truly prove useful to its users by adding new place/event notifications?

Or that when I got home I searched "social mapping" and found that Google's Latitude, an update to mobile maps that will track you via cellphone and broadcast your position to your private network, would be released tomorrow (that's today)?

Or that today I routinely opened my design feeds and inadvertently stepped into a screencast featuring Mozilla's Ubiquity, which is an experiment that in-part promises to bring mashups from site-centric status to user-centric?

Or that jQuery is just so frickin' awesome that even a dense-head like me might be able to pull it off?

Do you believe in coincidence?

Web Design Ledger - 10 Amazing Designers

2009-01-29T23:10:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the big dogs in the web design world. And yes I have to put a picture of Moll here since he's my idol right now.

10 Amazing Designers that Influence the Community

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Happy Lunar New Year!

2009-01-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year
To all our friends and family
Near and Far
We wish you the best for 2009
May you find happiness, success and good fortune
In the Year of the Ox!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Chúng cháu xin chúc các bác, cô chú, anh chị em
Một năm mới tràn đầy hạnh phúc và thành công.
Mong rằng năm Kỷ Sửu sẽ mang lại nhiều may mắn.

Hội Tết is this weekend so prepare for pictures!

Greepit Post - Long Exposure Pictures

2009-01-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

Greepit is a design blog I've been frequenting lately. It mostly posts about web design but once in awhile drops some inpsiring photos. Thought I'd share this one.

I Heart Google Chrome

2009-01-21T16:50:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love most about Chrome is that the dialogs and alerts are, well, almost funny. Like this:

My favorite is the secret agents part. I ran into a new one today:

I still love Firefox, though, for more reasons than I can name. I'm just glad to have two tools now for traversing and dissecting the web.

Cameron Moll (pronounced Mull or Mall but not Mole)

2009-01-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

I first ran into Cameron's work several months ago when I was reading a snap2objects article on how to destroy the web 2.0 look. Little did I know who I had found! That was when I first started dabbling in actual solid web design instead of just screwing around with my blog, and since then I've seen his name pop up over and over. Today I hit the jackpot - an interview with Cameron on UIE.com. I haven't listened to it yet, but after break I plan to spend the next 29 minutes and 52 seconds listening to Spool pick Moll's brain while I calculate stats from the Nov election for work. Wonderful.

Oh, and he did a letterpress of the temple. He's so awesome.

Earlier today I found found his wife's blog, as well. Suzanne has a delightful sense of humor and made my day with her post about her boys. 4 boys. Phew.

Needless to say, I think I've found a new role model.

UPDATE 01/22/09: Lookie what I found today: Chatting with Cameron Moll on Nettuts.com

Nine Lion Design

2009-01-20T08:38:00.000-08:00

This homepage has got to be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. I still get chills looking at it.

Carrot Creative - jQuery at Work

2009-01-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

The folks over at Carrot Creative have put jQuery to good use. Great use, actually. Smooth animation, no-refresh content changes, good sense of humor (they give you directions to their office by foot, car, train or dinosaur. How funny is that? lol) all combined to yield a rather pleasant experience.

Lately, I've seen so many sites like theirs, utilizing dom manipulation to create full-fledged applications instead of merely a website, all without moving from the homepage. The first I saw was a year or so ago (can't remember the link - doh!) by a Scandinavian company where you were a little plane flying all over the site. It had cool background sound effects like you were in a terminal, to complete the ambiance. Now this concept is being applied in very creative ways to more and more sites each day (favs: nofrks, youlove.us). I wonder if it will become so widespread that in 5 years from now we'll look at it like we look at the blink tag now haha. We'll see I guess.

I'm getting an itch to redesign again... argh, gotta kick it. Back to school. Clean your house. Serve your members. But don't redesign. Maybe next year.

But then all this cool stuff will be old. :(

The Best CSS Design of 2008

2009-01-06T07:50:00.000-08:00

Wanna see some of the best CSS designs of 2008? This site has a terrific collection of websites that use rock-solid CSS markup to break the Web 2.0 look. I love these sites - someday I will design like these people.

The Best CSS Design of 2008

Sleddin' in Utah

2008-12-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

Here's what we did today. Fun.

Design and Developer Tips

2008-12-26T20:30:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on a treasure trove of design feeds full of tips, tricks and tutorials about web design and development. Jon over at spyre studios shares with us the rss feeds that have helped him with his web design skills - he is a self-made artist, you know. Here it is:

160+ RSS Feeds For Web-Designers And Developers

LDS Maps = Pretty Sweet

2008-12-22T22:10:00.000-08:00

This was awhile ago, but the Church released a new map app for finding your closest meetinghouse (aka "church"). I remember the old text-based one that they used to have, it reminded me of Oregon Trail. "You've been bit by a snake. You've found your closest meetinghouse." Actually, it was nothing like that but for some reason it makes me think of it. Either way, this app blows the old one out of the water. Link: maps.lds.org

It's exciting to me to see how much the Church has opened it's doors technologically. Open source projects and profitable freelancing have skyrocketed the number of professional programmers and web developers with excellent skills, and the Church is reaching out to that community to built its online presence. I remember when the Church revamped its homepage (not too long ago) and I thought "Woo hoo, it will be awhile before we see another change around here." Not! The newsroom, a new media player for watching conference, and the tech site - and that's just the beginning! It looks like they've got a Home Teaching/Visiting Teaching web app in the works, which is still in the draft draft draft stage and pending approval before it can even move beyond a prototype, but that's still cool! It was funny because I stumbled on that piece of news right as I was finishing up my home teaching web app for the branch. Don't know if I'll ever roll it out, but it could be useful for the younger home teachers, anyway. That, of course, includes President. :)

One last thing: Church discussions on Twitter. I just joined Twitter so I'm still figuring out what a tweet and a hashtag are, but I caught the vision while reading the article of what this could mean in the future. My twitter feed can be found here (please no stalkers please), or it can be accessed directly from this blog (the bottom sidebar tab).

Tonight I told my wife that I'm getting in touch with my geeky side as we gorged ourselves on Korean banchan and bulgogi and tofu soup. She nonchalantly replied, "That's ok, as long as you don't cheat on me." What? I didn't see that one coming. Where did that come from? Did she hear what I said? I guess she meant spending more time with the computer than with her. That could be a form of infidelity. Man, I love that woman.

Christmas Tradition!

2008-12-21T07:14:00.000-08:00

Some individuals have incredibly elaborate traditions to celebrate Christmas. As you can see, I am one of those individuals:

My Grinch tie on the Sunday before Christmas.

Presents for our friends at church (hey, when you're mass producing you've got to be a little creative!).

The Economy at Your Doorstep

2008-12-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

The U.S. economy slipped into recession in December 2007, the nation's business cycle arbiter declared on Monday, and the downturn could be the worst since World War Two.
Reuters - Mon Dec 1, 2008

The above statement, or the basic idea anyway, has been haunting around our neighborhood for the last several months. I've heard rumors of job cuts. Church members catch me in the hall to tell me that their friends are being laid off and they're only working 30 hours a week. A friend will be taking a quick trip to Vietnam and back because her department was mandated to take a week off - unpaid. We all saw it coming, we all recognized the signs, but it's still an unpleasant surprise (to say the least) when it's staring you in the face. I just got out of a meeting with our department head who told us that we are safe from direct layoffs, for now anyway. Who knows what next week will bring.

Positivity is absolutely imperative. Of course I can "be" positive right now because I am still sitting at a desk getting paid to work. Many of my brothers and sisters, in the County and elsewhere, do not have this blessing or will soon be stripped of it. Finding the good in times like these can seem impossible, but truly it is the only way to survive. We must move with hope and not sit and bemoan tragedy. It is upon hope that we can regain our balance and continue forward; without it, we lose all and submit ourselves to defeat. And for what can we hope? Just as Mother Earth cleanses herself with fire, rain, and rumblings in the earth before shooting forth new life, the Economy must bend and break before it can start swinging up again. There's a pattern and a plan behind all of this - always.

