Hung Truong: The Blog!

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 howevér 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

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

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.

Funny Google Adsense Typo

I saw this on my Adsense page just now. I thought “Customer Search” was some kind of new feature where I could do a search for potential customers (advertisers) or maybe create a special search for customers.

After clicking on it, it just takes me to the custom search page. So I think they meant “Custom Search” but someone typed “Customer Search” instead. This is funny (probably only to me) because it makes me think there might be three levels: Custom Search, Customer Search and Customest Search. Maybe there’s also a Customestest Search available after that.

Prison Card Fight and Punishment!

I had a dream that I was in prison for some reason. I guess the reason is irrelevant. I imagine I was innocent and was unfairly accused of committing some crime. Anyway, since weapons are not allowed in prison I decided I would carry a pack of playing cards around and I’d the use cards as some kind of shiv if I got into a tussle.

I think the idea originates from when I read about a book (I think this was in some kind of magician’s manual) that explained it was possible to get so proficient at throwing cards that one could, if thrown with enough velocity, lodge a playing card into a watermelon. I’m not sure if this is even really possible. I should look it up or ask it as a reference question to a librarian.

Okay, after a brief digression, I found the book: Cards as Weapons. But apparently it’s just a hoax/parody. Oh well.

Anyway, back to the dream. As expected (think about Chekhov’s gun), I eventually got into a major prison fight using cards (my opponent also used cards to fight back). We actually fought with two cards in each hand, sort of knife style or something. The prison guard broke up the fight and had to punish us. This is where the story gets interesting. He used the face value of our cards to determine how severely to punish us! I have to hand it to my dream guard, he sure knows how to make things interesting. Is that just me complementing my own subconscious? I don’t know.

The guard was gonna add up the value of the cards we used as weapons and probably put us in “the box” for a duration of time appropriate to the value of the hand. Or something. In the middle of the guard figuring out the value, I woke up. Good timing, I think.