Hung Truong: The Blog!

Lucid Dreaming: Inception Style

I often have the problem that the moment I realize I'm dreaming, I wake up. I never get a chance to do the cool stuff you're supposed to do in a dream when you know what's going on (like fly and whatnot). Last night, I did end up having a lucid dream of sorts.

I was walking around a house when I realized I was dreaming. I read somewhere that you can spin around really fast, and apparently that helps you stay in the dream and not wake up when you realize you're dreaming. I did this and was able to stay in the dream. After that, I walked through the house some more and looked at the furnishings, thinking that I have a pretty cool brain for being able to invent that stuff on the fly. Like, “wow, my mind just made up that sofa arrangement.”

At this point, I decided to do something more fun. I tried moving parts of the house around with my mind, and see if I could demolish it. It didn't work. Once I wasn't able to control the dream, I woke up. After I woke up, I decided I would try to go back to sleep and dream the same dream. I wasn't quite able to do this, though, because I was still dreaming! What I thought was a lucid dream was really me dreaming that I was lucid dreaming. I think this is the first case I can remember of having a dream inside of a dream. I'm pretty sure I was dreaming that I woke up, because I can recall actually waking up and it being quite different from my dream waking up.

I think it's kind of interesting that I was able to keep dreaming even though I realized I was in a dream partially due to the fact that I was dreaming of dreaming. The complexity of dreams continues to surprise and confuse me. Hopefully I am writing this blog post in a non-dream, because I'd really like to have a record of this dream in a dream.

Dropbox Referrals with Google Adwords

I read a tweet from someone a while back about how they used Google Adwords to max out their Dropbox referral disk space. I thought this was a clever hack and decided to try it for myself. I made a new Adwords account and entered a coupon code from Dreamhost for $75 in free Adwords money.

I ran into a few issues with my first ads. They were running okay in the beginning, but were getting shot down in the review process for trademark issues. I couldn't figure out why this was the case, since I had seen multiple blog posts describing how to set up the ads with no mention of trademark issues. I tried a few tweaks, and removed “Mac” from the copy of my ads, thinking that the word might have triggered the trademark issue.

The first set of ads without “Mac” in them ended up getting approved, and I was on the fast track to Dropbox space gluttony. Here's a screenshot of what my campaign looked like (until I stopped it because I maxed out on referrals):

Things looked like smooth sailing and I think I only used something like $20 worth of credit (though I could've easily optimized for spend, I kinda wanted to finish more quickly, so I set my cpcs aggressively). I was gonna change the ads and open it up for friends to get referral space, too.

Then yesterday, with no warning, I got an email that my account had been suspended. There wasn't really any good explanation for this. When I look at my account, it says:

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended for repeated violation of AdWords or Landing Page and Site policies in this or a related account.

and

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended because your billing information in this or a related account could not be verified.

I'm not sure I could come up with a more vague message. So far, Google Adwords email support has been of no use at all. I first got an email saying they were “escalating” the matter, which probably just means they didn't get around to it within 24 hours so they had to send something, then I got a generic form email saying that:

After reviewing your account, it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords accounts do not comply with our Terms and Conditions. As a result, your account, and any related accounts you may have created, have been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on Google.

Well no shit, that really doesn't tell me anything new! The best tidbit of the email was that:

– For privacy reasons, AdWords Support is unable to provide any additional information regarding this account.

You know, in case I find something out about myself that I didn't know… It's my account!

If I did something wrong to get banned, I sure would like to know why. Since I don't, I feel like I'm in the customer support limbo that is synonymous with “Google Support” which is already an oxymoron of sorts.

Anyway, TL;DR I used Adwords to max out my Dropbox referrals like many have before, got the banhammer from Google and now their customer support is atrocious (as expected).

Facebook Trolling: Ticker Edition

I sort of have a tradition when it comes to Facebook updates. When Facebook introduced polls, I took advantage of the viral sharing properties to expand my poll to more than my close circle of friends. The Facebook ticker feature just rolled out this week, and yesterday Spotify integrated with Facebook's new graph api.

I've noticed a whole lot of ticker updates since then from my friends' playlists. I decided I would have some fun with the Ticker feature, so I went on Spotify and made a playlist of just “Never Gonna Give You Up.” At first I thought it had not worked, but it looks like my friends are now all aware of my favorite song in the world.

I mostly mess with Facebook to point out unintended consequences of their design decisions. In this case, something passive like listening to music overpowers stuff that might actually be interesting, like a comment or a post. I wonder if Facebook will change their ticker behavior, or continue to allow it to be used for a “firehose” of info while the news feed will be used for more interesting/important stuff.

An Important Announcement About My Employment Status (And T-Shirts)

If you know me or if you read my blog, you know that I have been a huge fan of Threadless since I first found out about it in 2005. For a while, Threadless was pretty much the only thing I wrote about on this blog.

Last year, I developed an unofficial mobile app for browsing and sharing cool Threadless designs on the iPhone and iPad. This caught the attention of Threadless and I got to visit their sweet office!

I had the chance to visit again for the Threadless Family Reunion and an interview of sorts, and I was offered a job! I am happy to announce that I will join Threadless at the beginning of October.

I am really looking forward to making Threadless even more awesome (and now from the inside as opposed to hacking together an API for myself)!

Photo Hack Day NYC 2011 And My Hack: AllPaper

This past weekend I participated in my first NYC hackathon. The New York Hackathon is a mythical beast. They've been written about quite extensively, but you really need to just show up to one to know what it's all about.

This particular hackathon (Photo Hack Day) was organized by Aviary, with sponsorships by Bing, Pepsi, PBR and others. There was plenty of food so that hackers didn't have an excuse to leave, ever. I still ended up going home to get some sleep on Saturday night before the demo on Sunday.

I really think I picked a good first hackathon to attend, as the prizes were pretty insane. First place got $5000 and the cash prizes for second and third place were quite good as well. On top of those, there were prizes for best use of certain APIs. Face.com's API stood out as a popular one; 500px had quite a few users as well.

I ended up working on a project I had wanted to build for a while: a custom collage creator for your iPhone wallpaper. I called it “AllPaper.” It seemed pretty catchy and I don't think there's a product with that name yet. I integrated Instagram into it first, then threw support for 500px, PicPlz and Facebook before calling it a hack. I also integrated the Sincerely Ship Library which lets you turn your collage into a real postcard. I'm really looking forward to trying that out!

Overall I'm pretty happy with how the hack turned out. I can probably turn it into a real app fairly easily with some tweaking here and there. As this was my first hackathon, I noticed a few interesting things about the top hacks. There was some grumbling about how many of them seemed “hardcoded.” I wonder if presentation really counts more than actual hack-worthiness these days. You could spend your time actually coding something, or you could create the facade of something that looks even better, but is not really that worthy of being called a “hack.” It seems that the presentation wins over the true hack-worthiness, as one of the cooler ones, a jailbroken iPhone that took MMS messages and uploaded them to a web service, won nothing.

Coming away empty-handed was a little damaging to the ego, especially after winning something in my last hackathon, but my ego's not too bruised. I hate to sound like I'm complaining! Almost all of the presentations were well done, and the winners certainly did deserve to win. I'm hoping to participate in something similar again soon, as the atmosphere was really enjoyable.