Update: Here's the scoop on my county in particular. It will be interesting to see these leaders come to a collaborative agreement without tearing each other apart: County CEO proposes 3 percent across-the-board salary cut

Update 2: Looks like we're not the only ones: Việt Nam: Thất nghiệp tăng vọt

The Turtle is Real!

2008-12-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered about the stories we hear about Hồ Hoàn Kiếm, the lake in the middle of Hà Nội that supposedly harbors the magic turtle who returned King Lê Lợi's sword to the gods? Yeah, well here's his brother, who apparently didn't hold on tight enough during the recent flooding in Northern Vietnam and got swept away into a hungry fisherman's hands. I'm glad the turtle was saved (it is now back home) because it is believed that he is one of only four of his kind (rafetus swinhoei) left on the entire earth. I say that's a pretty good number seeing that they're magic turtles.

By the way, the turtle in Hồ Hoàn Kiếm is not a legend. My mother in law saw it.

Revamping the Blog - xanghe v2.0

2008-12-07T22:41:00.000-08:00

This blog has always been an experiment. Every time I learned something new, I would try to implement it. Well, I did it again.

This new design was inspired by the Web 2.0 sites I frequent (eBay, Facebook, Trulia, etc), some sites that try to break the Web 2.0 look (W3 <MARKUP/>, a Wordpress theme, Cameron Moll's site), and of course the magic of jQuery. I don't hold a candle to those masters, but by meager imitation I hope to achieve something that is appealing to me and functional for the readers (if any).

I'm caught between contemporary design and grunge, between straight lines and organic forms, so I end up with geometric shapes with shifting opacity, all superimposed over color-rich backgrounds. I love interaction (hence the really-useless dragging in the old blog) so I've attempted to encourage visitors (even force them) to interact with the site to initiate anything - even just reading. The icon in the bottom right opens the Background Picker, which... well... picks the background. The great part about the "picker" is that it is populated live from a google spreadsheet rss feed (didn't use an AJAX call because my database is on another domain and I don't like proxies - thank goodness for JSON!), so as soon as I add more background options, the menu will repopulate on the next click without even reloading the page!!! Ok, maybe the exclamation marks are too much, but I think it's cool.

Bedtime. Now that I enjoy seeing my own blog again I should probably start posting more. Or maybe I'll just play with the sidebar tabs.

Streamlining the Blog

2008-12-04T12:33:00.001-08:00

Well, I'm working on the blog again. It should load up faster, but no changing and background and draggable things... for now. I kept getting a message that my blog was infected and stuff because I was pulling scripts from freewebtown.com, which is a "Reported Attack Site!" Oh well

At the bottom, you'll see some links called "version backtrack" - it's my first attempt at implementing the magic of jquery on the blog.

More to come.

Van and Hai's Wedding pics!

2008-11-29T09:09:00.001-08:00

111508_VanHaiWed-SealingUT077, originally uploaded by xanghe.

Mawwiage. Mawwiage iss what bwings us togever today.

Lost in the Wilderness. And Found

2008-11-07T07:04:00.000-08:00

It's finally over. The biggest election in history (or so I heard, over and over and over) is finally over and my life has returned to normal. Registrars and elections officials across the country still have to finish up the counts on remaining ballots, check provisional ballots for qualifications, complete the post-election canvass and hand count 1% of all ballots cast (all the stuff you don't hear about on Fox and CNN) before the election is certified, but for all intents and purposes, the election is over. I got home at 4:30 yesterday. Life is good.

For the last year, I've felt some serious changes a'brewin in my life and I now's the time to implement them. I was sorting through some pictures last night and found this one from when we went hiking up in O'Neill park last spring (I did not photoshop the orange stuff in - it was this stringy stuff that covered half of the vegetation out there, kind of like War of the Worlds or something). I felt that it was very indicative of my current situation, lost as can be out in the middle of the wilderness but now free to finally start moving again. I'm going to go back to school for a masters in Environmental Science and Public Policy. I'm intrigued with energy and how we as humans can tap into the huge reservoirs of energy all around us, without burning all the oil in our lamps. We'll see how far that road takes me.

I was praying last night and wondering why 3-4 years ago I got everything I wanted without even asking. I've been applying for jobs here and there lately and nothing has worked out, but back then I applied for one job and just got it. I applied to one university and I just got it. I applied for one wife and just got her (I might get smacked for saying that, but it's true :P ). Back then, I had no clue what I was doing, I didn't have a direction, I could care less about making money, and I thought school was just so interesting but I never took the time to figure how it would translate into a career. The only thing I really put any stock into was my church and the youth I was called to serve. I feel so much more established now, I've laid out my path, I know what I want and I have a direction, but everything's moving like molasses and I haven't seen really any progress at all! Last night, I was perplexed: how could an oblivious, uneducated, naive person like me 3 years ago with no plans of his own just fall into fortune's path... then it hit. Duh. Oblivious: not impeded by his own thoughts. Uneducated: not stuck to what he thinks is right. Naive: not stopped by his own pride. No plans of his own: ready to accept the plans from Someone higher. I was being led because all my all was directed towards serving others. Now I have my big plans, but I'm so involved in them that I don't reach out like I used to. There's the answer. Hope I learn it this time.

By the way, there's going to be a big earthquake:

Your Temple

2008-10-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

Everybody needs to have a temple of their own. A place of peace, where you can come close to Nature and the Divine. A place where all things begin to make sense, where confusion and troubles give way to clarity and opportunities. Where you learn all the things that you already knew, which somehow seem new in contrast with your current struggles.

When problems make their way into your heart, or you're exhausted from always battling with the same questions that keep you up every night, don't find a distraction. Don't blast it away with loud music or hide it away with smoky darkness or drink it away with temporary elixirs. Don't sweep it under the mat or settle for impermanent solutions. Don't run away to a distant land, only to find your monster waiting on your doorstep. Don't bury yourself in busy-ness and work, only to find your assailant working right beside you. Don't ignore it for so long that your bottled-up emotional trauma suddenly becomes somatic and you become so ill that you can't do any good for anyone.

There's something absolutely terrifying about looking fear in the face. Lost hope and unmet expectations are even worse. Defeat and doubt probably the worst of all. But once faced, these enemies can no longer haunt you because you see them for what they are: spiritual imbalance. Something is out of whack between how you perceive your inner soul and how your soul really is. Someone's singing off note and you think it's your soul but your soul thinks it's you.

The only way back is through the doors of your temple. Stepping away from the worries of the world and allowing, for only a moment, your mind and heart to get back in tune. Taking all the little pieces of your emotion that life has flung around your soul and connecting them back together. Permitting a higher power to cleanse the filth that collects in the cracks of your heart. It's like defragmenting your spirit.

I just got back from one of my temples (yes, I have many) and I feel like I've been liberated from a wicked tyrant who has held me hostage for a long time. I entered with a specific question, and got the answer almost before I sat down. After 2 good hours of meditation, I have no clue what went on around me but I know that my life has been changed and a new direction set. Actually, it's the old direction that I knew I should have been following anyway, but refinding it has made all the difference.

Dreams

2008-09-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

the only thing now that can get to me, now i've found my dreams
is when I look in her eyes and see that i don't meet what she needs in me
first come the smarts and then come the skills, i finally got my degree
but what happens when the rice comes to an end?
the skills make the heroes and smarts become dead

i'm looking forward but can't see

the books on the shelf are collecting dust, i've consumed them all
but now and again i hear words in my head that
all of this theory still can't meet the ends

i'm looking forward but can't see

sometimes i dream of my children, all so pure and naive
they love unconditional, illuminating
all of the things I've been taught from the start
reminding me of the angels they are
but when they ask for bread
how can i give stones instead?

i'm looking forward but can't see

i know I have more, i scream to the sky
endowed with all things that i need in this life
but can i give more? can't I give more?

i watch them asleep on a bed of dreams as i make my night call
wondering what all their wishes mean and if i can meet them all

i'm looking forward but can't see

i'm looking forward but can't see

Tết Trung Thu social

2008-09-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

Come see our photos
We had our summer social for the branch last night, which happened to fall near Tết Trung Thu, so we sang a Tết Trung Thu song and called it good. It was one of the better socials I've been to as of late - nice and intimate, and more games for the kids than you can shake a stick at!

