Hung Truong: The Blog!

Earth Hour? What Happened to Earth Day?

So I keep hearing about this mythical “Earth Hour” in which we’re supposed to turn our lights off an hour earlier than usual. My first thought was that it was sad that Earth Day was downsized to last just an hour. My second thought was that, while the activity is a nice gesture of wanting to help the environment, it probably does little to actually affect anything in the long term.

I’m no electrical engineer, but the way I understand it, power plants adjust their output according to power usage. So they use less fuel at night and more during the peak hours of the day. Turning your lights off for an hour will probably just make the power plants less effective unless they anticipate or quickly adjust to the lower amounts of power being drawn. It’s sorta like how having a one-day gas boycott doesn’t really do anything.

Earth Hour seems like a sad indicator of how lazy we are as humans. It’s like a band-aid. “If I turn my lights off for an hour, I’m saving the planet!” You could also just switch to a different type of lightbulb and have a much better amortized effect on the environment, or ride a bike instead of driving. Who’s willing to bet that the same people who switch their lights off for an hour also leave their TVs and other standby electronics plugged in when they’re not using them?

Hung Truong: MSI Candidate

This is a random post to see if I can get on top of the Google query for “MSI Candidate.” My friend is currently on top (I won’t link to him, lest I sabotage myself).

Maybe I should put some body text here. Okay. I’m Hung Truong. I’m an MSI Candidate at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Let’s see if that’s good enough.

The Costs of Internet Fame: SI Visiting Days 2009

So I met some cool prospective students (I call them n00bs) of the school I go to for the annual visiting days. It’s funny to talk to them because they’re pretty much in the same place I was two years ago. It’s nice to answer questions and help them make the hard decision of what the heck to do about grad school. Personally I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out, so I generally say good stuff, but I guess I could also tell them to leave and never come back if I wanted.

Anyway, it seems as though I’m the only person who ever wrote a blog about applying to grad schools. Because a lot of people who meet me at visiting days tell me they’ve read my blog. This is kind of weird and kind of flattering as it means my page rank for certain queries is high, and also that these people know stuff about me before even meeting me. One guy even knew about my side project, Anime Nano and listened to my podcast! I playfully referred to the people who knew me from the internet as my “stalkers.” Hopefully I won’t ever have real stalkers. The crazy kind. Anyway, it wasn’t weird hanging out with these people or anything. I was actually pretty stoked to meet a “user” of one of my sites in real life! Plus I’ll never actually see these peeps again since I’m graduating before they come here.

And yes, I intentionally titled this blog post to get another entry high in the Google query for “SI Visiting Days,” though it seems that one of my peers is beating me at the moment.

Yahoo’s HackU Event at the University of Michigan

I sorta participated in the HackU event that Yahoo sponsored at my school. I say sorta because I got back in from SXSW on Tuesday night (post about that forthcoming) and missed the kick-off. First off, I gotta say something about the name. HackU. Is that like a pun on something?

Anyway, on Wednesday the Yahoo guys went over some stuff on semantic web, search monkey and BOSS. Apparently, the customized search results are the “carrot” on the stick for content producers to markup their content semantically. The Yahoos noted that the customized results provide better click-through rate. While that’s a nice way to think about incentivizing the semantic web, I see a few flaws.

First off, the increased click-throughs are probably due to the pretty graphics and stuff. What happens when everyone has customized search results? The search results page gets cluttered and looks like crap. Furthermore, an increase of click-through in a search engine that has 20% of the search engine market (says Comscore… the numbers for my sites are more like 2-3%) is not much. In my case I’d probably be better off spending my time doing other SEO stuff for Google. Yeah, this is kind of harsh to say (I didn’t say it to the Yahoo guys’ faces) but it’s also realistic. Honestly, I do hope search monkey and BOSS end up being successful, for Yahoo’s sake. As far as swag goes, I picked up a brown Search Monkey shirt on the way out. Oh, and they served some tasty Indian food.

