Hung Truong: The Blog!

Banished From Boggle

There’s a Facebook app called “Bogglific.” It’s sort of the Boggle equivalent to Scrabulous. Anyway, my boss Gillian likes playing it, so I added it to play against her. And she beat me handily. So handily, in fact, that I was resolute to come up with a way to have my revenge.

I’m the kind of person who likes to play smart, not hard. And I’m a programmer. So put one and one together. Go ahead, I’ll give you some time to predict what I did.

YES, I WROTE A PROGRAM TO CHEAT AT BOGGLE!

I mean, it’s sort of this fun problem if you think about it. My solution used a lot of recursion (probably too much), and a dictionary function that verified actual words.

And it worked pretty well, too. I beat one of my coworkers 70 points to 1. Of course, afterwards I fully disclosed this information. I’d never be able to live up to the hype if someone challenged me to a live game anyway. I mostly cheated to see if my program was any good. And apparently it was. My plan was to make it to the top of the leaderboard, then retire from the business altogether.

I have to hand it to the Bogglific people; they’re pretty clever. They detected that I was cheating and banned me. And I have nothing against that. I knew what I was getting wrapped up in. I still even have my pride intact, since it was my program that I was cheating with! I understand though that cheaters should be banned. It really isn’t fair for everyone else who comes up with their three and four letter words.

I’m thinking of adapting my Boggle solver into a Facebook app. For educational purposes only, of course. Like, check out all the words you missed! It’ll be a sort of Boggle trainer…

Anyway, I am taking my Boggle banishment in stride. I hold nothing against my oppressors. At least now I’ll have some free time to work on my Scrabulous Solver (which is actually a somewhat more computationally complex (and interesting) problem…).

The Meijer Free Sample Lady Saved My Life!

Yep. So today I went to Meijer for my weekly groceries. I had an extra hour, so I figured I’d be extra slovenly this morning. I made some coffee. I wasted time on the internet. Then I left. But I forgot to eat breakfast!

I only remembered this once I got to Meijer. I felt really weak, and realized I should’ve gotten food first. So I sorta just staggered around, getting stuff I needed. I went to the bottle return thingy too. Due to my weakness, I think I talked to myself a lot more (“soup get!”) and weirded people out. Wandering the aisles, I was trying to figure out if I could eat anything, then pay for it later. But that doesn’t really work in grocery stores. I would’ve sampled some Jelly Bellies, but I doubt that would have satiated my weak shell of a body.

Luckily, about halfway through the adventure, I saw that the foreign-sounding lady (“here! it’s-a very good a-pumpkin cake!”) that’s always giving away free samples at the Saline Rd Meijer had setup a pumpkin cake sample area! I ate one, and told her it was the first thing I had eaten all day. Then she gave me another! She basically saved my life, maybe.

I didn’t end up buying a cake, but I did buy lots of other crap today. So thank you foreign-sounding Meijer sample lady, whoever you are!

Orange Juice Snobbery

So since I’ve been living alone, I’ve been buying groceries for myself. One thing I’ve been drinking more of is orange juice. I’m not quite sure why; probably because I think that if I drink high volumes of the stuff, I’ll be healthier than if I don’t. And it’s sort of worked. I think pretty much everyone in Michigan is currently sick except for me.

On my weekly grocery run, I always make sure to grab at least two things of orange juice. I go through two in a week, and sometimes more. I think a 2-2-3 pattern works out nicely. Typically I just buy what’s on sale at Meijer. So far, I’ve had pretty much all brands of orange juice available. There’s Minute Maid, Tropicana, Simply Orange, Meijer brand…

In short, I’ve become somewhat of an orange juice connoisseur.

I never could make the distinction before between “from concentrate” and not. These days, “not from concentrate” is equal to “tastes like crap.” I’m drinking some Meijer from concentrate orange juice as I write this, and 1) It tastes pretty bad, 2) I think it’s giving me heartburn.

Aside from the concentrate issue, we have things like pulp density, added vitamins, etc. There was one version of Minute Maid I bought that had some kind of weird joint drug in it… Needless to say my joints were feeling great after I drank it. Perhaps this is due to some placebo effect. Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that I’m not quite old yet.

Also, there exist orange juices with an added “Omega-3” ingredient. Apparently this is good for you. But you get this ingredient from fish. Yeah, orange juice with fish in it. Not my idea of a tasty breakfast beverage. Incidentally, I think my multivitamin also has this fish stuff added. But I just swallow that whole. I guess it’s still gross, just somewhat less so.

But let’s keep on track. I’m blogging about orange juice, goddamn it! When I see OJ with added vitamins or minerals, I’ll probably go for that. Calcium is good, but normal is fine too. Last week, Tropicana was on sale. But they only had the “Low Acid” and “Healthy” versions. The “healthy” one apparently had half the sugar… I got the low acid one. And it tasted really damn good! I have to wonder where the acid went after being extracted from my orange juice. I can only hope it was used for good, and not evil.