I unknowingly took most of these at 480x640 (dork!) Thanks Kathy for letting us use your camera.

Harmony

2008-08-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

Some art just speaks to me. Last year, someone sent me a little animation called Animator vs Animation. I watched it several times, then began to browse the other works of Mr Alan Becker, the "Animator" of that short. I found in his journal that he had a sister, who went by "ilsung," who was an artist as well. Seeing that Alan was out doing good as a missionary and would therefore be unable to update his page anymore, I wandered over to ilsung's page to see some of her works. I was enchanted. There was something about her art - no, it's her expression, her feeling, her originality- that held me speechless for a moment as I looked through her gallery. I called my wife over and we looked together, commenting on the simple, graceful lines and hues that made up her images. We downloaded some we've used them as our wallpapers ever since. I even have this image as my phone wallpaper. I just feel happy when I look at it.

I've stopped by often since then, enjoying her new pieces, browsing back to my old favorites and admiring her skill. I've learned what it is that draws me to her most recent work: a constant reach upward (example), an inspiring draw to the heavenly (example), and her portrayal of heaven's interaction with with we mere mortals (example).

Harmony is now preparing to leave on her missionary service. My wife and I wish her well and hope she does much good while she's there. But we also look forward to when she returns, in case we want to change our wallpaper.

Nhà tôi

2008-08-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Lúc gặp khó nhà tôi cũng hộ
Bản thân đầy xấu cứ dối là thiện
Nãy sửng sốt gặp ma trong nhà
Nhà tôi đã bền không bỏ không trách
Nay nhận ân trời ban trong nhà
Nhận tôi bị ám chứ không phải nhà.

the Strait and Narrow

2008-07-02T08:35:00.001-07:00

IMG_4877, originally uploaded by onlyblue.

This photo is so full of symbolism to me... I've been looking at it all morning.

Walk

2008-06-26T08:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I had to walk so much
After biking to and fro from work
Like any normal day
I took a new bus route to school
Fell asleep
Passed Chapman
Went all the way to Katella
Before I figured out Chapman
Was 5 minutes ago
Jumped off the bus
Can't miss class
Ran the mile in my office clothes
And 5-year-old Sketchers
With too many holes and not enough tread
Fell upon the bus stop
"The bus broke down, we'll have to wait for the next one"
Great.
2 hours of class and back to the bus
Caught the early one
Might get some homework done tonight
Off the bus, to the next stop
Bus not scheduled for 34 minutes
Great.
I'll be home by then
If I walk
And I did.

Today while riding my bike to and fro from work
I saw a man a-crossing the street
Pink pack, shorter than most
Behind the rest
One leg longer
Than the other
Never corrected
Limping in back
Knee over-extended
Foot under-curved in a painful arch
Limping in back
Across the street
Through the parking lot
Into the way station
Red light to Green
Go

Thank you, Lord, for letting me walk so much

Belated and Unfinished Xanghe Version 1.0

2008-03-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Well, it's done. For now. I've been working on this little blog since January and now it's time to stop. I'm not done with everything I was planning to do, but life has a way of pulling in different directions quite suddenly and I've just been yanked. So no more blog design. For now.

Here's a condensed list of the release notes, accessible from the link in the top corner:

02.04.08 - v0.6 LAUNCH

main components (blog body, sidebar, header, etc) designed and implemented

styling for font, links, drop caps, etc. finished

02.07.08 - v0.8 LAUNCH

image style to imitate polariod

moveability - post-it notes and static clings can be repositioned by drag and drop

release notes styled and written

02.26.08 - v0.9 LAUNCH

travel log seems to be working, so I'll keep it

lightbox also seems to have passed the test, so it's a keeper

some credits/info added to bottom (will expand)

keeping old Viet terms in archive for future viewing

03.18.08 - v1.0 LAUNCH

installation and testing of time-sensitive background completed (for now)

Now that time-sensitive background is supposed to be much more than it now is. So far, I've only got a day, night and sunrise background, and it's all in winter. I had big plans, like having spring, summer and fall seasons and even attach some script to an rss weather feed and have the background change with the actual weather. Big plans. But sometimes big plans never materialize, as is the case with my now perpetual-winter-mountain-town background.

I had dinner with some good friends tonight, and the discussion turned to a project that I participated in several years ago. I need to reinvolve myself in working with people. Blogging is nice, but there's magic in the touch of a human being, physical or otherwise. The Magic of Touch - that may make a nice post someday. Perhaps after I post on The Magic of the Khổ Qua - How the Most Bitter Melon on Earth Can Actually Cure All Your Problems.

Ok or Cancel - The Dialogs in Life

2008-03-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

For the last 2 weeks I've been engrossed in a web project at work trying to migrate a recruitment database from Access forms to web-based forms. It is actually workable right now (big surprise to me!) and the recruitment process is moving along smoothly. However, I'm enduring some serious after effects. I used VBScript to connect all the pages and being a novice at even VB in general, I've spent a lot of time trying to get things to work. I'm now thinking in "if...then" statements (which is not totally effective in a marriage) and I'm under the impression any mistake I make can be fixed with a simple click of the "Undo." Everything around me seems to be framed in procedures and sub procedures, which for one, lead to an interesting thought today.

The common interface between a user and his or her machine is the dialog box. It's small, to the point and in most cases directs the machine what to do next. Although some just inform, the majority of dialog boxes ask the user a question, or rather an ultimatum which requires an answer of yes or no, Ok or Cancel. Some contain a simple question, others an entire copyright. Some dialogs have evolved into incredibly complex windows with lots of information and a series of questions we must answer before clicking Ok or Cancel. No matter how many answers we come up with, it always comes down to one choice - Ok or Cancel. (Actually, there's the little close box at the top which technically counts as a null click, I think, but for all intents and purposes we'll count that a Cancel click. Man, what a geek) No matter what we chose in the interim, our click on one of the two buttons is what decides the next action the machine will take. I realized riding my scooter home today that life is like that in many ways.

How many times do we get hit with promptings from above that leave us with a choice? "Help that old lady across the street. Ok or Cancel" How often do we click Cancel too quickly, or perhaps ponder and mull over the prospect of acting on that prompting... and then click no? Some choices are quick and painless, like "Shall I eat breakfast this morning?" Others are incredibly complex, multi-faceted decisions impacting multiple people and setting the direction for the rest of your life. We can come up with our own answers, we can beat around the bush until the cows come home trying to figure out what to do, but it all comes down to one choice: Ok or Cancel

Theorize, analyze, rationalize it away, but it still distills down to one choice.

Visit the elderly at a nursing home even though they can't move and they drool and stink and might be gone soon anyway.

Ok or Cancel

Take a moment to reflect on your blessings even though a loved just passed away and you lost your job and your brother is in jail.

Ok or Cancel

Hold your tongue even though he or she has offended you so many times before and you're hurt and they're rude and you're so tired of it.

Ok or Cancel

Surprise a loved one even though you're so busy and your work day was hard and they see you 24/7 and already know you love them.

Ok or Cancel

Apologize to someone even though they deserve your grudge.

Ok or Cancel

Make the change in your life that you've needed for so long even though you're not ready and you're a little afraid and it might hurt.

Ok or Cancel

Help that old lady across the street even though you don't know her and it's cliché.

