2007 must have been my record year of travel. I always tell people that I really don’t live in Mountain View, California as I am never really here on weekends. Frankly, I am probably out of town more often than in town—mostly for personal trips. My best friend (who happens to live in San Francisco) is already used to the fact that we never see each other, and I find myself conference-calling into my “local” school team meeting at Carnegie Mellon West more often than I would like to. Ah well, here’s a compilation of places I’ve been to just this year alone:

• New York City, New York (six times, mainly only 3-day trips—gosh, I love that city!)
• Las Vegas, Nevada (twice!)
• Gelsenkirchen, Germany (twice—one time even just for a weekend)
• Berlin, Germany (for a few days)
• Seattle/Redmond, Washington (for a few days on business)
• Vancouver, Canada (for a day prior my business trip to Seattle)
• Rome, Italy (for almost a week)
• Venice, Italy (for a few days)
• Dublin, Ireland (for a single day as a stop-over to Europe)

I’ve already lost count of the many trips to Orange County (of which there are probably more than a dozen), and to top off the year, I’ll be flying to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this weekend—yay!  As for 2008, we are already talking about a trip to Asia (we’re looking into Tokyo at this point) and for 2009, I am already eyeing Dubai. Ah.. sigh, so much travel, but I am loving it!

Microsoft released the Windows Vista Vietnamese Language Interface Pack (LIP) last month, and I finally got some time take a screenshot to blog about it. I installed it a few weeks ago, and I think it's pretty cool!! I am now running Windows permanently in Vietnamese so I can learn Vietnamese. The hardest part is to use the search functionality in the Control Panel, because you can’t type in "services" to find the NT services—you have to know the Vietnamese word for it (which quite frankly I still don’t know, haha). 

Another funny thing is that if you right-click on a webpage and choose "View Source", … well that’s translated as "Xem Nguồn"... hm... isn’t "Nguồn" more used as "roots"? Finding my roots? And what’s up with the random capitalization of Vietnamese words all over the place?

Anyways, if you are running Windows Vista, you can download and install the Vietnamese LIP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0E21EB7B-E01A-4FCC-B7F1-30E419DA7F5B&displaylang=vi

Have fun.... or shall we say.... Có sự vui đùa!

So, on October 12th 2007, the new Vietnamese TV Talk show "The Viet Connection" invited me on their show to talk about the Vietnamese Alliance to Combat Human Trafficking (VietACT). At first, I thought this was going to be an interview on VietACT only, but somehow we drifted a way and talked also a lot about the Vietnamese community (from Lenduong's International Vietnamese Youth Conference to the Union of Vietnamese Student Association of North America to Journey from the Fall) and about myself (more than I wanted to). Thanks Hang and Ly Pham for the interview.

BTW, the video-loading on vietconnection.com takes a while, so you be patient.

and while you're at it, visit www.malaysia2008.net for more information on the conference or www.nhamagazine.com for the magazine.

Update: Please refer to this new post for an updated version of this application (including source code).

Minh T. Nguyen's Mandelbrot Explorer is an application that allows you to zoom into the Mandelbrot set fractal at an arbitrary level. Simply select an area to zoom in, and use the back button to backtrace or restart button to start from the beginning. If you don't see the fractal above, please install the freely-available Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 plug-in (available for most popular browsers) using this link (the above link won't work). Note that this application is very power-hungry, so a fast computer is recommended.

Academic details: The Mandelbrot fractal is generated by drawing the set of complex numbers c on a complex plane, where the value of the function f(z) = z * z + c applied iteratively on itself is unbounded. In other words, if you pick a complex number c and an initial value of z being c, and apply the above function over and over again, you’ll see that the absolute value of the running result always remains bounded below 2 or suddenly shoots up towards infinity after a certain number of iterations. Well if the latter happens, you draw the complex number on the plane with a certain color that is reflective of how many iterations it took for the function to escape. But anyways, before mathematicians are lynching me for such a rude definition, you’re probably better off reading a formal description of the Mandelbrot set over at Wikipedia.

Technical details: This application was coded with the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha September Refresh and is hosted via Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. The Mandelbrot generation algorithm is very loosely based on Marc Boizeau's implementation of using complex number classes and operator overloading, while the coloring of the complex points outside of the Mandelbrot set is borrowed from Pierre Leclercq's implementation. Since Silverlight does not support setting pixels in a bitmap, this Mandelbrot Explorer is setting tiny rectangles instead to mimic the same behavior, though some optimization have been made to reduce the number of UIElements drawn on the Canvas by recognizing neighboring pixels of the same color and drawing them all as a single rectangle. Since the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha September Refresh does not yet support marshalling the execution of code from the background thread to the UI thread (the "Invalid Cross-Thread access" exception), I had to resort to the empty timeline trick to display the progress status. The full source code for this Mandelbrot Explorer will be posted in the near future.

Personal details: So, why does the world need yet another Mandelbrot fractal generator? It doesn't. There are tons of them out there, with far more snappier UI and superior performance, but I wanted to create one to get my hands dirty with Silverlight. When .NET was still in its early stages, I coded the Sierpinski Triangle fractal to get my hands dirty with GDI+. When Silverlight came out recently, I first wanted to convert my WPF-based Sudoku 3D browser application to Silverlight, but as it turns out Silverlight does not have support for 3D geometry, so I ended up doing the Mandelbrot fractal instead. I've always been intrigued by the mother of all fractals anyways, and always wanted to learn and understand the mathematics behind it, so this was the perfect opportunity.

Epic Vietnamese American saga arrives on DVD October 30, 2007

 

NEW YORK, NY October 17, 2007 – ImaginAsian Home Entertainment, Genius Products and Fire in the Lake present one of the most acclaimed Vietnamese American films, Journey From the Fall , on DVD on October 30, 2007. Ham Tran’s critically acclaimed epic Vietnamese American saga is presented as a special edition double disc and priced to own for $24.99 SRP.

 

Journey From The Fall was an official selection of both the Sundance and the Pusan Film Festivals and won 16 awards at 20 festivals around the world.  The film was inspired by the true stories of Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, and those who were forced to stay behind. Journey From The Fall follows one family’s struggle for freedom.

 

“We are proud to be working with ImaginAsian for the release of Journey From The Fall on DVD,” said Tran.  “It’s very gratifying to see that both ImaginAsian and Genius share my understanding of the importance of including the behind-the-scenes footage which showcases the heartbreaking, yet significant stories of the true survivors.”

 

An epic written in fire, mud, despair and hope includes a stellar cast which includes starring Kieu Chinh (The Joy Luck Club) and Long Nguyen (Heaven and Earth) and was directed by Ham Tran.

 

Special Edition Double Disc Features:

“The Making of Journey from the Fall” (38 min)

Roundtable discussion with cast & crew (135 min.)

Deleted Scene and Alternate Ending

Original Theatrical Trailer and TV spot

Cast & Crew Bios

 

BASICS

Price:                           $24.99        

Street Date:                 October 30, 2007

Genre:                                     Drama

MPAA Rating:            R for some violence

Language:                   Vietnamese/English

Subtitles:                     English/Vietnamese

Running time:             135 minutes

Audio:                         5.1

So, I really enjoy web development. I still remember the very first time I was exposed to the internet at a computer fair, while I was studying abroad in the United States during my high school years. The guy at the fair was showing off the internet to attendees, and all I thought was “why, gee, that’s so neat. It’s as easy as browsing through a Windows help file” – and with that grew my interest in web development. To finance my way through college, I started working at this Dilbert-like dot com business designing and creating websites for small businesses. That was still in the days of “if you build a website selling X – they will come.” (where X can be replaced with any word you can find in the dictionary).  Upon graduating from Berkeley in 2001, my first job was with a printer driver company, but my focus was a web portal, including some 3D rendering of printers using VRML (how cool was that). My second job was focusing on library web portals with some heavy DHTML scripting. When I joined Expedia.com I was doing heavy web development of course, and I was originally hired by  Microsoft to do web-based work for the TV. Though my focus at work has broadened a lot to cover many areas, my passion still remains with user interfaces. So, it’s of no surprise that combined with my other passion for community work, I spend a lot of time volunteering to create websites for non-profits or other organizations that I believe in or support. With that, I present to you a list of selected websites that I have designed/written/maintained in the past. It’s a surprise to me that some of them are still around. Consider it my Mini-portfolio. No, I am not for hire, and yes, I am fully aware that I need to take a graphic design class some day to complement my technical skills.

