Hung Truong: The Blog!

To Mac, or Not To Mac... Part 2

So I wrote a post a while back describing in detail how I wanted to get a Macbook right about when Summer was starting. In the end, I figured I didn’t need one since there seemed to be a lot of production madness going on and I had a perfectly good laptop already. Plus the Macbook processors were just the normal Intel Core Duos and not the Core 2 Duos!

Just recently, the Macbooks got an upgrade to the Core 2 Duo. So now I’m once again wondering if I should get one. I’ve been getting my grad school applications ready, so it looks like I’ll be going to school again next Fall. If I make it in. Maybe I should just wait until then, because Apple might release something cool like an ultra portable tablet or something!

Or maybe I should just say screw it and get a Macbook already. Amazon.com is having some rebates, so I could get one for $1100 – $75 = $1025.

I’ll definitely end up getting a new laptop if I end up going to grad school, but it might be better for me to just wait and see if anything awesome comes out between now and next Fall… Oh, BTW, check out The Grad School Chronicles if you want to know more about my grad school adventures.

Reviewme.com – Pay Per Reviews

So something that’s hitting the blogging scene pretty hard is the notion of pay per reviews. Some sites are discrete, while others don’t require a blogger to say that they’re getting paid to write the review.

Reviewme.com is a site that allows advertisers to contact bloggers for paid reviews. In fact, this is one of them! Yes, I’m getting paid $20 to write this review. So is it biased? Perhaps.

The good thing about ReviewMe is that they don’t require positive reviews. So bloggers aren’t forced to shill a website or product. Something tells me, however, that bloggers who give nothing but bad reviews will probably end up not being called back. It’ll probably end up being an unspoken rule that positive reviews are preferred.

Another observation: if people are so desperate that they need to pay people to write about their product, the product probably can’t be that good. On my anime blog, I write reviews on stuff for free. Occasionally companies will send me stuff to review, which is good enough for me! I can’t imagine a legitimate having to do more than that to get reviews.

The bottom line: Will I keep using ReviewMe? Maybe, if anyone’s willing to pay for me to write about their stuff…

The 30 Days of Threadless $10 Holiday Sale!

So apparently, Threadless is having another $10 t-shirt sale. And I guess it’s going on for a month. And they’re releasing 2-4 shirts each day for 30 days. WTF!? I think I’ll need to pace myself on this one. Either that, or have a different shirt for every day of the year…

You’ll Never Believe This!!!

For some reason, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Jeff Bingaman, and Marty Chavez all called my house today! It’s like we’re some kind of important political family! Seriously, does the Kennedy household even get this kind of attention?

Unfortunately, I didn’t pick up the phone, but all of those highly important political people took the time to leave messages on my answering machine. I feel so honored! I’m never deleting those messages!

All I can say is get out there and vote. If Bill Clinton has the time to call up little ol’ me, then I can tell you for a fact that every single vote counts!

I’m Hung Truong, and I approve this message.

Pumpkin Carving 101

Today is Halloween. UNM had a special pumpkin carving contest going on in the SUB. Since I had 2 hours to kill, me and Wei (some guy from my CS class) went to carve a pumpkin. Wei picked a way too big pumpkin and we started.

But there was a lack of tools. Apparently the blades kept on breaking off of the handles for the carving tools. I went into MacGyver mode and made a custom shiv out of one of the blades and a napkin. It worked okay, but it also made my hands really tired.

Anyway, it took like, 20 minutes to get the top off of the damn thing. Then it took a few more minutes to scrape all of the crap from the inside out. Once we finished doing that, they announced that all participants had 5 minutes to finish their pumpkins…

We ended up just trying to finish, but we both had class to go to. I took the pumpkin home and finished it there. Here’s the result!

It’s really badly proportioned, since the pumpkin is huge and the face is tiny. I do like, however, having a pattern of an actual jack-o-lantern on a jack-o-lantern. It’s kind of meta, don’t you think?

Next time I’ll do a jack-o-lantern of a jack-o-lantern with a jack-o-lantern inside of that one! And so on.