I subscribed to Consumer Reports’ website a few years ago in order to help make some sound purchasing decisions, and after a year, I let the subscription lapse. Since then, they’ve been sending me plaintive emails like, “Jemaleddin, we want you back!” with promises of discounts.

And you know what? I’d be happy to go back – and at full price! – if they’d fix the problems that made me leave. In fact, all I want for them to do is to take their own advice.

1. Prioritize Reliability

Consumer reports will often rate the same car that Motor Trend or Automobile magazine picks as “car of the year” as un-buyable based on reliability. It’s a tough stance, but it’s fair: a car that doesn’t run isn’t a car, it’s a driveway art installation. Getting the prettiest art installation on your block is fine, but getting to work is more important for most people.

In the same way, a website that only lets you log in one out of every three attempts isn’t a website. It’s more like a slot machine. Which would be bad enough, but their site logs you out every time you switch to a different section. And at random. I kept wondering if it was me – Mac? Fail. PC? Fail. IE? Fail. Firefox? Fail. Get your site in order, folks!

2. Minimize Advertising

Consumer’s Union doesn’t take money for advertising in their magazine or on their site. Taking money from GM or Black and Decker might put them in a position where they feel like they have to provide good reviews to substandard products in order to keep the money coming it. It’s tough, but it’s fair.

But that leaves them without the ad revenue that other publishers rely on to make ends meet. They make up for that by stuffing everything they send you full of ads for their own products and services. I’m glad that they offer new and used car pricing reports – I’ve used them in the past, and will always get one in the future when I buy a car – but I don’t need to hear about them on every page. Tone down the sales pitch!

3. Be a Good Citizen

One of the reasons that Consumer Reports has such a great track record is that they see what they’re doing as working for the public good. More than just a magazine, they employ lobbyists and outreach workers to protect consumers from bad products, services and companies.

Being a good citizen on the web means putting your data out there where it can be linked to, and linking to other sites for information you don’t provide. ConsumerReports.org does a good job of linking to outside websites, but any site that wants to link to them runs into their pay wall. This kind of one-way information sharing goes against the spirit of the web, and it certainly doesn’t help get their message out to more consumers.

JEMALEDDIN COLE,

Your resume was received for employment consideration by AOL LLC. (“AOL”). AOL is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other classification prescribed by applicable law.

Two thoughts:

a) I know I didn’t send my resume to AOL, so which of you jokers was it?

b) In the headers I see: mailed-by: gmail.com – NATURALLY.

Marissa Mayer in the Times:

At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from? Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet as part of a program to foster in-house talent. In essence, math is used to solve a human problem: How do you predict whether an employee has the potential for success?

A scrum of executives sit around a table, laptops in front of them, as they sort through résumés, college transcripts and? quarterly reviews. The conversation is unemotional, at times a little brutal.

One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

Evan Williams in the Times:

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

[...]

I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

Evan Williams, for those unaware, sold Blogger to Google, and now Google is doing everything it can to buy his new company Twitter. ? It looks like he’s not good at all things. Who would you want working for you?

So we’ve covered the failures of computer dating pretty well: hateful algorithms that match you with the exact opposite of what you were looking for, and boilerplate come-ons that don’t exactly seem heartfelt. What about successes?

After experimenting with Match and eHarmony I began to despair. Would I only meet conservatives and robots on the Internet? ? I was also disappointed when I tried PlentyOfFish, and worried that free sites would only get you what you paid for. I’m not saying that everyone on that site is ugly and scary. I’m saying that when I last checked 9 months ago, everyone on the site was ugly and scary.?

But if there’s one great thing about the Internet, it’s that there’s a lot of it. Eventually I found OkCupid (OKC or OkStupid to the locals), which has an interesting method for matching. Instead of having some 113-question personality test that’s about as useful as a star chart, users of the site can submit their own questions. When you answer a question, you also fill out how you would want your ideal date to answer it, and how important his or her answer would be.

That’s confusing, so let’s try an example. One of the questions might be, “Do you think spanking children is a good parenting strategy?” Possible answers might be,? “No,”? “Yes,” “Hell YES,” and “CPS has me on speed-dial.” So you’d pick the correct answer (obviously, C), and then decide? how you’d want that special somebody to answer (this time also C), and how strongly you felt about their answer on a scale from “Not at all important” to “Mandatory.” (Mandatory for this example, natch.)

