Hung Truong: The Blog!

Managing Rejection (And Success!)

Over the past few years, I've found myself in a number of situations where I've been rejected. I read an article via BoingBoing on why some people see failure as crippling, while others see it as a motivator. Pretty interesting stuff. I have the book on hold at the library. I guess I fall into the latter category as I haven't really let my numerous failures drag me down.

When I was fresh out of college (for the first time), I got an amazing opportunity to interview at Google. If you were a CS major in 2006, Google was pretty much the holy grail. In my mind, it definitely was (well, maybe second to Facebook, but they never got back to me). Like many of my adventures, I wrote about this in a blog post.

Long story short, I was rejected. I think at that point I was a bit cocky and thought Google was a sure thing. You should never have a sense of entitlement; that leads down a pretty depressing path. Getting rejected was a good wake-up call that I needed to improve myself if I wanted to end up with my dream job. At the time I thought I had missed an amazing opportunity. This may have been true; I'll never know what my life would be like if I had started working at Google. Looking back, though, I think the rejection was really a blessing.

Nacho Libre: Spam Magnet

Maybe I'm on some kind of “spam roll” right now. But after checking my spam bin in WordPress, I noticed that about 100% of my blogspam was directed towards an old post I made about Nacho Libre.

What makes the post a spam magnet, though? I didn't really stick anything in there that would potentially make it a spam target for spammers, did I? Is it because I mentioned some lady that looks like Penelope Cruz (but isn't)?

I closed the comments on the post. My apologies to people who wanted to make a legit comment on the post but couldn't. Maybe you can just post your comment here instead. Oh, crap. What if this post becomes the new Nacho Libre spam magnet post!? I guess I'd have to close comments on this one and make a new one explaining it. Then that new one would become the next spam magnet, and I would have to continue the process ad infinitum. Hopefully that doesn't happen.

Update, 4-27-09:

I noticed this post is getting lots of spam now, so I'm closing comments. Geez, what is it with Nacho Libre and SPAM!?

Will Smith: Web Redesigner

For some reason I decided to look at my spam in Gmail and this was the first spam message:

Apparently when he's not rapping, Will Smith redesigns people's websites out of the kindness of his heart (though I guess he also works it as a side business).

Oh my god. I just realized I made an almost carbon copy of this post regarding George Lucas and spamming. Am I that predictable!?

John Linnell’s New Album For 2009!

I had a dream that John Linnell released a new album (solo, not with TMBG) and I was gonna buy it or something. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a false dream. Or a dream with a false real-world connection. Too bad; State Songs was great.

Mucinex: The Booger Drug

So I have a cold right now. I called my normal doctor's office and apparently they don't do urgent care type stuff. But they do have a nurse! So I talked to the nurse and she gave me a list of drugs to take. One of them was Mucinex.

Apparently this is some kind of miracle drug. It's the one in the commercials that has a family of green boogers (or mucus?) living in a human's chest. Then the person takes the Mucinex and the family of boogers is evicted, to put it nicely. Mucinex tears families apart. Families of the mucus variety.

Anyway, I used it and it seems to be okay. It didn't work in the elaborately theatrical fashion as the commercials would have me believe, but I think I have less junk in my chest now than before.