Personal

Not impressed by the acclaimed Cirque Du Soleil in Seattle

Jun 18, 2010 · 
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Personal · 
By Vu Nguyen

Please excuse my igno­rance because I have never heard of this group before we saw their tent on our way home with my bet­ter half, Rali. She later did some research online and bought two tick­ets for the pre­mier show. I almost had a heart attack after she told me how much it cost to place us close to the front stage. My sav­ings for an ipad is gone. I have been chip­ping in every week in hope to save enough money to buy an iPad before Christmas and now it is all gone. Just like that. Gone. Ok, maybe I am dra­ma­tiz­ing a lit­tle bit here :) .

Rali has not been to a cir­cus since she was a lit­tle kid and I have only been to a few in the US. We came through the main gate to a cov­ered area with a few shops for sou­venirs and snacks and was told to go to door num­ber 4 of the main tent to find our seats. The main tent is a half cir­cle with a rel­a­tively small stage in the mid­dle. I was not really impressed by the set­ting until the music came on. Darn it, the sur­round sound sys­tem was good. The lights were good, too. There are a few inter­est­ing parts of the show like beau­ti­ful gym­nas­tics and some extreme in-air actions but the big part of the show is a bit slow in my opin­ion. Rali loves it, but I think I have seen better.

If you hap­pen to be around the Seattle area, you should def­i­nitely give it a shot. It is almost worth the money. You can also check their web­site to see where they are head­ing next.

Here is a bit about the show from the site:

From a group of 20 street per­form­ers at its begin­nings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil is now a major Quebec-based orga­ni­za­tion pro­vid­ing high-quality artis­tic enter­tain­ment. The com­pany has more than 4,000 employ­ees from over 40 dif­fer­ent coun­tries, includ­ing 1,000 artists.

Cirque du Soleil has brought won­der and delight to almost 90 mil­lion spec­ta­tors in over 200 cities on five con­ti­nents. In 2009, Cirque du Soleil will present 20 shows simul­ta­ne­ously through­out the world. The com­pany has received such pres­ti­gious awards as the Emmy, Drama Desk, Bambi, ACE, Gémeaux, Félix, and Rose d’Or de Montreux. Cirque du Soleil International Headquarters are in Montreal, Canada.

Cirque du Soleil’s mis­sion is to invoke the imag­i­na­tion, pro­voke the senses and evoke the emo­tions of peo­ple around the world.

Have you ever tried to get a refund from Amazon.com?

Feb 24, 2010 · 
3 Comments ·
Funny, Personal · 
By Vu Nguyen

I ordered a tread­mill from Amazon on 11.29.09. It was deliv­ered on 12.9.09, and a week after the deliv­ery I moved to a new place. That’s when I assem­bled the tread­mill and real­ized it was not work­ing. The dis­play was OK, the timer was count­ing down, but the belt was not mov­ing. So here’s what I’ve been doing the last cou­ple of months.

Continue read­ing »

Offline for a few weeks

Jan 13, 2009 · 
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Personal · 
By Vu Nguyen

I just got a cou­ple of free­lance projects, so I am offline for the next few weeks, maybe cou­ple of months.

Also, just to keep things inter­est­ing, I man­aged to install my first super ultra cool lame app on my iphone :) . So what’s the next step? Well I plan to cre­ate the next Google :P

Friday at msnbc.com

Dec 12, 2008 · 
One comment ·
Personal, msnbc.com · 
By Vu Nguyen

Friday at msnbc.com

Thanks, Evann :)

Porfolio section is up, finally…

Nov 16, 2008 · 
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Design, Personal · 
By Vu Nguyen

I have been debat­ing with myself for the last few months over how to design the port­fo­lio sec­tion for this site. I started play­ing with some con­cepts in late 2007 using flash as the base tech­nol­ogy. Out of all the ideas, I chose and refined one in early 2008. Here is a mock-up of the concept.

Mock-up of portfolio in flash
Click on image to see full size.

I also cre­ated a mock-up of how dif­fer­ent con­trol pan­els might look like and behave. Note that the orange dot­ted lines are there to show what sec­tion is cur­rently high­lighted in the mock-up. They are not pre­sented in the final look.

Mock-up of the interface in flash
Click on image to see full size.

It was excited about this project at that time because I had just moved to as3 and wanted to find a project to sharpen my skills. I wrote most of the core func­tion­al­ity for this project in about 20 hours spread­ing over a few weeks. But then I moved to Seattle and never fin­ished the project.

Now that I finally have time to think about this again, I decided to go with a dif­fer­ent approach using html as the base tech­nol­ogy instead of flash. I made that call because html is still a bet­ter option when it comes to search engines. It is also much eas­ier to cre­ate and main­tain a new sec­tion with the CMS I am using. A sim­i­lar sys­tem in flash would take much longer to imple­ment. So, here is the result. It took me about 3 hours to put together =)

My Social Network Idea

Nov 19, 2007 · 
One comment ·
Personal, Social networks · 
By Vu Nguyen

I was work­ing hard on the port­fo­lio sec­tion for this Web site. I spent a lot of time try­ing to write it in AS3.0 using good OOP prac­tices, so later I can just attach a sim­ple PHP/mySQL back­end and make it a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for my projects. I was close to fin­ish­ing it, but then I real­ized that what I did would only ben­e­fit myself and nobody else.

While work­ing on the port­fo­lio site, I wrote a lit­tle nifty piece of code that can be used to put a slideshow together in no time. I am plan­ning on releas­ing that, so you can down­load and use it. But I still didn’t feel like the project worth the efforts.

Few months ago, a friend of mine started a social net­work that is a copy of face­book but for Vietnam, you can view it here. He invited me to be a part of it, but we couldn’t come to an agree­ment as of what would be my respon­si­bil­i­ties in his com­pany. I dropped out of the project. At that time I had a few ideas for a social net­work of my own and was study­ing the tools nec­es­sary to do that.

After talk­ing to a few close friends, I decided to start a social net­work on my own. My idea is to have a social net­work that tar­get media pro­fes­sion­als. As the indus­try is going through a major tran­si­tion from print to dig­i­tal, many pro­fes­sion­als are left behind. This site should help them learn the new tools nec­es­sary to work with the web. It will also be a place where peo­ple can post their works and get feed­backs from other peo­ple in the com­mu­nity. There are many other fea­tures that I am still work­ing on, but ulti­mately, the site will be a place where every­body can come and share their thoughts, col­lab­o­rate on dif­fer­ent projects and learn from each other.

Let me know what you think.

Back and Alive

Sep 30, 2007 · 
One comment ·
Personal, Travel · 
By Vu Nguyen

I am back from North Carolina. I had a very good week­end besides a minor set­back on Friday night when I got bumped from my flight. I had to be at the air­port at 6 am the next day for the first flight to N.C.

The rest of the trip was great, though. I had a great time with my friends and drank enough, but not to much, alco­hol. My whole body hurts badly now because I danced too much :)

I will resume the work on this site tomor­row as there are many things left to be done.

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