Website	URL	Designed	Coded	Maintain
Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California	http://www.thsv.org	X	X
Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations	http://www.unavsa.org		X
Vietnamese American Community of Southern California	http://www.namcali.org		X
Vietnamese Professionals Society Southern California Chapter	http://www.vps.org/namcali/	X	X	X
Vietnamese Professionals Society North American Conference 2004	http://www.hcgvn.net/bm2004/	X	X
Vietnamese Conversions	http://www.enderminh.com/minh/vnconversions.aspx	X	X	X
.NET Developers Blog	http://www.enderminh.com/netdev/	X	X
Vietnamese Alliance to Combat Trafficking	http://www.vietact.org/	X	X
Journey from the Fall	http://www.journeyfromthefall.com		X	X
Hoa Phat Goi Tien	http://www.goitien.com	X	X	X
Minh T. Nguyen's Sudoku 3D	http://www.sudoku3d.com	X	X	X
YouViet	http://www.youviet.com/		X	X

Traveling: So, I’ve been flying around a lot—and I mean a lot. Just two weekends ago, I flew up to Seattle on a business trip, and PT met up with me there, so for the weekend we drove to Vancouver, went up Grousse Mountain, checked out Robson Square and so on. Then, last weekend, I left work on Thursday evening to fly via San Francisco->Los Angeles->London->Duesseldorf to attend one of my best friends’ wedding in my hometown Gelsenkirchen in Germany, only to leave again on Sunday on a Duesseldorf->London->New York City flight, had dinner with PT and Trinity Infinity at Times Square, only to return back to work on Monday morning via a non-stop from New York to San Francisco. Yup, you’ve read it right—I’ve spent a single 3-day weekend in Germany and New York, and next weekend I’ll be in NYC again!

Career decisions: Being in the Valley, it’s quite normal to get emails and phone calls from recruiters from other high-tech companies all the time trying to hire you. I’ve come to gotten used to this and even have a “no-thank-you-I-am-not-interested”-email template/phone script that I use. However, this month I received phone calls from two CEOs of two very successful and well-known Fortune 1000 companies (these are household names) asking me to join their new start-up that putting together. I originally declined, as I generally don’t like the idea of working for startups, but this one was slightly different, as I actually believed in their leadership skills. However, in the end, we chose not to pursue this avenue further, as I convinced them that my skill set wasn’t what they were looking for exactly. This couldn’t have come at worse time anyways, as I am still in school.

School: Alright, so school this semester ain’t too hot. The content of my current class as well as the main teacher’s teaching style is quite boring and unexciting (a first in my Carnegie Mellon academic experience so far!), so I am counting the days until I can start the next class. However, check out who’s on the front cover of our new brochure:

Yup, I am going to the Fifth International Vietnamese Youth Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in January 2008, and I hope you folks will join me! I'll blog more about it later, but for now check out the flash-based e-card that I created as well as a recent TV interview I did on Song Viet TV about this conference:

Sau khi xem màn dương ảnh tại buổi lễ chiều nay, chúng tôi được nhắc nhở một lần nữa về sự hy sinh anh dũng của các chiến hữu tiên phong, những người đã dấn thân trên con đường đấu tranh, từ những ngày đầu thành lập Việt Nam Canh Tân Cách Mạng Đảng. Tôi thấy mình rất vinh dự được tham gia vào đảng Việt Tân từ 4 năm qua, được bước đi trên con đường mà các chiến hữu tiên phong đã hy sinh để vạch ra cho thế hệ chúng tôi ngày hôm nay. Con đường đó, chúng tôi sẽ tiếp tục dấn bước và để lại cho các thế hệ mai sau. Trên con đường này, mục đích tối hậu vẫn là canh tân đất nước. Tuy nhiên, phương tiện đấu tranh có thể khác đi, cho thích hợp với các thay đổi của tình hình hiện nay. Ngày hôm nay, chúng ta cần đấu tranh bằng cách làm việc với các tổ chức phi chính phủ, bằng cách vận động chính giới Hoa Kỳ và quốc tế, và nhiều phương thức bất bạo động khác để đem lại tự do cho VN.

Thế hệ chúng ta không những có trách nhiệm canh tân đất nước, nhưng chúng ta lớn lên trong tự do và được hấp thụ văn hóa và giáo dục tự do, chúng ta được đào tạo từ những trường đại học nổi tiếng trên thế giới. Do đó, chúng ta đang đứng ở vị trí rất thuận lợi và phải góp phần trong công cuộc đấu tranh để giải phóng tổ quốc, canh tân con người, và canh tân đất nước.

Nguyễn Trí Minh
25.08.2007

I generally don’t blog about bad customer service calls, but when a representative tells me “I am sorry you are wasting my time” and hangs up on me, I figure I blog this entry so that people understand what they are getting, when they are ordering a camera from Broadway Photo (http://www.bwayphoto.com).

I ordered Sony Cybershot DSC-T20 on bwayphoto.com yesterday at a base price of $207, not really wanting to spend more money on a simple point-and-shoot camera that I bought for my parents. As part of the purchase process you have to call them at 1-800-307-1148 to have the order “verified”. During that phone call, they were trying to very aggressively upsell me with extra specially-made memory cards (since according to their claim this Sony camera doesn’t take in standard memory cards, which I find hard to believe), batteries, warranties, specially-made camera cases, and full packages, etc. I understand that it’s part of their business to upsell you with optional items, but the aggressiveness was really bothering me, but I have declined all items except for the different battery, as they have told me that the supplied battery from the manufacturer (Sony) only last for twenty minutes (which I also still find very hard to believe, and would like to have Sony comment on that). At any case, I reluctantly agreed to add the 4-hour battery to this at an additional $60. At the end, when he quoted me the total price of some $350, I enquired about this discrepancy, and he told me that I have said “Yes”, when he asked me whether I wanted to add a supercharger (that charges the battery at record speeds). Wait, what? I have not agreed to such a thing, I don’t even trust superchargers anyways, and I can’t believe that he claims that I have agreed to that when he asked me. Even if he did ask that question, wouldn’t it make sense that he mentions the price for such an item as well? At any rate, I can’t even remember him asking me that, and I would have declined that up-front immediately.

This phone call was getting more and more unpleasant, and when I suggested that I might want to purchase a different camera (even with Broadwayphoto) instead to keep the total price in the $200 range, he offered me a package for this camera with all the gizmos at $300, which I still declined (what part of “I don’t want to spend more than $200” did he not get?). Well, it is at this moment, when the representative said “I am sorry you are wasting my time” and hanged up on me! That is the rudest customer service call I have experienced in years!

I wish I would have recorded this phone call, so I can post it here and send this to both Broadway Photo customer service and Sony. At this point, I don’t even know if he cancelled the order altogether or whether he just cancelled the extra gizmos, but after a short while, I’ve then been informed via email that my order has been completely cancelled.

After further investigation I realize that this company has an extremely bad reputation among shoppers and the Better Business Bureau. Go figure, I should insisted on BBB membership before the purchase, and I suppose researching about a company prior purchase would have helped. Now, I just need to keep an eye on my credit card statements to make sure that they remain uncharged.

Anyways, here's a plethora of other customer complains. Hopefully this will be a warning to other shoppers:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,107855-page,1/article.html
http://www.resellerratings.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=113697
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/01/whoa-avoid-broadway-photo-folks.html
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Broadway_Photo

Alright, this will be the last Vietnamese Buzz I’ll be writing. I realize that I just don’t find the time to write this, because there’s just so much going on, and my life as a full-time worker and full-time student ain’t pretty. Seriously, there’s so much going on in the Vietnamese community in the past three months, and this Vietnamese Buzz has been long overdue.

Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Truyet’s visit to the United States

Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Truyet came to an official visit on the US’s invitation in June this year, but received a second-rate welcome. Administration officials downgraded the summit  and refused a state dinner due to renewed concerns about Hanoi’s recent and ongoing human rights violation. What’s really cool was that the White House initiated talks with key members of the Vietnamese American community to hear our opinion on this issue. In particular, the White House invited four notable Vietnamese American activists, including Vietnam Reform Party chairman Diem Do to the Oval Office and discussed this issue prior Nguyen Minh Truyet’s visit. This was widely welcomed by the Vietnamese American community.

Mass Protest in Vietnam

Dominating the Vietnamese overseas news for months now was the farmer’s protests of unprecedented scale in Vietnam followed by the police suppression of those protests. To make a long story short, several hundreds of farmers from a dozen provinces have gathered in Saigon in front of the National Assembly buildings since the third week of June to protesting the government’s unfair land seizures. The demands to speak to government officials have not been answered. Supported by religions groups and Vietnamese overseas, some 500-1000 protesters staged this protest for 27 days—the longest-running protest Vietnam has seen for years. It ended when Vietnamese police in riot gear entered the scene, fired tear gas, detained some 100-200 people into buses to unknown locations, creating international concerns about Hanoi’s growing crackdown on its own citizens.