Ok or Cancel

Oh, how life is like an internet of its own. So many distractions and entertainments, enticements and allurements, inventions and deceptions - all swirling around a handful of worthwhile destinations. Each decision moves us closer to a destination. What kind of destination? It's not the balance of Ok's and Cancel's, but the sequence and frequency of our choices and the pattern set by such that determine what destination we ultimately receive. We will be lead finally to meet our Maker in the infinite worlds to come who will ask if we are prepared to move forward into glory and peace, a far better world of promise instead of continuing in the pain and sorrow of this life. At that moment, faced with the ultimate decision and final dialog box, the answer will make its way out of our heart, already determined by thousands of previous answers, before we can even stop it.

Cancel

A Fairy Tale for Unwitting Adults, Part 2

2008-03-03T06:15:00.000-08:00

My idea going into this study of the Book of Mormon, especially the section dealing with evidence for and against its historicity, was if the Book of Mormon is true, then it has to stand up to the most rigorous assaults and critiques that skeptics and nonbelievers can make. So I made every effort to honestly, fully investigate every criticism, every objection that's ever been made to the historicity of the Book of Mormon. One has to suspend judgment in a number of cases, because it's hard to say when the evidence will all be in, but at the present there are still a number of unresolved anachronisms and problems and ambiguities in the text.

But I felt satisfied that there was in every case a corresponding weight on the other side of the equation, which actually led me to, I think, some very important insights into the nature of faith and how faith works. I came to the conclusion, in large part through my study of the Book of Mormon, that for faith to operate, and for faith to have moral significance in our lives, then it has to at some level be a choice. It can't be urged upon us by an irresistible, overwhelming body of evidence, or what merit is there in the espousing of faith? And it can't be something that we embrace in spite of overwhelming logical rational evidence to the contrary, because I don't believe that God expects us to hold in disregard that faculty of reason that he gave us.

But I do believe that the materials are always there of which one can fashion a life of belief or a life of denial. I believe that faith is a revelation of what we love, what we choose to embrace, and therefore I think [it] is the purest reflection of the values that we hold dear and the kind of universe that we aspire to be a part of. And so it comes ultimately as no surprise to me that the evidence will never be conclusive on one way or the other. I think that there's a purpose behind the balance that one attains in the universe of belief. ...

This quote from Terryl Givens (taken from an interview for the PBS FRONTLINE "The Mormons" found here) presents an interesting view of faith. Givens distills faith down to a choice - a choice to believe in something that has not been proven nor is based on any tangible evidence; or in Alma's words, the choice to "hope for things which are not seen, which are true." The crux of spirituality is being able to reach beyond this human body which demands proof, and attain a higher level through positive thinking. This is the emphasized by Christ himself: "Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." (John 20:29)

Religions are based on faith. If it were not so, religions would be no more than service organizations or social clubs. Yet it seems that in our attempt to prove the "only true church," some may lose sight of this principle. Those against the LDS Church claim that we are "unwitting" for following a religion that has so little evidence - the fact that religion is founded on faith (not requiring evidence) is somehow disregarded. Those Latter-day Saints who take up arms against other religions claim that those religions are the "whore of all the earth" - the fact that only those who "fight against Zion" are considered such is somehow shoved to the side. The point of my other post (which I didn't portray very well) was that the two above parties represent two extremes on the spectrum - those who actively engage in discrediting the Church and those who actively engage in discrediting those who discredit the Church. I mentioned a "delineation" in my last post - I meant the delineation in question which, to me, is the invisible line that is constructed by these two extremes, when really there's more common ground than not.

I love the idea of faith because it's so all-encompassing; I can have faith in Jesus Christ as my Redeemer just as much as I can faith that the sun will rise this morning. One I've seen everyday of my life and one I haven't seen even once, but that's the beautiful of faith - seeing is not necessarily believing. When it comes to evidence, well, say what you may but I have my evidence for everything I've ever believed to be true. That evidence is in my heart.

2007 in Pictures

2008-02-23T21:46:00.000-08:00

I know this is a little late, but we finally got our pictures from last year organized. Come take a look at our 2007 in pictures!

A Fairy Tale for Unwitting Adults, Part 1

2008-02-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

It appears that there are people who think I am going to hell for believing in Christ, only because my way of doing so differs from their way. Conversely, experiencing this feeling has opened my eyes to the fact that I may be thinking the same thing about others because they do things differently than I do them. My wife likes to tease me when I'm upset at someone and ready to tell them "where to go" - she reminds me that whatever judgment I pass on someone else will be the judgment passed on me (see Matt 7:2). She is probably not too far off.

For the two weeks of Early Voting that I spent racing around the county with VVPATS, 2nd VBM Declarations and SOS-mandated security seals (no wonder I went a little crazy!), I rediscovered a radio station that I hadn't listened to in years. It's a Christian radio talk show that jumps between recorded sermons, books on tape, Christian politics and a lot of fundraising. I really enjoy the program between 6-9pm, which consists of mostly archived sermons from pastors with heavy southern accents. "Ya got ta git intersted... intersted in Jesis..." A lot of the teachings I heard while driving from polling site to polling site made me reflect on my beliefs and how I fit into the broader spectrum of Christianity.

One day I was listening to this station and the host was doing a question and answer show. I tuned in late so I didn't hear the prompt, but I did catch the tail end of one of the questions. I heard the questioner mentioning Moses and other ancient prophets and then he referred to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Bruce R. McConkie, saying something about Mormons always excusing their leaders by saying "they're only human." I gleened from context that he found it ridiculous that people who call themselves Christian would align themselves with such sinful men, whereas as those aligning themselves with the Ancients were ok because of the obvious purity and perfection of the prophets of the Bible. The radio host agreed and quickly summed up the Joseph Smith story (emphasizing the lack of evidence for Smith's claim), ending by calling the whole story of Mormonism a "fairy tale for unwitting adults." I'm not a fightin' man, but I'm just glad I hadn't been told that to my face.

That phrase - a fairy tale for unwitting adults - stayed with me for many days. Not long after, I was working with a large group of temporary staff at the office and one of them noticed that I was LDS, just like her. She talked to me about her experience in south county, where the missionaries are sometimes heckled by "born again Christians" and she finished by expressing her dismay that one of "their" main churches was just up the street. "Now we have the Christian Right. They hate us!" Despite my common affiliation with this woman, I was just as taken aback as when I heard the radio host denounce my faith. What's with these people! Or "we people" I guess, since I'm in there, too.

The delineation between born again non-denominational Christians and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has nothing to do with doctrine or beliefs or anything of substance - it's pure perception. I'm not a doctrinal scholar on either side of the "line" but it seems to me that born-agains and Mormons have a lot more in common than many would like to believe. We both believe in Jesus as the Christ, our Savior and Redeemer. We both believe in the power of the Atonement and that through Christ, we can find joy in this life and in the life to come. We both look forward with an eye of faith to the Second Coming and see the signs of the times all around us in the world. We both believe that God reveals his truth to His prophets, and that those truths are recorded in recorded in scripture to teach us and give us an example of how we should live. This list could continue but for brevity I'll just say this: for two theologies that are so closely related, there sure is a lot of hard feelings between the two.

I had a friend who welcomed two Christian men into his home to witness. They shared their message and stood up to leave, but before stepping out the door left one last thought: "By the way, make sure you find a church where you can worship Jesus, but don't join with the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses." I once spoke with an LDS colleague about his experience with a non-denominational Christian church. He said that they breed their children to hate us and have classes for Sunday School just to teach bashing the Mormons. As I look back and begin to catalog all of the perceptions I've heard from both sides of the spectrum, I feel like I'm in the middle of a high-school love triangle. To make an analogy, I guess the person that both sides are fighting over would be Jesus (I hope that's not irreverent). Both sides want so badly to be looked upon by Jesus as the best and most faithful but, as high school students often do, each side feels insecure in their diligence and position and therefore belittle the other to attempt to compensate. Inaccurate as it may be, that analogy seems to reiterate itself every time I hear the born again vs LDS debate. But that's just my perception.

