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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




    That's more than a stray nuisance that comes with the experience, it is something that, by its very nature, redefines the experience, and not in a good way. While one may be amused by the thought "by day, he tutors math students at Hillel over bagels and lox, by night he's the most confused operative in all of Al Quaeda", one should come back to what is what should be the basic question of one asks oneself about any social networking effort, online or off in which one participates - "Am I meeting the sort of people who I would be proud and happy to know and be known by, or at the end of the cliched day, am I going to be left wondering why I came, and why I didn't leave a lot sooner?" By now, I think that the question answers itself, and that the reader will not be surprised to hear that I retired my avatar.

    Aside from offering me the company of those special souls who made me feel so glad that I had not filled out the "first life" section of my profile, Second Life offered me other delights as well, before I decided that the time had come for that game to be over. I had frequent browser crashes using SL, and this seems to be a common problem, if arguably not much of a loss, given how little of that virtual world one is free to explore - the concept of "private property" having made a major appearance in a setting where one finds people spending real money on fake land and seeing nothing odd about this. What we find is that on a site devoted to "your world. your imagination", what many users like to imagine is a world in which they get to chase everybody else off the beach and little is to be found other than virtual clothing stores and condos, populated by people who, if they can't have the decency to be Anglo-Saxon, can at least be courteous enough to fake it. Welcome to virtual Schaumburg.