Hung Truong: The Blog!

Michigan SI Visiting Days: Impressions

After my Google Visit, I left early on Saturday morning to fly to Michigan. Michigan is my top (and sadly, only) school right now as far as graduate school possibilities go. It’s okay though, because I think Michigan would be my top school even if I was admitted to all the schools that I applied to.

In March, Hung Joins The Jet Set

Or at least it seems like it. Earlier in the month, I rode on a bus with the UNM basketball band to Las Vegas. I guess that doesn’t count as “Jetting” but hey, I was traveling. Just last week, I flew with the basketball band to Hartford CT.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to California for a Google job interview, then flying from there to Michigan for the University of Michigan School of Information Visiting Days. Finally, on the 26th I fly back home.

That’s a lot of cities in one month, and a lot of frequent flier miles. Hopefully I can get something cool. Like a magazine subscription!

I’ve just finished printing all of the documents that I think I’ll need to find my way around (this is my first time flying alone). Plus I gotta take taxis and shuttles and all sorts of crap that I never thought about when traveling around with my family.

Hopefully everything will go without a hitch. Maybe I’ll even get to do one of those things where I give up my seat and make mad bank for it, flying out the day after! One can only hope.

The Come In/Go Away Welcome/Unwelcome Mat!

I saw this at BoingBoing. It’s a welcome mat that says “Come in” when you view it one way, and “Go away” when you rotate it 180 degrees.

I guess the idea is that when people are entering your house, they feel welcome, but then when they leave and look at the mat, it tells them to go away (which they’d probably be doing if they’re looking at it from that angle).

Or vice versa, the mat could act as some kind of barrier, with people seeing “Go away” as they’re about to enter, and “Come in” when they’re ready to leave. Theoretically, no one would enter or leave the house, which would create a state of home equilibrium, perhaps. Unless there are other entrances…

There’s also a doorhanger, in case you need to signal to people whether it is acceptable to enter a particular room.

Wii Play for Nintendo Wii – Review

I got Wii Play from Amazon.com yesterday. The main selling point is that it comes with a wiimote and costs $50, so the game itself is worth $10. It comes with a bunch of minigames, much like Wii Sports, but they’re not all sports.

Out of the nine, I’d say 3 or 4 are actually fun to play.

The Shooting Range game is not Duck Hunt, which makes me sad. Basically you just shoot stuff. Sometimes the Duck Hunt ducks will fly by and you can shoot them, but otherwise you just hit targets.

Find Mii is lame, unless you enjoy finding people in crowds. Table Tennis is really weak, because you can only control the horizontal action of the paddle. Tennis in Wii Sports is about 100 times better, and it comes with the Wii when you buy it! Pose Mii is also pretty boring.

Laser Hockey is actually very fun. The graphics are cool, and who doesn’t like air hockey? I need to get a friend to play this one with me, since the CPU is kind of dumb. Billiards is good too. It’s not quite ready to be its own game, but I enjoyed it (and I actually played it more than once).

Fishing is worthless. This looks like a tech demo. An unfun tech demo. Charge is kind of okay, and very surreal. I like how it uses the wiimote, at least. Tanks is also very fun with the nunchuck. I imagine getting 4 players would make this very, very fun.

In the end, if you’re looking to get an extra wiimote anyway, then Wii Play isn’t a bad buy. If you already have enough controllers, I don’t think it’s worth $50 for the game. There’s some good games, and there’s some not so good games. I personally think Wii Sports is more fun. Laser Hockey might be worth $10 by itself though.

Hung Truong: In PHP!

So I decided that I should do a little bit in PHP since I’m going to have a Google interview soon and the most I’ve done before is manipulating other people’s code. I have my (semi-) professional site thingy over at the root of the site, hung-truong.com. One thing that bugged me about doing that quick site was that I was writing everything in static html. So I had to statically write the menu bar thing so it showed the active menu item for each page. A lot of code was repeated, and it was generally pretty ugly.

I figured it’d be a good exercise to redo that simple site in a php template of sorts. So I used this pre-existing templating class and modified it for my needs. Yeah, I’m still manipulating other peoples’ code, but at least in this case, the code is simple enough so that I understand how all of it works (I haven’t taken the time to go digging around in all of WordPress’ source yet).

Unfortunately the class was really simple, and it still couldn’t handle my dynamic menu bar list thing. So I wrote a quick class called Menubar and it works! You can see the php version of my professional website at this location. I might end up just making it the official one, once I know it’ll work ok.

It was a bit of work, and I didn’t really change anything to the actual site, but if I ever end up adding another section, it’ll be a lot less work than before. Plus it sorta refreshed my (almost non-existent) PHP coding skills!