Dopp Juice

I usually try to keep my love life out of the public blogosphere, but this story just needs to be told. I have a date tomorrow night with a guy who is six feet tall and looks like a surfer dude. He enjoys talking about movies, society, philosophy, and politics, and is looking for someone mature and responsible. Sometimes he can get bored easily. Sometimes he smokes. He’s white, he’s college educated, and his religious beliefs are “Other.”

I also know his first name and his age, and that’s about it. We’re meeting at 7pm at a bar in San Francisco. And no, a friend didn’t set us up… unless you want to call CrazyBlindDate.com a “friend”…

CrazyBlindDate.com was started by the folks who brought us OkCupid — the free social networking / test-taking / dating site that’s given the pay sites like Match.com and eHarmony a run for their money. And so far, I’m impressed.

The premise is simple: you tell them a few things about yourself, who you’re looking to meet, where you’re willing to travel, and when you’re willing to do that. Meanwhile, other people are on the site doing the same thing. The Internet Brain lines you up, makes a match where requirements coincide, and asks both parties to confirm the date after showing basic information about the other person. This includes very blurry pictures of each other, as a teaser. Once you say yes, you’re committed to it.

Thirty minutes before the date, they open a phone relay so that you can send text messages to each other via CrazyBlindDate’s central number (you don’t actually get to see the other person’s phone number). This helps with the “spotting each other in a crowded bar” issue. Once you find each other, you’re on your own. Then, after the date, you provide feedback for each other on the site. This helps in coordinating and verifying future crazy blind dates.

Blind dates are inherently sketchy-sounding. Blind dates without mutual friends involved, even more so. That’s why I’m excited about this site: they’re taking something that has massive screw-up potential, and handling it well.

My favorite thing about the site is that it stays focused. When you get there, they don’t start by asking for your login info; they start by asking what city you’d like to go on a date in (sorry — it’s only active for Austin, Boston, NYC, and SF Bay right now). They then walk you through a full dating wizard, convince you that yes, this really could work, and get you emotionally invested in the process. THEN, at the end, after you’ve already checked your schedule to make sure you can have a date tomorrow night, they suggest signing up to actually make it happen. It’s clean, friendly, American-buddy-style language that sets an encouraging tone and asserts some basic etiquette. There’s nothing extraneous thrown in to distract. Not even any ads. And the service is free.

Since the site is pretty new, it’s not overrun with a massive dating pool yet, and finding specific kinds of people at specific times can be hard. I didn’t specify age, gender, or any other personal details. I also set my region to cover most of San Francisco, and I listed wide time slots. That seemed to do it.

What does Surfer Dude know about me? He knows that I have a shaved head, I like to talk about technology and poetry, I’m really just testing out this website, and I’m not planning on sleeping with him (let’s just get that out of the way now!).

The rest will come out over a beer tomorrow night.

Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it.

Tags: Adventures, crazyblinddate, my story, relationships, Research, social media

You may have noticed that my last post was about having a full plate. You may have also noticed that my last post was nearly three weeks ago. These are not coincidental. They are quite related.

But while I have a few free moments on “Indigenous People’s Day” (or “Columbus Day,” if you live in a less rebelliously liberal part of the United States), I’d like to give a quick summary of my recent technodrama and its unexpected happy endings.

First, Gmail. I posted awhile ago about getting locked out of my gmail account. Fortunately, I received some very valuable feedback from a reader who has now become a very valuable friend to me (yay for broken tools creating new connections!) and was creatively persistent with Google. Forty-two days after the incident, I finally received an apology from them, along with instructions on how to now access to my account. My Gmail account is alive again! The irony is that I had forty days and forty nights to completely detach from it and pronounce it dead. It feels sort of like a zombie now. (A zombie that wants to eat my brains.)

Second, the Treo. Have I told you about the physical health of my beloved Palm-driven cell phone? Let me put it this way: every single person on my web development team has been threatening for more than six months now to steal it from me and destroy it so I will be forced to get a new one.

More specifically, the antennae is held on by a paperclip. That paperclip is held on by green electrical tape. The earpiece has broken off. The holder for the stylus is so loosened that I’ve now lost three of them and have given up on carrying one. The front face plate has separated from the back of the machine and is being held on by a single loose screw (and the paperclipped antennae, when it happens to be attached). The RAM is so overloaded that it takes 5-10 seconds to load the dialing screen when I’m ready to make a phone call.

BUT IT WORKS FINE! I DON’T SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT!

The laughable part is that I’m paying for full insurance on the machine (which is all of $6 a month), and I could have claimed it for repairs or replacement a long time ago, given its condition… even without my coworkers first stealing it from me and throwing it into the bay.

