close

Subscriptions

josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a 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 must be viewed in Internet Explorer. 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.

Please click on "list" to see this blog the way it was meant to be viewed. You can return to your ring here.

  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    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)