 | Last login: 23 hours agoJoseph is a single guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and probably best viewed in Firefox. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.
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- Dec 14, 2008 8:38am
- Dec 14, 2008 8:38am
 Comments posted to yet another page that Stumbleupon won't let me discover - an article on socialtwister.com written about LinkUp Central, which I commented on in an earlier review. At the time of this posting, my comment is awaiting moderation - let's see if it gets approved.
Gregarious writes:
What is most interesting about LinkUp, from my point of view, is the fuzzy reputation system that powers it. Here's another note from the site:
`Each member has a reliability rating, based on a combination of their "flake factor" and the number of times they've RSVP'd compared to the number of times they've cancelled.'
My reply:
Maybe a little too interesting, Greg. Let's think about the implications of that standard, as we apply it to two hypothetical LinkUp Central members.
1. Somebody embarking on a career in medicine, who will often find himself called away on emergencies and would never dream of letting down those who truly need his help by pretending to not hear a page.
2. Somebody embarking on a career as a drunk, who would never miss a chance to tie a few on, and to **** with that stupid job ... what is his job, again?
Hypothetical member two is going to be ranked as being "highly responsible" and be encouraged to stay, while hypothetical member one is going to be labeled a flake and told to go away for not doing the "responsible" thing and maybe letting somebody in the middle of a heart attack keel over because darn it, they're serving Mai Tai's at Firinn's place tonight, and a man has to know where to set his priorities. 
When "responsibility" is defined to mean a willingness to prioritize play over work and over real life responsibilities that unlike play, can't be scheduled because crises come when they want to, not when we want them to - what sort of person is going to qualify as being "responsible", and would one really want to spend much time surrounded by a pack of them? (Followup: here)
- fileXoom - Free File Hosting - 2GB Storage - Unlimited Bandwidth!
 Dec 14, 2008 8:38am  (4 reviews) http://filexoom.com/
 Worthless. They seem to be down far more often than not, offering the hapless user nothing more than the empty and endlessly repeated promise that this time, the old problems are now going to be a thing of the past and the long promised good service is now at hand. "Unlimited bandwidth" sounded too good to be true, and it was.
- ImageShack&174; - Image Hosting
- Dec 14, 2008 8:37am (143 reviews) internet-tools http://imageshack.us/
While I'm not completely ready to do as preceding contributers have urged us and abandon Imageshack, I will vouch for what others have already said here - Imageshack will often delete completely inoffensive images seemingly at random. A picture of a house in a quiet residential neighborhood with nobody in the frame - how can that possibly be offensive? On a page whose counter is clicking, but just barely, at that - meaning that bandwidth consumption can't be an issue.
On occasion, I've written in to these guys, reported the problem, received a friendly reply in return and the image has gone back up - temporarily. Then it has vanished again. Almost as if somebody was trying to win a test of wills. While this doesn't seem to happen to most images, it happens often enough to be a real annoyance and something to think about if one is about to post an image to a location where one won't be able to revise one's code later (eg. in a forum post).
- Judi - User Profile - DPChallenge
 Dec 14, 2008 8:36am (1 review) photography https://www.dpchallenge.com/profile.php?...- I'll come back to this later, when I've had time to look it over.
- Yahoo!
- Dec 14, 2008 8:36am (494 reviews) http://www.yahoo.com/
- A mixture of good and bad ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:36am
"Gee, what does THIS button do?" I accidentally hit the thumbs down, and for some reason the delete button wasn't appearing when I first wrote this, so I was left having to give Yahoo a thumbs up or thumbs down. The truth is, I don't feel comfortable doing either. Yahoo is a mix of good and bad.
 Yahoogroups, despite small frustrations such as the disabling of music on the group homepages, is still a highly reliable place to host a mailing list with attractive customization possibilities. Flickr offers the widest diversity of photography forums I'm seen, yet. But ... the staff has little history of listening seriously to user concerns when setting policy, a troubling habit of responding to trollish behavior with ill-advised attempts at appeasement, a tendency to leave products in Beta for years with serious defects unremedied, and the company has twice surprised users with the closings of popular services in what seems to be a response to the so-called "peanut butter manifesto".