Human Trafficking Conference in Little Saigon, California

In May of last year, some 20 local community organizations collaborated and hosted the first Human Trafficking Conference on Vietnam in Washington, DC.  The second conference will be co-organized by the Vietnamese Alliance to Combat Trafficking (VietACT), the Viet Nam Human Rights Network, and the Vietnamese American Bar Association.  The conference will take place August 24th and 25th at the Anaheim Plaza Hotel in Anaheim, CA. Be there or be square.

Fifth International Vietnamese Youth Conference (DH5) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2008

Alright, if you have read my past entries and essays about this conference, I assume you already know what this is about, but in case you haven’t heard about it yet: the Fifth International Vietnamese Youth Conference will take place this year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from January 4th - 6th 2008. With a strong emphasis on non-government organizations as well as Vietnamese students from Vietnam and the collaboration work that we can do for Vietnamese community I am excited to go back to Asia again. Heck, I’ve always wanted to visit Kuala Lumpur for the longest time now, so this is a perfect opportunity to go up those Petronas Twin Towers. Be there or be square.

Leonard Nimoy will play Mr. Spock in Star Trek XI

To the positive surprise of many fans, JJ Abrams, the director of the next Star Trek movie announced at Comic Con in San Diego that Leonard Nimoy, now 77, will return to recast his role as the legendary Mr. Spock in the upcoming Star Trek XI movie one more time. Wait.. this has nothing to do with Vietnam. Stop, Minh, stop.

The End of the Vietnamese Buzz

Haha, I write this title as if people are actually reading the Vietnamese Buzz—but hey, if you do, just subscribe to this Vietnam Watch Blog, which is just a collection of English-based news articles relating to Vietnam. I hope you enjoyed reading some of the last Vietnamese Buzzes. So long.

---

Past Vietnamese Buzz entries: May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 October 2006 September 2006 July 2006 June 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006

Oh yikes, I haven’t blogged for a while now, and that’s because I have been awfully busy with school and work. We are releasing a new version of our product at work, and I find myself staying in the office until really late for the past several weeks now (including weekends). At the same time, at school we are coming close to the end of the Software Architecture class, and in this final stretch we are expected to deliver a full Software Architecture document based on our research and prototyping and a final presentation to our stakeholders.

People ask how I can manage to perform well at a demanding job while finding time to deliver for school, and honestly I don’t know. Somehow I manage to get things done, but I must add that unlike other students in our cohort I do not have any personal commitments yet requiring me to be home early. I am the only member of my immediate family living here in Northern California, I am unmarried and don’t have children, and my girlfriend lives in New York City, so the only folks who care about the time I spend at home would be my two cats, but let’s be honest here, they really just want me to open those food cans for them. My classmates who are married and have children to raise must find it much more difficult to strike a balance. I commend those students who manage to work on their master’s degree while raising a family, and I am certain that that is probably a much harder situation to balance than my current situation.

Life has been pretty busy this month. I wake up, reply to a few personal emails (while a large number remain unread), go to work (and work through lunch), go to school, come home to do homework while having dinner, go to sleep and start a similar cycle again the next day. Sometimes, I come home exhausted and just veg out by watching stupid videos on YouTube before falling asleep.

I sometimes feel like it’s not me who manages my time to finish everything, but my Outlook calendar that accepts appointments on my behalf and each morning reminds me of school and work deadlines and what I have to do for the day (if I ever lose my Outlook calendar, I think I’ll be running around like a duckling looking for his mom). In times like these, our school advisors stress the importance of exercising, eating healthy and making time for personal fun, but much easier said than done. I do make an effort of buying more healthy food, and by putting a mandatory Volleyball appointment on my weekly calendar, I make a point of attending this appointment no matter how busy I am, so I can ensure that at least I’ll get three hours of exercise and fun each week.

On the other hand, a nice side effect of having both academic and professional demands peak at the same time is that after both demands die down, I’ll truly be able to relax. You see, I already planned and purchased the flights for my entire family to meet up in New York when my school vacation starts in two weeks. In fact, one of my classmates will drive me to the airport right after our final presentation, and I can’t wait to spend time with my loved ones in New York without worrying about school and work.

Whenever people ask me what I work on at Microsoft, it always takes some time explaining.

I joined Microsoft TV  here in Silicon Valley two years ago working on the Microsoft TV Foundation Edition. It's a platform for cable providers such as Comcast to provide an interactive television experience with a Guide, Video on Demand, Search and DVR. In particular, I was responsible for the search feature that allows you to search for movies by actor, title, keyword. Unfortunately, even though my work made it into version 1.9 and 2.0, those versions were never deployed (and might not be anytime soon in the US).

Well, a little bit less than a year ago, I've switched over to the Microsoft IPTV product, which is a end-to-end platform that allows traditional telephone companies (telco) to enter the TV market by providing a full TV experience using IP technologies. It's like Voice over IP just for your good old television. Now, people always get confused and ask how we can compete with YouTube or Joost. Well, Microsoft IPTV is not competing with that, because that's something entirely different. IPTV is not watching video on your monitor over the internet using your computer. What our product does is to watch live TV and on-demand video on your good-old TV via set top boxes that transfer data via internet protocol.

Providers such as AT&T here in the United States stream those videos via DSL modems in HD-quality using our software. Given the IP's flexibility, you can imagine the endless possibilities that IP-based TV can offer versus traditional TV: interactivity (vote on your American Idol from your TV), unlimited amount of channels (since only one stream is sent to your box), picture in picture or multi view (watch a baseball game from three different angles), share media with friends and family (share images from your computer directly to your TV, or send them to your mom's TV in another state), chatting, home shopping, games, etc, etc, etc. In other words, it's the best in TV plus all your media in one place -- and that is our division's new slogan.

Our IPTV division went through a huge rebranding this past month. Our product is now called "Microsoft Mediaroom" and it's an ingredient brand for other telcos. The same way Dolby Digital or THX are ingredient brands for movies, Bluetooth ingredient brand for cellphones or EnergyStar is an ingredient brand for electronics, Microsoft Mediaroom is an ingredient brand for TV providers.  We finally have a website geared towards the end-consumer (previously we only had marketing material geared for the telcos only). Check it out yourself on www.microsoftmediaroom.com and see what all the buzz is about.

Next time you sign up for TV service, ask for Microsoft Mediaroom and you might be seeing some of the features that I have worked on. In particular that would be Emergency Alert System (those "warning, there's a thunderstorm coming to your area" messages with R2D2-like sounds), Download and Play (the ability to download a high-quality Video-on-Demand assets over a low-bandwidth connection) and the notification messages (for instance the notification that displays caller ID info when someone calls your home while you watch TV), HDMI connections and of course a lot of bug fixes in all other areas. I think the really cool thing is that I work on a product that touch thousands and thousands of people every day. Our product is already deployed in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Singapore, China, South Africa, Hungary--you name it. Many of the end-consumers don't even know it's Microsoft software driving this technology end-to-end, but if you happen to know, realize that those buttons that you click might as well be executing my code. :-)

Happy watching.

I am pre-blogging this on my flight from San Jose to New York City to meet up with PT. Over the next two weeks, we’ll find ourselves flying to Duesseldorf, Germany via Dublin, Ireland to attend my 10-year high school reunion in Gelsenkirchen that I am currently organizing remotely. We’ll be visiting my friends and family in my lovely childhood town Wulfen-Barkenberg and other cities such as Essen, Bochum, and Krefeld. While in Germany, we will take the 4.5 hour drive on Germany’s Autobahn to Berlin (and back). After a week in good old Germany, we’ll be flying to Rome, to spend a few days there, and then fly to Venice for the remaining days of our vacation. After two weeks, we’ll be returning back to Manhattan where I will only spend a night there, because I’ll fly back to San Francisco the next morning to immediately drive up to Napa Valley to attend a wedding there. After the wedding, I hope to catch a late night flight back to Orange County to attend a single-day community meeting the next morning, only to fly back to San Jose the next morning afterwards, to take the train from the airport directly to work in Mountain View. All this in just 18 days. Let the games begin.