The camel’s back broke yesterday, though, when I dropped the machine on the pavement and cracked the front face plate. Now it took four fingers clutching the machine from three different sides to hold its pieces together well enough to get a signal. It still worked — no, really, IT STILL WORKED! — but okay, yeah, it was probably time to take advantage of the insurance.

This morning, I did a final hot-sync with my computer to back up the data… which turned out to be quite an undertaking because the hot-sync port is mostly broken, too. The task required propping the machine halfway up on the edge of a notebook and weighting down the cradle port with a pair of heavy metal scissors, stepping back, and holding my breath for ten minutes, praying that the precarious sculpture wouldn’t move before the sync was complete. It took a few tries to get it right.

Then I walked into the Sprint Repair Center at 4th and Folsom, slapped my busted Treo down on the counter, and announced, “My Treo is exploding in on itself and eating its own brain. I have insurance. What are my options?” The man ran some diagnostics (which amounted to dismantling the tape and paper clip and watching it fall apart in his hands like some kind of gag gift), and returned with a concerned look on his face.

“We can’t repair this for you,” he said apologetically.

“Oh,” I said with disappointment. “But I have insurance…”

He interrupted me. “We’ll have to replace it for you.”

“I am TOTALLY OKAY with you replacing it for me,” I reassured him. “COMPLETELY FINE WITH IT. But, um, how long will it take? Do I need to go without a phone for a few days?”

He pulled out a new Treo and handed it to me. It was already connected to my phone number. “Here you go,” he said.

“That’s it? I don’t need to sign anything? Or pay a deductible?”

“Nope. That’s it. If you’d like, you can wait ten minutes and I’ll transfer your contacts.”

“No, that’s fine, I have it synced on my computer,” I said.

And I ran home gleefully, laughing and skipping in puddles and dreaming about all the beautiful ways this new phone will fall apart on me over the next year.

Ah, beginnings!

One quiet Sunday afternoon just a few weeks ago, in a bizarre display of things-that-are-not-surprising-in-San-Francisco, groups of people on trains all over the city spontaneously burst into Christmas carols. It was August.

It was supposed to be about happy jolly fun. Then it turned into a political act about free speech. And then it turned back into happy jolly fun.

The story is covered at the SF Shenanigans blog.

And I’m only sharing this because it’s interesting. I had nothing to do with it. I swear. That isn’t me in those pictures. Really. I’m a good upstanding citizen who doesn’t create anachronistic merrymaking chaos.

Seriously.

Stop looking at me like that.

You believe me, don’t you?

I love O’Reilly. Their books are wonderful and their conferences are top-notch. But I have a prejudice against conferences that cost more than $1,000. I don’t go to them. There are plenty of cheaper conferences throughout the year that are more accessible to the people who actually use and build the web, and I go to those. O’Reilly can have its CEOs; I’d rather hang out with the entrepreneurs and freelancers who create free useful tools for their community. Life is just better that way.

(Nostalgia check: remember the Web 2.2. Unconference that I helped the Social Media Club organize in November? The tickets cost $32.95, and totally coincidentally it was held the same week as O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Conference, the tickets to which cost $3,295.00.)

So thank $deity (as Whump would say) that O’Reilly finally caught on. They’re hosting the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, and no, it’s not less than a grand to go, but they are allowing in their hipster open source little brother, Web 2.Open — a free side-conference that will be going on simultaneously.

It’s a smart move on O’Reilly’s part. They’re pulling in people who make a difference, and whom they normally wouldn’t have any sway over. I’m hearing rumors that some people are ditching the Big Conference altogether in favor of the Open, because really, that’s where all the action’s gonna be.

Consider this your insider’s tip and go register now before the slots close. Click “Expo” for your ticket type and enter this discount code: webex07em . It will be free. No credit card info requested at all.

Oh yeah, and it’s in San Francisco, so round them locals up!

I have some old Writ buddies in town visiting right now, and they were asking about local culture. I told them about Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge, the pirate store….“The pirate store?”"Yeah. The pirate store. 826 Valencia. You know, where you can pick up an extra wooden leg, eye patches, parrot food…”::blank stare::”Well, we’re a port city, you know, so it makes sense to have a pirate supply store. You can’t get everything via your looting and your pillaging. Sometimes you need to swing by 826 Valencia for your collapsable telescopes and such.” “So… there’s a pirate store in San Francisco.”"Yeah… but maybe you know it better as the sister store to the superhero store in New York City.”"Let me guess. Where you can pick up an extra cape?”"Exactly! Sometimes they get tattered by passing airplanes, you know? It’s really a nuisance.”"Of course… So let me get this straight. There’s a pirate store in San Francisco?“”Yes!“”You guys really do live on another planet, don’t you…”