But I'm stuck doing thumbs up or thumbs down, right? The tie breaker, for me, aside from the halfbaked nature of products that came out of some occasionally great ideas (eg. pipes) are the badly skewed priorities that are seen when the company feels that a cheesy gossip site is considered a worthy use of the human resources that its blogging community is being destroyed to conserve. To give a thumbs up in response to that would be to show disrepect for a lot of fellow users who stand to lose far more than I do, and deserve far better than they're getting. The thumb stays red, especially after a little recent fun I've mentioned in a May 19, 2008 post entitled Those Little Dickens at Yahoo.
Yahoo has been reviewed on Yelp; the image you see is a thumbnail of a photo uploaded by the Yelp user Mitchell "Maximum Mitch" Aidelbaum, more of whose photos can be seen here.
- Virtual worlds, avatars, 3D chat, online meetings - Second Life Official...
- Dec 14, 2008 8:35am (209 reviews) virtual-reality http://secondlife.com/
- Very, very strange and very often, not a very good strangeness ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:35am
Social networking site minus the social networking. Some of the locations are pretty to look at, in a minimalistic kind of way, but after a while it all looks alike. Even worse, perhaps, for a site that claims to have millions of users, Second Life offers a virtual world that seems strangely deserted. One can find oneself visiting location after location trying to find somebody, anybody to interact with, only to find a few and watch them suddenly vanish, one after another after another. Weird. I know that a lot of netizens are shy, but just how timid does one have to be to run in fear from a cartoon?
  Not that being snubbed is a given. Some places in SL seemed friendly, but even in them one is eventually posed with the question "what am I doing here". Picture playing a video game with the monsters removed. What's left? Something that is to chatrooms as the Web is to Usenet, perhaps - something that has been given structure where there was structurelessness and enriched that structure with graphic and sometimes audio content, and that could be cool, if only there was a discussion to be had, but in SL, there almost never seems to be, especially if, out of curiosity, one wanders in with a visibly South Asian looking avatar whose name hints of partially Middle Eastern ancestry to see how the other users will react.
Maybe not entirely out of curiosity - the Second Life system sharply limits the user's choice of username. Just like in real life in the Western World, one has a first name and a last name, but SL limits one's choice of surname to one of a few dozen, with a seeming attempt to cover every culture known to man in that selection ... I think forty family names were available. As there are millions of distinct user accounts on the SL system, this results in some very predictable frustration as the would-be user chooses combination after combination, only to be told that it is not available. Finally, one grabs an exotic name out of the air thinking "I'll bet nobody has this one" and one is right. All users have been through this, and the problem is understood and yet, to my amazement, I could still see other users react strangely to the fictional name of the animated character I guided through a cartoon world, as if they could possibly be endangered by such a thing.
Continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:35am
Continuing
While virtual racism was hardly ubiquitous, some (mostly European and Midwestern US) users being very friendly and outgoing, it wasn't scarce, either. From the Teutonic surnamed icon whose user seemed to be attempting to physically attack me, oblivious to the fact that I was not my icon and my icon couldn't be physically injured even in the virtual sense by anything another user did, to the multitude of young female icons (many of whom, I had cause to suspect, were being run by lonely men in San Francisco's Castro District) whose owners would type expressions of revulsion and older ones which would act as if I had just tried to panhandle as I approached them, Second Life offered me a rich assortment of users who just, really, really badly needed to get a grip. I wondered how they would have reacted had they known that the "Arab terrorist" who they just cold shouldered away was, in fact, a nice Jewish boy from Chicago.
How would their perceptions have been affected as those who held them discovered that they mirrored stereotypes for a group to which the object of their supposedly righteous scorn and rage did not actually belong? Would come to see those perceptions as being something that their expectations had imposed on their supposedly fairminded and objective observations this time? Could they be motivated enough to wonder on how many other occasions they had seen the actions of others through such an easily distorted perspective? Might they consider the possibility that their prejudices might need more careful examination, or would they have clung to their delusional worries for dear life, inventing such facts as they needed to keep their fixations from perishing?
I suspect the latter would have been closer to the truth. Many users seemed to have a real problem in distinguishing between fantasy and reality, actually showing visible signs of feeling threatened by the swarthy giant of a stranger appearing on their screens, and in the process revealed a little more reality than they intended. My personality didn't change just because I created a new cartoon character. I was my usual low key self; their expectations did all of the work for them as they created threatening encounters in their own minds which had never existed in reality.
Continued
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