Visual Studio .NET是微软推出的功能最丰富，扩展性最强的编程工具。 VS.NET中的功能与快捷方式不计其数，并且在每一个版本中都会明显增加。 不熟悉这些节省时间的功能的话，开发者会错过提高开发生产力和效率的大好机会。

本书主要介绍如何高效使用VS.NET。全书内容分为精练而容易把握的几部分，收录的技巧从编辑代码，到编译和调试，以及VS.NET编译器深入了解等多个方面，对所有开发人员而言都是本必读的书籍，无论他们是否熟练，或者使用哪种开发语言。 本书涵盖了Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003和2005 Beta 1。

 

在本书中你将读到以下内容：

·            在编辑与编写代码，使用编译器，对程序进行编译、调试与部署时会用到的120多条技巧

·            专门描述VS.NET 2005的章节

·             大多数技巧的键盘快捷方式

·             90多张图片与截图

关于作者：Minh T. Nguyen是Expedia.com的网站开发工程师。 他从最早的Beta版就开始使用VS.NET，并定期为.NET社区举行研讨会，编写文章。

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• ISBN: 978-1-4303-2800-1
• 建议零售价格: 15.95 美元
• 格式: 平装本, 104 pages 页
• 出版社: Lulu Press 公司；中文版（2007年5月）

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在lulu.com上订购 价格：15.95美元

在barnesandnoble.com上订购 价格：14.35 美元

在amazon.com上订购 价格：15.95美元

So yesterday I attended the opening concert of the 2007 world tour of Play! – A Video Game Symphony at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts performed by the Symphony Silicon Valley and Chorale. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised, mostly because I have not given video game music its attention that it has deserved for quite some time and never realized that video game music has already gained its status as a first-class citizen in the world of scores.

You see, I am a huge fan of film music, and have been listening and attending film music concerts around the globe since high school (including concerts in Germany, Hong Kong and Los Angeles), but up until recently I have mainly ignored the music of video games, because I am not a gamer and am therefore only vaguely familiar with the most-famous video game compositions like those from Final Fantasy or Halo.

Well, yesterday’s performance included music from video games like Mario Bros, World of Warcraft, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Legend of Zelda, Halo and even world premieres of upcoming titles such as LAIR. Video game music has gotten very far since the times of Tetris. The MIDI files have been replaced with full, orchestral scores that are indistinguishable from other film scores when it comes to format and style. In fact, yesterday’s world premiere of LAIR was even co-composed by John Debney, one of my favorite film composers.

I loved the music of World of Warcraft and to be able to hear Nobuo Uematsu’s Sephiroth from One Winged Angel was absolutely terrific. Sephiroth is one of those action-sequence music with very strong use of a choir that you absolutely love if you are a film music enthusiast, or absolutely hate if you are not familiar with the art of film music.

The concert yesterday was accompanied with (badly edited and inappropriately synced) video game cut-scenes projected on a screen. I very much enjoyed the concert, albeit that I wished that the program would have included Nobuo Uematsu's Eyes on Me. I also think that as a fun gig, musical director and conductor Arnie Roth should have played the music of Tetris in the encore part. That would have been fun.

On a tangent, it turned out that my co-student and teacher from CMU West were at that concert as well, and I even bumped into several co-workers from Microsoft. Either the South Bay is a small world indeed, or we are all computer nerds attending this nerdy concert.

Last month the 3rd International Vietnamese Film Festival took place again in Irvine, CA. I wished I could have attended, for I was dying to see The Rebel, but school + work kept me busy as bee. But what else is new in Saigonywood?

The Rebel – The buzz these months is Charlie Nguyen’s martial art period film The Rebel starring Johnny Tri Nguyen, Ngo Thanh Van, Dustin Tri Nguyen and a few others. The website finally got updated as well, so you can hopefully keep up to date about this really-cool-kick-ass-looking film. Check out the trailer which shows some very professional and stunning martial art choreography. Can’t wait to see the Vietnamese folks kick those French asses (excusez moi). In addition to having screend at last month’s Vietnamese film festival in Irvine, it was also shown at the Visual Communications Film Festival in LA, and was even shown in Ha Noi and Saigon (no, not those cheap DVDs you find in Cho Lon). I can’t find any info on when exactly it will screen in other cities at normal movie theaters yet, but if you happen to know, just add your info below.

Saigon Eclipse – well, and now get this, there’s another action movie starring Dustin Nguyen and Johnny Nguyen coming out this year. Huh? Yeah, I am not kidding. It’s an action flick called Saigon Ecplise based on Vietnam’s famous epic poem Truyen Kieu set in modern-day Saigon (and entirely shot there too). The movie already won Special Jury Prize at the Worldfest Houston Film Festival and was also screened at the previously-mentioned Visual Communications Film Festival. The movie premiered in Vietnam just a few days ago, but I don’t know when or where it will screen overseas yet, so simply check out the website for yourself.

Journey from the Fall – In case you haven’t noticed the theaters listing on the main website yet, but Journey From the Fall just keeps on going and going, and it’s not even powered by a pink bunny! I remember how director Ham Tran told me earlier this year that he’ll be happy as long as the movie can last from its premiere on May 23rd until the April 30th (the Fall of Saigon commemoration date). Well, as you can see it surpassed everyone’s expectation and continues to roll out over the next months in many more cities such as Atlanta, Austin, Honolulu, Kansas City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Gulfport, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Boston, and San Antonio, just to name a few. The Australia release has been postponed to about September 2007. San Jose’s continuous screening at Camera 12 in particular broke the theater’s all-time-gross-record-of-any-movie-every-played there, beating Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and Star Wars Episode 3. Journey from the Fall also just received the AZN Asian Excellence Award for Best Independent Film, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t know what are you waiting for.

Reporting live from the second floor of the Mountain View library, this is Minh T. Nguyen (pronounced Minh T. Nguyen), now back to you (or rather back to studying).

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Past Vietnamese Buzz entries: April 2007 March 2007 October 2006 September 2006 July 2006 June 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006

Go to www.cmu.edu and see my story on the homepage for the next seven days (screenshot). Afterwards, you can go directly to this link instead.

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Software Program a Great Fit for Professionals

Minh T. Nguyen, a software design engineer at Microsoft, is getting his master's degree in software engineering at Carnegie Mellon West. The program's unique set-up makes it a perfect fit for full-time professionals.

The program is project-oriented, with no traditional exams. Students work individually and in teams — studying online material, scheduling meetings with faculty and each other, collaborating and delivering their results as a source code, document or presentation.

"I never realized the importance of team-building and soft skills until I started at Carnegie Mellon West," said Nguyen. "Just during the first semester alone, I learned so much about how to effectively lead a team that I wish I could have applied this knowledge at my previous non-profit work."

Nguyen says he appreciates that he can be on a business trip in Seattle or a family visit to Orange County and still not miss a meeting. According to Diane Dimeff, associate dean for external relations and professional development at Carnegie Mellon West, the flexibility of the program is key.

"Flexibility makes this program ideal for full-time professionals, especially those who spend a lot of time traveling for their jobs and putting in long hours," she said.

A strong focus on solving real-world problems translates to the students being able to immediately apply what they learn to their responsibilities on the job. Teaching methods that include workshops, small group coaching and problem-driven seminars allow the students to get the most out of their learning experience.

"Carnegie Mellon West's simulation-based curriculum places me right into a context that most closely resembles a real work environment," said Nguyen. "It focuses on the strengths that will pay off the most once I graduate, if not even earlier."

So I have been on a Star Trek trip lately. Not only have I recently revisited the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas (see geeky picture above), but I am also in the process of watching every single episode of the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation series in strict chronological order. Next Gen is one of the best TV dramas ever produced, and I nostalgically remember how back in my early years, I would come home from school on Fridays, and impatiently wait so that at exactly 16:15 I can tune into channel 2 (ZDF) to watch this. Anyways, at the rate I am revisiting the series, I hope to complete this 178-episodes trek in about two years, haha. Beep. So, I saw “The Pirate Queen” over the weekend on Broadway. However, the much-anticipated new musical by Les Miserables composer and lyricists Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg wasn’t all that great. Neither the story, nor the stage production, nor the music impressed me much. I don’t know how Schoenberg/Boublil can create such a beautiful and powerful music with Les Mis, only to do an good-but-not-spectacular job with “Miss Saigon” and then do a more disappointing one with “The Pirate Queen”. I came out of the theater, not being able to remember any great songs or hum a melody. Ah well. Beep. My book “Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks” was translated into Chinese. In fact, the e-book might be coming out within a matter of weeks, and if everything goes according to plan, you will be able to buy it on amazon.com, bn.com, etc by the end of May. I’ll be sure to blog about it. Beep. Yay! PT and I have booked and finalized our Europe trip. My itinerary for the summer will be: San Jose, CA -> New York, NY (1 day) -> Duesseldorf, Germany (7 days) -> Rome, Italy (7 days) -> New York, NY (2 days) -> San Francisco, CA (1 day) -> Napa Valley, CA (1  day). I am looking forward visiting all my relatives, friends and high-school buddies in Germany, and I intend to do a photo-essay on my childhood town, the immensely-beautiful Wulfen-Barkenberg. Stay tuned for some beautiful pictures! Beep. I just finished my second semester at Carnegie Mellon West. One third of my master’s degree is now done, two thirds to go. See my academic blog for my updates on my journey there. Beep. So I wake up one day, and guess where I found Charlie? Unbelievable.