So who wins? In the end, it's got to be both sides who decide to put doctrinal differences aside to seek for a higher level of understanding. We live in a world full of mislead perceptions blown out of proportion that result in hate and crime and war and death. Values and morals are shifting as religious institutions - Christian or otherwise - lose their foothold in society. The last thing we need is bickering and stubbornness between the individuals who call themselves Christian and who should be uniting to do good for Jesus' sake.

I may need to split this post into two (or more). I'll end part one with this:

That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:
But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.
For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;
Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;
And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby:
And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.
For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;
And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;
In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord:
In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Ephesians 2:12-22

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới

2008-02-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

Cung chúc tân xuân - Xin chúc bà con một năm mới vui vẻ, đầy hạnh phúc, sức khỏe dồi dào, tiền vô như nước, an khang thịnh vượng, mọi sự như ý, and all that good stuff.

Happy New Year

xanghe Makeover

2008-02-04T00:11:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm going to miss the old blog, but I need a change. I've been concocting this design for a long time now, and I have much more tweaking to do in the future, but I thought I'd put it up first to see if I can handle leaving the old design behind. I put so much time into that thing... Oh well, times change.

The bumble bee up there was bouncing around that thistle blossom when I walked by. I was at Bryce Canyon with some friends right after I got married and we were heading back to the car. I was a little camera happy (ever since digital cameras came out) and thought this little bee might enjoy a photo shoot since he was working so hard. Several months later, I came across that picture again and the thought hit me that I feel like a bee sometimes, always searching and looking and gathering. I might not even know what I'm looking for, but it feels like I'm constantly seeking for something. Currently it's a new job, but that's because the election is on Tuesday and I'm super sleep-deprived so I'm sure as things calm down I'll relax and go on enjoying my job. At that point, I'll start searching for something else, and so the cycle continues. I guess that's why I put a bee at the top of the old blog - I wanted something that said something about me.

I've put away the old design and I'm going for something totally new. I have a whole stack of lined paper from school that isn't being used, so I'm going to start typing my blog posts on that paper and taping it up to my window. I'll put all the sidebar stuff on different sized post-it notes so I can line it down the side. Feel free to rearrange them if you feel like it. And the title is on a static cling sticker, just in case I feel like moving it once in awhile. Right now, the view from my window is from a mountain lake high in the Uintas, I'm laying on the ground looking up at the night sky framed by towering trees. Ahhh... it's calms me just to think about it.

So there's my new blog. Hope you like it. Now I've got to somehow find a way to get that bee back into this blog...

President Gordon B Hinckley Passes Away

2008-01-27T20:07:00.000-08:00

I just received three texts that President Hinckley passed away tonight at 7pm. He was my Prophet. I remember so vividly hearing about President Benson's passing nearly 15 years ago - I was walking into the kitchen at Uncle Glen and Aunt Jody's house when I heard the news. President Hunter's passing is much more vague in my memory, and I don't even recall sustaining President Hinckley. But since then, through all my teenage years, my missionary service and the last 5 years of growing into adulthood, I've repeatedly returned to the words of my Prophet for guidance and inspiration. I have a hammered copy of the Ensign from high school that I carried around for years (until the pages fell freely from the binding) because of the two pages filled with quotes from President Hinckley. President Hinckley reminds me of temples and earrings and the Book of Mormon challenge, of Vietnam and the silver thread and the dedication of Asia for missionary work. I recall the several last General Conferences in which President Hinckley looked so weak, and everyone thought it was his "last time" when he mentioned his failing health and his hope to make it to another conference. I remember his good-humored reply to these assumptions, that he was not giving his own epitaph but just his feelings. I look back to just two weeks ago and see President Hinckley speaking at the Southern California Stake Conference Broadcast. He did look frail and the camera intentionally focused on the other side of the pulpit while President Hinckley arose and sat down, perhaps in an attempt to allow him the time and assistance he needed to move.

I just received two more phone calls about President Hinckley's passing. I am grateful for the internet and text messaging that allows news to relayed to hundreds or thousands of individuals at the click of button. I will miss President Hinckley, but I look forward to see the continued progression of the Church upon the foundation he built. One thing is for sure: of all the people on the earth right now, he's the only one I know for sure is going straight to Heaven.

The Election is Almost Here!

2008-01-21T06:36:00.000-08:00

Well, I've never worked this hard in my life (except maybe for Đại Hội). Yesterday I worked 17 hours and it looks like the next 3 weeks will be the same thing. I've been placed over Early Voting this time around, and it's a killer. Needless to say, there's not much time to blog (or clean or cook or do anything other than eat and sleep) but I just wanted to drop a line and let my 8 readers (or maybe we're up to 10?) know that I'm still alive. If any of you have emailed me in the last month, please know that I'll respond after Feb 5th. hehe

Remember, get out and vote!

click for flickr slideshow

Here's some pictures from before the madness took over my life.

Happy Birthday to me! and the New Blog

2007-12-30T21:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's not my birthday, but we are approaching this blog's one-year anniversary. So it must be my blog singing that song.

Let's take a quick look back at the past year. The first blog I created got only two posts. That was before I found "blogger" and found out it worked with a google account. Click on the picture for a "sneak peek" of my blog - from last year.

Next came this blog, which has transformed in the last year from somewhat relevant to completely superfluous, but I love it anyway. Take a trip back into the past - take a look at the first post here.

Now, I've done it again. I've started another blog project, but this time my aim is a little different than blowing off steam or trying to be funny. This time I felt a pull to aim at building something of a community, something that reaches a larger audience than just my friends and family (I think this blog's readership may be up to 10 by now). As this idea sprouted in my mind, my wife pointed out an article on the Church's homepage: Apostle Urges Students to Use New Media by Elder M Russell Ballard. The transcript is here. After reading this great address, I realized that I could use a principle of the Gospel to form my idea into a tangible blog. So here it is - a sneak peek at what may become a thriving community of faith or just another failed attempt at innovation in a saturated market.

Make this Christmas Special

2007-12-19T23:08:00.000-08:00

Please take some time this Christmas season to remember and cherish the loved ones in your life. Last week, I received an email from a friend that her sister had gone missing. After 6 days of exhaustive investigation and searching, her body was found in a landfill. Please keep the family of Ann Lisa Nguyen in your hearts and prayers this holiday season.

We are so blessed to be surrounded by friends and family - let us not forget that life is fragile.

The Nguyen family dedicated a Christmas tree to Lisa in San Jose's "Christmas in the Park" and plans on sponsoring a tree for several years to come. If you would like to show your support during this difficult time, please visit Lisa's Tree website to donate for the sponsorship of Christmas trees in the future. Lisa loved seeing the trees at Christmas time.

UPDATE: The Nguyen family created a website in memory of Lisa, here's the homepage:
AnnLisaNguyen.com

MERRY CHRISTMAS, CHARLIE BROWN!!

2007-12-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

Chinese Chess - never play after a 3-hour, late-afternoon nap

2007-12-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful day today, but we didn't take advantage of it because my cold from last week somehow made its way to my wife and she was in bed all day. However, after napping for several hours this afternoon, we decided to try a rematch at chinese chess, our new "thing to do" at home. Last time she whipped me two matches to one, but this time I put up a better fight. The only problem is that we got down to a few pieces and we're both too stubborn to surrender, so we just played and played until we were blue in the face. Literally. We both went a little wacko at that point, pushing the pieces extraordinarily long distances and capturing three pieces (including the general) in one swoop. Click here to see what happened next:

November Rain (and Decemeber, too!)

2007-12-07T23:36:00.000-08:00

It rained last Friday and it rained again today. I love it.