After answer a few dozen questions, you can judge how well you’re suited to another user in three ways. The first is how well they match what you want in a date, the second is how well they match what you yourself answered, and the third is how often you vehemently disagree (like if somebody answered A above – yeesh). These are Match/Friend/Enemy, and it works awfully well. By going for quantity of questions over quality, and by allowing you to decide what you want in a mate as opposed to what some bullshit test-writer thinks is best for you, you get awfully good matches.?

Best of all, they had the best looking selection of singles. By a long shot. Seriously. Not that I’m Mr. Superficial, but if you’re looking for a date you don’t find attractive, you’re Doing It Wrong®.

I created a profile that expressed exactly how excited I was to be on a dating site (“As a widower raising a teenage step-daughter and a son with autism, I don’t have time for you, and even if I did, you’d be better off dating a wood-chipper”), and started looking around. I? was ? immediately contacted by a young lady who wanted to let me know that she was quite talented at performing a particular sex act, and that if I EVER NEEDED A FRIEND I should contact her. ? At which point I discovered how to block people.?

In searching for dates (26-36, within 25 miles, no god-botherers), there was one girl who stood out immediately: cute, educated, good taste in music and a match of 91/91/0. I know that you don’t have any context for those numbers, but trust me, it’s ridiculous. To agree with somebody 91% of the time, to have them be what you’re looking for 91% of the time and to have no areas of disagreement? Crazy. Especially when you factor in that I’m… a difficult person to match.

I know that everyone is a beautiful and unique snowflake, but just like some animals are more equal than others, some people are more unique than others. And let’s face facts, you don’t meet many red-headed single fathers named Jemal? who are both ex-military and ultra-liberal. And you could say that I’m a teensy bit opinionated.?

[It's not that I think that I'm always right. I just think that I'm almost always better informed than the average person, and therefore people should shut the hell up and listen to me, dammit. Is that so wrong?]

But that number is even more impressive, because OkCupid gives you another number: your highest possible match. Based on the number of questions we each answered abd the total number of questions available (several thousand) my highest possible match with this young lady was 95%. Which means that in reality, we were closer to a 96% match overall with 0 disagreement. See what I mean? Ridiculous.

Back to the story: 91/91/0 was a stupid-crazy match number, and the girl it represented seemed really cool. Unfortunately, her profile was even more discouraging than mine: “Taking a break, back in a few months.” Damn.?

The site does offer a lot amusements for those who aren’t looking to ask anyone out. The questions themselves are fun to answer, and you get little badges in your profile based on trends in your answers. So naturally, I got “Less pure,” “More Kinky,” and “More Law Abiding.” (Dirty, but not disgusting!)? Also, ? there are a whole slew of silly tests to be taken, and who doesn’t want to compare “Which Firefly character are you?” results with potential dates?

They also have their own blogging setup, and since I wasn’t exactly ready to tell the world (okay, the 6 of you who read this blog) that I was poking around on a dating site, I wrote a few entries there (two of them formed Parts 1 and 2 of this series). ? Eventually I wrote an entry about smoking. I had gone back to smoking in November of last year, but I’d already started the process of quitting. I’d cut back, seen my doctor, gotten a prescription to help me quit, and started warning my friends and co-workers that I was about to be an unbearable asshole (okay, MORE of an unbearable asshole). But if I’m in this smoking limbo – not quite a smoker, not quite a non-smoker, what should I put in my profile? And who better to answer this question than the OkCupid hivemind?

Lo and behold, who should respond, but good old 91/91/0! For somebody who was supposedly taking a break, she was awfully active on the site. (Not that the guy who didn’t expect to be dating until 2009 should talk.) So I messaged her.

A few dozen emails later, she let me know that she was going to have to retreat from messing around on the internet because she had to finish proof-reading a paper she was writing. I asked if I could help and the next thing you know, I’m spending my evening reading through a bunch of stuff in a field I don’t really understand. Math? Rule of Law? Statistics? After a few hours of this, it occurs to me: I must REALLY like this girl.

So I asked her out. One platonic lunch later, we were dating. She introduced me to Korean food, I forced her to spend time in the suburbs. I made her watch horror movies, she introduced me to the Wire. She met my crazy family, I met her… ? family.

Nine months later ? – possibly while you were reading this – I married her.?

That Internet thing is really starting to work out, eh?

