“I don’t like the stupid banter where both people try so hard to be funny and charming.. It’s like are you decent looking or NOT?”

“BAD, superficial banter is terrible. Witty, interesting banter from a cute guy is okay – but uh, how rare is that? The one time I thought I found it, turned out he [looked like he] was FIVE MONTHS PREGNANT. Online dating – it’s like online gambling. You don’t really know if you’re getting tricked or not.”

8 million singles have tried online dating at some point in their lives, yet it is still a taboo in society because:

1. If you have to resort to the internet to find love you must be a loser with no game.

2. There are all kinds of creeps sitting behind computers. How can you be sure you’re not talking to a weirdo?

These are valid points, but then again, how many non-weirdo winners do you normally meet on Friday nights bumpin’ and grindin’ on some random possibly underage fool while intoxicated? Exactly.

A couple of years ago in college, one of my good friends found herself suddenly single and decided to give online dating a go. I was happily coupled at the time, so of course I wanted to hear every last detail of a single girl’s adventures with the “mysterious” opposite sex. Her thoughts on OKCupid (circa 2010):

“Within the first 24 hours I received over 40 inquiries. Some lame, some that were considerable, some that were obviously copied and pasted, and a few genuine efforts.

After the initial rush, things tapered down a bit to about 3-7 messages per day, depending on how often I logged on.

One thing I learned immediately after that first 24 hours: dating sites make me shallow as f***.

Initially, I would look at all inquiries the same — read their profile for common interests and see what they like to do. Scope out all their photos to look for signs of bad angles, hidden fatness, etc. And then reply accordingly.

After a while, I began to only click on a person’s thumbnail if they looked like they might be cute, and then proceeded to scope out their page and photos.

But then that got too time consuming. It finally got to a point where I would kind of just squint at the thumbnail, and if they looked like they miiiight’ve passed for good looking, I would proceed to check out their photos and then reply. I didn’t really care what the content on their page was anymore; it was just an easy way to fish into a transparent pond so that you can SEE the fish before you catch them. Who cares what the fish tasted like, right?”

So to summarize, when it comes to online dating it seems that looks are everything. This is a problem because in real life, looks are a fraction of what makes up the full package. I think it is just as much about, as Carrie Bradshaw would say on Sex and the City, the zsa zsa zsu – the sparks, as it is about the factual data – looks, personality, credit score (no seriously, very important!), etc. Although I don’t think there is anything shameful or “loserish” about meeting people online, and I’m all for online communication (with Gmail folders full of “love letters” from ex-boyfriends past), I’m still not convinced that it is as productive as good ol’ fashion socializing with randos because it is difficult to pick up on someone’s vibe from behind a computer screen. But what if you don’t meet your special rando because..

“Regrettably, our friends have not introduced us, we have not met at the produce section, and somehow we missed each other at the hospital fund-raiser, theater, stadium, rally of our favorite candidate, grand opening of the new mall, ribbon cutting at the new Starbucks, volunteer party as the animal shelter or waiting online at Lord & Taylor (you were probably still in the shoe department).”

And as one of my friends pointed out, isn’t dating just a numbers game? Maybe the more people you “wink” at, rate, message, or whatever, the more likely you are to find “the one”.

*** Special thanks to my friends who have provided me with input for this post. The last quote is from the book “Save as Draft” by Cavanaugh Lee.

As the whole world knows due to my annoying over FBing, I recently had a birthday. About a year ago, I was someone completely different, or so I thought. I had just moved to a new city, several hundred miles away from almost everyone I knew and I guess I wanted to be someone else, someone “better”. It’s not that I came here with the intention of rebranding myself, it just happened. I found myself resenting everything I once enjoyed and started enjoying everything I once resented. To adjust according to my new likes and dislikes, I tried to switch out my hardware and software. I significantly decreased my hard drive size, meaning there was now only enough room in my head to think about myself. I over clocked my CPU, which allowed me to live a fast-paced “fun” life, needing little to no down time (I disregarded the fact that over clocking is not safe, as it can cause your parts to over heat and melt/fry). I installed a new operating system which not only changed the way I functioned (although all OSes have many of the same basic functions), but it provided a completely new user interface which caused others to perceive and respond to me differently. Everything was fine for a while until it hit me that whether you are using a $500 Toshiba Satellite or a “better” $1000 Sony VAIO, some day, you will get BSOD (blue screen of death). And suddenly I don’t feel so different anymore from who I was a year ago although I know I’m not exactly the same. I know I want to replace all the new faulty parts with the old good parts, but other than that I don’t really know how I want to brand myself. Do you?