Update: Journey from the Fall continued to be America’s #1 movie based on per-screen-average even in its second weekend. Here in the Bay area, it will be released in San Francisco, Daly City, Berkeley, and Mountain View. See below for full schedule (more cities to be added soon).

NOW PLAYING

DALLAS (GARLAND), TX: Cinemark Hollywood USA Movies 15

DALLAS (GRAND PRAIRIE), TX: Cinemark Movies 16

GARDEN GROVE, CA: Regal Garden Grove 16

HOUSTON, TX: Cinemark Tinseltown Westchase

SAN JOSE, CA: Camera 12

WESTMINSTER, CA: Edwards Westminster 10

STARTING 4/06/2007

ARLINGTON, VA/WASHINGTON, DC: Regal Ballston Common 12

LONG BEACH, CA: Cinemark at the Pike

PLANO, TX: Cinemark Legacy

SAN DIEGO, CA: Regal United Artists Horton Plaza

STARTING 4/13/2007

BERKELEY, CA: Elmwood 3 Theater

CHICAGO (EVANSTON), IL: Century 12 Evanston/CinéArts 6

DALY CITY, CA: Century 20 Daly City

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: 4 Star Movie Theatre

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA: Century Cinemas 16

STARTING 4/20/2007

PORTLAND, OR: Lloyd Mall 8

SEATTLE (DOWNTOWN), WA: Regal Meridian 16

SEATTLE (COLUMBIA CITY), WA: Columbia City Cinema

STARTING 4/27/2007

HONOLULU, HI: Regal Dole Cannery Stadium 18

STARTING 5/04/2007

ATLANTA, GA: Plaza Theatre

5/26/2007 AND 5/27/2007 ONLY

CLEVELAND, OH: Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

California – In commemoration of the one year anniversary of the founding of Vietnam’s modern day major democracy movement called “Bloc 8406” which was established on April 8th, 2006, the Len Duong International Vietnamese Youth Network will host an international dialog on human rights in Viet Nam via Paltalk. 

Speakers in Viet Nam will be linked up with speakers from outside of Viet Nam to discuss the human rights conditions in Vietnam and collaborative advocacy to further advance the democracy movement which was spearheaded by the Bloc 4806 one year ago.  Since its creation, the Bloc 8406 has spurred the establishment of several other human rights advocate organizations such as the Alliance for Human Rights and Democracy in Vietnam, the People's Democratic Party, and the Committee for Human Rights in Vietnam.  Father Nguyen Van Ly is one of the founders of the Bloc 8406 and was recently sentenced to 8 years of prison for his human rights activities.

This Paltalk event is a part of a series of activities of the “Raise Your Voice”, an international campaign by Vietnamese overseas youth to demonstrate support and solidarity with the democracy movement in Vietnam.  Vietnamese youths are encouraged to develop in-depth understanding of the human rights abuses in Vietnam, and to participate in local activities to help raise awareness of recent human right abuses. 

Paltalk room to join: “Hay Len Tieng Tuoi Tre vi Nhan Quyen”

Paltalk will be set on:
 
Saigon, Vietnam:  9:00 PM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
Tokyo, Japan: 11:00 PM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
Moscow, Russia: 6:00 PM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
Paris, Europe: 4:00 PM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
California, USA: 7:00 AM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
Washington-DC, USA: 10:00 AM – Sunday, April 8, 2007
Sydney, Australia: 12:00 AM – Monday, April 9, 2007

Dominating all Vietnamese news this past week is the imprisonment and sentencing of Roman Catholic priest Father Nguyen Van Ly to eight years in prison. I’ve already reported on this in my last Vietnamese Buzz, but the situation is escalating quite rapidly. In a televised event, we are witnessing as Father Nguyen Van Ly is brought to the Vietnamese court, silenced and then sentenced to 8 years in prison for organizing a voter boycott in the upcoming state election as well as the participation in the non-violent pro-democracy movement Bloc 8406 (name after the organizations inception on April 8th 2006). Originally signed by 118 dissidents in Vietnam, the Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam proposed by Bloc 8406 calls for a multi-party system in Vietnam.

The latest sentence to Father Ly (who has already been imprisoned for almost 15 years in the last 24 years of his life) is catching international attention, following the “peaceful” phases in the last months when Vietnam was the center of international attention when it hosted the APEC conference and was still applying for the WTO.

Leaders around the world condemn the sentence and maltreatment of the people of Vietnam by their own government, with BBC News summing it up very well in one of their recent programs. US Secretary of state calls this a “negative development […] that we’re going to watch very closely”, while the Wall Street Journal calls Bloc 8406 a “full-blown democracy movement”.

In response to this, the Lenduong International Vietnamese Youth Network is kicking off the “Raise your voice” campaign around the world in April, that includes a resourceful website at http://www.lenduong.net/raiseyourvoice and a photo/video blog. More “actionable” items probably will surface on this website soon. For now, please raise awareness of this sad development, contact your local government officials and ask for their support (such signing the letter of US Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who started a letter urging the Vietnamese government to stop the crackdown of pro-Democracy activists in Vietnam.)

For more info, check out these good blogs and join the “Raise Your Voice” campaign:
http://www.lenduong.net/raiseyourvoice
http://vietnamwatch.blogspot.com/

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Past Vietnamese Buzz entries: March 2007 October 2006 September 2006 July 2006 June 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006

So in the past weeks, I’ve attended and watched a lot of Vietnamese movies due to the close-by San Jose Cinequest Film Festival as well as my beloved San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. Here are the movies I watched and my short (and mostly unprofessionally written) reviews of them.

White Silk Dress
Vietnam’s most-expensive movie to date tells the tragic story of a family torn by war and poverty, but never losing their faith in the Vietnamese culture and the symbol of the white Vietnamese dress. The movie felt like a Vietnamese version of ‘Gone with the Wind’ with its themes of turmoil, war, love and patriotism. Albeit being a bit slow at the beginning, the movie is worth the watch, as long as you can ignore the very-out-of-place propagandistic inserts of anti-capitalism in the end. In particular, the movie flows very beautifully and very well, but ended in some very roughly-cut scenes of the ‘American War’ and it seems as if the director was forced to put those scenes in after the movie’s production completed, but failed to pass through the censors.

Bolinao 52
This also is a very heart-wrenching and disturbing documentary about one particular boat people experience. The documentary talks about one individual experience surviving her boat people experience after a Navy ship’s captain refused to rescue them at open sea, after which 58 people starved to death, and only 52 survived (partially through cannibalism). The documentary Bolinao 52 complements the boat people movie Journey from the Fall very well, and is also a movie that won't keep your eyes dry.

Oh, Saigon
Doan Hoang’s personal documentary about how her family had to abandon her half-sister in Vietnam when escaping during the fall of Saigon on April 30th 1975, and how her family deals with this hardship as well as her attempt to organize an extended family reunion is a production that is worth the watch-especially for non-Vietnamese people. The documentary provides a lot of very good background information on the “basics of the Vietnam war” and is accompanied with a lot of archival footage (some of which I have never seen before). During one of the footage, I even recognized the German rescue ship that picked up my family when we escaped from Vietnam in 1979-neat, huh?

Going Home
“Going Home” is a 20-minute short about a Vietnamese American family in Northern California, whose religious Dad decides to return to Vietnam to practice his Buddhist meditation. The unscripted home-video was shot by the son of the family within a period of 24 hours—covering mainly only the night before the Dad’s departure as the mom reminisces on the family’s escape from Vietnam as well as the morning of her Dad’s departure. Presented entirely in black and white, the home-video is edited beautifully through close-ups, but relies on no other effect besides the unscripted dialogue.

Footy Legends
“Footy Legend” is the production of Vietnamese Australian Khoa Do. The comedy/drama tells the underdog story of an unusual group of non-athletes, each with their own personal problems, trying to win a local rugby competition. At the heart of this group, is an unemployed Vietnamese Australian who tries to find a job to regain the right to be the legal guardian of his little sister. Albeit being fairly predictable, it’s a funny comedy with a human touch.