Like many unfortunate people, I spent years of my life using Windows PCs. Finally freed of the burden of constantly updating, fixing, scanning and re-installing them, I’ve given up on keeping track of how to do anything more than the bare minimum with Windows. And now that’s come back to bite me in the ass.

I have to use Windows at work – as do most people with office jobs. My work computer was recently upgraded with a pretty nice Samsung LCD monitor, and I switched from standard font smoothing to ClearType. That made all of the text so spindly and spidery that I could barely read it, so I turned off font smoothing entirely, and it was fine. Not good looking, but fine.

Today I made the mistake of loading up my blog in Google Chrome on my work computer to show a co-worker a trick I knew, and I was horrified by the way the fonts looked. I usually only deal with my blog from my Macs, so I wasn’t prepared for the horror:

Ghastly, no? I switched to IE and Firefox and discovered the same thing. Horrifying. I then tried Safari for Windows which uses its own font drawing software:?

Well, that’s certainly better. Or at least what I’m used to and what I meant for the site to look like when I last worked on it. I tried Microsofts ClearType tuner, both online and as a Control Panel tool, and while I could darken things up to a point where they weren’t horrible, I couldn’t make them look much better, and nothing I did seemed to have any effect in any of the web browsers.

So my question is, how do I get Chrome or Firefox to look more like that? And since I’m presuming that the fonts are this ugly for most people, should I be switching to sIFR or somemthing? Because that’s just heinous.

I like how the red link color for pages that don’t yet exist on Wikipedia can give you some idea of where things are going in a story. For instance, when you read this in the Art Alexakis entry:

Alexakis had two respondents,? Craig Montoya? and? Scott Cuthbert. The trio became the first incarnation of Everclear.

…you know that something like this is coming:

After Cuthbert was replaced by? Greg Eklund, the band spent the better part of a decade as a dominant act on? alternative rock? radio.

Oh Scott, you never stood a chance.

Hey Michael,

Love the site. The new redesign is going great. Simple, clean. Really pretty. And I hope Habari is working out for you – if you ever get that nailed down, I’d love to switch too! But could you do me a favor and put up some kind of contact link or email address?

The reason is that I’d love to talk to you about how your feed is messed up. Instead of ? getting HTML, it’s spitting out the textile/markdown you’re using to create the entries. I’d even volunteer to help you figure out what’s causing it. But you know, there’s no way to contact you.

Best of Luck,

Jemal

One of the great things about having had this blog for so long is that I get contacted by a lot of PR people because they want to give me free stuff. The downside is that I get contacted by a lot of PR people who want to waste my time and get me to sell their shit for them. Yesterday it was somebody who wanted a link exchange, today it’s some idiot who wants me to link to his poll.

So here’s what I’ll be sending PR Flacks in the future:

Thank you for your interest in TangleBones Brand Premium Taco Seasonings®! While we are not currently taking orders, we appreciate your excitement for our broad range of products and hope that you’ll join us in taking a bite out of hunger with our delicious new flavors! Go online to our site now to vote for your favorite!

• Spicy Chipotle Chicken
• Zesty Poblano Pork
• Bold Banana Pepper Beef
• Eat a Shit Sandwich and Die!

Vote early! Vote often!

Thanks again!

Jemal Cole
Director of Marketing
TangleBones
1414 Dirty Spammer Drive
Alameida, CA, 91919

Further details about how computers suck, especially when they pretend to be human:

I don’t think the people eHarmony.com matched me with are even real. Some selections from the suggestions they emailed me (emphasis mine):

Kim (Alexandria): It’s important for me to make new friends, and to keep physically fit.
amy (Abingdon): It’s important for me to be in settings where I will meet new people, and to keep physically fit.
Amy (Baltimore): It’s important for me to create romance in a relationship, and to keep physically fit.

Really, ladies? Really? Guess what went in my profile?

Jemal (Glen Burnie): It’s important for me to hunt you robots down and kill you before you and Skynet take over the world on judgement day and to keep physically fit.

Here’s the sad part: these three “ladies” were sent to me sequentially within 20 minutes. Great minds think alike, eh?

So here’s a little story about how computers suck:

As some of you know, I’m the kind of person who likes to agonize about things for 9 months before doing anything about them. Buying a car? Gotta research, gotta test drive, gotta agonize. Getting a loan? More agonizing. But what you may also know is that I’m also a multitasker.

