Archive for July, 2007

dating opportunities

4 years ago

by dawn in dating

This morning mental floss magazine has an article about “niche dating sites.” Above and beyond the true and blue match.com, eharmony, and craigslist (hey, if you’re in for an unencumbered night of passion, I’ve heard craigslist is IT), there are sites that cater to the discerning dater.

More of a cup half-empty type of person? WeNeither is the place for you. Don’t like bananas in your wheaties? Someone out there hates it just as much as you do. Hate the rain? Your perfect match is huddled in a doorway waiting for the sun to shine and watching her Blackberry to see if you shoot her an email. I think this is the ultimate of pessmistic dating. What if you don’t like people? How do you meet people who don’t like people? Or if you’re starting everything on the negative, will anything ever get positive?

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,
Make me a match,
Find me a find,
catch me a catch

Some niche sites are a bit more personal (and allow users to face the reality of certain conditions). Prescription4Love is geared toward daters who have special health considerations like obesity, STDs, or infertility (among many others). IBS Dating (Irritable Being Single) is for daters who deal with irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease — mostly so they don’t have to be embarrassed telling their date about the issue and why they need to be near restrooms.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Look through your book,
And make me a perfect match

SugarDaddie.com is one of those places that just makes me shake my head. I mean, come on. “Where the classy, attractive, and affluent can meet”??? Who determines if they are truly classy and/or attractive? MillionaireMatch and WealthyMen do the same thing. WealthyMen even focused on my IP and told me the men in my area making over $100,000 a year. Hmmm…didn’t even know that many men made that much money here (and I doubt most of them are truly that wealthy).

Dream Matches is along the same lines. It’s an exclusive online community only for those who are very HAWT. Eh? How old are we? It’s the next step (not necessarily up) from Hot or Not.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,
I’ll bring the veil,
You bring the groom,
Slender and pale.
Bring me a ring for I’m longing to be,
The envy of all I see.

Nerd Passions helps those of us on that geekier side to find one another. Oh…it’s a little like finding love in a petri dish. Funny thing is, most of the guys are like the guys I tend to talk to the most…smart, interesting, if a bit socio-phobic. Oh…wait…that’s me. Ahem.

Vegetarian? Want to meet other non-flesh eating omnivores? Ok, I joke about that but I don’t eat much meat, either. VeggieDate is the place for you. The name makes me think of VeggieTales or, conversely, the obscene things that I’ve heard some people do with vegetables. It does not imbibe me with much confidence.

I found lots of sites geared toward American men who want (insert nationality here –> Russian, Chinese, Thai, Latin, etc.) women. A lot of sites.

Wht this makes me wonder is how any of us actually meet the right person. I mean, really…what if my perfect match is on DateMyPet.com and I’m on DemocraticSingles? Am I doomed?

Maybe I should just start my own site: Thinkstoomuchandhatespost-structuralismsingles.com. I wonder if it would work. Hmmm…

lyrics from Matchmaker by Sheldon Harnick

sleeping on the job

4 years ago

by dawn in rant, social networking, technology

I was proselytizing zooomr during the early parts of the summer. I wrote about the amazing actions of some companies to assist the zooomr team in overcoming their upgrade emergencies. And I cheered them on when people were tearing them down. I was a zooomr evangelist – and excited about it.

But I’m not anymore. In fact, I’m feeling a bit shamefaced in urging you to go check it out. Remember when I quoted Thomas Hawk? He said,

Itâ€™s easy for people to take potshots at Zooomr when we are down. But we will be back up. We will get back online. And these growing pains will be a part of our history. But we will always remember the people who stood by us in our troubles and I think the support that they are giving us is something that you canâ€™t understand because what they know that you may not is that we are doing this for them.

And I agreed with him. And they are back online. But the growing pains are still going on, nearly two months after they began.

Services are still not restored. The only way to see who has commented on my photos or favorited them is to actually go into EACH photo SEPARATELY and look.

The IPTC information is still not coming in totally. Sure, tags are coming in. But the titles, descriptions, and copyrights of my work are not being attached in zooomr. In fact, I have to set these with each upload that I do for each photo that I upload.