Story of Pao
Okay, fine. I’ve seen “Story of Pao” last November in Boston, but I feel I should include this in this list, since it’s also a “recent” movie that toured the US lately and I failed to write a report on it. Vietnam’s official entry to the 2007 Academy Awards tells the story of a Vietnamese pageant discovering her family’s painful secrets in Sapa. The movie is comparable to ‘Buffalo Boy’ in its coming of age themes and scenery. Some critics claim that the complicated love relationships presented in this movie is atypical for the simple lifves of the ethnic groups in North Vietnam, but I can’t comment on this too much. The movie is a bit too slow for me though.

Owl and the Sparrow
I very, very, very much regret not being able to see “Owl and the Sparrow” at either festival due to scheduling conflicts, for its story of a Vietnamese flight attendant, run-away child and zoo keeper is quite intriguing and the movie even won Best Narrative Feature Award at the San Jose film festival.

Journey from the Fall
Go read the rest of my blog. But some updates: we added a showing in San Diego and Washington, DC on April 6th, so be there or be square.

The Fifth International Vietnamese Youth Conference will take place December 28th to December 30th, 2007 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at Hotel Istana. The 5-star hotel is located close to Petronas Twin Tower (the once-tallest building in the world--slightly higher than the Empire State Building). Malaysia also celebrates in 2007 its 50th anniversary of regaining independence from the Britain, so you'll be in for a treat for one of the largest fireworks you'll ever see during New Year's Eve.

 

A lot of things have not been finalized yet, so no, there is no DH5 website, trailer or more info at this point. However, we do know that DH5 will be on a smaller scale, and target less people than we had at previous conferences. For now, keep your winter break open!

 

This is totally, totally cool, because I have always wanted to visit Kuala Lumpur, and as an enthusiast for high-rises, I can’t wait to go up the Petronas Towers. Yay!

Wow---I don't even know where to start. Journey From the Fall was released nationwide this weekend and it has been a thrill ride for the past 72 hours. Here in San Jose, we had sold-out screenings back to back to back. According to some preliminary numbers, Journey is going to break the record for the highest-grossest opening weekend for any Vietnamese movie ever, and we only screened it in three cities!!! It also seems that it might even break the record for the highest gross per screen of ANY movie released this weekend (beating American mainstream ones)!

On Friday, a VSA person went to the San Jose theater and bought 130 tickets, and the theater person freaked out. On Saturday, the Vietnamese Veterans association bought out the entire theater in Orange County. Heck, the theaters in Orange County even bumped Shooter (which was also opening this weekend) just to accommodate the huge demand for Journey and added a second screen. Advanced ticket sales were so strong in San Jose, that the San Jose theather decided to open Journey on their biggest screen (in addition to the one already planned before). Sunday sales were overall higher than Saturday sales (highly unusual for a movie). The manager in Garden Grove said that the night was even crazier than the time when '300' or 'Pirates of the Carribean 2' came out. The lines were long and crazy.

On top of that, we got word that the movie is going to be released on April 30th 2007 in Australia and New Zealand. A Malaysian company already purchased the TV rights to air in Southeast Asia (boy, do I hope this will also air in Vietnam).

I picked up Ham Tran from the airport today to get him to the show, and heck, we even had to buy tickets to his own film just to save a seat (which we eventually gave away anyways, because people kept on coming--I even had to split up families just to find them seats).

The movie continues to screen in New York, Orange County and San Jose this week, so for those that have been turned away, do see it this week! It’ll open in Dallas and Houston this coming weekend, and soon will be in Chicago, Washington DC and San Francisco as well. With the high success of the movie, I have no doubt that we'll open in more cities soon as well (looks like Atlanta, Boston, Seattle might be next). Stay tuned on www.journeyfromthefall.com, and do spread the word!

Read the great articles in Orange County Register and San Jose Mercury (quoting grassroots brainchild Bao Ngo and a tiny mentioning of myself, wuhaha). Hey, Ham gave me a signed copy of the sheet music for Journey from the Fall. How freaking cool is that?! Can't wait to buy the soundtrack!

I'll report on the other many Vietnamese movies that I saw at this festival later ("White Silk Dress", "Bolinao 52", "Oh, Saigon", "Footy Legends", "Going Home")--kinda exhausted after watching Vietnamese movies for 10 hours today. Whew!

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Update Monday, March 26th, 10am:

 ImaginAsian Pictures JOURNEY FROM THE FALL tops the charts!
#1 per-screen average in the country at $21,861 per screen

NEW YORK, March 26, 2007-  ImaginAsian Pictures first theatrical release, JOURNEY FROM THE FALL made a spectacular bow in the opening weekend of its rolling theatrical release, earning the highest per-screen average of any film, specialty or mainstream, in the country with $21,861 per screen.  Playing in four theaters, the film grossed $87,442 for the weekend.

"This is a defining moment for Asian American cinema and is a testament to the talent, determination and vision of the filmmakers and producers involved.  All those who champion independent productions should draw inspiration from this!" said Michael Hong, CEO of ImaginAsian Entertainment, Inc.

Currently playing sold-out screenings in New York City, Westminster, and San Jose, and expanding nationwide beginning March 30, 2007, Journey from the Fall is directed by Ham Tran and is inspired by the true stories of Vietnamese refugees who fled their land after the fall of Saigon, and the struggles of those who stayed behind and suffered the brutalities of the re-education camps. The critically acclaimed film was an official selection of both the Sundance and the Pusan Film Festivals, and has won more than 10 awards at 20 festivals around the world.

The film stars Kieu Chinh, Long Nguyen, Diem Lien, Nguyen Thai Nguyen, and Jayvee Mai The Hiep.

Journey from the Fall (www.JourneyFromTheFall.com) is an ImaginAsian Pictures release, a division of ImaginAsian Entertainment, Inc.

Wow—exciting times for “Journey from the Fall"/"Vượt Sóng”. Two years ago, I blogged about this movie called “Journey from the Fall”, when I saw a non-final version of the movie in San Jose (and cried throughout it). As a big fan of this movie, I started as an unofficial blogger about the movie, interviewed director Ham Tran, and a couple of months ago even coded and implemented the website, and now I am in full swing promoting the movie, talking with director and the distributors on a daily basis.

Ladies and gentlemen, this masterpiece work of art—one of the best and most important Vietnamese movies every produced, is finally hitting theaters tomorrow, Friday, March 23rd. It's a winner of more than 12 international film awards. I am so excited, because a lot of things are happening right now:

• Actress Kieu Chinh and director Ham Tran and producer Lam Nguyen have posted special messages about the movie, and I have posted them on the website (see below).
• Director Ham Tran will appear at the 6:45pm screening this Sunday, March 25th in San Jose for a post-movie Q&A, so if you are here in the Bay area, come to that screening. Meet this very funny and down-to-earth director!
• Tomorrow’s screening in San Jose was already sold out a several days ago, and they have big Journey from the Fall billboards along Bolsa and Beach Ave down south in Little Saigon. The HD trailer is even on the Apple Trailers homepage. How cool is that?!

This is most important weekend for Journey from the Fall, and I strongly recommend that you go see the movie in the selected cities that it is showing: San Jose, New York, Garden Grove, Westminster, Houston, Dallas, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco. There will be more cities soon, but how many? It depends on how successful this opening weekend will be, so please spread the word!!!

www.journeyfromthefall.com

www.myspace.com/journeyfromthefall 

 

 

JOURNEY FROM THE FALL opens in Orange County, San Jose and NYC on March 23^rd, and then rolls out to different markets every weekend.  Buy your pre-sale tickets today!