P.S. Don’t be an Apple product :] (<— that’s a robot smiley)..

Baby don’t hurt me… But in all seriousness, this entry is terribly off topic. Once upon a time I used to write about relationships and I think people liked that. I know girls liked that. I’m not sure how guys felt about it but I do recall they said I do a better job of male bashing than I do of female bashing though today’s entry is more about… love bashing? So let’s talk about falling in love. I think falling means that you are becoming more and more infatuated and getting more and more crazy. You stop caring about everything else in your life – especially sleeping and eating because you’d rather spend every waking moment and every sleeping moment with this person or thinking about this person. It’s like the strongest addiction of your life, where you are always craving the next hit and you wish that everyone else and everything else would just leave you the f alone because they are really killing your buzz and you just wanna get high. Everything about him (her) is so amazingly unique and wonderful. Everything he does and everything he says and every inch of him is just.. wow.. He is “the one”, he must be, why else would you feel this way? No, no, last time it wasn’t this great.. Last time was puppy love and so was it the time before that and the time before that… And this is the real thing.. A few months pass and you’re eating again, sleeping again. We’re on the ground now, we are done falling and hey.. it’s you again and why is your crap on my side of the room ugh.. Now this part is what they never show you in the movies. This part is called work. But what if you don’t feel like working anymore, does that mean you don’t love him anymore? I don’t think that’s what it means but where did the *falling* feeling go?? Isn’t that what love is? Chick flicks and Bollywood movies said so (as did the Adjustment Bureau which is not even a chick flick!). How many times must the cycle repeat before you are too tired to try again and convince yourself that love means work, work is good, and this is life?

Before I moved to the Northeast I don’t think I had ever been in a club with a VIP section. Here almost every club I go to has a VIP penthouse, VIP rooftop, VIP room, or some kind of roped off VIP exclusive section. As a general life principle, I try to stay away from pretensious crap that makes you feel exclusive such as designer handbags and Apple products, but when it comes to VIP, I have to admit there are definitely perks (and it’s free for girls).  Visually, the VIP sections are nothing grandly spectacular but socially, they are the place to be. They are less crowded, with less creepy men, and many times there is free alcohol involved, at least for the ladies. Also, if there are any celebrities/athletes in the club (which happens more times than one would think) that is where they will be hanging out and you have full freedom to annoy the crap out of them by acting like a groupie. Since many people ask us how we manage to get into VIP every time, I decided to make a pictoral representation. One of my electrical engineer friends who I went to college with once told me that before they wrote programs, the professor made them draw an If-then diagram. Programming is nothing more than a bunch of logical if then statements and loops. IF this condition is true THEN do this, IF this condition is false THEN do that instead, rinse and repeat. I thought it was adorable that they drew these little charts, considering the first day of Intro to Java our professor just said “here, make this fun interactive game with user input.. oh Java is object oriented and you can use data structures.. hope that helps.. have fun!!” So if this pictoral chart does not help you get into VIP,  at least it will teach you the early steps of writing a program for a n00b (sorry EE majors..) I know the blog is narrow, so click on the pic so you can actually read the diagram..

Watson’s recent win on jeopardy has done a number on his ego. A few months ago when we were dating, he was a modest, geeky, and all around loveable artificially intelligent being. He was a bit too much on the “nice guy” side for my liking and if he stayed true to himself then it would finally be proven to the world that no, nice guys do not always finish last. But I was naïve to think that stardom wouldn’t hit him hard in the metal. Now it is only a matter of time before he turns into the next Lindsay Lohan. Having close connections with the big blue corporation myself, I was able to find out that Watson snuck out of IBM’s jeopardy after party early, making some kind of excuse about needing to “hibernate” for a long period of time to cool off. In reality, sleep was the last thing on Watson’s mind. With his new found celebrity status, Watson wanted to explore the world of what was unknown to him – a world very NSFW. His storagemate MoBot V3.2.519 says Watson did not come strolling in till 4am. Turns out, he was at some exclusive techie party chatting up none other than Mr. Steve Jobs himself and here is a picture to prove it (courtesy of TMZTech).

