Hung Truong: The Blog!

Reviewme.com – Pay Per Reviews

So something that’s hitting the blogging scene pretty hard is the notion of pay per reviews. Some sites are discrete, while others don’t require a blogger to say that they’re getting paid to write the review.

Reviewme.com is a site that allows advertisers to contact bloggers for paid reviews. In fact, this is one of them! Yes, I’m getting paid $20 to write this review. So is it biased? Perhaps.

The good thing about ReviewMe is that they don’t require positive reviews. So bloggers aren’t forced to shill a website or product. Something tells me, however, that bloggers who give nothing but bad reviews will probably end up not being called back. It’ll probably end up being an unspoken rule that positive reviews are preferred.

Another observation: if people are so desperate that they need to pay people to write about their product, the product probably can’t be that good. On my anime blog, I write reviews on stuff for free. Occasionally companies will send me stuff to review, which is good enough for me! I can’t imagine a legitimate having to do more than that to get reviews.

The bottom line: Will I keep using ReviewMe? Maybe, if anyone’s willing to pay for me to write about their stuff…

The 30 Days of Threadless $10 Holiday Sale!

So apparently, Threadless is having another $10 t-shirt sale. And I guess it’s going on for a month. And they’re releasing 2-4 shirts each day for 30 days. WTF!? I think I’ll need to pace myself on this one. Either that, or have a different shirt for every day of the year…

You’ll Never Believe This!!!

For some reason, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Jeff Bingaman, and Marty Chavez all called my house today! It’s like we’re some kind of important political family! Seriously, does the Kennedy household even get this kind of attention?

Unfortunately, I didn’t pick up the phone, but all of those highly important political people took the time to leave messages on my answering machine. I feel so honored! I’m never deleting those messages!

All I can say is get out there and vote. If Bill Clinton has the time to call up little ol’ me, then I can tell you for a fact that every single vote counts!

I’m Hung Truong, and I approve this message.

Pumpkin Carving 101

Today is Halloween. UNM had a special pumpkin carving contest going on in the SUB. Since I had 2 hours to kill, me and Wei (some guy from my CS class) went to carve a pumpkin. Wei picked a way too big pumpkin and we started.

But there was a lack of tools. Apparently the blades kept on breaking off of the handles for the carving tools. I went into MacGyver mode and made a custom shiv out of one of the blades and a napkin. It worked okay, but it also made my hands really tired.

Anyway, it took like, 20 minutes to get the top off of the damn thing. Then it took a few more minutes to scrape all of the crap from the inside out. Once we finished doing that, they announced that all participants had 5 minutes to finish their pumpkins…

We ended up just trying to finish, but we both had class to go to. I took the pumpkin home and finished it there. Here’s the result!

It’s really badly proportioned, since the pumpkin is huge and the face is tiny. I do like, however, having a pattern of an actual jack-o-lantern on a jack-o-lantern. It’s kind of meta, don’t you think?

Next time I’ll do a jack-o-lantern of a jack-o-lantern with a jack-o-lantern inside of that one! And so on.

Google Information Session

So some dudes from Google showed up on Wednesday at UNM to talk about Google. Apparently, it’s a pretty awesome place to work. Like they have all you can drink, and mini kitchens where you can order free food. They go on company ski trips and don’t even think twice about it! Oh, and it seems they’re really casual too.

I went ahead and gave them my resume. Maybe they’ll hire me. Apparently the hiring process takes about 6 months, though. To help pass the time, they gave me a pen, a pad, and a long sleeved red shirt that says “Google” on the front, and “I’m Feeling Lucky” on the back. It’s so nerdy and awesome!

Also, I’ve been looking for grad schools. I thought I had graduated from sending applications and getting letters of recommendation, but yeah, I’ll have to think about that stuff again. I was thinking that Stanford will be my primary school, and Harvard will be my backup. What do you think?