So I figured that I wasn’t planning on even thinking about the concept of dating until December or later. I didn’t think you should go on a date when all of your stories start with, “my late wife once said,” or “when my wife died,” and your interests and hobbies are “grieving” and “crying” respectively. But at the same time, I knew that when I finally decided to do some dating, I was going to have to agonize about that for a while. So why not grieve and agonize at the same time?

Add that to the fact that a friend at work suggested that I look around at Match.com to find people who are even more pathetic than me to laugh at, and guess who had a profile? Hey, you got it in one!

It wasn’t much of a profile since it actually said, “I’m not looking to date anybody and am only using this to check out profiles – please don’t talk to me.” Not that this prevented people who live a thousand miles a way and look surprisingly like escorts from trying to send me messages.?

Where this becomes interesting to you (let’s hope) is that every so often the site sends you a list of people who “match” you. And this is fun in itself, because you get to play the “next level” game. This is like when you’re a kid and the doctor says “this won’t hurt” and you know that means it’ll hurt a little. And if he says, “it’ll hurt a little” you know it’s gonna hurt a lot. Right? Well when you look through the profiles you discover that “slender” means “a few extra pounds,” “a few extra pounds” means “overweight,” and “overweight” means, “HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL DID YOU EAT? LET GO OF MY LEG!”

That’s not to say that you don’t get all types. In fact, there are some cute folks on Match.com. Case in point, one of the first pics they sent me wasn’t too shabby, but the angle was sketchy. People have learned every trick in the book to hide neck fat, etc. I certainly did. But regardless, she was an okay looking girl. That’s not the problem. The problem was the second pic. The “match” that they sent me? That match is HUGGING former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich. Republican poster-boy Newt. Conservative-to-the-core Newt. How the hell am I matched with a girl that would a) go to one of his signings and b) not stab him in the face?

Which brings us to problem 2: her username was snowflakeGOP. Now the GOP is obviously to indicate that she’s a Republican. And hey, that’s fine and dandy. Odd that they matched her with somebody who listed himself as “ultra-liberal,” but whatever. The problem is that once you identify as conservative, snowflake starts making me nervous. Are you interested in winter sports? I don’t see that in your profile. Or are you calling attention to your whiteness? Why would you do that? OH SHIT ARE YOU SOME NEO-NAZI?!!?! WHAT THE HELL?!?

So there’s my review of Match.com: they set you up with your enemies.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? Dot com, natch.

Update: it has a feed, of course.

Here’s what was waiting for me in my feed reader this morning:

1. The Sun mocks Tito, Jenna and the little tike
2. The Sun mocks Tito, Jenna and the little one
3. Shamrock says brother beat Kimbo
4. Rogers shreds Shamrock and calls Kimbo the ‘Black Yeti’
5. Shamrock says brother beat Kimbo
6. Shamrock says brother beats Kimbo
7. Rogers calls out Kimbo, shreds Shamrock

I don’t know if this is a Google Reader problem or a Yahoo! problem, but none of my other feeds do this, so I’m presuming Yahoo! still has some work to do.

As a side note, there are now officially a million and one sites copying BloodyElbow.com’s “Quote of the Day” format. Strangely, even as I change the format, other sites change right with us. The fact is “Quote of the Day” isn’t the most original format ever, but no one in the MMA world was doing it before us. I was doing it before I was even writing for this site. So, the next time you see it, just know where it got started.

Right on, Luke!

During the writers’ strike, Joss Whedon and some assorted members of his family wrote a musical comedy called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, filmed it with Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, and then streamed it for free on the Internet a few weeks ago. That’s right – the streaming is over, and you probably missed it.?

But don’t despair! You can buy each of the 3 about-15 minute episodes for $1.99 each from iTunes, get a season pass for all 3 episodes for $3.99 from iTunes, or watch the whole thing for free on Hulu. I, of course, didn’t know about the Hulu link until after I’d felt pretty smug about getting the $4 deal, so I can’t imagine how smug you’ll feel about seeing it for free.

And yes, it’s just as good as you’re imagining it will be, and for Buffy fans there are extra surprises in the form of cameos by David Fury (Mustard Man!) and Marti Noxon (Parking Ticket Girl!) who did such fine work in Once More with Feeling, the best musical of the last 20 years.

Truer words have never been written:

The purpose of the Internet is to make in-jokes more obscure.

