Hung Truong: The Blog!

Whole Foods Cereal Shill

I was at Whole Foods today getting some groceries when I came across this mini food testing area at the end of an aisle. There were two nice sales people (one lady and one dude) who were hawking cereal. The type of cereal was super organic and it came in a pouch. The lady bragged that all of the ingredients were on the front of the bag in large type. The cereal was available for testing in cereal form, baked into a cookie, and blended into a smoothie (which was apparently made with apple cider and yogurt or something).

Sidenote: While I was deciding what to taste test (I eventually went with the smoothie and it was not bad, and followed up with a chunk of cookie), an old Asian lady walked up to me and started talking in Chinese. I tried to tell her that I don’t really speak Chinese, but I forgot how to say “I don’t know Chinese” in Chinese. It’s kind of absurd, anyway, to say you don’t speak a language in that very language you’re saying you don’t speak. Anyway, she mumbled some more stuff and then said “Chinese.” Like, yeah, lady, we’re both Chinese. I guess she walked away after that.

So anyway, here’s the real part of the story. I’m tasting the cookie and am about to leave when another woman walks up to the food tasting area. The sales guy asks if she wants to buy some cereal and she’s like “oh, I already have some at home! I love it! I’m just going to have some samples.” And they get into this conversation about how great the cereal is. I caught some more of their conversation as I walked away. Only later did I realize that the cereal-praising lady was probably a shill! It was literally the oldest sales trick in the book! I mean, no one gets that excited over cereal, right? She was really into it; a little too much into it to be believable.

Perhaps I am just cynical, but I would love to hang around Whole Foods to see if the same lady came over and did that multiple times. The sad part is that I can see the shill bit working on quite a lot of people. It probably didn’t work on the Chinese lady, though. She didn’t speak English.

Thoughts on Textbooks on iBooks

I was thinking about the latest news from Apple, that they were partnering with textbook publishers to bring cheaper textbooks directly to the iPad while at the same time releasing an application for anyone to publish iBooks for the Apple Bookstore.

Perhaps I am being cynical, but it’s always appeared to me that the main business model of a textbook publisher is to slightly tweak versions of a textbook, altering page numbers and quiz questions in order to force students to buy newer editions instead of used ones. Perhaps the industry is thinking that iBooks will eliminate the used book market, and they’re probably right. But this could also have some negative (for publishers) side effects as well.

Apple is lowering the distribution costs of textbooks dramatically. Assuming that schools actually pay for a set of iPads for each student, it becomes trivially easy (with the iBook publishing software) to create free textbooks for schools. Who would want to give textbooks away for free? Teachers. There are cases of teachers self-publishing for their own schools, but for this idea to really work, I think teachers would need to collaboratively create a textbook that meets either regional or national standards and release it for free on iBooks. If you don’t believe this will happen, take a look at Khan Academy.

Previous attempts to create free textbooks have been hit or miss. I am not quite sure how popular Wikibooks are in the classroom. The problem is probably that of traction and scale. Previously, no one has created a standard for e-textbook distribution. Apple is doing that with iBooks. The beautiful part is that they’re bootstrapping it with traditional publishers who are probably digging their own grave.

Of course, this could play out in a number of ways. Maybe iBooks will prove to be too costly for most public schools to adopt (I’m guessing this is very likely). If only private schools or schools with a lot of funding can support them, it may not become worthwhile to create free textbooks for all.

What I’d hope to see is a slow adoption of iPads in the classroom using iBooks as textbooks. Once a critical mass of schools is using iBooks, free textbooks will be developed and adopted by certain school districts and spread to others.

I’m glad to see that Apple is trying to “disrupt” (I lose some points here by using a word I hate) the textbook industry, and it’s awesome that they’re partnering with that industry to do it. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays out, hopefully for the benefit of our education system.

2011: A Hung Truong Year In Review

Last year I wrote a review of the stuff I had accomplished in 2010. It was useful for me to look back and realize that even though I felt I hadn’t accomplished much, I really had. I figure I should do the same this year, so here’s what I did in 2011.

