Monthly Archive for June, 2009

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Free Birthday Stuff Adventure in Ann Arbor!

Published on June 9, 2009 in Life. 7 Comments Tags: , , .

Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve been aware of this giant list of free stuff to get in Ann Arbor on your birthday at ArborWiki, and since my last day of work was on Friday and I’m basically on vacation, I figured I’d try and get as much free stuff as possible. This is my story.

The day started pretty late. I was up kind of late the night before writing my post on the Quarterlife Crisis and then set the post to show up at like 9:30am. But I slept in until around 10:30 and didn’t get out of the house until after noon. I had to print out coupons and basically plan out my day. The first stop was Northside Grill. They offer a free entree until 3pm. For free! I went by myself since everyone else was working. I saw this in front of my parking spot:

DO NOT READ

Maybe I’m the only one who finds the sentence “DO NOT READ” to be slightly funny-ironic. Anyway, I went in and got some tasty potato pancakes. If you go to Northside Grill, I highly recommend them! I also got some coffee. While paying, the person behind me overheard that it was my birthday and suggested I go to Cupcake Station to get a free cupcake.

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After Northside I went to Zingerman’s Deli to get 6 free bagels. I went in and told the girl at the counter that it was my birthday. She told me to just grab the bagels and bring them to her. At first I put the bagels into really small paper bags. I think they could only hold like 3 bagels. So I got two small bags. The girl thought this was dumb and got me a bigger paper bag. Then she didn’t even check my ID! I really wanted to prove it was my birthday to her though, so I showed it to her anyway. I was hoping this could turn into a good craigslist missed connection (you didn’t want to see my ID, I showed it to you anyway. I’ll share some of those free bagels with you for breakfast!).

1st 6 Bagels

After Zingerman’s I felt like I needed to recharge. So I went home and drafted an email for a Birthday Dinner Extravaganza. Then I chatted up my good friend KDT who happens to be on vacation as well. I picked her up and we went to Caribou Coffee for a free coffee drink (requires you to get on the email list prior). I walked in and asked the dude what the best drink they have is. He didn’t even blink and said it was the Turtle Mocha. I decided to get that. He kept pushing me to add more and more espresso shots. 1? 2? 3!? Every time he hit the extra shot button, the register read “Moose it!” I guess that’s their code for extra shots. Luckily KDT helped me drink the beast or else I probably would’ve been completely moosed.

Turtle MochaMoose it!

From Caribou we went to the other Zingerman’s, Bakehouse and Creamery, for more free stuff. The Creamery had lots of good gelato, of which I sampled each one before deciding on Mint Chocolate. KDT also tried a bunch. The guy gave us a huge lecture on the difference between gelato and ice cream. Thanks, guy! I also got 6 more bagels at the Bakehouse. Sorry if this is not kosher, Zingerman’s! After eating the gelato (remember, I had samples), I felt kinda gross. Too much heavy free food. We walked around the campus for a while with a prospective student at SI and then went to Pizza House. I got a free Carrot Cake! I couldn’t eat most of it though. So I shared it with the 6 other people there.

Finished Gelato2nd 6 bagelsIMG_1027

After Pizza House, we passed the Cupcake Station for a free cupcake. I thought I could just get a free one but they made me buy one, get one free. I didn’t wanna just say “nah, I’m too cheap to purchase one cupcake” so I begrudgingly got one for me and one for KDT. Hers was a “Red Wings” cupcake. I got a chocolate-filled one. I met up with 9 of my friends at Grizzly Peak for dinner. I got a GP pint glass, a $10 gift certificate and a free dessert (cherry cheesecake), but I had to buy dinner. I have to use the gift certificate within a month. I totally forgot to take any pictures at this point.

People weren’t ready to call it a night at that point, so we walked through the rain to get to Stucchi’s. Like, massive rain storm. I must’ve been hit by at least 400 individual raindrops. When we got there, I really couldn’t stomach the extra ice cream, so I got a scoop on behalf of my friends (buy one get one free). This picture is sort of staged; I ate like, a spoonful of it:

Stucchi's Ice Cream

Afterwards I met back up with KDT and had a cupcake candle ceremony and her co-op friends sang me Happy Birthday. It was an unlicensed performance, but I think it’s okay because it was a private performance.

Birthday Cupcake

Overall it was a fun birthday filled with free stuff and good company. I hope next year’s is just as fun!