Not only that, but when I do create a description, it is not holding the HTML that I put in it.

These are all things that work pre-MarkIII.

Sets and Favorites JUST started working this week. And even then, they aren’t great. I don’t know who favorites my work without looking at each photo. The sets are limited in how you can create them.

The site REALLY needs good usability testing. The usability sucks. Really. I’m not just saying this. Others have said the same to me (and it probably doesn’t hurt that we’re all trained in usability, either).

They took commenting off of the zooomr blog because they wanted people to use the groups more. However, it’s hard to see groups in action. I see every single group in zooomr, whether I’m subscribed to it or not. I have to weed through to find my few groups. And I’ve never once had Thomas or Kristopher reply to me in either a group, the Zipline, or email. I don’t even know if they read what I have to say. Probably not.

To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.

I think, at this point, it has turned into a “hey, look at me” venture for Thomas and Kristopher and not a “lets create a wonderful online experience for our users.”

I don’t care that you’re at party schmoozing with other geeks. I don’t care that you’re attending a blog camp that has nothing to do with zooomr. What I do care about is that the site you set up functions and functions well.

I’ve been patient. Now I’m just annoyed.

eight

4 years ago

by dawn in life, my story

Laurie chose me as one of the people to respond to the meme of telling you eight things about me that you may not know.

I’ve been thinking about this the last few days. I even posted the question to Twitter and Pownce, wondering what people would be interested in knowing. I feel like people who read my blog know me very well. Almost everything about me is here, in these pages. I’m not sure there is much that isn’t. I’m afraid that the things I’ll post won’t be so positive because I tend to be critical of myself.

I’ll give it a whirl…but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ve always enjoyed being the lurker…the one who watches but doesn’t say much. From “Dear Abby” to “PostSecret,” I like reading about people and their thoughts. I think that’s why I am drawn to reality TV — anything from Survivor to Big Brother to Temptation Island. I like the social aspect of people without being involved in the social side of them.
I had blue hair in high school. Not just blue hair but designs shaved into the back of my head. I wore long black trenchcoats. I rode a skateboard with boys who also wore long black trenchcoats. I wrote bad poetry on napkins late at night in Denny’s. I wore pink converse high tops with long johns and skirts. I was odd — but also in speech & debate, student government, theater, concert band, softball, basketball, and volleyball. I wasn’t typical.
I commuted from Flagstaff to Las Vegas once a week during my senior year in high school to complete a college course that I was taking concurrently with my high school courses. Classes were not offered online at that time.
I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to work on cases for indigents and traumatized people — specifically women. I wanted to make the world a better place for them.
I’ve never been proposed to or engaged. I’ve seriously dated only 5 men in my life and I lived with four of them. None of these is recent.
I walk between 12,000 and 15,000 steps, on average, a day. I also do 100 sit-ups every other day.
I have over 100 plants in my house. They make me happy. At least one of them has been with me since I first moved out of my parents house when I was 18. It is still beautiful.
Home, for me, is where Dakota, my books, my music, and my photographs are. If I have those four things, anywhere can be home. When I lived in London, I was missing Dakota (but had some books, music, and photos). I felt that loss every day I lived there.

I’m not going to directly pick anyone to answer these. But if you do, please let me know. I’d like to learn a bit more about you, too.

crash

4 years ago

by dawn in entertainment, fun

Found via TechCrunch. Too funny not to share.

echo

4 years ago

by dawn in poetry, sunday songs

american life in poetry: column 114

by ted kooser, u.s. poet laureate, 2004-2006

Poetry can be thought of as an act of persuasion: a poem attempts to bring about some kind of change in its reader, perhaps no more than a moment of clarity amidst the disorder of everyday life. And successful poems not only make use of the meanings and sounds of words, as well as the images those words conjure up, but may also take advantage of the arrangement of type on a page. Notice how this little poem by Mississippi poet Robert West makes the very best use of the empty space around it to help convey the nature of its subject.

Echo

A lone
voice

in the
right

empty space
makes

its own
best

company.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2005 by Robert West. Reprinted from “Best Company,” Blink Chapbooks, Chapel Hill, NC, 2005, with permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Archive for July, 2007

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