I believe my blog has now fallen into the "Boringest Blogs in the World" category, if it ever left that category in the first place. No pictures, no thought-provoking thoughts, just me blabbing. And not even very often. Pitiful.

It is election season, which makes it difficult for me to blog at work (don't tell my boss) and homework is adding up (finals are coming soon) so I don't have a lot of time. I've been busier, but I'm getting old so I can't hack it like I used to. And I just got sick, so anytime I move too fast I feel like my head is caving in. Let's see... anymore lame excuses...??? Nope, that's it.

So much has happened in the last few weeks, I can't fit it all in here. I've sworn off drawing (oh yeah, that's another lame excuse for not blogging) because it takes me too long and then I either get discouraged and quit or I think it's a work of art and drool over it when really it looks like crap. I've finally written out the text for my storybook (by the way, I've been trying to write a storybook) and my original intention was to illustrate it myself but that's gone down the drain. By the time I'm talented enough to do that I'll be 50. Plus, I'm trying to pick up an extra income somewhere (and praying for a promotion!) to recharge our monetary reserves, so I don't have time to practice. I'm looking for someone to illustrate and I think I've found an artist whose style I've really taken a liking to, but I don't know how to get in touch with her. So that's that.

I have started playing the piano again. I try to get a little bit in each day so that I might be able to play the hymns when our regular organist is not at church. My fingers are starting to remember how to jump from key to key without me prodding them too much. It will take awhile but I hope in a year I'll have several songs down. My wife enjoys the background music much more than the click click click of my laptop or the scratch scratch scratch of my pencils on paper so I think I'll stick to this hobby. Mutually beneficial. That's what marriage is all about.

I was talking with my friend on Sunday about "the fire." You know, that massive force deep within your soul that moves you to action, the feeling that something inside you is bursting with light and you can almost see it coming out of your fingertips, the burning desire to be perfect and pure. The feeling that is followed by focused, poignant faith and vision that opens all doors and clears all obstacles in your path. The power that radiates from your eyes, that demands attention and belief from bystanders, that crushes opposition and invites success. The sense that whatever goal you're aiming at has already been accomplished and you just have to go claim it, the result so tangible that you can almost feel it before you even see it. That's the fire. At times, it's all-encompassing and exhausting and absolutely perfect. At other times, it's gone. Like, all gone. That's when depression sets in. We came up with some good stuff on how to get it back, how to rekindle the fire, but you had to be at our joint FHE last week to get it. :) The most important thing is to keep on going and never give in, to not stop dancing just because the music is gone, and to remember that before and after any great moment the opposition will mount almost to the point of collapse (please read this great address from which we find the oft-quoted line "...beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it and trusted it and lived for it, it is right now.").

Thôi, viết tới đây đã dài quá rồi đấy, ngừng nhe. I'm stopping here, this is way too long.

Note on the bathroom mirror

2007-11-18T23:07:00.000-08:00

If you're not happy today, what will make you happy tomorrow?

If you're not satisfied with today, how will you be satisfied with tomorrow?

If you're not content with today, will you be content tomorrow?

More so than my surroundings, my environment, my friends or my family, my trials or my blessings, it is my choice to be happy today that will make me happy today. If I'm doing something - or not doing something - today that prevents me from feeling joy or contentment today, or if I'm waiting for that "thing" that will make me happy in the future, what guarantee do I have that tomorrow I won't still be doing that something or waiting for that thing? The only sure way we can feel happiness is to choose it... today. I once had a missionary companion who would ask this question when faced with a difficult choice that was easier to put off until tomorrow than dealing with today:

If not today, then when?

My Glory Days are Over

2007-11-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

How fitting. My wife and I watched The Incredibles Sunday night as we folded clothes and I was struck at how fixed "Mr Incredible" was on his former, glorious identity. Now it's my turn.

I was riding my bike home today when this other biker came speeding past me as I tried to maneuver myself safely onto the sidewalk. Now I have this thing when I'm riding my bike or running - when my adrenaline is already pumping - where if someone passes me, I automatically speed up to catch them. I can't help it. Even if I'm on a ten-speed and they're on a beach cruiser, I still try to overtake them and I feel pretty accomplished when I do so. I guess that's a vestige from my glory days, back during high school when I was at the top of my game and passing people like crazy. But that was ten years ago. Since then I've done a little training, but mostly sitting and sleeping. Anyway, today when I saw Mr Whiz fly past me I felt my legs kick into "go get 'em!" mode and I found myself flying towards him. I caught up and even passed the man without even the slightest glance back. I felt pretty good about myself as I watched him grow smaller in my rearview mirror (yes I'm a nerd with a mirror on my bike), until I felt my legs turn to mush. Luckily he turned instead of going straight, therefore missing me slouch over my handbars, gasping for breath.

I can't believe it. 400 yards of exertion and my legs gave up. Whatever happened to crashing through the wall and pushing my VO₂Max and letting the monster out and "Head for the barn, babycakes!" Whatever happened to all those times I pushed myself beyond human strength, all those sprint hills and Roger's Road and the Lake and the Peak... all that and I die at after .25 miles? Sickening. I guess my glory days are over.

I just pray that I don't live my spiritual life like this. I hope I don't meander down life's paths and hope I'm blown the right way, then suddenly kick into gear when a challenge - or what I consider a challenge - comes my way. I heard a great speaker expound on this a few years ago:

I have titled my talk “The Dedication of a Lifetime.” I borrowed this title from something said by Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, who was the Democratic Party candidate for president of the United States in 1952 and 1956. He was a fine man and would have been president if he had not been running against a very popular opponent, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In speaking to an American Legion Convention, Stevenson gave a wise statement about patriotism. He said that what we need “is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime” (speech given Aug. 27, 1952, quoted in John Bartlett, comp., Familiar Quotations, 13th ed. [1955], 986). I like that—“not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.” I will use this description of patriotism as a formula for how we should live the gospel.

Read the talk here or download the pdf.

Tranquil and steady. That sounds like "mundane" to me. It's in the everyday that we shape our character. Mr Incredible learned it, now it's Mr Not-so-Incredible's turn.

Inkscape and me

2007-11-03T01:04:00.001-07:00

Well, here's my first real attempt at vector graphics. I've been using AI at work for fliers and such, so my taste for vector graphics has improved as I learn more about it. I'm using Inkscape at home, a free vector graphics-based program which has proven to be very cool. I will become a master at this, some day. For now, I must be satisfied with mediocrity.

VDict - and other Online Vietnamese Dictionary Resources

2007-10-30T01:13:00.001-07:00

Well, I should be asleep right now but I've run into a very cool internet dictionary tool. I've been a faithful follower of Hồ Ngọc Đức for the last several years and still use his dictionary on a daily basis because of its ease of use. He gives me the option to search different dictionaries at the same time, which saves me a lot of time when I'm translating and proofing at work. Thanks Mr Đức!
I occasionally cruise through the list of online Vietnamese to English dictionaries, and have come across some interesting ones (to see a list I compiled last year of my top dictionary resources plus other interesting sites relating to Vietnam, please see my wedding website) but nothing to compare to Mr Đức's work. I do remember coming across VDict a while back, which claimed to be the best dictionary online and had hopes of becoming a whole community based on internet dictionary lookup for Vietnamese. It sounded nice, but the site looked far from it. Until now.
VDict has become a high-functioning Vietnamese-English (and French and Chinesedictionary tool that has several nice "tiện nghi" that come in handy. Though it does not implement multiple dictionary lookup, it does support searching for the term in the definition, which I have yearned for with my current online dictionary. It also allows exact, broad or fuzzy lookup, as well as providing IE and Firefox toolbar and search plugins. It claims to have the "one and only free translating service" which works well for titles and occupations but has problems with phrases (just try "reading log"). But my favorite part is the forums.
The community they have built is great fun. It consists of just over 2000 members who are constantly volleying different Vietnamese and English phrases to see who can come up with the best translation. I've posted a few things and it's great to converse with people who are as interested in the mundane aspects of language as I am (but not too technical because I get lost in linguistics). Unfortunately, as I've seen with other Vietnamese language forums, there are several posts where non-Vietnamese-speaking men are requesting a translation of the text message or email they received from a Vietnamese woman. Or they want to translate their message into Vietnamese. I don't like that, but I try to keep my mouth shut. Or at least my hands off the keyboard.
Lastly, the great folks over at VDict have opened their script up for webmasters to integrate the dictionary into a webpage. Like right now, did you know that if you double-click any of the words on this page (besides the links) that a definition will popup? How about if you select a multiple-word phrase and press Ctrl+Shift+A (try tiện nghi)? They have done a great job at debugging this tool and I think it's so great that I've added it to my website. So from now on, xanghe.blogspot.com will have a built-in dictionary (both Viet-En and En-Viet), including an actual dictionary input box where you can type in your word like a regular dictionary (on the right-hand side). This probably won't turn out to be incredibly useful, but it was way too cool to pass up.
Good nite all

