Hung Truong: The Blog!

Xbox 360 For $100 at Amazon.com: Live Blogging!

So I’m sitting here trying to get the Xbox 360 at Amazon.com for $100. It’s like some kind of special Thanksgiving deal. Amazon started being unresponsive at around 11:55, and now it’s totally dead. I figured I’d blog about it, since I have a lot of free time waiting for the page to load.

I think the main mechanics of who will get the Xbox will work like this:

People who are “lucky” will actually get the page served to them. The chances of this happening are pretty slim, since there’s like a billion people frantically reloading at this point. Once you are “lucky” and get a page served to you, you must get “lucky” a few more times since you’ll have to check out and everything. I guess it would have been a good idea to set up that one click checkout thing at Amazon.com prior to this event. Anyway, people will slowly start getting the available boxes until they are all gone.

Of course, the site will still be unresponsive long after all of the Xboxes are taken. This is because the continued unavailability of the site will cause people to think the deal is still on. And plus they can’t access the site since everyone is still frantically reloading.

So who knows, maybe all the Xboxes are taken, and I’m just wasting time reloading and sitting here blogging about reloading…

Update: they’re all gone. Well that was a waste of time…

Where’s My Lime Green Wii, Nintendo!?

Today is the official launch of the Nintendo Wii. Once again, Nintendo has defied logic and released a product that is not in lime green. I already had this discussion when discovering the official DS Lite colors.

If Nintendo wants me to buy a Wii, they must release it in lime green! Okay, so I’ll probably end up buying one anyway (if I can get one). I did get the white DS Lite, after all. If only Photoshop worked on real life objects…

To Mac, or Not To Mac... Part 2

So I wrote a post a while back describing in detail how I wanted to get a Macbook right about when Summer was starting. In the end, I figured I didn’t need one since there seemed to be a lot of production madness going on and I had a perfectly good laptop already. Plus the Macbook processors were just the normal Intel Core Duos and not the Core 2 Duos!

Just recently, the Macbooks got an upgrade to the Core 2 Duo. So now I’m once again wondering if I should get one. I’ve been getting my grad school applications ready, so it looks like I’ll be going to school again next Fall. If I make it in. Maybe I should just wait until then, because Apple might release something cool like an ultra portable tablet or something!

Or maybe I should just say screw it and get a Macbook already. Amazon.com is having some rebates, so I could get one for $1100 – $75 = $1025.

I’ll definitely end up getting a new laptop if I end up going to grad school, but it might be better for me to just wait and see if anything awesome comes out between now and next Fall… Oh, BTW, check out The Grad School Chronicles if you want to know more about my grad school adventures.

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…