There’s a lot of family stuff to be done while I’m here in Viet Nam, leaving me with scant little time to try and provide the tourister narrative that Jason Kottke did such a good job with during his trip here. I’m probably not the best such guide in any event. My experience here is fairly atypical, I think, due in part to my stranger/familiar status as a Viet Khieu: a returning Vietnamese who, quite unfortunately, doesn’t speak the language very well at all, but who looks just Vietnamese enough for the locals to expect a certain level of fluency I just can’t manage.

It’s frustrating, because I do make an effort to communicate in what is ostensibly my native tongue. Members of my extended family encourage me to speak it more frequently so that my skills will improve… but ultimately their own mastery of English is sufficiently superior to my pathetic mastery of Vietnamese that they all speak English to me anyway. I’ll never learn, it seems.

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As much as small things have changed each time I come back to Saigon — roads laid with gravel now paved, broadband Internet now almost commonplace, newer, taller and more gleaming high rises towering over old construction — the city is basically the same as it was when I first returned here eight years ago. Undeterred by progress, it remains a mess of human traffic, diesel exhaust and unkempt and unregulated commerce everywhere.

I can’t resist it. Its disjointed clicks and whirrs are in sync with a romantic idea of home that I nurse very tenderly: so too the omnipresent and melodic sound of spoken Vietnamese — nasal, drawling, bearing hurt and satisfaction at once.

I was born here but I left when I was three and a half. So just being back, in the midst of the quotidian and the unremarkable, is profound in a very private, intimate way. It’s more than just being a visitor to a place one cherishes; it’s like playing tourist in another course of events, sightseeing the attractions of a life I might have led if it weren’t for, you know, global politics and war and all. Everywhere and everything is a could-have-been for me, superficially strange and foreign but, in an emotional way, also deeply familiar. It’s weird, it’s fun, and the food is amazing.

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To pass the time during this tryingly long flight from New York to Saigon, I picked up a copy of Mac Addict Magazine at the airport. I haven’t read it in years, but its lightheartedly written geekery is still an amusing diversion in short doses. For this trip, one nice thing about the magazine is the free CD-ROM full of trial software, shareware and on-the-cheap instructional videos included with each issue. Since to travel by plane, in 2005, still means being away from Internet access, I’ve been digging through the CD-ROM a bit and playing with its contents; soft of like surfing a very small, very limited Web.

This issue’s disc includes a copy of BeLight Software’s Image Tricks, an image manipulation application for Mac OS X. Written as a kind of demonstration vehicle of the power of Apple’s Core Image technology, Image Tricks is perhaps best described as a utility for applying Adobe Photoshop-like filters to photographic images with fantastic speed. It’s lightweight and extremely adept at adjusting an image’s exposure, color balance, gamma etc., and applying sometimes ostentatious visual effects.

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A quick housekeeping post before I head out to Newark International Airport: as mentioned earlier in the week, I’m leaving for Viet Nam this evening. I’m bracing myself for the day-long plane ride that it’ll take to get my feet back on the ground in Saigon, but it’ll be worth it. Like a dutiful digital dork, I’m toting along my digital camera and my PowerBook, so if I find the time and the Internet connection, I’ll post pictures on Flickr and updates here. Otherwise, I’ll be back in New York in early December. Happy Thanksgiving!

On Sunday night I’ll be leaving for a long-delayed trip to Viet Nam to visit some family: aunts, uncles, cousins and my dear grandmother, most of all. I’ll be back in early December, at which point the year will be practically over, save for the customary holiday craziness. In the spring I went to see my mother, sister and nephew in California, and of course I also just returned from a week visiting my father in France.

With relatives in so many far flung locations, I spend most of my vacation days each year simply traveling to visit them. With the balance of those days, I try to get away with my girlfriend as much as we can — and that’s basically all the time I have away from my desk between January and December.

I’m not complaining about the way I spend those days, because I enjoy the time with my family and the traveling my girlfriend and I do together. But I’ve started to think also that I should perhaps be devoting some portion of my holidays to just me, specifically to some personal growth.

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The November issue of Andy Arikawa’s resurrected Design in Flight magazine is up. Until recently, I had missed its relaunch this past summer, which transformed it from a PDF-based, pay-for-download publication into a Web-based magazine with free access to its content, but I’m glad it’s still around.

This newest edition also happens to feature a new interview with me, and for those tired of me talking about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion, rest assured that topic is never broached in this piece. Instead, I fielded several tough questions from Justin Goodlett about grids, practicing design in New York City and the nature of opposing factions within the profession, among other topics. It’s probably my most articulate interview yet about my thoughts on design in general, for what that’s worth. Go read it.

