Hung Truong: The Blog!

Wii Fit Anniversary!

So today is the very near anniversary of me starting Wii Fit. My first day was actually May 23rd 2008, but I think If I wait to post something I might forget to do it in two days. So here’s my anniversary post.

It’s actually kind of interesting that for the last few sessions I’ve been feeling pretty tired. Today I felt really energized though. I have no idea why. I was sick the past few days but today I feel pretty much at 100%. Maybe it’s because I got a lot of sleep while sick. I also had a Twig and Berry salad from Zingerman’s today for lunch.

Anyway, when I started Wii Fit about a year ago I was obese (according to the machine) and weighed about 202 pounds or so. Today the Wii Fit declared I am merely overweight and that I weigh about 179.9. So within a year I lost 20 pounds. I actually lost the 20 pounds between May and November, I wanna say. Then between November and now, I think I hit some kind of ceiling (or floor). I’ve sort of slowly been losing again. I think it might be a seasonal thing.

Besides the lost poundage, I’ve been consistently feeling better (physically) ever since I started, and have been getting better and better. I’m also considering using a cutting stack just to get those last few pounds off. These days I can walk to and back from campus very easily when a year ago it’d feel like a hike (it’s a little over a mile each way, I think). I believe my general endurance and energy levels have been better, too. I haven’t only been doing Wii Fit to get healthier though. I’ve also been trying to eat better and live more healthily in general. No more soda (pop) for me.

I’m pretty happy with my progress with Wii Fit so far. I wish I had done better between the November-Now time points, though I will admit that I made non-pound progress (I am now doing 20 push-ups instead of 10 and lunges are doable when before they were insanely hard). Hopefully I’ll be able to report back in a year with even better numbers and results.

Bonus actual anniversary update: (5/23/09)

I look at my time completed in Wii Fit and it appears that I did 83 hours and 33 minutes of working out. Not too bad. I know I did less in the beginning and have been ramping up to about 34-45 minutes of workout each session though I don’t do it every day. I’ll probably have more time to commit to working out over this summer though.

Play Him Off, Pianica Human!

This is what happens when you mash up one bored Hung, one pianica and an internet meme.

Freakonomics – Book Report!

I was first introduced to Freakonomics in my grad school stats class. Part of the readings (don’t worry, we also had a textbook) included two chapters from the book. I liked the chapters and eventually subscribed to the Freakonomics blog (which sadly only has excerpted stories in its RSS feed). It’s been kind of overdue for me to finish reading the book. I finally checked it out from the library last month and finally had enough time (sick time) to finish it today.

There have been a lot of reviews on this book, so I don’t think I need to go there. I’d rather just give my reactions to it. Basically, after reading the book, and assuming the work that’s done in the book is in the realm of economics, I’d really like to become an economist. Seriously. Do economists just sit around at universities all day and think about interesting answers to difficult questions? I’m sure not all of them do. Maybe just a select few who are able to look at the world differently.

Maybe it’s a stretch to try and relate my own field of study to the book’s. Maybe not. In my former (I just graduated!) program, a lot of importance was given to contextual inquiry, incentive-centered design, user-centered design, etc. Basically, you can understand a problem better if you understand the context and the people who are experiencing it. I’m actually surprised that there wasn’t formal game theory introduced into the book, though they did touch on that with the example of how a real estate agent’s time would be much better spent trying to get rid of a house than work a little harder for a much smaller commission (volume versus quality).

I think that one of the overarching ideas of the book is that incentives drive the behavior of people. People cheat because it benefits them and they can get away with it. They don’t always do what’s best for them, though they might do what seems best given their situation. The world is much more complicated than a few variables in a regression analysis (though it’s still a pretty useful tool!). Also, correlation does not imply causation.

The book takes a strictly practical approach (“if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world”), which is nice, if you can handle having some of your underlying beliefs questioned. In fact, I think the main thing I learned from the book is to really question “common knowledge” and “popular opinion,” because it almost always seems to be informed more than just fact.

I like that this book takes research (and a number of research methods like statistical analysis and surveys) and explains them in a intelligent and easy to understand way. It’s probably why my professor used it as part of the class readings (or maybe she just likes the book). It makes me yet again wish I had still applied for some PhD programs (though whenever I do, I again remember how crappy applying to grad school is and they sorta cancel out).

I wonder if this book will have the effect that in twenty years or so, people who read this book and encouraged their kids to become economists will cause a huge uptick in economics degrees…

The State of The Book (and Bookishness)

I attended a sorta all day symposium last Friday at the University of Michigan titled “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age.” While a lot went over my head (I am not as prolific a reader as many of the presenters), I think I still got some cool ideas from it.

Leah Price spoke about book fetishism. How, as the book is considered less and less the de facto vehicle by which its contents are delivered, it becomes more of a fetishized object than just a “book.” In other words, there are computer screens, Kindles, audio books and other ways for us to digest fiction and non-fiction works. Because of this, books become special objects. The act of reading a book instead of a screen or anything else becomes something special and deliberate.

