Matthew Botos

For as much as I ramble about eHarmony and its founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, I’ve yet to pick up any of the books he’s written on relationships and marriage. The story behind eHarmony goes that while promoting one of his books on how to evaluate people as marriage material, people kept asking him how to meet these people in the first place, ultimately inspiring the eHarmony site. With this in mind, I picked up a used, hardcover copy of Finding the Love of Your Life for the bargain price of 99 cents.

The book reveals the origins of many of the serious relationship themes found in eHarmony while exposing a bit more of the author’s Christian background. If you can get past that and his argument for celibacy until marriage, there is some solid advice to be had:

• Get married for the right reasons
• Figure out what’s important to you in a partner first
• Find someone you have a lot in common with or is good at compromising
• Get to know them over a good length of time before marriage

Many of the big issues and areas of compatibilities show up in eHarmony’s “29 dimensions”, and explain why their matches tend to be better than the basic physical characteristics used by Match or even OkCupid’s more sophisticated test question and personality fuzzy logic. Given the author’s degree in clinical psychology and experience as a marriage counselor, you would expect him to be able to identify the critical traits of successful matches.

In summary, the book offers solid basic advice on finding the right person to marry once you remove a few biases, and provides some useful background on what’s driving eHarmony’s matching system and philosophy.

… by doing nothing. This is actually a multi-part story, going back a couple of months:

One of my “benefits” at work is discounted car insurance, the provider of which sends out mailings every six months or so urging you to get a quote and save money. The first two times, their website crashed on me. The last time, I actually called, gave them the particulars for a quote, and found it to be several hundred dollars higher that what I was paying at State Farm. Their home insurance actually was a better deal, until you figured in the combination discount I was already getting. So no sale.

Yesterday, I got two exciting pieces of mail from State Farm. The first was a $20 dividend, essentially a refund of my premium since they had a good year. The second was my car insurance bill for the next six months, which has dropped by over $100! More reason to keep driving an old car, and to stick with my existing, traditional insurer.

One final note: the reason I started out with State Farm to begin with was that their quote seven years ago was much more reasonable than any of the TV-hyped, web-based discount providers. Go figure.

Here’s an interesting assertion: Facebook’s growing popularity is causing a Rapid Decline of the Dating Industry. Perhaps it’s more of a pruning; graphing eHarmony and the author’s own Plenty Of Fish site over the same period doesn’t show much of a decline.

The other interesting thing that jumps out from the graph is how only eHarmony really got a noticeable post-Valentine’s day spike.

Today was one of those all too rare enjoyable days at work, which got me thinking about what makes them happen. At a task level it’s doing things like this:

• Writing a blog about the hidden insight behind humorous mashups
• Prototyping a participation and reputation ranking that pulls in information from 5 different social software tools (like eBay stars on crack)
• Being consulted by a few coworkers for help with their tasks
• Reviewing some outstanding user suggestions and influencing the future direction of our product

What it comes down to is that I’m happiest either when left alone to pursue my own ideas to fruition, or feeling like I’m multiplying my impact by guiding the bigger picture. That’s still a tough niche to carve out, but at least it gives me of what to aim for.

When a $38,000 Car Costs $44,000 is a bit of a scary article. Not only are people paying more money for cars with more gadgets and lousy fuel mileage, now they’re financing them with 9 year loans and paying tons of interest. These must be the same people who whined about having to learn math in school.

It comes at a good time for me, though. I’ve had my Maxima for almost 7 years now after I bought it slightly used, and just hit 90,000 miles. I’m sure it’ll run for plenty more, but 100,000 miles is something of a psychological threshold after which you expect more problems and repairs.

Looking around, though, any new car would be a mostly cosmetic upgrade; I’d probably get something with similar size, power, and unfortunately gas mileage. For $20,000, driving an out of date car isn’t such a bad deal.

Stagnant fuel economy isn’t much of an incentive, either. Foreign and domestic automakers and Congress have given people exactly what the people want: more weight, more horsepower, same gas mileage. You didn’t even see an ad mention miles per gallon until those gallons hit $3.

That makes a hybrid tempting (but still expensive), along with a pure electric. There’s a trade off there, too: decent range will cost you, or you take on the work of building your own.

Given all that, it seems like the best solution is just to drive what you’ve already paid off.

With all the yahoos making a run at the Whitehouse in 2008, we really need a few more real representatives to take a shot. Take congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, who made Fark today because of the following:

• He’s got a blog
• He’s trying to live on food stamps
• The TSA took away his peanut butter and jelly and he didn’t stick around to argue since he had to make cattle-call boarding on a discount airline

Now that’s a man of the people!

One of the fun things about Mac Mail is that if you have a picture of someone in your address book, it shows up next to all their messages. I’ve done this with all my friends and family, so the only faceless emails I get are from faceless corporations. But you can add them to your address book, too. Now I get all my eHarmony matches directly from TV pitchman Dr. Neil Clark Warren and iTunes music recommendations from Apple CEO Steve Jobs

I surprised Brian by flying out to Illinois for his birthday, and he surprised me in turn by taking me hunting for seasonal mushrooms. We didn’t find any, but I did get some photos along the way.

View the Mushroom Hunt photos

The Onion is ripe with yoga statistics today:

• All but 32 women in New York and San Francisco are now certified yoga instructors
• 15% of students are hoping to get laid at wild Animal House style yoga parties

Doubly funny because both of my regular instructors are guys, and I’ve yet to get so much as a date (with a woman) out of class.

Brian jokingly asked me today if I had a spreadsheet going to evaluate the women I meet. (It was probably only half-jokingly since he knows how I love my number-crunching.) I’ve become wise enough to realize that love is more a matter of the heart than one of mathematics, but it’s been a long learning process.

In 2005, when I found myself single after a long relationship, I plunged headlong into dating and eventually began to wonder how productive it really was, leading to the inevitable spreadsheet. eHarmony sent me 249 matches over a 7 month period. I had some contact with 46 (18%), but only 4 actual dates (< 2%). On Match.com, I found 42 women over 3 months interesting enough to to contact and continued emailing 8 (19%), but none led to actual dates.

Online dating is big business, especially when you look at the monthly fees for some sites. So the frugal dater naturally wonders if it’s more cost effective than the standard benchmark of buying a woman a drink. For eHarmony, the cost per match contacted came to $0.34; for Match, $0.55. It’s a bit surprising, considering eHarmony’s costs are higher at face value; perhaps their is some truth to Dr. Neil’s claims that his 29 dimensions of compatibility produce better matches. Any of the women I’ve dated, of course, are welcome to comment on that