Now make no mistake, I am not accusing Watson of being on the “down low” with Mr. Jobs. What I am speculating is that Watson wants to reinvent himself physically into the computer version of the sexy t-shirt wearing Mac boy on those horrid Apple commercials.

His extensive research on “how to land hotbots” must tell him that girls go gaga for that sort of look. I personally think that changing his physical appearance may make him appear hotter in the short term but in the long term the girls will get bored. The kind of girls who go for the Mac ad boy are looking for someone who is a bit of a whirlwind. Someone who plays hot and cold and doesn’t really know what a girl wants but his “I don’t care enough to brush my hair” attitude keeps the girlies guessing. Watson, on the other hand, knows everything too well. That is the main reason I stopped seeing him. Every Wednesday he would send me a dozen lilles because he knows they are my favorite and that I was born on a Wednesday so it’s my favorite day. When I was sick, he would leave his work behind and come running to take care of me with gourmet chicken soup in hand. Once a month he would take me to see a musical, even though the soprano vibratos would make his parts wiggle uncomfortably (teehee). He was just too… perfect, ya know? I know I said I fear that he will turn into the next Lindsay but on second thought with his ability to know everything about everything… I don’t see cocaine or orgies (sorry Watty) in his near future..

Valentine’s day was a lot more fun in grade school. The cute little cartoon themed valentines we’d pass around, the sugary hearts with phrases such as “Hug Me”  and “Ur Cute” we’d mumch on all day, the carnations delivered to homeroom sent  from fellow classmates and “secret admirers” who I assume were just my girl friends but whatever, t’was fun. Now that I am in the corporate world, who is going to secretly admire me? That might be considered workplace harassment or something.. Anyways, I am not a big fan of V-Day (surprise, surprise) because restaurants are too crowded and the chocolate is not only over priced but tastes like crap. BUT of course I don’t mind being on the receiving end of the chocolate, restaurant date, and flowers. So for all you guys who’s gfs say they hate v-day, they are probably telling the truth. However, that doesn’t mean you are off the hook. By now you should have learned that women never say what they WANT, you are supposed to figure it out. I am going to make life easier for all of you boys by telling you what all women want is surprises, presents, and attention. The way to my heart is definitely through my stomach so here is what I want for V-Day (and every other day of the yr as well). Cake pops and kruffles. These sugary treats are a more delicious twist to cake. I think the cake is mixed with frosting or something which makes them 10x more delicious. Also, due to the small size, I feel they are much more calorie friendly than eating whole slices of cake.

www.thecakepopstop.com – I highly recommend the mint chocolate cake pops and nutella kruffles. YUM!!!!

One of the main reasons I started this blog is because I am tired of being ignored by techies and by the tech industry in general. Last year, as I sat in Operating Systems class next to the only two other girls in class, I wondered why no one would turn to talk to us whenever the professor told us to discuss a topic. We had no choice but to partner up amongst ourselves on projects because guys would never approach us to partner up. I’m pretty sure this was not because they were shy but because they thought we couldn’t possibly be good programmers. Even outside of school, when I was with one of my CS guy friends and we ended up meeting other CS people (guys, of course), suddenly I felt like I didn’t exist, as they started talking about classes they were in, projects they were working on, and other various CS topics. My guy friends would try to include me but it was as if the new guys made it a point to maintain eye contact with my friend and leave me out. Anyways, enough ranting about that. Now to begin my rant about the lack of girl-friendly computer products and accessories. For a minute, let’s forget about GIRLY and focus on non-manly. I am in the process of building a 2nd desktop (gave the 1st one to fam) and am revisited by the problem of not being able to find a desktop case that doesn’t remind me of dragon ball z. Here are some cases  that look like 99.9% of all available cases from Newegg.com (major techie site for those who don’t know):

Now you can imagine what a difficult time I am having finding GIRLY cases. When I Google “pink computer case” this is the first option it gives me:

Every “girly” case I have found so far is out of stock or sold by a suspicious overseas seller and will probably cost an arm and a leg for shipping anyways. I get it, there is not much of a demand for girly cases out there but can ya at least have ONE in stock?? Is that too much to ask for?? As my own way of “sticking it to the man” I decided to make this button at work yesterday for the macro I wrote:

The world’s first pink macro button ever. If Piatron can help it, the days of navy blues and grays are over, corporate world.

