Matthew Botos

I’ve published two plugins for WordPress:

• Markdown Confluence Plugin provides an easy editing syntax
• Session Settings Plugin solves PHP errors on certain hosts

I dodged the heat but not the crowds for a while this weekend at the aquarium. The former New Jersey state aquarium is now privately run and has been expanded to include a large shark exhibit. There wasn’t time to visit the nearby Battleship New Jersey (both keep surprisingly short summer hours), but I did take some pictures along the waterfront. Those were much easier than inside the aquarium, where the combined degrees of difficulty from photographing animals underwater in the dark cut the take of 123 photos down to these 33.

View the Aquarium photos

With today’s mature web and powerful search engines, it’s nice to find that you can still walk an interesting path of links from one article. This dating site roundup from Digg included links to an amusing piece on using the almighty Google for dating. It also explains, “PlentyOfFish started as a way for Markus Frind to teach himself ASP” and revealed that he has a Web 2.0-oriented blog.

A break in the humidity and thunderstorms finally made good weather for some good grilling and photography. After firing up a few hamburgers, I took an evening walk in Valley Forge Park to catch a few pictures in the golden light. My shadow, meanwhile, did its best to dance into the frame.

View the Late July photos

Douglas Coupland captures a key geek personality trait in Microserfs when he talks about overfocusing. Bringing an obsessive, microscopic focus to the task at hand allows smart technical people to perfect the myriad small components that make up a complex system. In personal pursuits, it often shows itself in a mastery of a few chosen interests.

The liability of overfocusing is burning out while concentrating on things beyond one’s control and any logical solution. Couple this with a need for short-term measurable progress towards a goal, and you have my typical source of frustration. Both work and my romantic life fall squarely in this category; for all my effort I often have little to show because of external factors. Even with this logical knowledge, it’s still difficult to find the patience to wait for results.

A recent Pew Internet Blog Report surveryed bloggers on a variety of topics. I found the following to be particularly true of my own motivations (quoted from NY Times coverage):

Despite a potentially vast audience in cyberspace, the Pew project found that 52 percent of bloggers said they blogged mostly for themselves. When asked for a major reason for blogging, 52 percent said it was to express themselves creatively and 50 percent said it was to document and share personal experiences.

OkCupid is a free site with an interesting mix of dating and community site, due at least in part to being created by a handful of Harvard hackers (C++ and Lisp are included in the list of otherwise spoken languages). It’s non-dating claim to fame are user-created tests, ranging from a Myers-Brigg like dating type to measurements of many obscure preferences.

The dating part of the site is well-developed with plenty of space to talk about yourself and a good photo system with cropping and captions. Matching is done using their own algorithm, which looks for compatibilities between answers to user-submitted questions. For each one, you give your answer, as well as the answers you’d want to see in potential mates. These are also used as relative measures such as telling you that you’re more political than a match, or that a match is more emotional than her peers.

The population on the site is less mainstream than others: more off-center politically, more bisexuals, and wider range of drug habits. It makes for some interesting browsing, though as with noted in my Plenty of Fish Review, you can’t hide profiles you’ve already seen.

Though a free site, OkCupid offers a number of innovative features not found elsewhere, including user-driven tests and personality matching. These features and an electic community make it interesting even for those not dating.

I recently mentioned to someone my need to start dating again, and the ensuing discussion of how much of “need” it really was got me thinking. I certainly don’t want to date a bunch of strangers; I’d much rather put the effort into one rewarding, lasting relationship. But dating is a necessary step to find the right person to build that relationship, so I trudge through dating sites, speed dating, and the too rare real life encounters with eligible women.

For a long time, I was single and happy. My own intellectual and physical pursuits filled my time comfortably. While I became a more rounded person, I watched more of my peers get married, despite studies showing people marry at a later average age today. The clock was ticking, and the pool of women draining. Since I’m planning to have a family, you can add a biological clock to that ticking as the window for ideal pregnancy is shrunken by today’s increasingly school and work oriented women. (See Babies and Life on Demand)

I need to date because it’s the gateway to a relationship, marriage, and a family. And I need to do it now because a number of clocks are ticking.

Mountain biking involves more than a few scrapes and bruises; I got a nice helping last week. It’s been healing well, though, with a very simple remedy: antibiotic ointment. A daily coating keeps the area moist and protected so it can heal without drying out. The deeper gouges still need bandages and time to heal, but this simple solution works well for less severe scrapes.

Just when you think you’ve tried everything to meet women, someone goes and takes it to the next level: UCF Student Set Dorm Fire To Meet Women (from Fark). On the plus side, this makes my own dating situation look a lot less desperate.