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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.

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  • 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 •






    Continuing my review of the "Steak Porn" video ...






    It's a way of making tough meat seem more tender than it actually is, and impressing the gullible along the way. The problem with cooking beef over heat that intense is that the fibers inside the meat don't really have enough time to break down, one of the reasons why I may have seemed less than completely enthusiastic about that idea of using a vegetable pan to cook one's meat a few paragraphs back. Ramsay cuts through the fibers his much too brief and rapid cooking failed to break, hoping that the resting he gives his cut of meat will reduce the loss of juice such a cutting will inevitably produce. Properly prepared, good (or even average) quality meat neither requires nor benefits from such a pretentious presentation - it need simply be brought to the table intact, with appropriate garnitures and sauces. The West abstained from adopting the chopstick for a reason. The diners have knives. One might break down and decide to let them be used.














    Or, one might do as Ramsey does, ending up with something that looks spectacular and at best tastes tolerable (if one doesn't notice the faint flavor of burnt olive oil), something which will go cold on the plate rapidly if not wolfed down. That the diner will do so might well be Ramsey's hope, since the finer nuances of what he carbonized are likelier to be overlooked when food is passed too quickly over the tounge for those nuances to be detected and the blame for them properly affixed. Which, given Ramsey's own fondness for boorishly mistreating others without provocation, one should do without hesitation or any undue feelings of regret.






    Typical of the commentary found on Youtube on that last video I linked to was this bit of wisdom, and I wonder how much it explains of this Gordon Ramsay phenomenon I was lucky enough to have not heard of prior to my appearance on StumbleUpon.







    Gordan KNOWS his (expletitive deleted).

    So less about "oh he's so arragant/rude/cocky"

    HE KNOWS how to run a restaurant. He makes like £500MILLION A YEAR.






    I guess high school never ends for some of us. Such a comment as the one above puts on display the same depth of reasoning one sees out of a herd as it begins to stampede, or in a group of yuppies who huddle in long lines during a midwinter night outside of a tacqueria no different from the many on the same street, merely because so many others are waiting as well.





    [ continued ]