Text of ad:

Are you single? My name is Markus and I created Plentyoffish.com; my site is completely free and we generate about 800,000 relationships a year…

Hmm, generate relationships? Interesting language. I guess you could put it that way from a statistical perspective, as in, salesmen, sorry… salespeople generate leads. Perhaps that’s a poor example, though; salespeople don’t just discover folks who happen to be already interested in the product being sold (but just don’t yet know it), although that’s one way of putting it, rather they also (and maybe this is the bulk of the marketing effort) create that interest, and in the case of leads-generation we might imagine they do it one folk at a time. [Side note: "folks" is one of those words without a singular case, it seems. Like "cattle"; see the "Singular terminology dilemma" section.]

Are you single? My name is Markus and I created Plentyoffish.com; my site is completely free and we foment about 800,000 relationships a year…

Nah, that’s not it…

Are you single? My name is Markus and I created Plentyoffish.com; my site is completely free and we hook up about 1,600,000 people a year…

Hmm, that facilitates a larger number, and plays to the reputation I hear the site’s earned, ha ha, but nah, I’m sure that’s not the angle they’re going for, either.

There’s gotta be something better than generate…

I dislike the expression “blast from the past”, as if the fact that it rhymes with itself makes it somehow worthy despite the fact that “blast” hardly makes sense here, semantically. But, wow, the Evite photo viewer stinks. Is this still 1995?

• Maximum photo size appears to be 400 x 300.
• Uploaded mages are re-compressed at very low JPEG quality.
• Normal photo viewer does not use AJAX / JavaScript when going from one photo to the next.
• Website is slow.
• …So it takes several seconds to skip from each photo to the next.
• “Slide show” feature is faster at skipping from one photo to the next, but does not pre-load the next photo, so it still takes a moment.
• Ads are shown all over the place.
• Uploading requires Java applet.
• Photo viewer often renders random JavaScript code as visible on the body of the page.

On the positive side, it doesn’t matter if I have my eyes closed, because the resolution is so low that you can’t tell.

Evite has been sitting pretty for too long; they really should upgrade their technology. The problem is that the name is so evocative that it has virtually become part of everyday language, and there’s a lot in names. (“Add me to the evite!”, you say, using a word that’ll be added to the O.E.D. any day now, I’ll betcha.) Speaking of names, I don’t remember if I posted about this, but I firmly believe that Dukakis lost against Bush because… who would want a president named Dukakis? Say it to yourself. Dukakis, Dukakis, Dukakis. Now Bush, on the other hand, that sounds positively presidential. I’m so glad people follow their conscience(s) when they vote.

I’ll keep this short, because it’s a meta post. And “meta means murder” (I read somewhere). And if I read it somewhere, it must be true! Anyhow, let’s continue.

After much figurative navel-gazing, I realize I’ve been reluctant to post here because I’d subscribed my Facebook profile to this blog, such that everything I wrote was being cross-posted over there. And as cool an idea as that was, it meant that in the back of my head I was writing for a lower-common-denominator audience. Oh, not to denigrate my Facebook pals in relation to all of you dear readers and dear leaders (even though they won’t see this, ha ha); rather, I know what those folks are interested in, and there are pretty large swaths who don’t care about random musings on JavaScript replete with code examples, which is perfectly fine; I still love them all. Facebook being a “social” network, just as I’d probably not walk into a party and subject a relatively random group of friends to a discussion of Objects versus Arrays (complete with code examples), not even at a Google party, the same goes for the large virtual party which is my Facebook profile. Yes, that’s where the party is happening; don’t forget: you read it here first!

A better solution by which burnination can be achieved: create a separate RSS feed which only incorporates items I’ve tagged with “facebook” and link that up; only those party-worthy pearls will get auto-posted. Like the proverbial hole in the fence around the nudist colony, I’m looking into that.