Hung Truong: The Blog!

Yay, Libraries! + Stumbling on Happiness – Book Review Sorta

One of the things I’ve rediscovered in Ann Arbor is a place from my childhood. A place where you’d go in elementary school to go look up facts, and perhaps even borrow a book. And you didn’t even have to return it! Ever! That’s right, in my short time here, I’ve already rediscovered libraries.

I dunno why I forgot about them. Probably because the libraries in New Mexico aren’t as good as the ones in Michigan? My local library of choice here is the Ann Arbor District Library.

This library has like everything. Books, CDs, DVDs, Books on CDs. Soon they might have DVDs on Books… I found that the library had a lot of things that were on my Amazon.com wishlist, too.

And Stumbling on Happiness is the book I’m going to attempt to review.

Despite the title, Stumbling on Happiness is not written by Dr. Phil, as my friend Adam Torres presumed. It’s written by some psychology professor from Harvard. And it doesn’t explain how to become happy either! It sort of explains why people think they’re doing things that will make them happy, but end up not being happy.

“So why did you read this, Hung!?” You might ask. Because knowing what makes people unable to become happy might provide a clue on how to actually become happy. And plus I already checked out the book, and it’s due on Tuesday, so…

The general style of the book is fairly analytical, but also sort of explained in terms that normal people can understand. There’s also quite a bit of humor involved, which makes the seemingly dry task of figuring out the definition of “happiness” a bit more gratifying. One chapter starts off, “The last decade has seen an explosion of books about poop.” This is my kind of writer.

While I don’t agree with everything the author says, he does use lots of real case studies and examples. Some of which seem cooked. But the main point is quite clear. People can’t predict what will make them happy because their brains aren’t really equipped to make such a prediction accurately. It’s sort of this fight against your brain’s natural reasoning capacity, and you’ll always lose.

At the very end, Daniel Gilbert offers a way to escape this mental trap: phone a friend. It only works if the person is presently in the exact situation you want to be in, however, since human memory is really messed up. So really the solution is more of a cop-out. Even though I do ask people for advise a lot, I still get the feeling they are far too removed from my personal context to be accurate forecasters of my future self’s happiness.

Overall, I did enjoy the book, thanks in part to the wacky humor. Though it could’ve contained a lot more. Stumbling on Happiness shouldn’t be taken as pure fact. In healthy doses, however, I think the ideas and advice within might actually prove useful to those in search of happiness. Which is like, everyone?

And So Ends the Great Experiment…

That’s right, after about two months of doing the quarter scavenging thing, I’ve caved in. I got $20 worth of quarters from the bank.

For the past three weeks or so, I’ve been short on quarters, which is really inconvenient when I need to do laundry in a hurry. I had this ideal image in my head of me getting just enough quarters to do laundry per week. And I coveted quarters. I searched far and wide for quarters. I dreamt of quarters.

Keeping them in my special Mario Bros. ? bank, I waited until laundry day, then punched the bottom of the bank until the quartery goodness came out. Or not.

Anyway, I’m really just stalling so I don’t have to do my homework for Networks, but I guess I better. So let’s publish this post, shall we?

Blue Moon, I Saw You Standing In The Ice Cream Aisle…

I was at Meijer today doing some grocery shopping. Because that’s what adults do, apparently. Anyway, I’m almost out of ice cream, so I thought I’d buy some more. I picked up a flavor called “Blue Moon” that I thought I’ve had before, but maybe not.

Wikipedia says it’s a flavor that’s particular to the Michiganish area. Apparently it doesn’t have a concrete flavor, with different brands flavoring the ice cream in different ways. I think it tastes sorta vanilla-ish, and after I read that it’s sorta “fruit loop-ish” I believe that, too.

What’s the point of this post? I dunno. I do know one thing: Meijer uses Garfield as some kind of brand mascot, and Garfield is the least funny comic I have ever read in my entire life.

Facebook Information Session at Umich

So tonight there was a Facebook info session up at North Campus in the exact same room as the Yahoo one was, exactly one week ago to this very day!

In stark contrast to the Yahoo one, there were actually engineers, and they actually told us what they did, and why they liked it. Bob Trahannypoo (was that really his name?) and Jon Warman did the talking.

The info session was very geared towards engineers, and I found it interesting that a lot of the stuff they talked about seemed like shared knowledge among the room. Like they’d reference f8 and just assumed we knew what that was. I got all the references, but I’m not sure about other people.

Before the session, I was pretty convinced that Facebook was a solid company and seemed fun to work for. Now, I’m even more convinced. When your engineers answer questions like PR people, you know you’ve built a pretty good company culture.

Also, for anyone who hates the “is” in the status updates, I asked them if they could remove it when they asked for questions. The answer I got was “no, but maybe when we internationalize the ‘is’ will go away.” So good news on that front.

As far as schwag goes (it’s always a factor), I got some neat Facebook branded gum and M&Ms. If I ever decide not to be lazy, maybe I’ll take pictures. On the downside, no pens, notebooks, post-its, or shirts! Come on, guys! All the Silicon Valley companies are doing it!

The only thing that really sorta annoyed me was that I had tried and tried to get an interview with them. Because I’m not in the Engineering school of Michigan, I couldn’t log into their super special system. I still tried contacting the Facebook HR people but they never replied. I physically handed them my resume, so hopefully they’ll have a slot open tomorrow. I felt a bit of Engineering snobbery going on (as in, you’re nothing if you’re not an engineer), which is funny since I still consider myself an engineer (B.S. in Comp Sci == Engineer, right?). But I guess that’s the price I pay for entering the School of Information…

I’m still convinced that SI is a good choice, and also that Facebook rocks. Let’s see if something good happens.

EDIT: I got an interview, so it looks like I’ll be reading a bit of the algorithms book tonight.

University of Michigan Squirrel Club: First Meeting

Walking around the University of Michigan, I see a lot of people. And I’m really into shirts if you didn’t know already. So this combination leads to me seeing a lot of people and noticing their shirts.

A common “genre” of shirt here is a blue shirt with “maize” words that say “Michigan ___” with “Michigan” being on top, and the other word(s) being below it. So for example if you were a law student, you might wear a shirt that said “Michigan Law.” They’re basically available for all majors, minors, and anything else you might think of.

I surmised that it would be fun to have parody shirts. Ideas I thought up, along with Adam Torres (the guy who likes being mentioned in blogs) were “Michigan Culinary,” “Michigan Blacksmith,” and “Michigan Undeclared.” But then I walked around and saw someone with a “Michigan Squirrels” shirt and figured they had beaten me to the punch.

It turns out there’s a Michigan Squirrel Club that meets every Sunday at 4pm at the grad library steps. Their main mission is to feed squirrels peanuts. And they do it pretty well. There’s a squirrel call that they use to summon squirrels, and several advanced techniques like tree feeding and squirrel fishing.

I attended my first meeting today and fed some squirrels. The squirrels seem to be a bit wary at first, but after a while they became more bold, even running up to us to demand a peanut. I talked with the creator and ex-president, Jason, who is also a fellow SI student. He says people are always asking about the club, and sure enough, when we were feeding squirrels, people kept on coming up to us and talking.

I’m not sure how often I can make the squirrel club meetings, but I’d say it’s a fairly cool club. Also, not to brag, but the website is pretty damn bitchin’.