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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 •










    Lost Gardens of Apollo, near the teleport in location





    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?






    Pictures first created using the 'take snapshot' function, this one in a virtual shopping center down near the virtual beach ...... and then cut into pieces and trimmed.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