UPDATE:
I posted a question about east and west in the VDict forum and I had a good discussion about how to translate it, but it ended with such a funny post that I had to share it here. I was basically told that I'm a bit confused with all my examples so here's a diagram, drawn by one of the
discussion members, to "làm sáng tỏ mọi thứ."
It ended with "Happy Halloween!"

Weather cools but we won't forget

2007-10-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

As with all big news, the tantalizing reporting starts to wain within a week or so. The newspaper articles have gone from terrifying stories of generations-old ranches burning to the ground to mundane stories of school kids missing homecoming because of the fires. At the same time, the harsh, surreal heat of the Santa Ana winds has died down to nothing, and even as I type I hear raindrops pattering on our porch. Here in my kitchen things seem pretty cozy, and the memory of a raging wildfire seems like yesterday's news.

But it's not. Even though the predictions are aiming at Tuesday for full containment of the fire, the lives of those involved have been burned to the ground as well. I've heard a lot of hush hush talk about those rich people shouldn't be living on the hillside in a place like this and other types of complaints. I don't feel that's the emphasis at this point, maybe we should focus on the people who started the fire and why.

As an asthmatic, I'm feeling the repercussions of the fire. Every morning still smells like smoke and my lungs have been constricted for the last few days. It's a small price compared to what others are going through, but it just reminds me that this is not over yet and there is a very human aspect in this disaster that lies deeper than the reports can show.

images courtesy of:
http://www.imperialvalleynews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=223&Itemid=2
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/nasas-latest-fi.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ocfires27oct27,1,7868980.story?track=rss

A Little Autumn Part 2 - I spoke too soon

2007-10-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

Well, all that rubbish of coolness and gray from the last post seems like something from another world right now. With 99 degrees and 40-50 mph gusts of hot, dry wind, it feels like autumn might never come. The air is like a furnace and I'm not even in danger of the flames.

The term "Santa Ana Winds" refers to the annual week of h-e-double-hockey-sticks caused by high pressure systems in the inland deserts (as far as Colorado). The winds blow across the desert sweeping up dry hot air then are funneled through a series of natural wind tunnels in the mountains on their way to the coast. Those winds hit our coastal plains and fan out to create a climate much like that of the inside of a convection oven. The heat is enough, but inevitably these winds are accompanied by lightening and/or arsonists which lead to fires in the mountains. Every year trees are blown down by these winds and every year our hilltops are peaked with orange and red flames and every year we breathe ash for air even as we wipe off the layer of ash on our cars. I thought we might have escaped it this year because it usually happens much earlier in October or September. Oh was I wrong.

It is reported that over half a million Southern California residents have been ordered to evacuate due to the fires. 1,400 homes have been destroyed. This video looks like something from an action movie: Modjeska Homes Burn. Below is a link to the map that gives details on the location of the fire:

View Larger Map

We are praying for those who are in danger of this fire and empowered by the efforts to help them. My wife and I are blessed to be safely distanced from the danger, but have experienced some of this extreme weather in the last few days as well:

Sunday night we found ourselves street-locked between two fallen trees. I later heard that a man had been in his camper, which was parked on the road, when he heard a crack and found himself running for shelter as the tree crashed a hole in his ceiling. The winds had been shaking our little condo so we knew they were very strong, but stepping out in the road and being met by the sight of trees, now dead, laying in the road was quite eerie. It too looked like a scene from a movie. Later that night, I went back down to the road and looked off into the distant hilltops. The wind was so harsh that it whipped at my face, but if I squinted, I could see red and orange drops leaping on the hillside. The next day I saw a horizontal column of red and gray smoke laying across the sky, turning the sun and air red. Today the smell of smoke permeates even into the house. In addition to the heat, the sky and air have taken on an eerie red haze. I took this photo an hour ago as the sun was nearing the horizon; no filter, no editing, just a little saturation shows the depth of red in the sky right now. It's much more surreal seeing this in person. It happens every year, but each time I have a sneaky suspicion that it's the end of the world. Plus I know a lot of people who believe the apocalypse will begin in Southern California anyway:), so it's always a little unnerving when these things happen.

A Little Autumn

2007-10-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

Things have been a bit melancholy around the house this week, and I'm thinking it's because of the impending change in seasons. I've always felt that Orange County doesn't have much of an Autumn, just a lot of hot, dry Santa Ana winds followed by an immediate jump into the cool monotony of an OC winter. But it seems like this year we might be graced with something like Fall, a little Autumn to top off our summer.

Things are winding down around our place as well: Prophet, our pregnant praying mantis, has gone missing for a few days now. She's probably off spinning one of those mantis webs for the eggs. Ally, our new Southern Alligator lizard, is spending more and more time hiding in her corner under the bark chips - I think she feels hibernation right around the corner. Our hoa giấy (bougainvillea) is just about to drop it's last bunch of flowers and all the other plants are slowing any sign of growth to a halt as the days get shorter and sunlight becomes a scarcity. The ash tree is about to drop it's leaves and I think our banana tree is done sprouting for the year. The mornings are overcast, days are cloudy and evenings return to overcast as we tilt oh so slowly from the sun. My wife mentions that she's feeling a little down lately, perhaps because her moods happen to follow the sun more than the moon. It's as if the lush, green, sun-drenched, ocean-lined "OC" that the media perpetuates is going to sleep for awhile, probably planning to wake back up around the time Ally does.

But I like it. I'm always too hot in the summer and this weather is perfect for riding my bike to and from work. For some reason, the cloudiness and unshakable gray of winter here seems to rejuvenate me from the oppressive summer sun. I should be deep asleep now, but I feel more energetic in this cool weather. Things at work are picking up - who would have thought last year when I was hired as a Vietnamese specialist that I would be doing graphic design and database management now, in addition to my actual "job" - but I've decided that I'm not going to come home exhausted anymore because it seems to wear on my wife's morale. She's having a hard enough time with the weather right now, the least I can do is not make it worse by bringing work home. We just finished a great General Conference and Stake Conference and I'm feeling pretty enlightened despite the dreary backdrop. I've always kind of blossomed this time of year; especially now amidst the melancholy season I'm feeling more alive than ever.

Good thing God made my wife blossom in the summer and me in the winter or else we'd be in trouble. If we were both feeling down, who would cheer us both up? That's the magic about marriage - two individuals who are willing and able to lift the other up during the Falls of their life... even if it's only a little Autumn.

Time for new strings

2007-10-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

I hate it when this happens. :) Mid-song, too...

