4th of July Fun

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

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!

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

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

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?

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 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

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

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

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!!

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]