eHarmony’s Dissonant Chords

I’ve tried a few online dating services over the years, but never got too serious about them. The dates that I did go on never led to a second one. The matches were poor and if I had to go by the flattering photos alone I’d have never recognized the woman in a crowd. Of course, that doesn’t stop all the services from sending me recruitment spam. I doubt that I’m part of their target demographic. I am not interested in the “Hot 23 year old in YOUR AREA!” or “Russian beauty looking for love!”

Regardless, I find something oddly appealing about creating profiles. Maybe it strokes my ego and iconoclastic nature to see that few people share my array of interests. Maybe it’s a way to look like my ideal self. Most of these services allow you to check off negative properties in your match preferences but I’ve yet to see any that allow you to describe yourself as lazy, drug addict, egotistical, reclusive, pedantic, sloppy, fat, depressive, or psychotic – not that I’m any of these things, mind you.

These dating profiles usually languish after an initial rush, just like my Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and drive-by forum profiles. I can’t even remember many of them.

It was a slow day and I didn’t feel like pursuing my latest essay (a history of drug advertising.) The eHarmony dating service has been pestering me of late to take their FREE personality analysis. In the past I’ve found these things to be about 50% accurate or so general that they’d fit most anybody, but I was bored. I waded through the several pages of multiple choice questions. As expected, some of it was accurate, some way off. Undoubtedly, my aversion to pigeon-holing and my general ambiguity has something to do with this. I tend to see things from several angles which makes generalization difficult.

In addition to the personality analysis eHarmony has an extensive checklist of profile descriptors. In most cases there is an “other” field for free-form text entry.

The matches they recommend don’t always “match.” They use something called “Flexible Matching” which will ignore any preferences marked less than “very important”. The result is quantity over quality. As they explain it, you should look beyond your expectations. Good advice, but no matter what they say I’m not going to begin a relationship with someone on the other side of the country or who thinks that a good weekend is seeing the wilderness from the window of an SUV.

eHarmony utilizes something called “Guided Communications”. When a match is made, both parties are informed. One party initiates communication by sending a list of five questions chosen from a set. The other party answers then sends their own five questions. The next step involves the two of you exchanging “Must Haves” and “Can’t Stands”, checklists of qualities you look for in another person. Another round of questions ensues, again chosen from a pre-packaged list, but this time they are essay-type rather than multiple choice. Finally, after reading an essay by the founder of eHarmony, you are allowed open communication.

Managing my account has started to feel like a job. Every day I get a half-dozen matches. As soon as I clear those, another half-dozen shows up. Currently there are thirty of them. eHarmony keeps prodding me to participate, often by using one of their extra, additional-fee services. My inbox is filled with emails from them.

I gotta go. Debbie from Dallas has some questions for me.

Console Wars, Round Two

There is no doubting that the Wii has out sold by an enormous margin both Microsoft’s XBox and Sony’s Playstation. Nintendo’s focus on it’s innovative controller instead of shinier graphics allowed it to reach beyond the core gaming market and into the hands of the casual, first-time gamer.

Now they are ready to break open the market for downloaded games. The Wii Store has two channels, the Virtual Console for purchasing games of yesteryear, and WiiWare for purchasing new content. Established gamers may purchase childhood favorites from the Virtual Console but new gamers are unlikely to get excited about the original Mario Brothers, Kirby or Street Fighter. Until now the new content offerings from the WiiWare channel have been limited to updates and the Opera web browser.

On May 12 (U.S. projected date) all that is going to change. Nintendo has been hard at work lining up developers to produce downloadable games. This in itself is not a new idea; Microsoft and Sony consoles both offer downloadable games. But Nintendo’s Wii has several aspects that are attracting developers. First, by not jumping on the shiny graphics treadmill they keep development costs down. It takes thousands of man-hours to create all that high-polygon, texture-rich content required on the XBox and Playstation, content that a small studio cannot afford. Second, their Software Development Kit(SDK) is one half to one quarter the price of the other consoles. The Sony SDK is notoriously difficult to use. According to one developer, “The cost of making a game for WiiWare can be significantly less than that of an XBLA [XBox Live Arcade] or PSN [Playstation Network]game, firstly because the hardware is a lot cheaper and secondly because the SDK Nintendo provides is very detailed.”

But lower cost isn’t the only thing attracting developers to the Wii. Nintendo has adopted an open arms approach to third party games. Instead of exerting strict control they have given the responsibility of quality assurance (QA), maturity ratings and marketing to the development studios. As Nic Watt of Nnooo games put it, “We found trying to get a downloadable title approved on other platforms prohibitively expensive as we needed to supply artwork and demos to be looked at and if that demo is not signed we could have spent three to six months worth of development money and be nowhere. Nintendo’s stance has been about getting studios with good ideas and letting them decide what content to make rather than trying to dictate everything which goes on the channel.”

Simple and casual have been the watchwords for many of the Wii titles, but some studios are thinking beyond the party game. As the cost of a WiiWare game will be between $5 and $15, some have been thinking about long form games in episodic form, where both play and story can get as complex as a traditional boxed game.

In the end, it will be the consumer who decides the success or failure of the WiiWare channel, but if developer excitement is any indication, Nintendo has another genre-bending success on their hands.

Develop Magazine’s WiiWare Week Roundup

Help Wanted, No Skills Required

Comcast is taking heat for packing a recent FCC meeting on internet neutrality. The topic of net neutrality has pitted the telecom companies against wide segments of the public, including groups as diverse as ACLU, Gun Owners of America, American Library Association, Christian Coalition of America and the Parents Television Council. At issue is whether all data should be treated equally or if the telecoms can do “traffic shaping”, favoring some types of data over others.

The FCC often holds public meetings to allow citizens to voice their opinion. At the recent meeting in Harvard Comcast paid a group of people to fill the available seats. Interested individuals who arrived as much as 90 minutes before the meeting found the room nearly full. Comcast admitted to the payoff and stated that the seats were being held for Comcast employees, most of whom did not show up.

Linestanding is a common practice at congressional hearings but this appears to be the first time it’s been used at a public meeting outside of Washington. Lobbyists pay linestanders between $10 and $15 an hour, many of whom will queue up for a hearing the day before. This practice has been common since the early ’90s and several linestanding companies exist to serve the lobbyists. The end result is that the public rarely gets a chance to attend. Senator Claire McCaskill, freshman Democrat from Missouri, has recently introduced a bill to ban lobbyists from employing linestanders.

Comcast packs the room
Sen. Claire McCaskill
Washington Post interviews linestanders

Be Careful Out There

Domain Name Service [DNS] servers are the roadmaps of the Internet. They direct your browser to the correct website. Computers use numbers [called an IP address] to identify themselves, but humans have a hard time remembering numbers. Enter the DNS server. When you type www.google.com the DNS server looks it up in a table and returns the number 208.67.217.230, which is the IP address of Google. When you first connected to the Internet your Internet Service Provider [ISP] told your computer how to find its DNS server.

DNS poisoning is an increasing problem on the Internet. If your machine is compromised then it will point to a rogue DNS server. This server will return incorrect numbers and you will be sent to the wrong website. These websites can be mockups of legitimate sites that are phishing for personal data, malicious sites that try to install software on your machine, or sites that are full of advertisements.

If you notice that you are being sent to the wrong websites or a familiar site doesn’t look quite right, contact your ISP or local computer geek and ask them to verify that your computer is using the right DNS server.