Hung Truong: The Blog!

Nintendo DS Lite Get!

So I got my Nintendo DS Lite in the mail today. My first impressions? It’s hot! Comparing the screens of my original DS and the DS Lite is insane. The original Nintendo DS backlighting wasn’t bad, but the Lite makes it look like it’s lit by candle! They should rename it the “DS Light!”

Other impressions: It’s smaller (duh). It also started hurting my hands when I was playing. Maybe this is because I haven’t played video games in a while, or maybe it’s because the DS Lite is too small. I dunno.

I’m gonna sell the original DS to my brother, but I better not let him see the DS Lite until he goes through with the transaction. Otherwise he might just buy a DS Lite himself!

George Lucas (Lukas) is a Spammer!

So while looking through my akismet spam filter entries for false positives (usually I don’t really care, but I thought, what the heck), I found this post from one George Lukas:

Apparently, when he’s not destroying Star Wars or wearing flannel, he’s trying to sell hair loss cures. Thanks, but no thanks, Georgie.

Anime Nano, na no!

And now for a little “What I did during my Summer vacation.” Well, I’ve been brushing up on my ‘gramming skills. And I’m pretty much done with my first web app. It’s called Anime Nano. As in “Anime, na no.” I know, only two or so of you will get that.

Basically, It’s an anime blog feed indexer. There’s also a forum in there that I wrote in a day. Since its grand opening on midnight, quite a few anime blogs have joined in on the action.

For those who are interested, it’s written purely in Ruby on Rails. I learned the language, learned some css skills, and wrote the project in about 3 weeks. RoR is a cool way to produce web application code in an Object Oriented paradigm. I’m losing most of you, aren’t I?

My next web app is still a secret, but I’ll let you know when that hits. For now, visit AnimeNano at http://www.animenano.com and let me know what you think. Is it ugly? Is it cute? Is it teh suck? Perhaps all of the above…

Of Ancient Japan, Giant Enemy Crabs, Massive Damage, and Riiiiddggeee Racerrrrr!!!

This is probably kinda late, but I wanted to point out this video. It’s the Sony E3 Press Conference in 1 minute:

My absolute favorite part is where the guy is talking about how Genji 2 is based on actual historical facts. Being based in history, the game also has battles that actually took place in ancient Japan. Then he starts talking about “Giant Enemy Crabs” and causing “Massive Damage!” by attacking their weak point. Priceless!

There’s also Kaz Hirai who, by being a bit too excited for Ridge Racer, has become an internet celebrity! Oh, and he also announces the giant price of the PS3.

Speaking of Ridge Racer, I just got a PSP and I’ve been playing Ridge Racer. It’s pretty fun, but I need some more games. Anyone have suggestions?

The Sheep Market: 10,000 Badly Drawn Sheep!

If you haven’t heard of the Amazon.com mechanical turk, it’s a weird way of getting paid to do human things. There are certain things that humans can do much better than computers (like identify street names and buildings), so Amazon.com pays you to do this stuff at a rate of like, 3 cents per thing you do.

I used it a couple of times to earn like, $1 by identifying buildings before I got bored as hell and quit. Anyway, it looks like someone has finally put this to good use by hiring people to draw sheep facing left. 10,000 of them! I’m kinda disappointed that I didn’t know about this. I coulda been part of internet history! And been paid 2 cents!

If you click on the little thumbnail, it actually shows you the strokes that it took to draw the sheep. Pretty cool. At 2 cents per sheep, the whole project cost $200. Not too bad, really. Where else are you gonna get 10,000 pictures of sheep?