Let’s get back to the pulp. I’ve been experimenting with pulp densities. So far, I’ve found that moderation is key; medium pulp works well. No pulp is just unnatural, and high pulp is just too chewy and hard to clean. Low pulp can be substituted if medium pulp is unavailable. The thing is, there’s no common pulp density measure between orange juice distributors. How high is high pulp? Only the juicers know for sure. I’ll continue experimenting with the pulp density levels until I reach, with a high confidence level, a consensus on my preference.

Due to cost and time issues, I have not yet ventured into the business of “home brewing” my orange juice. I think I’ll leave that job to the professionals. While there is something to be said about one who juices his own oranges, I cannot be bothered to perfect my skill in this particular craft.

In conclusion, there is no clear winner as far as orange juice brands go. I’ve only bought single brands of orange juice each week. I can say that I like Simply Orange, Minute Maid, and Tropicana. I haven’t tried the more expensive Meijer version yet. Perhaps in the future I will try a double blind orange juice taste challenge. But for now, I’ll just buy what’s on sale. I hope it’s something good this week…

Facebook Internship Interview Result: Rejection! And Why I Like It…

So I got a polite (aren’t they always?) email from a recruiter at Facebook about my interview. Rejection. I guess I’m not too surprised since Facebook is everyone’s favorite company right now. Apparently there are billions of people who want to get a job/internship there, and currently, there’s like ~300 employees. So I didn’t have a very good chance from the start.

Of course, my thought process immediately after reading the message went something like this:

Stage 1: Retaliatory. “I’m going to create the next Facebook-killer and they’ll all regret the day they rejected me!”

Stage 2: Somewhat more realistic, optimistic. “I’m going to create something they can’t help but acquire, which will be my ‘in!’”

Stage 3: Realistic: “Okay, I guess I’ll just improve and maybe try again next year.”

People might wonder why I’m so open to listing my rejections publicly. I think the reason is that I’m not ashamed by them; I actually tend to get motivated instead. For example, when I was rejected by Berkeley, Georgia Tech, UC Irvine and Iowa State, I decided that I’d work extra hard when I finally did begin grad school at Michigan. And I think I’ve been doing a job of getting involved academically.

When I was rejected by Google, I decided I’d become a better programmer (in addition to becoming more interested in real research with stuff like social networks, etc). Plus I made MapsKrieg shortly after the rejection (mostly because I needed to find an apartment, but if I had given up on Google, I might’ve used the Yahoo Maps API instead…).

Apparently I still need to work on this aspect a bit since the Facebook interview was basically a programming/algorithmic question. The “interview” was so short that I doubt anything meaningful about my abilities could have been evaluated. Sure, I didn’t prove P=NP, but I thought I did okay… I think it was a matter of the process being way too competitive (or at least, that’s how I’ll rationalize it to make myself feel better).

So what does this latest rejection mean for me? It means I’ll be working a lot harder in my networks class, for one. I’m working on a fairly interesting project, so hopefully that’ll buff my otherwise slim portfolio. Facebook is the only (should I say first?) company to reject me so far for Summer internships. So I still have a few other good companies to try.

In two years (more like one and a half, now), there might be a better company I’d like to work for. I still have a lot of time before I graduate, so hopefully I can become “acceptance worthy” material by then.

An Uninvited Dream

So, about two nights ago I had a pair of unsettling dreams. They weren’t nightmares, but I guess they were scary enough to make me wake up. Well, one of them.

First, some background. There’s this old NES game called Uninvited that was ported from a mac game (I totally didn’t know this until I just looked it up). It’s a pretty simple point and click game where you’ve happened upon a strange mansion and spooky things pop up everywhere. It’s actually kind of scary, especially the part where the ghost that looks like Scarlet o’ Hara rips you to shreds if you talk to her.

My dream was that I was sort of in this world. I dunno if I was playing the game, or actually in it. The point and click interface was there, regardless. I was walking around the house, and I knew that there was some kind of monster on top of the stairs. The plan would be that I’d go up the stairs, see the monster, run down and then spray it with some sleep spray or something. But the first time I just used the spray without going up the stairs and I think it killed me.

So the second time (I guess I was playing the game), I went up the stairs and I don’t really remember what happened next. I remember the whole experience of playing Uninvited to be quite freaky, so this translated into the dream as well. At the time the game did have a pretty strong effect on my mental state. While it wasn’t a full blown nightmare, it did wake me up and I had to assure myself I wasn’t being eaten by a ghost or something.

Oh, and the other dream I had the same night was that the old Lobos runningback, Dontrell Moore, had some kind of genetic disease and was going to die. I have no idea why I dreamed about that…