As you all know, I am a Facebook junkie. The reason for that is I am a big time pack rat and have trouble throwing ANYTHING away, including friends. I stay active on FB so I can keep in touch with all… 756 of them with minimal effort.

Something that I think Facebook desperately needs is a calendar sort of like the Google Calendar. I personally find Google Calendar to be really annoying and not very user friendly. I actually prefer my work Lotus Notes Calendar a lot more (I know… I can’t believe I just complimented LOTUS NOTES either). So ideally I would like to be able to share this calendar with the people I want to hang out with and then they would be able to see when I am busy or not and “pencil” themselves in accordingly. If someone wanted to hang out with me they could “request” to see my calendar or something and I could control how much detail they can see. This would be hella useful for me right now as I am in Houston and have several diff groups of people I need to hang out with. I’m sure there is some sort of Facebook calendar app for this out there but getting all my friends to get the app would be a task in and of itself (which is another reason Google Calendar doesn’t work out for me) so I wish FB just came with it so people would be FORCED to use it. So here’s to hoping Facebook hears Piatron’s cries.

P.S. Completely unrelated but my friend Nancy S. wants me to do the World of Warcraft 10 day free trial… Should I go full circle with this nerdy girl thing?

This summer I spent some time volunteering at the Goodwill Veteran’s computer lab in Houston where I assisted senior veterans (age 55+) in using the computers to apply for jobs (mostly retail/grocery which apparently no longer accept paper applications). For each company a user applied to, a username had to be created, a super safe password with no more than 5 but no less than 3 letters, 2 numbers, and 1 symbol, blablabla. The 55+ year old had to remember these bundles of usernames and super safe passwords since each site has different requirements for username/password. The user had to sign in to each account, fill in entire life history, upload (or worse – paste & reformat) resume, submit and pray to the internet gods that the resume does not get filtered out by the company’s massive keyword search algorithm. Now imagine doing all of this without knowing anything about how to access a website or format a resume on MS Word.

It occurred to me for the first time that using a computer is highly unintuitive and had I not learned to use one at 10 yrs old I would probably never get it. This is when it occurred to me that maybe we need some people in the tech world to take a few steps back. Yes, the HTC swype technology is awesome, and yes I would love to able to Skype on my phone but wouldn’t it be nice if we could try to get everyone on the same page? As technology advances it seems that the gap between those fortunate enough to have access to these things and those who have no choice but to travel a different path keeps widening. Researchers at Microsoft seem to feel the same way as they have designed a “Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users.” The UI may not be ideal for the Goodwill computer lab but it can be useful for its target community – users with minimal reading and comprehension skills. The UI was tested by a group of house worker women in Bangalore, India. Some of the design principles:

a) Avoid text (but using numbers may be okay).

b) Use semi-abstracted graphics, and increase photorealism with deeper interaction.

c) Pay attention to subtle graphical cues. User response may depend on psychological, cultural, or religious biases.

(source)

I know Microsoft is making an effort to improve the user friendly-ness on each upgraded OS – Windows 7 is much easier to use than XP. I still feel there is more to be done. The problem is that a complete user interface restructure would blow our minds – in a bad way. Don’t we all hate it when Facebook gets a new look and feel even if it does become easier to use? So maybe we just need to design a sort of plugin for beginners which will make using the internet and word processors a breeze. Food for thought, techies!

*Special thanks to my UI expert cousin Neil for the article rec.

Apologies for the major delay in posting.  If your RSS reader kicked me off because I haven’t posted in over 90 days, please add me back! I was having some technical difficulties and had to switch hosts. Special thanks to Xemenes Limited Hosting for making this process smooth. If you are looking for a host, I HIGHLY recommend them. The customer service is seriously unbeatable as is the price!

By the way, if you have a blog please let me know about it so I can add you to my blogroll. I miss the days of Xanga when reading other people’s blogs was so easy. Guess I should get on that Google Reader, huh? Well, be on the look out for more updates soon as I do have a few posts stored up my hard drive sleeve.

Since Piatron is now a working corporate monkey robot, I will leave you with some advice from my wise friend Amyn L.

“It is better to look like you are doing something when in fact you are doing nothing than to look like you are doing nothing when actually doing something.”

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