General Conference and the tender mercies of God

2007-10-11T20:24:00.000-07:00

Well, here's the post on our Utah trip. We decided to go from the airport to the mountains to see the autumn colors. It was beautiful. The weather was ideal, but by the time we got to the top the afternoon wind picked up to about 60 mph. It was strong enough to blow me over if I didn't dig my feet into the rocks. In fact, as I was taking this picture (), the wind actually blew the General Conference tickets out of my pocket!! Thanks to the tireless efforts of my parents, we procured enough tickets for all 8 of us, plus an extra one. 5 of them were in my shirt pocket at the time, and all of them just blew out and down the mountain side. Ah!! Luckily my dad kept his head and told me to go get them. We clambered down the mountain and ended up finding 4 of the 5 tickets, plus both parking permits. I believe it was the tender mercies of God that found those tickets for us because I might have been seriously injured if I had returned to my friends without those tickets. Once we finally got to Conference we were so worn out that most of us fell asleep but it was still worth it.

Ahhh, the Temple. It doesn't matter how many times I've been back here, and how many groups of people I've taken through Temple Square, it's still shockingly beautiful to me every time. Perhaps it's the spiritual significance of the place that strikes me. Anyway, here's the full slideshow so take a look:

UTAH TRIP SLIDESHOW

Magic Music

2007-10-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

I came home from work today with a long list of things to do like cooking and cleaning and homework, but I somehow ended up writing a song. It's been ages since I've written a whole song in one sitting, but that experience only comes around once in a while anyway. Lately I've been thinking a lot on heaven and how to get there, and I think since I haven't been writing down the little epiphanies as they come it just came spewing out in one musical expression. Phew, it's rather tiring, actually. I've always felt that the music and lyrics act independent of the musician, they present themselves when you're not ready and if you don't write it down at that instant, they get offended and leave. While I was feeding Ally today, I caught a wisp of an opening riff and felt the lyrics inside gurgling their way up, so I figured it was time for a song.

The first riff sounds a bit like Live's Dolphin's Cry, and the chorus chord progression (esp at the end of a stanza) kind of sounds like Collective Soul's Forgiveness. The lyrics are based on a loose version of the Prodigal Son, perhaps on his walk back to father's house. The funny thing is, I sat on the couch with my guitar for two hours and the song just came, lyrics and music and all, without me even thinking about the above comparisons. I made those just now as I was playing the song through my head. It's a very simple song and probably quite unremarkable in most aspects, but I've come to appreciate my music for the affect it has on me (now that's an ego!) because my songs are like a journal of sorts. But the music packs 100 times the emotion that plain words do, and every time I sing it, I relive those feelings.

I lost my recording equipment to a thief so I probably won't be recording this one, or the other two I've written since the last "album," but I am planning on putting together another project sometime in the future. Probably when I'm retired.

Well, I should go to bed. The next blog post on my list is about the trip I took to Utah last weekend, but that list might fall prey to another unforeseen event. Hopefully I'll get it out soon. In the meantime, here's some of my friends pictures of our trip...

The Power of Gratitude

2007-09-18T23:47:00.000-07:00

I am very grateful for my garden right now. I was about to go to bed after a long day at work (finishing a project that doesn't really have much to do with my actual "job," feeling the stress slowly run from my shoulders and neck, then sensing the stress return as my boss says "Oh, since you're so good at this kind of stuff, how about doing this as well? I know it's not part of your job, but...") when I remembered my ớt (chili) plant was wilting a bit this afternoon. I grudgingly started watering the back "yard" (if I can call a 7x11 porch a "yard") and halfway through felt 100% better. Had I neglected the thought to water (or if I didn't have a garden at all), I would have gone to bed with my neck and back just as stiff as it was when I left work at 5. Now, instead of going to bed, I'm blogging about gratitude.

On a more serious note, I received an email from a friend that reiterated the power of gratitude in changing one's life for the better. She recently experienced a great loss in her life and is still trying to cope with the feeling of sadness and pain and even guilt. However, despite the darkness that seems to encompass her, she ends her email with this: "But I know everything will work its way out somehow. I am grateful for everything that God has given me..." [including the opportunity for growth that this experience provides.] It struck me how much effort and courage it takes to articulate that statement when resolution and healing seem so distant. But it is that very courage that positions a person beyond the limited human capacity to cope. It is the acknowledgement that there is a higher power steering this human experience, that it's not up to fate but that the trials we face in life are there to make us stronger. When we understand that principle, we are imbued with the power to overcome, and I've felt that power and it's beyond anything I could ever muster myself.

I think the underlying principle here is faith. According to Alma, faith is "not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true." So that means that we've got to bring ourselves to hope for that end result, to hope for the future blessings that will come as a result of our current suffering, push past that human tendency to become bitter and cynical and forget our gratitude for what we have. Think of the power that is lost (sounds like physics, maybe it's not that far off) when someone says "I'll believe it when I see it." or "My life will never heal." They are instantly cutting all connections to the power that comes with faith. Why do I keep saying power? Because that person who says "Things will work out somehow" is equipped with the power to act without the baggage of doubt or fear.

Thanks, my friend, for reminding me (by your example) that gratitude is the best antidote for suffering. I pray that you will have the power to make it through this difficult time and that you won't have to put on a happy face to hide your sadness inside anymore, but that your happy face will be a reflection your happy soul.

Ok, now time to water the front yard...

Why I love my wife

2007-09-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

She was out doing errands when I got home so I did up a little dinner and ended up eating it alone because I was so hungry. Why do I love my wife? Because when she got home, instead of getting a new bowl for her dinner she just grabbed the one I had used with out even rinsing it and piled it high with salad and pan-fried pork. One bowl to clean. Man, I love that woman.

xanghe

Minor cosmetics

Infographics and data visualization - two blogs of note

Be like Jesus

Web 2.0 Summit Map and Wooden Laptops

Please pass the focus

He died that we might live... today

We are losing our focus on Focus

Wisdom and order

The geospatial revolution, or why I'm getting a degree in geography

Unplugged

Lead, Kindly Light

The Great California Shake OUt

Is science the antithesis of faith?

Another scam - Weekly Health USA: Tip of a Flat Belly

Online Vietnamese language resources

Vietnamese Dictionaries and Glossaries

Vietnamese Language Resources

Death of the BEST Viet dictionary

Organic Design and Internet GIS

Photo album complete

The purging and the soul

2009 - A lesson in expectations

The future of online mapping... is Here!

Bánh?

Annual Update

Top 50 Common Vietnamese Surnames

15 days to the 2009 Shakeout!

Batch IP Locator - New Home

Batch IP Locator - Official Launch

Batch IP Locator - Beta!

Design inspirations

xanghe redesign! (yes, again)

Still Learning

Google Money Master: The art of designing web scams

Localization

Content

Layout

Reader Feeback

Functionality

Oregon road trip 2009

Oregon Road Trip Pictures

4th of July Fun

Life and Death - the Sudden Paradox

Inglewood Earthquake: A Reminder to ShakeOut!

The Journey IS the Destination

For All Who Care - Viet Speaking Mission Website is Down

Want to use a smiley outside of chat?

Sometimes the most common things are the hardest to do

Vietnamese Input - A Few Methods of Typing Vietnamese

Input Method Software

Online service

Online Vietnamese Keyboard

Change of Direction

Tết Pictures In!!

Taking Notes Helps!

A Wealth of Data Visualization Links

Graphic Design - My 2009 Hobby

Discussion Forums are Frustrating

Why I Miss "Real" Winters

Do you believe in coincidence?

Web Design Ledger - 10 Amazing Designers

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Happy Lunar New Year!

Greepit Post - Long Exposure Pictures

I Heart Google Chrome

Cameron Moll (pronounced Mull or Mall but not Mole)

Nine Lion Design

Carrot Creative - jQuery at Work

The Best CSS Design of 2008

The Best CSS Design of 2008

Sleddin' in Utah

Design and Developer Tips

LDS Maps = Pretty Sweet

Christmas Tradition!

The Economy at Your Doorstep

The Turtle is Real!

Revamping the Blog - xanghe v2.0

Streamlining the Blog

Van and Hai's Wedding pics!

Lost in the Wilderness. And Found