Firefox 3.5 beta 99 – Get Multitouch Gestures Back!

Published on June 9, 2009 in Code. 9 Comments Tags: , .

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I just updated to the newest beta of Firefox 3.5 and it’s apparently beta 99. This is pretty funny because the previous one was 4. I think it’s just an indicator that they’re pretty close to a release candidate.

One thing I really like about Firefox (at least these beta versions) is that they support multitouch gestures on my Macbook Pro. Pinching zooms out, un-pinching (spreading?) zooms in, three finger swipe up goes to the top of the page and three finger swipe down goes to the bottom. This is really cool.

One of the weirder ones is that twisting with two fingers lets you go back and forth between tabs. I thought it was wacky at first but now I think it’s very useful. For some reason, the default value for this gesture is disabled in the newest version (beta 99). It’s also disabled in Shiretoko, the nightly build. I tried looking in the preferences to control this but they weren’t in there. Then I remembered about:config.

To get the twist thing back, type “about:config” into the address bar. Then find the settings that say “browser.gesture.twist” The setting for “browser.gesture.twist.left” should be “Browser:PrevTab”  and the one for .right should be “Browser:NextTab” like so:

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Voila! Your twisty tab changing gestures will be back!

Quarterlife Crisis!

Published on June 8, 2009 in Book and Life. 2 Comments

quarterlife-crisis

Today, I turn 26. I think I can officially have a “quarterlife crisis.” Yes, I know that’s pretty generous, assuming I’ll live to 104, but hey, with science and technology, maybe life expectancies will shoot up…

Though I used the term previously, I recently read about it at Krunk4Ever. That led me to an article about the phenomenon, which led me to a book on the subject. I checked the book out from the library (Shapiro Undergraduate, AKA the UGLi) and figured it’d be an interesting read.

Basically, the phenomenon is that people these days are on a fixed track for much of their lives, up til around their twenties. They go to grade school, do well in that, go to college, do well, and maybe go to grad school. After getting a terminal degree, they actually have choices to make. They need to decide what they’ll do for the rest of their lives. This can seem daunting, apparently. I suppose I myself feel that way, though mostly I think it’s empowering and exciting.

The article I read was concise and informative. The book is a bit too long, too colloquial and seems to talk down to the reader a bunch. There’s also lots of random references, like a testimonial that uses Back to the Future to drive home the point about rejection (Marty’s dad is a wuss). Basically, the book is composed of a bunch of examples of people who had quarterlife crises and what they did to get out of them. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts (of the amount I read (I only got about halfway through the book before deciding it’s a waste of my reading time)):

… I realized that I don’t want to make marriage my goal, because I’m afraid that if marriage is a goal for me, then I’ll settle for some less-than-perfect man when I hit 30 just because the time is right… I have a backup plan: if I’m not married by 30, I’ll buy a cat (I already have two). And then if I’m still single at 35, I’ll buy another cat. And then, if I’m still single at 40, I’ll buy another cat, which means my goal in life is this: at the age of 40, I’ll either be married or have five cats.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Sandra has an ALA-accredited degree… Librarian!

Maybe one thing that just annoys me about the book is it’s full of whiny twentysomethings complaining about their lives that aren’t really that bad. Everyone wants a job that’s fulfilling and interesting. But those don’t come easily; if they did, everyone would have them. The book claims the profiles are from multiple ethnicities and regions of the US, but it reads like Stuff White People Like. This is kind of amazing because the book came out years before the blog.

I guess my own experience has been a bit different. For a while I didn’t know what I’d end up doing, but I was pretty confident I’d be okay in the end. I just realize that as bad as things might seem, they could definitely be worse. I’ve also been extremely lucky, getting into a great graduate school program, securing a job before graduation, etc, so maybe I have enough direction that this crisis doesn’t apply.

I’ve had a few life experiences that have shown me that living life to the fullest is really important. There isn’t really time to doubt yourself and get into a slump. After all, the quarterlife crisis assumes you will live to 100. It assumes that you will have much more life ahead of you. While that may be true, I’ve seen firsthand that life can be cut very short. I think the trick is living with intention and enjoying life however you can. Roll with the punches; play it by ear. This doesn’t mean to forgo planning, but don’t sacrifice too much for the distant (unpredictable) future. It sounds cliché, but really, I think it’s a good motto to have.

