Eharmony review...

Hi. You can call me Shaun... actually... you can call me shazbot the 15th for all I care... just call me ;). Kidding. After a few tries at finding the right woman on Craigslist, I decided to try one of the alternatives... namely e-harmony. And the fact that it was 'free' for the weekend had absolutely nothing to do with it... really.

*Picks up a few pennies... finishes rolling the ones he already has... and various other levels of cheap related tightwadery... I'm not even sure that's a word.*

Everything began normally... looking for the right woman. 6 matches right off the bat... or was that 8... I forget... but they were all local and every single one of them had god or jesus mentioned somewhere in their profile... so far so good. Most of them wanted kids (hopefully not right this second... few years to prepare would be nice... especially since I'm not out of college yet).

It seems that all I'm getting are christians... which certainly simplifies things... but I did set it to allow all jewish denominations and those who are spiritual but not affiliated Oddly enough.... I looked up each christian denomination one by one and ended up checking them all... there were good points to each of them. I'd go more into depth about my personal reasons for this... but this is an e-harmony review.

At about this point I found my e-harmony personality profile... "When did they mind probe me?" It was pretty accurate... a little too accurate... so I put on a little foil hat to stop the brain-scanning satellite (I've got to look up their patent one of these days) and continued. At this point I decided to share my profile because... it sped things up(and it's really good). Disclaimer: Results may vary, e-harmony may not be mind-probing me (but the jury's still out).

Day 2. More matches now. I'm up to 11... and one actually responded to the initial questions. I've had to swap out a couple of questions because they're already answered in their profiles. The matches look good... but a lot of them don't seem to be online this weekend... only one response so far. Oh a lot of closures... luckily not from the ones I'm really hopeful about.

Day 3. It(the free weekend) ends monday(tomorrow)... this could be bad... one day left and only one woman is actually at the second set of questions. Just found a post on slickdeals that mentions secretly slipping the e-mail into the questions... I thought of it... but I thought at least one woman would make it to the second set of questions. I was wrong.

Day 4. It's early in the AM...only one match has made it past the first set of questions. She seems to want a leader... maybe I could be one if I could keep my foot out of my mouth... The 'personality profile' gives a good list of 'negative reactions others may have towards me' that explains why.

The last page of the personality profile explains that I'm an introvert... which is something most people miss. I'm simply an introvert who lacks the 'social fear' some people have. There is something to be said for having a questionnaire look at you... especially because looks can be decieving.

All in all... I highly recommend e-harmony's personality profile... and if it works for you... and you have money to burn... go for the service. But... this tightwad will be saving his cash for something more important... like maybe a date.

They do have me considering the premium personality profile though... only $20.

Finally, the worst thing you can do is lie. You'll probably get the wrong matches, the personality profile won't reflect who you are, and it'll generally suck. Anyway, if you're so paranoid you can't bear to let the machine 'invade your mind with it's evil scannery'... you probably shouldn't be dating... and you definately shouldn't reproduce.

It's early in the AM on the 4th day... and I'm still single... with just a few hours left... oh well... back to craigslist... maybe I'll post in a few days. This looks like the end of me and e-harmony... but maybe it'll work for you.

Don't think this means I won't try e-harmony again... I think I'll just wait to shell out the cash until I have it to spare.

You heard it right... e-harmony even filters out the broke ones for you!!!!

I think I'll try singlesnet now...

E-harmony trial

Well... I gave e-harmony a shot... it called me judgemental... it may have been right... it also said that was tempered with compassion... hmm. I think I control the level of compassion I temper it with... and don't always get the right mixture... oh well. Anyway, the personality profiling algorithm... whatever it is they use... it nailed me down to an almost creepy level. Unfortunately it's patented... so... I don't think I'll be making my own matchmaking site any time soon.

http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/rsfwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=IKATAlgorithm
http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/rsfwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=IKAT

http://www.uportal.org/faq.html#1_1


http://www.cadence.com/company/newsroom/features/feature.aspx?xml=45nm&DCMP=BAC-20070813_45nmchallenge

Edit this later

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html fairly spiffy.

Sakai was selected for the Georgia Tech campus based on the recommendation of the Georgia Tech Academic Technologies Advisory Committee.
http://sakaiproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=141&Itemid=258

Common surface for MMORPG

Here's an interesting little theory I just came up with while watching the 'coast through the floor glitches on second life'. Have a common or 'default' or 'most commonly used' floor height and as long as the characters walk at that height, it's assumed in all communcation and you don't need to send any related info.

Edit: It didn't work out too good, at least not as my basic idea. First I thought height map... wow... a huge height map for the room. Then I found a book that recommended polygons... but why not just create an array of pointers to the 'sides' of the objects that have the polygons... hey... that works (came up with that while writing), anyway... anyone have anything better?

Zip zip and more zip

This was annoying the heck out of me.

Windows XP treats ZIP files as folders. This is an issue when you are doing a search and you specify "Search subfolders". To turn this behavior off, you can go to Start Menu > Run, type regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll and press enter.

To revert things as they were, type regsvr32 zipfldr.dll and press enter.

found here.
http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/winxp_stop_searching_zip_files.html

Some game essentials.

http://gpwiki.org/index.php/Libraries
No game animation library for free... i know what I'd like to give the world. And hopefully I will (likely, it'll be crap, especially considering how little I know about... a lot of things).

http://www.pharr.org/matt/
Monte carlo equation... wish I knew what one of those is but it sounds like a probabilistic equation (statistics... which I suck at).

http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/emery/index.php?page=software
Also interesting.

An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display by Turner Whitted
The original raytracing doc.

http://brainwagon.org/?p=2507
Siggraph stuff, the plushie thing is nifty.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html Duff's device... fun to think about what it does.

Everything's falling into line

Game Inducer (awesome source)
Cat Mother (would have been commercial, and it's got source)

Boost Library (source available, usable for garbage collection)
Object Pool source (faster than creation)
Other type of pool source (see boost library)

Basically, I've got 4 game engines (all c/c++ and all free and available for anything I wanna do) of varying quality

Now... which compiler to use... which source to use.

http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/emery/index.php?page=software Also cool.