Hung Truong: The Blog!

Winning at Jeopardy

I just had another dream that felt very real up to the moment when I checked my phone and realized I hadn't won on Jeopardy. I might need to start up a series on my blog about weird dreams if this keeps up.

There was a news story on AnnArbor.com yesterday about a local Ann Arbor guy appearing on Jeopardy that I tweeted from my parody account, so that's probably what fueled this weird dream.

For some reason I'm on the Jeopardy website, checking out the hall of fame. I vaguely recall having been on Jeopardy. This is cool because my old friend Susan was always trying to get onto Jeopardy and now I can brag to her that I was on it. I investigate further and realize that not only did I appear, but I won! My total winnings amounted to around $21,000 in June of 2011. At this point I'm wondering why I never got the check from Alex.

The first thing I did was search for “jeopardy” in my gmail (this is also what I do in real life if I need to remember something). This was harder than I expected, because spelling “jeopardy” in a dream is harder than in real life. That only brought up two random emails, so I checked the hall of fame webpage again. It listed that my email address on file was “hungtron@gmail.com.” So apparently a typo was all that stood in the way of me and my prize money.

The website had an email form to fill out (as well as a fax number) for corrections, etc. I didn't really question why the public-facing website had so much information on it. As I raced to fill out my correct information “I regret to inform you that you have not paid me yet, and I am the Hung Truong who won back in 2011”, I woke up to the sobering reality that I was never a Jeopardy winner.

That's always the hardest moment. Realizing that you didn't win at Jeopardy, don't have an awesome dog, etc. sucks. But I guess I can take consolation in the fact that today is a new day where literally anything is possible (except for winning at Jeopardy, obviously).

Weird Dream Starring Cameron Diaz and Ellen Page

I had a weird dream that won't fit into Twitter, so I might as well write it down here since my blog hasn't seen much love lately.

This was the sort of dream where I'm watching a movie. The movie starred Cameron Diaz and Ellen Page as two roommates (or some people living in the same house) who have recently become zombified. Apparently they're fighting to survive in a dream/cyber world with other people in the same predicament. Now that I think of it, the plot resembles a modern Beetlejuice.

For some reason, Tina Fey was cast as their PR specialist. In one scene, Page and Diaz dump off Fey at the beach, along with one of their boyfriends. Apparently they don't want their significant others and family worrying about the fact that they're zombies now, so they leave without a word. I wasn't sure how the family didn't notice the smell (maybe they were being polite).

If someone can get this green-lighted I'm sure I can fill in the rest of the details.

SXSW Panel Idea: Mashups – Noble Bootstrapping or Downright Stealing?

I checked SXSW today and noticed that the deadline for panel proposals is tonight. I originally wasn't going to post anything, but I sat and thought for a bit about things I know enough about to propose/speak about at a conference. I remembered the whole craigslist incident and thought it would be interesting to propose a panel discussion about the state of mashups today.

In the past, mashups were held to a pretty high opinion. The proper mashup might be able to take two things and simplify a process to critical acclaim. I think in those days, mashups weren't thought of as startups or businesses, just small tools that people could use. Flash forward to today and sites like Mapskrieg and Padmapper (and others like AirBnB) are being C&Ded for their terms of use violations. Something happened in the startup world that made mashups into a viable threat, which the bigger players did not approve of.

While the term “mashup” seems a bit archaic now, I think it would be interesting to revisit that term and see what it means today. Take some pioneers of mashing up and some new startups and get them talking about stuff.

In other news, it looks like the Panel Picker requires some kind of “visual resource” like a video or slideshow or something. I don't see how my proposal could be improved by that (it's pretty cut and dry) so I'll probably just link to this blog post and insert a lot of unrelated pictures of things being mashed up. CC licensed, of course.

On Mapskrieg and craigslist Cease and Desist Requests

As I mentioned on Twitter a while back, I got a cease and desist request from craigslist a couple of weeks ago for Mapskrieg (my craigslist + Google Maps mashup for web and iOS). This request came at a pretty bad time (right before I was to move from Chicago to Ann Arbor). I quickly agreed to it and removed the app (I didn't really have time or money to fight a lawsuit). I also added a passive-aggressive note on mapskrieg.com that you can still read if you'd like. I contacted a reporter at PandoDaily since I had seen a few other tweets about C&Ds from craigslist. He proceeded to write a pretty badly researched article (he originally was going to post that I made housingmaps.com) that got very little attention.

Pharma Hacked!

I noticed that the Google results for my blog have been showing ads for pharmaceuticals. I am not actively trying to sell drugs, so I figured this was a hack.

I ended up nuking the wp directory for this blog and re-installing plugins/images. I think the site's clean now but it's hard to tell since the “fetch as Googlebot” feature in Google Webmaster tools seems to show stale data. I'm not sure whether to blame Cloudflare, Google or myself.

Hopefully my Google results for this blog clear up in a few days or so. The weird part of the hack is that normal visitors are not affected. So the malware writers are apparently trying to sell stuff to Google. Of course, they're just trying to raise their Google rank by inserting links and not being caught by being too obvious. But it's interesting that the hack is transparent to normal people unless you check the Google cache.

Oh and sorry if you came here looking for the pharmaceuticals. You'll just have to get them somewhere else.