 

MARCH 23rd 

Garden Grove:

Regal Garden Grove 16

9741 Chapman Ave., Garden Grove, CA 92841

SHOWTIMES - 12:45pm | 4:00pm | 7:00pm | 10:00pm

http://www.fandango.com/MoviePage.aspx?mlp_tab=critic&date=3/23/2007&mid=96438&location=garden+grove%2c+ca 

 

Westminster:

Edwards Westminster 10

6721 Westminster Blvd., Westminster, CA 92683

SHOWTIMES - 1:00pm | 4:00pm | 7:00pm | 10:00pm

http://www.fandango.com/MoviePage.aspx?mlp_tab=critic&date=3/23/2007&mid=96438&location=garden+grove%2c+ca 

 

San Jose :

Camera 12

201 South Second Street, San Jose, CA 95113

SHOWTIMES - 1:15pm | 4:00pm | 6:45pm | 9:30pm 

http://boxoffice.printtixusa.com/camera/advance?v=2657&i=6448&dd=0 

 

New York: 

The ImaginAsian

239 East 59th Street

New York, NY 10022

SHOWTIMES - 1:00pm | 4:00pm | 7:00pm | 10:00pm 

http://www.theimaginasian.com/nowplaying/index.php?cid=900&date=20070323#100000621 

 

SUNDANCE 2006 - OFFICIAL SELECTION 

WINNER OF 12 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS INCLUDING:

Milano International Film Festival 2006 - Best Cinematography

Newport Beach Film Festival 2006 - Special Jury Prize

Amazonas International Film Festival 2006 (Brazil) - Grand Jury Prize

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival 2006 - Audience Award

Boulder International Film Festival 2007 - Best Feature Film 

 

"movingly depicted" - Kevin Crust, LA Times

 

"Striking in its timeliness, unforgettable in its impact, this is a JOURNEY that must be taken." -Todd David Schwartz, CBS Radio

 

"A Post-Vietnam War boat people saga is launched to compelling effect" - Russell Edwards ,  Daily Variety 

 

"a deftly directed movie" - Howard Feinstein , Indie Wire 

 

"careful and intelligent story-telling" - Jonathan W. Hickman , Entertainment Insiders

 

  

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Bolinao 52

I saw Bolinao 52 a few days ago at its world premiere at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. This also is a very heart-wrenching and disturbing movie about one particular boat people experience. The documentary talks about one individual experience surviving her boat people experience after a Navy ship’s captain refused to rescue them at open sea, after which 58 people starved to death, and only 52 survived (partially through cannibalism). Bolinao 52 complements Journey from the Fall very well, and is also a movie that won't let your eyes dry. I got to talk to the subject of the movie co Tung as well at the post-premiere reception and commend her for telling her story. The movie will be screened in 2008 in public television, but if you can't wait that long, remember that documentary will screen again this Saturday, and if you watch it, watch for my name being mentioned in the credits (yay!), since I was involved in organizing a fundraiser up here in San Jose.

Oh boy, lots of things happening in the Vietnamese community and I am too busy with school and work to blog about it. Heck, I didn’t even promoted UVSA’s Tet Festival last month. Shame on me. The Vietnamese village that they have there is just getting more and more impressive, as this year they even have a replica of the one pillar pagoda in Hanoi. How cool is that? Anyways, let’s get right to the point.

Father Ly and Dissidents Crackdown

Dominating all Vietnamese headlines these past weeks is Vietnam’s recent crackdown on a variety of Vietnamese dissidents. Internationally-known religious leader Father Nguyen Van Ly has been arrested and imprisoned over the last thirty years multiple times by the Vietnamese government for “making anti-government propaganda.” His peaceful, political dissidence has created international attention including Amnesty International designating him as a Prisoner of Conscience and President Clinton’s Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam visiting him in 2000. Well, Father Ly has been arrested last month… yet again. This time, he recently joined a group of other dissidents in signing the Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam (aka Bloc 8406). In addition, Nguyen Van Dai and Thi Cong Nhan, both lawyers and cyber-dissident, were arrested this week as well for posting an article for “right to found a party in Vietnam" for the BBC’s Vietnamese-language website.

Numerous organizations including Reporters Without Borders, and plenty of Vietnamese community organizations are calling for the international community’s attention to Vietnam’s continuous violation of the freedom of the press despite joining WTO and having been removed from the State Department’s Countries of Particular Concerns. Find out if your local VSA or community is joining on this national movement this Sunday, March 11th. Rallis are already planned in cities such as Paris, Oslo, Canberra, Hamburg, Adelaide, San Francisco, Sacramento, Orange County, Toronto, Tokyo and Washington.

Vietnamese Youth Conferences

The 2007 Vietnamese Interacting as One Conference is taking place March 16-18th at Purdue University. Then, just a few weeks afterwards, folks can head directly to Vietnamese-American Student Conference VASCON 3 in Austin, Texas. Co-hosted along with the Vietnamese Professionals Society (yeah, the folks that bring you the VPSKeys), it will be hosted this year in… holy crap, the Austin Convention Center! Then, in the efforts to rebuild the Vietnamese communities hid by Hurriance Katrina, uNAVSA will take place this July 26th - 29th in New Orleans. As with most Vietnamese youth conferences this year, a lot of these organizations are joining hands in the Collective Philanthropy Project. This year, these youth organizations are supporting Catalyst Foundation. Proceeds of the fundraising campaigns will go towards building a school in Vietnam, and selected students will even join the group to Vietnam on their next trip in August 2007.

Ah, and since so many ask: The Fifth International Vietnamese Youth Conference has been postponed to December 2007, and while there has been rumors that it will take place in Thailand, I must add that I don’t even know what the final location yet is. That should give you an idea as to how truthful this rumor could be. All we know is that it will be in Southeast Asia.

Vietnamese Movies Galore

Okay, there is an explosion of Vietnamese movies being released over the next two months. I barely have time to just compile them all, but here’s my attempt in chronological order (and yes, being an independent film fan, I am trying to see them all too):

At the San Jose Cinequest Film Festival

• March 7th: “The White Silk Dress” directed by Huynh Luu. After slaving for a landlord all their lives, Dau and Gu finally manage to start a family of their own in 1950s Vietnam but soon get caught up in war and a cycle of poverty, losing everything but their faith in Ao Dai the symbol of the loftiness and purity of womanhood.
• March 7th and 9th: In case you haven’t seen “Pao’s Story” yet as it was touring North America last year, it’ll play again here in San Jose. It’s a story of a Vietnamese pageant discovering her family’s painful secrets in Sapa. The movie has some very nice landscapes of Vietnam (at the Boston screen last year, I found out that the director and the main actress were married, how cute is that?)
• March 11th:  Stephen Gauger’s “Owl and the Sparrow” will serve as the closing film of the San Jose Cinequest Film Festival. It tells the fictional story of a runaway child, a lonely flight attendant, and zoo keeper, and how their lives intertwine in the quest to be loved.

From the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

• March 17th, 21st and 25th: “Oh, Saigon” is a personal documentary by Vietnamese American director Doan Hoang in which she documents her own family's separation during the Fall of Saigon. This film is being preceeded with Hung Nguyen's poetic documentary “Going Home“, btw, so two Vietnamese movies for one price!
• March 18th and 25th: “Footy Legends” is the rugby comedy by Young Australian of the Year Khoa Do, starring his brother Anh Do and some famous Australian rugby players. Yes, for the folks who joined me last year at the Fourth International Vietnamese Youth Conference, it’s the Khoa Do who presented his shorts and movies at the conference, and at whose house we stayed at.
• March 19th and March 24th : “Bolinao 52“. After being in production for this for so long (heck, was that really two years ago, when I organized the San Jose fundraiser for this?), this documentary about the Vietnamese boat people experience in the Philippines is finally getting its world premiere.
• March 23rd and March 30th: “Journey from the Fall“. If you have been reading my blog entries, I you are probably sick and tired of me repeating it again, but I’ll do it anyways: this boat people and reeducation camp drama/experience movie is probably the most touching and finest piece of art I have ever seen, and it’s finally premiering in New York City, San Jose, Westminster, Garden Grove, Dallas, Houston and an array of other cities that I can’t name yet. Please help spread the word, as this is an Oscar-worthy movie that American mainstream need to see.

Then in April 2007, the Vietnamese International Film Festival is back. Yup, the third edition of this conference will take place from April 12th to April 22nd in Irvine again. Among the movies probably will also be Charlie Nguyen’s martial arts movie “The Rebel” (which strikingly has a lot of the same production crew like “Journey from the Fall“).

Whew… that's it. I believe I’ve covered the main talk of town in the Vietnamese community. Well, I suppose, I could also mention that Angelina Jolie is adopting a Vietnamese orphan, but that's stuff for the ever-increasingly popular Vietnamese tabloid Viet Weekly.

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Past Vietnamese Buzz entries: October 2006 September 2006 July 2006 June 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006

Guess who is now an official student blogger for Carnegie Mellon West? So, now in addition to my professional blog and I also have an academic blog over at CMU West. Beep. I have moved my Sudoku3D program over to the recently-acquired www.sudoku3d.com. I have received some good suggestions for the game, but since I have other priorities right now, I have marked this project as “completed and out of the door”. In other words, I won’t touch this again for years. Beep. I have temporarily ceased my piano lessons. I just don’t have time to practice anymore. School and work is keeping me busy. Beep. Check out my newest, coolest gift I bought for Annie and Charlie: The litter robot. A bit pricey, but very cool automated litter removal. I can now leave on my many weekend travels without nightmares of an overfilled litter box. Beep. I saw Mamma Mia the other day on Broadway, and boy I love it. I did not expected anything from this musical, but the innocent beauty, touching (but fictional) story of this musical along with its array of surprisingly suitable ABBA songs lands this musical among the top of my favorite musicals lists. Speaking of which, the lyricists and composer of Les Mis are back with the Pirate Queen. I can’t wait to hear what they have to bring to Broadway. Beep. Back in the “old days”, whenever I was bored at work, I would be watching stupid YouTube videos. Well, I now have a new addiction: Wikipedia. I loooooove Wikipedia. I can spend all day reading articles on Wikipedia, and it still amazes me how complete anarchy can be so productive. I find myself reading, editing, correcting, and writing new articles on Wikipedia all the time. It’s my newest productive waste of time. Beep. Why does Wells Fargo offer a 1-800 number, when they charge me $2 for the phone call anyways?

