I always try to keep one fun project for myself that consumes around 10% of my time. Over the years I have dabbled in many different software development projects, and occasionally I hit on something that is really useful and worthwhile, while a good percent of the time I am just having fun. 🙂 But …
Mostly I write here simply to document my progress in Chinese. With each book I read, I look up fewer and fewer characters, but it still requires a lot of concentration. 骆驼祥子 (LouTuoXiangZi) is about a rickshaw puller in Beijing back in the 40s when the Japanese had invaded, and life was really hard. He …
My grandmother maintains many records about our family, which I believe my mother has now, but here follows a little bit of what I have: Images
I never realized that there is an actress named Tippi Hedren who was in the movie The Birds, and who was an inspiration to Vietnamese people who then went on to create their nail salon businesses and beauty schools. When she helped some refugees who came over around the time of the fall of Saigon …
How Vietnamese nail salons got their start in America Read More »
Perhaps there are millions of people related to Charlemagne, but I am one of them, and my grandmother was an avid genealogist, who spent hours and hours researching these things before we had the internet, so this is both interesting and sentimental for me. Charlemagne Family Tree Charlemagne(768-814)=Hildegard Pepin, King of Italy Bernard, King of …
Just made a couple of small edits (I don’t like broken links or bad formatting). At the time, I was probably using Dreamweaver. June 4th, 2002 – Day 1 of David-DuVal.com. Hosting with PHP and mySQL: I’ve been trying to learn more about building websites that interact with databases. The current hosting package that I am …
My grandfather told me long ago about the TIGER approach to life, and it is as true today as ever. I hope you will think through this for your own life. T – Tolerance People are different, but you have to be empathetic and try to understand what makes them the way they are I – Integrity …
Failed ideas are great if you went through the process of trying to make something work, but you learned a lot in the process, and I suppose in this sense, it really isn’t a failure. I’ve made a lot of websites and web apps, and definitely some of them are no longer in existence. So …
Well the name doesn’t translate very well (Amazon books uses this translation as well), but I just finished reading this book. It the second full length novel I have read in Chinese. The Chinese name is 忧确杂货店, and actually it was written by Keigo Higashino, a Japanese mystery writer, and then it was translated into …
In internet years, I think a long time time passed during which time there was no suitable alternative to Windows at a good price. Sure, there was Linux, and I tried it, but it just wasn’t easy to use. And of course, there is Mac, but the price is quite high. For someone that is …
