The view of Okcupid from my mother

Date

Spent some lovely time with my parents and godchildren over the Easter holidays. On the Sunday night me and my mum was sitting down after our lovely cream tea for supper. I was showing mum some stuff and somehow got on to the subject of online dating. As you can imagine to my parents the whole thing is a little removed from reality but anyway, I decided to show her the kind of people who use it, mainly to point out there not all fruitcakes.

In Okcupid there’s a mode which is best described as hot or not. Instead you choose a rating from 0 to 5 stars. It was a quick way to show a flavour of woman without getting too bogged down in the details. As flicked through I asked my mother what she thought of the woman’s photos.

It was fascinating hearing my mothers view on the woman’s photos and glimpse of personality in what they wrote.

Generally my mum would look at the photos, if she liked what she saw, she would start reading the profile. Nothing new there I hear you say. But it was the woman who she choose to read more about which interested me. If I could generalise, I would say it was somewhere right in the middle. She liked to see the whole face in one photo and the whole person in the next one. She was not impressed by woman drinking beer and low light photos full stop. She was also not a fan of photos showing lots of cleavage or flirty photos. For example a picture of a woman on the floor with her legs open facing away from the camera in stockings received absolute scorn. Of course it was playful and didn’t show anything but it didn’t matter… Scorn and burn!

She didn’t seem to like single photos either, specially if they were trying to act cute. She also didn’t like the look of the boyish looking woman, think my mum likes woman to look like woman. She also needed more that one photo to make a good decision, which makes sense. With the profiles she read, she glossed over interests like films, etc. But liked it when the woman talked about cooking or food. Even a few who talked about baking cakes.

Looking back through the marks I trying to tally them against my own personality, its very much a napkin/tomboy notes calculation… Here’s what I’d say my mum looks for me…

  • Someone more introverted
  • Someone easy going
  • Someone more independent
  • Someone more conventionally moral (religious maybe?)
  • Someone less progressive
  • Someone less kinky
  • Someone less adventurous
  • Someone less romantic?

Thats done by looking at all the woman my mum ticked high and averaging the scores. Its far from scientific with only 8 woman my mum rated as very suitable for myself. I would say the woman were generally younger looking and in age. Bear in mind I only showed woman within my filter of 26-38 and less than 50miles away. Anyway… Once I get them the Chromebook, I’ll have to seek more matching advice from my mum as it was fun and interesting at the same time.

More interesting is what we decided on with some twitter help…

Facebook for my old crusty photo collections

Me and the wowball

Most people know how much I really hate Facebook, although in the last few months I’ve slightly warmed to it for certain things.

Recently I scanned all my old negatives into jpgs, and I’m not sure what to do with them?

Normally I would upload them to Flickr.com like most of my photos but to be honest I only upload the best of my shots to flickr.com (even though I have a pro account and I have done for the last 4+ years). It just didn’t make sense to upload the old crusty scanned pictures to flickr.com. So I had a think and decided that the best place to publicly put them is on Facebook. Yes the EULA still really bugs me and It probably means Facebook now owns my photos but heck, there so old and crusty, that I don’t really care. Better online somewhere that lost in negative form forever?

On the upside, most of the photos are from when I was in school, so most of the people in the photos will be on facebook too. This means they can tag the photos to death and write stupid comments which make youtube comments look like degree essays in comparison. Oh and of course there will be the crazy (its taking over the web like crazy) "I like this" button for those who can’t be bother to say anything meaningful… (Geez I’m so snotty about facebook, I should really stop being so darn negative about it)

I also reckon theres roughly about 300 of them once you take out some of the duplicates (I did the scanning over a few days and didn’t really do a good job of splitting the done and to do piles, so shoot me). No one really wants to see my photostream full of old crusty photos for almost 300 photos… Heck not even I want to see that. So I’ll use facebook as I’ve been using it previously, a massive dumping ground for publicly available data. I’ve marked the photos as public, so it will be interesting to see what that means in the great scheme of things.

I’m aware there is some facebook event later today but I doubt its anything which will change my view on facebook or using it.

So old friends of mine, do check out the tip of the iceberg collection i’ve uploaded so far under school days (I was tempted to write skool daze but I don’t want to encourage the super lameness which comes with facebook stuff). I’ll upload the rest once Facebook stops telling me to update my flash player or I can be bothered to deal with the crappy html uploader.

Oh yeah I’m aware that this does get fed into facebook via rss. So no offense meant to my lovely facebook friends… Actually screw it. Isn’t all this so AOL 2.0???? What did you all think about me making it public instead of just my little network? Whooo the public Internet is so scary 🙂

Photos of my new flat at Islington Wharf

The view from my new flat

So this is the view I’ll be seeing a lot more of in the very near future. It is the view looking northward across the Ancoats, i mean new islington area which I learned on Saturday use to be the home of the italians who moved to Manchester in the early 20th century. Of course I’m nice and high in the islington wharf block of apartments. I would have like to have been on the other side but it was an extra £10k to be on the south side with a balcony. Hey at least I get to see the Manchester City stadium (sport city) and the rest of new islington including the planned beach which meant to be put in just next to Chips (the two tone block of apartments in the middle of the picture).

So to go with the floor to ceiling windows, is two bedrooms a nice large lounge with kitchen and two bathrooms. There’s also a huge community garden for everyone in the building. I took advantage of the governement scheme which is now ending this weekend. Basically its a interest free loan for 30% of the property while you put in 65% in a mortgage and 5% via a deposit. Its a good deal because the loan is interest free for 5 years then you can either pay it back via the sale of the flat or pay it back slowly at a low interest rate.

I get the keys on Thursday, so only a week now and everything seems to be swimming along nicely. Thanks in part to my sister (Sharon) and Billie Wilde (my estate agent and mortgage advisor). Billie kept trying to get hold of me on my mobile phone but couldn’t get through due to #mybrushwithdeath. So in the end my sister picked up the call and got back to Billie with the bad news about me being in hospital with the bleed on the brain. Billie informed everyone involved and held the mortgage for as long as she could.

When I was well enough to continue the flat buying process she came to my house with everything to sign before I went to Bristol. If Billie and Sharon had not done what they had, I would have lost the flat for sure or at least the mortgage which would have been a real lost. So thank you to both of them, I’m very happy to pay the small fee to Billie because she really did over and above what she needed, to make sure I got the mortgage and ultimately the flat. And of my sister for being my caring sister. I owe you one, hope you enjoy the flip camera I bought you.

Flickr reaches 250,000,000 photos

Found via BoingBoing

On February 15, 2006 I discovered that the photo sharing site Flickr had reached 100 million hosted photos. Today (September 22 2006) at 11.18 PM CET, only seven months later, Flickr passed the quarter billion mark – 250 million photos.

It maybe that Flickr is doesn't have the number of people that Yahoo Photos might do, but I very much douht that the quality and quanity of photos is anywhere near flickr. I do wonder the percentage which are creative commons licenced however.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]