I might be biased though, since they’re my words. Regardless, I bet you’d like an example!

Unless you’ve beaten Guitar Hero III or are a fan of “extreme power metal,” you’ve probably never heard of DragonForce or their first big hit, “Through the Fire and Flames.” The video is very impressive, at least if you’re into super-fast simultaneous guitar solos – and have 5 minutes to kill. I’d recommend that if you truly want to appreciate it, don’t look at the lyrics. Seriously.

But with two virtuoso metal guitarists, it lends itself to the obvious mashup: replacing the audio with Dueling Banjos.

Another good meme is the SomethingAwful-inspired technique of making videos where a movie scene is ruined by an inappropriate soundtrack. It’s amazing how easily and completely you can ruin Terminator 2 with this technique and a little celebration. And screwing up Contact is as easy as 3-2-1. Oh, 1980′s educational science programming, how I loved you.

But you know what we call that? Not obscure enough. How about ruining Deliverance by replacing Dueling Banjos with Through the Fire and Flames? That, dear friends, is the Internet proving its worth. All it needs now is an LOLcat joke and for somebody to cite it as a good example of FAIL and we’ll have achieved pefection.

People love lists. They never want to read an article about how to actually do anything: They want to read the 10 ways to do it. Or the 5 worst places to be when they’re doing it. Or the 3 most famous people that ever did whatever it is they want to know about doing. Fine. I’ll play along.

Here’s the Top 1 Web Navigation Design Tips: Don’t use Flash for navigation.

See what happened here?

I just wanted to open New Balance’s “Where to Buy” link in a new tab. But what do I get instead? The Flash right-click menu. And it’s not even as though the link does something inside the flash movie: it takes me to an entirely different page on the site! So why can’t I open it in a new tab? Because – and this is me guessing – they really loved moving the words I was trying to click on 5 pixels to the right.

But look: I’m not some anti-Flash? curmudgeon! I love Youtube as much as the next guy. Hell, I’ve done my time building Flash sites. Some of the nifty stuff Chad and I were doing 8 years ago still isn’t common practice today. So believe me when I tell you: there’s a time and a place for Flash. This just isn’t it.

So here’s the deal, my designer friends: I’m not buying your shit when you interfere with using the browser the way it’s meant to be used. I’m done putting up with your bogus non-standard navigation. You’ve lost my business. How hard can it be to remember one rule?

The checkout process at TeeFury ends with this lovely bit of interface design:

Oh, they say it’s unnecessarily large, but I love it all the same. Just what a checkout needs: giant easy-to-read buttons with funny copy. A+!

I also love their concept: one tee-shirt a day, up to 3 shirts per customer, $9 each, and $2 shipping. Couldn’t be simpler. And obviously I picked up the inaugural tee for me and Sierra. Now all they need is a feed.

Oh Amazon, how did I live without your deals in my feed reader for so long? Such savings! Such convenience! And $0 off? Have you been reading my diary?

Dear Yahoo!,

If you can’t stop filling my feed reader with duplicate entries, it’s going to become even harder to take you seriously. I don’t know what’s wrong with the backend of Yahoo! Sports, but I’m getting the same entries 3 and 4 times – and not even because they’ve been changed.

So knock it off. You’ve got enough on your plate, what with half the company fleeing. No need to drive off your remaining users.

Thanks,

Jemal

I think it’s clear how much I love Threadless. I mean, look at all the shirts I’ve ordered from them! In fact, I think there are a couple missing. And not a week goes by where I don’t see something I like. But they’re not the only internet t-shirt outlet I like. And – don’t tell them I said this – they’re not the only community-fueled internet t-shirt site I purchase from.

Design By Humans, which is meant to be a more designery version of Threadless, has been doing some pretty amazing things with shirts. I bought Sierra Blackbird’s Attackin’ in the Dead ‘O’ Night, and we both love it (though I’m not fond of the grocers’ apostrophe). And I couldn’t be happier with Robot Attack and its metallic ink.

But the point of all of this is that if you’re a t-shirt nut the way I am, you can save 20% at DBH with the referral code “jemaleddin” (creative, no?) between now and July 6. There are all sorts of prizes for people that get lots of referrals – MacBooks, iPhones, iTunes gift cards – but I’m just happy that I can help get somebody 20% off on cool shirts – and I hope that’s enough to push them over the edge into buying something like Concentric Downpour. Enjoy!