In his excellent and characteristically exhaustive weblog post on the pros and cons of owning an Apple PowerBook, Jon Gruber advises: “Anyone already using an aluminum-era PowerBook G4 would probably be well-advised to wait” before buying a new Macintosh laptop. He also goes on to say that, in spite of Apple’s pending move to Intel processors, there are still at least “a handful of reasons why someone might want a last-generation PowerPC Mac instead of a first-generation Intel… The current versions of Adobe’s and Microsoft’s suites should run under Rosetta, but I strongly suspect performance won’t be as good as on last-generation PowerPC machines.”

As it happens, all of that is perfect advice for the situation in which I currently find myself. My 1 GHz PowerBook G4 is quickly approaching its second birthday and it’s starting to show its age. It’s noticeably slower than I’d like it to be, and it has no hope of running Apple’s forthcoming Aperture photo editing software. Still, it functions ably for portable computing needs, so I know it’s not quite ready to be replaced by a new PowerBook. On the other hand, if I want to offset the big bill coming my way from the Internal Revenue Service next April, now is the time for me to invest in new computing horsepower.

So I’ve been thinking more and more about buying a desktop machine. Notwithstanding the several desktop Macintoshes I’ve had at my various jobs, this will be the first desk-bound computer that I’ve bought for my personal use since my first Mac, a lowly Power Macintosh 6100/60 purchased back in 1994.It will also be the first time in over eight years that I’ll keep a desktop machine in my home office, such as it is.

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Like a lot of people, when I first adopted my dog I made a solemn oath not to succumb to the temptations of absurdly over-enthusiastic pet ownership: no dog sweaters, no canine birthday parties, no pet manicures. This was a point of pride more than anything, a line drawn in the sand to convince myself that I am macho and that I can in fact keep it real.

I haven’t completely given up on that oath, but the reality of having a dog is something else entirely: before too long, the dog’s irresistible, ingratiating ways break you down, and you begin wanting to treat him or her essentially like a furry child. It’s a very difficult impulse to resist.

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During the course of obliviously touring Paris, I took about five hundred pictures with my digital camera. For more experienced photographers, especially those shooting digital, that’s not a particularly remarkable number, but for me that amounts to the most shots I’ve ever taken on a single vacation. This is basically a reflection of a new and increasingly serious interest in my camera and how I can get the best shots I possibly can from it.

Never having had formal training in photography, I dabbled for a long time with point-and-shoot digital cameras. As anyone who’s used one can attest, they allow for instant gratification with little or no requirement for actually understanding the inner workings of photography. In that respect, they’re fantastic introductions to the craft.

But in the four or five years I was shooting with these models, I never really got it straight in my head what an f/stop is, for instance, or how to properly meter a shot — I was too easily insulated from the inner logic of picture taking. As a result I continually ran into frustrations in getting the kinds of shots I really wanted. I knew that I’d actually have to learn this craft, but it seemed silly to try and learn it with cameras so clearly designed not to teach it.

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To faithful readers of this weblog: if you stick with me, you have my pledge that you will not have to read about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion in perpetuity. At least I hope not. Looking forward, I hope to get famous (or at least infamous) for many more projects as interesting and as influential as this one, but in the meantime, I’m humbled by the fact that at least some people continue to find it interesting.

One of them is James Archer who, aside from being the founder of Fortymedia, is the publisher of The Weekly Standards, an online magazine focused on the real world practice of standards-based Web design. He’s just published an interview with me which discusses at length — you guessed it — the redesign of TheOnion.com.

But wait! That’s not all you get with this article because, for absolutely no extra money, James has thrown in a major added bonus: a very thoughtful, fair and insightful critique of the redesign as a whole by none other than Garret Dimon. Even if you scroll right past my own rambling answers to James’ questions, don’t miss Garret’s comments.

I’ve been back from Paris since last Wednesday night, but I spent the first two or three days battling a jet-lag-fueled exhaustion so acute it hurt. It gripped my spine, shoulder blades and neck in the same way that I histrionically and baselessly imagine the bends must treat its victims. Not fun. I’m closer to normalcy now, but I’m still waking up very early in the morning and going to bed very early in the evening, which I admit isn’t unpleasant.

Until yesterday, I was in no shape to blog, but I’m not sure I had all that much to say about Paris anyway. That is, apart from the obvious, which is that it completely justifies its reputation for being redolently gorgeous and romantic, at once historically overwhelming and inspiring… if you conveniently ignore the civil riots taking place at the edge of the city.

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