Hung Truong: The Blog!

Pownce: Beta Impressions

I got a Pownce invite today (Thanks Jessica!) and finally got a chance to try out the hot beta. Unfortunately I couldn’t actually get any of my uploads to work…

While the site is pretty nice looking and slick, if the functionality doesn’t work, it’s useless. I think it could actually be somewhat useful for sharing files with a select group of friends. Like “hey, I like this song, check it out” and bam!

Then again, you could do that by email, but email is SOOOOO 1999! Actually, email’s more like 1979, but you get the idea. If only Pownce worked… The worst part is that it’s a beta product, but there’s no way to report a bug besides using (wait for it…) email. How ironic, indeed.

How To Remove Annoying Gawker Internal Links

I like a lot of the blogs on the Gawker network. Kotaku, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Valleywag are all blogs I read, with Valleywag being the one I must read everyday. One thing that infuriates me, however, is their use of “SEO” tricks to up their pageviews. Almost every article on the Gawker blogs will have links to “Posts tagged as” whatever, which links to a tag list.

I noticed on the actual sites that they change the color of internal link to blend in, and the external links look like links. That’s good, except that I read the blogs in Google Reader. So an article ends up looking like this:

Holy Crap! 8 of the 12 links on that page are directed to a fucking tag list! First of all, this is incredibly annoying. If a person clicks on a link entitled “Facebook” then maybe clicking on it should take them to FACEBOOK!!!

Second, linking to internal “search results” for SEO purposes is frowned upon by Google. Of course, they’re not just doing this for the SEO, but also for crazy-insane inflated pageview stats.

I was gonna write a greasemonkey script to remove the annoying links, but before I could, I found an existing one. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Google Reader.

A lot of other blogs are starting to do this, and it’s really starting to annoy me. I’m sure others are annoyed too. Maybe if enough people complain, these sites will ditch the annoying SEO tactics. Maybe we should report their evil ways to Google?

If I do end up giving up reading Valleywag, at least there’s a better (yet less often updated) successor, Uncov. Long live Uncov!

Gmail Loves Threadless!

Whoa! I just read about this from Google Blogoscoped. Apparently Gmail is sponsoring a Threadless t-shirt contest. Threadless usually has cool entities like bands sponsor their contests. This is the first time I’ve heard of a web company, let alone Google do one! I should try and enter a submission. I think the geek points for winning the Gmail Loves Threadless might be somewhere in the infinite range…

GrandCentral Beta: Impressions

So I’ve been getting a lot of invites to random beta things recently. The latest one is GrandCentral, a sort of central hub for your phone number. It was just recently bought by Google, which is sorta neat. GrandCentral says:

GrandCentral doesn’t replace your phones; we just link them together and help them do more. How do we do that? We give people One Number…for Life – a number that’s not tied to a phone or a location – but tied to you.

With GrandCentral, you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, and even know whether a call is important before you take it.

This idea is good in theory. My family’s had the same home phone number for like, 20+ years, and if we ever changed that number, a lot of people would instantly lose contact with us, since it’s the only thing point of contact they have. I signed up and chose a number in the 505 area code (they give you a bunch of choices and you pick one).

I change cell phone service a lot, which means I usually just change the number as well. It’s always a hassle to tell everyone when my phone number’s changed. With GrandCentral, I could just change the number that my primary number forwards to.

So far, the service works. I have it currently set up to ring on my cell phone, but you can also have it ring to other places as well. GrandCentral also supports things like spam filtering in case you get a telemarketer call.

I think the service is interesting, but I’m not sure I want to “change” my phone number with a service that’s still in beta. Who knows how long the company will be around? The fact that Google has acquired GrandCentral is a good sign, but I’m still a bit wary of giving people this number since it’d be a hassle to change it again.

They Might Be Giants Podcast 27A: John Henry Demos!

They Might Be Giants used to be my favorite band. I say “used to be” because their last few albums have kind of sucked. I mean, there’s still some good songs coming out, but I think they’ve jumped the shark (seriously, a kid’s album!?). Anyway, I subscribed to the TMBG Podcast since it’s free, and they occasionally play some rare stuff from their old glory days.

I just listened to their podcast 27A today, which has a crapload of demo versions of songs from John Henry. The songs are: Dirt Bike, No One Knows My Plan, I Should Be Allowed To Think, No One Knows My Plan, Out of Jail, Lullaby of Nightmares (which I think appeared on Long Tall Weekend), and A Self Called Nowhere. Unfortunately, nowhere does End of the Tour or Destination Moon show up. I guess they can’t put the whole album up…

The first real TMBG album I ever heard was John Henry. Or maybe it was Flood, but I liked John Henry more. I’m probably the only person who actually likes John Henry (it’s criticized a lot!). So it’s very cool to hear demo version of the songs that I’m really familiar with. It seems like the horn players haven’t really gotten their inflections into the songs yet, and the Johns also sing a bit more reserved.

If you’re one of the few TMBG fans that actually likes John Henry, I suggest you go grab the podcast and give it a listen. Incidentally, I’ve heard that their new album is good, but that might be only compared to the last two albums (Mink Car and The Spine) which were passable at best. I really do hope it’s good, but I’m not really in any rush to be disappointed.

For now, I still pledge my Nerd Rock allegiance to Jonathan Coulton.