January was a pretty big month for me. I had entered my apps into a University of Michigan contest and Checkmate ended up winning 3rd place. I also “released” Instascriber, which got picked up on a couple of tech news sites, including LifeHacker. At the end of January, I socially engineered a Facebook poll to virally get around 60,000 responses before Facebook shut it down. That was pretty fun.

Lucid Dreaming: Inception Style

I often have the problem that the moment I realize I’m dreaming, I wake up. I never get a chance to do the cool stuff you’re supposed to do in a dream when you know what’s going on (like fly and whatnot). Last night, I did end up having a lucid dream of sorts.

I was walking around a house when I realized I was dreaming. I read somewhere that you can spin around really fast, and apparently that helps you stay in the dream and not wake up when you realize you’re dreaming. I did this and was able to stay in the dream. After that, I walked through the house some more and looked at the furnishings, thinking that I have a pretty cool brain for being able to invent that stuff on the fly. Like, “wow, my mind just made up that sofa arrangement.”

At this point, I decided to do something more fun. I tried moving parts of the house around with my mind, and see if I could demolish it. It didn’t work. Once I wasn’t able to control the dream, I woke up. After I woke up, I decided I would try to go back to sleep and dream the same dream. I wasn’t quite able to do this, though, because I was still dreaming! What I thought was a lucid dream was really me dreaming that I was lucid dreaming. I think this is the first case I can remember of having a dream inside of a dream. I’m pretty sure I was dreaming that I woke up, because I can recall actually waking up and it being quite different from my dream waking up.

I think it’s kind of interesting that I was able to keep dreaming even though I realized I was in a dream partially due to the fact that I was dreaming of dreaming. The complexity of dreams continues to surprise and confuse me. Hopefully I am writing this blog post in a non-dream, because I’d really like to have a record of this dream in a dream.

Dropbox Referrals with Google Adwords

I read a tweet from someone a while back about how they used Google Adwords to max out their Dropbox referral disk space. I thought this was a clever hack and decided to try it for myself. I made a new Adwords account and entered a coupon code from Dreamhost for $75 in free Adwords money.

I ran into a few issues with my first ads. They were running okay in the beginning, but were getting shot down in the review process for trademark issues. I couldn’t figure out why this was the case, since I had seen multiple blog posts describing how to set up the ads with no mention of trademark issues. I tried a few tweaks, and removed “Mac” from the copy of my ads, thinking that the word might have triggered the trademark issue.

The first set of ads without “Mac” in them ended up getting approved, and I was on the fast track to Dropbox space gluttony. Here’s a screenshot of what my campaign looked like (until I stopped it because I maxed out on referrals):

Things looked like smooth sailing and I think I only used something like $20 worth of credit (though I could’ve easily optimized for spend, I kinda wanted to finish more quickly, so I set my cpcs aggressively). I was gonna change the ads and open it up for friends to get referral space, too.

Then yesterday, with no warning, I got an email that my account had been suspended. There wasn’t really any good explanation for this. When I look at my account, it says:

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended for repeated violation of AdWords or Landing Page and Site policies in this or a related account.

and

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended because your billing information in this or a related account could not be verified.

I’m not sure I could come up with a more vague message. So far, Google Adwords email support has been of no use at all. I first got an email saying they were “escalating” the matter, which probably just means they didn’t get around to it within 24 hours so they had to send something, then I got a generic form email saying that:

After reviewing your account, it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords accounts do not comply with our Terms and Conditions. As a result, your account, and any related accounts you may have created, have been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on Google.

Well no shit, that really doesn’t tell me anything new! The best tidbit of the email was that:

– For privacy reasons, AdWords Support is unable to provide any additional information regarding this account.

You know, in case I find something out about myself that I didn’t know… It’s my account!

If I did something wrong to get banned, I sure would like to know why. Since I don’t, I feel like I’m in the customer support limbo that is synonymous with “Google Support” which is already an oxymoron of sorts.

Anyway, TL;DR I used Adwords to max out my Dropbox referrals like many have before, got the banhammer from Google and now their customer support is atrocious (as expected).