This article is a part in the Cruel Kids, The Animals I Know and How to Neuter a Cow series.

I was going to write a paragraph about chickens, but to be honest, chickens have always been somewhat a boring topic to me. So let’s make it more interesting, let’s add a… scorpion!

As a child, I’ve often witnessed the applications of many folk medicines and natural remedies. Being one of the “Dennis the Menace” kids, I was frequently at the receiving ends of these treatments. Somehow, it always ended up with someone chewing a bunch of grass, peed in it and apply it over the wounds.

This article is a part in the Cruel Kids, The Animals I Know and How to Neuter a Cow series.

The drum is a serious object in Asian culture. It’s loud and it’s “official.” Usually, a village has two drums: one for the local school and one for the church to be used during funeral processions.

This article is a part in the Cruel Kids, The Animals I Know and How to Neuter a Cow series.

Weather-wise, there were probably just two most common types of days from my childhood memories growing up in Việt Nam: scorching hot and torrential rain. People don’t call it a “Jungle of ‘Nam” for nothing.

Growing up in a bucolic part of southern Việt Nam, I loved waking up to all sort of intriguing sounds like pigs squealing, cows mooing, cow cart wheels on dirt road and people talking loudly to each other.

When I was thirty, my daughter turned one and I joined a startup.

As much as I remember the lack of sleep or the constant struggle to keep a work-life balance, the thing I remember most was how blessed I was to have a such a wonderful and supporting wife and family.

These days, it seems that businesses are finally starting to be more comfortable with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy which allows employees to use their personal devices to access privileged corporate information.

Device manufacturers have also started to push their own flavor of cloud storage service such as Apple with iCloud, Google with Google Drive and Microsoft with SkyDrive.

One of the tools I use on a daily basis is Git, a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Other than the usual git checkout -b branch, git tag -a and git merge/push/pull, the Git workflow generally demands very little of me to keep the repository under control.

When dealing with displaying large html content, we need a way to generate its summary and a “read more” or “continue” link to the full article.

This is a simple matter of truncating the html content at a defined maximum word count and adding the convenient ellipsis (…).

Other than our short temper, my brother and I share little in common. Our hobbies and activities are also completely different. While I love arts and technology, he is an accountant, a true “foodie” and an avid fisherman.

Having said that, I love my brother dearly and would find any opportunity to spend time with him. Since the thought of him joining me in a brotherly hackathon is a little absurd, one of the most joyful activities we do together happens to be fishing.

I visited Viet Nam in the summer of 2008 and jotted down some memories. This was written on June 4th, 2008

I felt the smooth and squishy earth between my toes. That was last week. Standing in a flooded rice paddy with water just above my ankles, it felt like my childhood has woken up after a long slumber. The air and cold breezes carrying the fragrance of live mud together with the biting sunrays on my face placed me in a rather poetic setting.

Perhaps rice was recently harvested here and the paddies are left nude for the dry season. Then again, I’m only guessing. But this much I know: surrounding me is a vast and seemingly infinite flat land of water-filled rice paddies shimmering with a million suns.

Starting a personal blog is something I have wanted to do for a very long time. However, my priority list tends to favor non-personal action items.

As a web developer, technology consultant and especially as a bootstrap startup enthusiast, it makes sense to produce work that has a fixed or potential monetary value.