Some people are not even lucky enough to reach their quarterlife crisis. That seems to make the “crisis” seem a bit more manageable. While this is a pretty far-out comparison (being unsure of your life is better than being dead), I think it helps to put the thing into perspective. Be sure to check back in ~25 years for my mid-life crisis thoughts!

Shuffling and Randomizing Algorithms for Music Playlists

Published on June 6, 2009 in Code, Music and Software. 0 Comments Tags: .

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I’ve been messing around with iTunes and the DJ functionality. It seems like all it does is pick random songs out of the library and shows them in the order they’ll be played (unlike shuffle, which just randomly jumps around). Typically, I like to put my iTunes library on random when I’m listening. This allows me to hear a bunch of different music in my library. If I don’t like a certain song, I’ll skip it, unless I’m not really paying attention.

I find that the most important piece of metadata in my iTunes library is probably “play count.” This is a pretty good indicator of how much I like a song. It’s a bit off sometimes though, since I might really like a new song with a lower play count because I haven’t had a chance to listen to it 80 times. I use a smart playlist that sorts on “play count” to determine which songs to stick into my iPhone on sync since the phone can’t hold my entire music library. Generally it works well. Perhaps there could be another measure like “normalized play count” that takes into account how long the song has existed in my library.

The iTunes DJ is pretty lacking in terms of how you can weigh what will randomly show up next. You can basically click a box that says “play higher rated songs more often.” I don’t rate my songs (the metadata gets thrown away pretty quickly as I move from computer to computer or Mac to PC, etc), so this feature doesn’t do a lot for me. I prefer the implicit rating (play count) versus the explicit rating (star rating) because the implicit way to do it is natural and doesn’t require me to do anything extra.

I’d like there to be a “play songs with a higher play count more often” feature. This could be bad, though, because it’d lead to a sort of rich get richer deal. So weighting would be important. I’d say it’d be a good heuristic to give each song a probability of “(playcount + 1)/(total number of library plays + # of songs)” to be played. That way the more popular songs (the ones I like more) are played more often, but other songs still have a chance to be played as well (and skipped). There might be other better algorithms for weighing songs based on play count that don’t lead to an unnatural skew (which would mess up the point of having the feature in the first place).

Another thing I could do is prune all of the songs I skip most out of my library. I’m too much of a digital packrat to do that, though, so I guess a smarter algorithm will have to suffice.

Microsoft Bing

Published on June 1, 2009 in Web. 1 Comment Tags: , .

bing

So today, Microsoft unleashed its new search engine, Bing. Apparently it was gonna be called “Kumo” before that (which I liked more). Live.com just redirects to Bing now. First thought: Thanks for wasting the four letter URL namespace, Microsoft!

Second thought: Bing.com basically looks like a re-named Live Search. People were talking about the mouse-over video search results starting automagically. I thought I saw that feature at the Microsoft booth at SXSW a few months ago. While I’m not totally familiar with the original features of Live Search, it really seems like this is just an incremental update, if not just a renaming.

Giving the search engine a fair chance, I guess it’s okay. The search results for my name are good! First one is my blog and the second one is my portfolio. Microsoft also recognizes my Facebook profile as the real Hung Truong instead of that other car Hung Truong that Google links to. Another thing that’s kind of nice is that Bing actually links to the website directly in the search results. Try right click copying a search result link in Google and you get something like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hung-truong.com%2F&ei=1ZMkSv3gDonUNNfQvYYF&rct=j&q=hung+truong&usg=AFQjCNGifmoNxXdlqaiytpE2QMgHxLkl6A&sig2=Uj7WesESTLWJEXHkfqK2Fw

The same thing in Bing is just:

http://hung-truong.com/

One more funny thing is that Bing is soooooo biased towards Microsoft, and you can tell already. Type the letter ‘w’ into Bing and the 7th auto-suggestion is “Windows Vista.” Google comes up with nothing MS related. The now famous example is that if you type “linux” you’ll get

  • linux windows
  • linux microsoft
  • linux vista

WTF!? Despite the wonkiness, I hope Bing does well. Because *someone*’s gotta kick Google’s ass for the sake of competition. While I’d rather see it from an independent player, someone’s really gotta step up search and make it better. Actually, Yahoo is doing some neat stuff with semantic web thingies. Maybe MS and Yahoo can double-team Google or something.

Books

Hung Truong's book recommendations, reviews, favorite quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists

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