Anyway, I missed the Yahoo events on Thursday. Apparently they did some presentations, then went to a bar. Instead, I had fun at the video game archive and my student org, SCSI. Then on Friday, the 24-hour hackathon thing started. I got there at 4pm and ate some food (it came in waves, burritos, pizza, snacks, Red Bull, soda, etc). They had a different shirt this time, a black one with a wizard on it!

I started trying to figure out what to hack on and came up with an addition to a site that I’ve slowly been working on, What is Hung Doing? Note to self: I think I need to write a blog post on WiHD as well. Basically, I thought it’d be cool to add my location to the site (I was hoping that Google Latitude would be able to do this but I guess it doesn’t offer an API). I used Fire Eagle and the iPhone app called Sparrow to update my location. To grab the location I just made a new application on my server. I dunno the best way to present this info. I’ll fix it up later.

I got the location stuff working and promptly decided to go home around 2am. No 24-hour hacking for me. On Saturday (today), I got up and ran some errands. I bought groceries and got a haircut, then raced back to the CS building on North Campus to do my presentation for WiHD. There were some really neat hacks that were shown off today. One of my friends from the School of Information even won 3rd place. I ended up with a novelty award: “Wannabee Internet Stalkee” or something like that, because WiHD basically enables stalkers. But hey, if it keeps them online instead of around me, then it’s okay, right? Finally, I picked up my final shirt (It has a dragon and a kung-fu guy on it) and went home, along with my award:

Not too bad for just hacking away at my own project. It’s nice to see Yahoo come and show some goodwill to our school, especially since they skipped out on the career fairs this year. I wonder if they’re even hiring. Either way, I got three shirts, an official Yahoo Faceball, a random puzzle ball and an award, so I’m pretty happy.

Twitter? I Hardly Know Her!

Sometimes it’s fun to go look at what I wrote, say, two years ago and compare it to how I feel now. Case in point: Twitter. Almost two years ago, I wrote that:

Now, I actually use the Facebook updates now and then, but it seems like people who use Twitter do this to the max. Like they update multiple times a day. Are these people so self-centered that they think everyone needs to know what they’re doing?

…

In Twitter, the ability to update is the entire application itself. To me, Twitter is simply a subset of what Facebook already provides. Why would you ever need both?

This historical post is both illuminating and funny for a number of reasons. Apparently in the past I hardly updated my Facebook status at all. These days I probably do so at least once a day, and usually multiple times a day. I guess that’s just an indicator of how social norms have changed in regards to sharing personal information online: what was thought of as “oversharing” in the past is basically normal now. It’s also funny that I recognized that Twitter was a subset of Facebook. Recently I’ve come to believe that being a subset is actually a feature.

I think Twitter hit critical mass for me somewhere in the last few months. So really, my previous opinions of it being pointless weren’t necessarily incorrect. It just didn’t hold any value for me. Now that the value of Twitter (in my own usage) is improving due to network effects, I use it more often.

I think the appeal of Twitter comes down to this: There is a much better signal-to-noise ratio at this point using Twitter versus Facebook. On Facebook I get updates about everything that everyone I have ever known (and befriended) has ever done! I don’t care about pictures of drunk cheerleaders who I was friends with in undergrad. But Facebook feeds them to me. I really should remove them at some point, but oh well, such is social networking.

For now, Twitter has a much more relevant set of messages. I’ve also noticed that people are much more likely to respond to me via Twitter, versus commenting on a Facebook status. Probably due to the noise/signal thing again. It’s easy for me to simply “unfollow” someone who is not providing me with relevant or funny information. Sadly, the relevance factor of Twitter is probably a temporary quality. Facebook used to have a low S/N ratio until everyone joined it. Twitter may face the same problem if it can grow like Facebook did (lol at scaling).

It’s interesting to look at all of this in the context of history. I used ujournal before I used Xanga before I used livejournal before I used MySpace (ick) before I used Facebook before I used Twitter before I used (fill in the blank)…