VietCali.com

These are the music I recorded in that one crazy night where I pretty much stay up all night. This was my down and lonely period where I tend to withdraw from the world. I remember those solo backpack trips and many other lone wanderings. Anyway, I’m glad I recorded the song I played. It serves as a reminder of what loneliness is about so to appreciate happiness when it is in you. To think about it these song probably don’t exist if I was not in that state at the time. click here to LateNite Album songs

Rough Guide Vietnamese Phrasebook

My VietCali’s QEVP is probably the most simplest and free tool to help you to start speaking some Vietnamese. But I know you just can’t be online all the time to get to this page. If you are traveling to Vietnam and want to speak some local lingo then the next best thing to bring along is this Rough Guide Vietnamese Phrasebook.  The book is basically a traveler phrasebook and a mini English<->Vietnamese dictionary.  This book is less popular than some other phrasebook like Lonely Planet Vietnamese phrasebook but I think it’s much better in content and price. The publisher also provides audio files for some common conversation scenarios that you can download to yours MP3 player. The book also has tips and cultural tidbits that can enhance yours stay in Vietnam.  There is one page titled Coloquialism but actually it contains profanity or bad words.  I don’t think it’s approriate to use bad words when you travel to any country.  But I guess you might need to recgonize the the words just in case you know someone is swearing at you .   For less than seven bucks I think the  book is a best buy for the money.

I finally moved my VietCali blog from Blogger to my own hosting server and power it using WordPress. This way I have more control on how I post my special stuff, like the QEVP. Yes, the Quick English Vietnamese Phrases is now back in VietCali.com and working properly.   So far I love the WordPress blog engine.  It’s much better than using the Blogger since I have it installed on my own host server so I can pretty much customize anything I want.

One big challenge was figuring why the Vietnamese characters wasn’t displayed properly and after a long Googling session I figure out it was a mySQL database thing and able to fix.  Drop me a note if you have similar issue.  The short answer to the problem is you need to cofigure the database to accept data in UTF8 Unicode format,  not some Swedish set up by the installing script.

I’ll try to clean up VietCali blog and put in more articles.   I’m glad I finally have some free time to work on it.  Thank you for coming by.

You know the first place to check for free anti-virus software is from your Internet provider. A lot of people doesn’t know this but Internet provider like mine DSL from ATT comes with free anti-virus from McAfee. It’s just that the information is not forthcoming. In my case I have to actually search around for it. If you are using DSL from ATT the free Anti-Virus software download can be found here . Click on Download and enter your account log-in info to get the software.