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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 from above ...


    That's what Burning Man was about for a lot of us - that spontaneity, and spontaneity is a difficult thing to show, one of those pleasant things that I spoke of at the beginning that is so difficult to bring alive through any noninteractive medium. The written word is what it is, yielding in no way to the reader's actions, leaving him to wander a conceptual landscape defined by an absolute determinism; the world of a story, true or fictional, is set in stone, a reality that the author will try to mask through a series of artfully conceived illusions - or perhaps not so artfully conceived - as he tries to get the reader to imagine that he has lived through choices he hasn't been able to make, bringing us to one point on which I am dissatisfied with this site.










    Piccdrop.com - Free Image Hosting












    While we are offered some nice photographs, the eye candy on this site is static. No footage, no recordings, no real time exposure to the social experience of the dragon. Not even stories from those who were in it. Just stills, and business oriented pages like this one about future plans on something that, while certainly an attractive and well layed out site, seems more a scrapbook of memories for those who were there than an explanation for those who weren't, and the memories reserved are wholly visual ones. The experience was so much more than just that; Ms.Nigro and her associates should give themselves more credit, and maybe if those who rode the Dragon would send in a few accounts for them to publish, they would? But for now, they haven't.




    [ continued ]