I tend to agree a lot. Just as part of me enjoys wearing glasses because many people do not, and the act of wearing glasses sort of differentiates me from other people, so does reading a physical book. On top of the fact that leisure reading of books seems to denote socioeconomic status (and the kind of company you keep), I guess I also just like reading. Besides, I don’t have a TV, so what else am I supposed to do with my free time?

Paul Courant brought up a lot of issues with digital vs. physical intellectual property that has a lot to do with other mediums as well (and not just books). He pointed out that digital copies of things do not currently afford the kinds of things that physical copies do by virtue of simply existing in real life. He argued that there’s a lot of information contained in physical artifacts. When you walk into someone’s house, you see the books on their shelf and can make an estimate of who they are by what books they’ve read. Someone later pointed out that it isn’t necessarily which books they’ve read but which books they’ve bought! Another point is the legal ramifications of DRM of digital goods versus the common sense physical item. Courant asked hypothetically if he’d be able to leave his Kindle (and the books on it) to his kids when he dies. He has a number of books passed down from generation to generation. Will that stop with digital distribution?

I tend to like the romanticized notion that physical items have a particular charm and historical value. I also think that digital information can also have some valuable information, especially in the form of metadata. The digital photo from your Canon SLR may not have the same qualities as film, but it could also contain metadata like where the photo was taken, when it was taken, camera settings and other stuff that’s very valuable. We might not be able to put things like Bill Gate’s computer into a museum like we do Galileo’s sketches, but think how cool it would be to have the revision history of a future great novel (assuming novelists keep their documents in a version control system…)! You could see all of the steps that the writer took, things they wrote and erased, and the order in which they produced a work. Now that I think of it, WordPress keeps a revision history of sorts, so I guess we’re not too far off that idea.

It’s interesting to see how the “death of the book” is being described. It seems as though the general message of the day was that books were already dead (and long live the book). The decoupling of the book and its contents happened a long time ago. But for now, I think as long as people continue appreciating them (and I think enough do), the book will still exist as one of many vectors for the dissemination of information.

I’m in Ur Universities, Graduating Ur Programs

At some point in the last week or two, I graduated from the University of Michigan School of Information with a Master’s of Science in Information. Yes, that last sentence was totally for SEO purposes.

I figured I should write a blog post about it since I made a big deal about grad school in the past. So much so that I even made a blog for it. Maybe I should cross-post there. Nah, that blog is long-dead. In fact, it was totally dead until I just checked it and fixed a php bug that’s probably been there for two months… Oops!

It’s fun to look back at my old posts and see what I was thinking (or attempting to portray what I was thinking) at the time. I went through a bunch of my posts when I was writing this post up, so I guess I can skip a lot and focus on the University experience.

When I went to visiting days, I just coming from an interview with Google that I thought I had aced. Apparently I was wrong about that. I came in with a sort of nonchalant attitude. I think this was kinda good (being too serious is never a good thing) but also kinda bad (I might have not taken the visit as seriously as I should’ve). At the time I thought there were a pretty large number of non-technical peers for an HCI program, regardless of how interdisciplinary it was supposed to be. In hindsight I think this concern was reasonable for a CS person. I guess I don’t think of myself as a CS person anymore, though.

One shock of the program I had to overcome was that people outside of it don’t know what to think of it. In my numerous job fair experiences, I noticed that recruiters really didn’t know what to do with me. “You have a computer science background, but you don’t want to write software!?” Well, sort of but not really. I lucked out and talked to a recent graduate who worked for Google. He told me that the ideal position I was describing had a name: Product Manager. That exchange really helped me solidify my goals for what I wanted to do after I graduated and what I should accomplish before I graduated.

I should also note that I’m pretty lucky that I have a background in CS. Many of my classmates and peers in the program do not have a CS background, which makes finding an internship or job even harder for them. In a field that’s so new, we have a lot of explaining to do about why the skills we’re learning are valuable to employers. I’m able to explain it in relative terms (I’m like a software engineer + 1) whereas others have to define who they are from a blank slate, at least in terms the recruiters can understand.

I had some great opportunities to do academic-style research. I did two independent studies: one on an audience-aware public display (using bluetooth, facial detection and a large touch screen display) and another on the reputation system of a large social network, CouchSurfing! For the latter I co-authored a paper. We’ll see if it gets into the conference June 1st! I tried to make sure that I experienced a full range of academia including normal classes, research and being involved with a student org. I think I did a good job, though I feel I might have overextended myself a bit.

I sense this post is getting a bit tl;dr, as many of my posts tend to drift towards. So maybe I’ll just conclude. Back when I started thinking about applying to graduate schools, I did so because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. At this point, I think I have a better understanding of what I want to do, generally. I should probably try and escape the ivory tower of academia, at least for a while, and see if doing real industry stuff is a good idea. Then again, I have been doing my own thing for as long as I’ve been programming. I had thought of applying to PhD programs but that process was cut short when I remembered how much I hate applying to grad school and also after I got a job offer in November. I think that making the leap and attending school for another two years was definitely worth it in terms of professional and personal growth. I don’t know if I can say the same for spending ~$70 for a cap, gown and hood that I wore for one ceremony…