Hello my Vietnamese-Northern-California-friends-that-I-always-spam,

Some of you know that I have been involved in promoting two boat people feature film/documentaries in the past years, and it is with excitement that I share with you that both Ham Tran’s feature film “Journey from the Fall” as well as Duc Nguyen’s boat people documentary “Bolinao 52” will be finally released nationwide next month starting here in …. San Jose!!!!

Journey from the Fall

Ham Tran’s “Journey from the Fall” is an incredible movie about the Vietnamese boat people and reeducation camp experience that so many of us, our friends, and relatives had to go through. This movie has gathered numerous awards left and right at various film festivals, and continues to bring me to tears every time I watch it. I ask for your support by attending the opening weekend screening starting March 23rd at Camera 12 in San Jose. Tickets are expected to sell out long before that, so please purchase tickets now and spread the word. The limited March 23rd screening of this movie in San Jose and New York City is closely watched and our weekend success will determine the breadth of its nationwide release to American mainstream theaters on March 30th, so please come that weekend!

http://www.journeyfromthefall.com/Theaters.aspx

Bolinao 52

Duc Nguyen’s documentary “Bolinao 52” documents the tragic event of a boat people ship with more than 100 people that was refused to be rescued by a US navy ship in the Pacific Ocean, resulting to the boat people reverting to cannibalism before only 52 survivors finally made it to Philippines island of Bolinao. The documentary will premiere at the upcoming San Francisco International Asian Film Festival with the following dates:

• Monday, March 19, 6:30pm, AMC Van Ness Theatres, San Francisco
• Saturday, March 24, 2:45pm, Camera 12 Cinemas, San Jose

 http://www.bolinao52.com

 I assume that tickets will be available for sale very soon on http://www.asianamericanfilmfestival.org/2007/

Thanks and please forward this email to all your friends,
Minh T. Nguyen – a boat person.

PS: As always, let me know if you want me to remove you from my spam list. No questions asked. :)

I’ve already played with XAML almost a year ago when it was still in the early stages, but over my winter break, I spent some time getting my hands dirty with the 3D aspects of Microsoft’s XAML/Windows Presentation Framework. I decided to create a 3D version of the famous Japanese Sudoku game, and pretty much finished coding 90% of it already in December 2006, but it’s not until today that I finally found the time to wrap up the code, the user interface and fix all the pending bugs.

So, here it is: Minh T. Nguyen’s Sudoku3D

The Game

Just like in regular Sudoku, you need to fill in a row, column and “height column” of the cube with all natural numbers, so that each number appears once and only once. Unfortunately, the third rule of Sudoku (that a given 3x3 sub-square of a 9x9 Sudoku square contains all 9 numbers) does not translate into the third dimension. For instance, in a 4x4x4 Sudoku cube the 2x2x2 sub-cube has eight cells, not four. I therefore had to get rid of the third rule, which makes playing this game not as fun as I expected it to be. If anyone has any insightful suggestions on how to translate the third Sudoku rule into the third dimension, let me know.

Requirements

This game requires Internet Explorer as well as the Microsoft .NET 3.0 (which comes pre-installed with Windows Vista but is available as a separate download for other Windows systems). A fast and powerful computer running Windows Vista is preferred, as the Sudoku generation for large cubes can be very CPU-consuming (in fact, I don’t even allow you to generate cubes larger than 5x5x5 even though it’s theoretically possible). In addition, the graphics just looks much smoother on Vista since 3D anti-aliasing is only enabled there.

Development

Coding this game has been pretty fun. The hardest part of this all was actually not the 3D aspects of this, but the Sudoku generation algorithm itself. I never realized that creating a valid Sudoku is actually much harder than solving one. In the end, I’ve opted for a backtracking algorithm using a stack of intermediate steps that can be undone in conjunction with a 3D matrix of possible moves. Fun stuff.

Hope you all will enjoy playing this game as much as I enjoyed coding it!

I no longer live at the Rivermark area in Santa Clara and have moved to Mountain View. My rent hiked 24%, so I bid farewell to my lovely apartment and moved out this past weekend. My new place is situated in perfect location: I am close to Mountain View’s Castro district (with the many Vietnamese restaurants) as well as the San Antonio Shopping Center. I am so close to school and work that I don’t even need to go on the freeway to drive to there (heck, I actually should try to bike there during the summer). Email me if you need to know the new address and home phone number.

Yesterday, we launched the new Journey From The Fall website. Check it out over at www.vuotsong.com or www.journeyfromthefall.com (no surprise here). Please don’t give me credit for the design, the folks over at ImaginAsian designed this—I only coded the HTML/ASP.NET for this website over my Christmas vacation (and boy do I hate the fact that different web browsers render completely valid XHTML differently). I am excited to see the progress that has been made with the movie promotion. We are going to release the new trailer on this website tomorrow as well, so are you guys eggcited as I am??! The movie is going to be released in March 2007 in about ten US cities, and I can’t wait to see it (for the fifth time) in the theaters. As a boat person who left Vietnam at the age of one, this movie means a lot to me—this is the untold story of Vietnam that the world has to see. It’s my story. It’s the story of so many other Vietnamese Americans, and I am anxious to see mainstream America’s reaction to this movie that has been long overdue.

If you want to get involved in promoting the movie, please send an email to info@iatv.tv. I am hoping to see a lot of VSA support. Spread the word, let other people know about this movie. I'll post the date/locations of the ten screenings once it's finalized, but I hope to see sold-out shows, because this will then pave our path into releasing the movie in all theaters across the United States and the world.

PS: I dislike MySpace with a passion, but here’s the Journey From The Fall’s myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/journeyfromthefall

I give workshops for the community on how to write Vietnamese unicode on a computer every once in a while and get asked the following questions all the time, so here they are for everyone:

Question: Why does VPSKeys insert random spaces into my document when I type in Vietnamese unicode characters?

Short answer: Microsoft Word’s “Smart cut and paste” feature interferes with VPSKeys, so simply turn it off in Word 2003 by going to Tools/Options/Edit and uncheck “Smart cut and paste” or in Word 2007 by clicking on Office Icon/Word Options/Advanced and uncheck “Use smart cut and paste“.

Long answer: “Smart cut and paste” is a feature in Word used during cutting and pasting that inserts spaces around the selection that was just pasted into Word. This helps in preventing words “running” into each other. In doing so, Word looks for word boundaries to insert spaces when necessary. Whenever you type in a Vietnamese character with signs, VPSKeys deletes the previous character without the sign and pastes in the character with the sign. Unfortunately, Vietnamese text in the VPS or unicode format don’t translate well into English. Certain characters that are legal Vietnamese characters within a word happen to be word boundaries in English. This interferes with the “Smart cut and paste” algorithm, making Word think that spaces are missing.  You can also selectively turn of just that “insert space” functionality of Smart cut and paste, by going to the Settings and uncheck “Adjust sentence and word spacing automatically”.

Question: Why does my lowercase ‘i’ gets capitalized into a big ‘I’ whenever I type Vietnamese words?

Short answer: Microsoft Word’s “AutoCorrect” feature interferes with VPSKeys, so simply turn it off in Word 2003 by going to Tools/AutoCorrect Options or in Word 2007 by clicking on Office icon/Word Options/Proofing/AutoCorrect Options and uncheck “Replace text as you type”.

Long answer: “AutoCorrect” is a very useful feature in Word that simply replaces common misspellings with the correct counterparts. Word comes preinstalled with a variety of these combinations, one of which is to replace a lonely lowercase i with a capital I, since the pronoun referring to one’s self in the English language is always capitalized (how egocentric). When you type a Vietnamese word that contains an i, the i might be capitalized, because Word thinks that this i stands by itself even though you have Vietnamese characters around it. Again, that’s because certain Vietnamese characters-while legal in Vietnamese-are word boundaries in English (maybe a dash, a period, an exclamation mark, etc...), and Word is tricked to believe that you misspelled .. uh… yourself. Since AutoCorrect is such a useful feature though, I recommend only deleting the i->I combination instead of turning the feature off altogether.

Happy Typing!