Simkhai [Grindr's CEO] Says Its Important To Fill Out Your Height, Weight, Ethnicity And Other Fields

Simkhai [Grindr's CEO] says it’s important to fill out your height, weight, ethnicity and other fields on Grindr. This will allow users who filter people on the app to find you. “If you don’t fill them out, you won’t come up in the search results,” says Simkhai.

Alternatively, you can leave your height, weight, and ethnicity blank and make sure that you never get a message from a person who filters by height, weight, and ethnicity.

(Quote from Grindr tips: CEO Joel Simkhai gives advice on optimizing your experience)

Maybe I should take more #selfies because I'm kinda hot and it'll get me more likes and followers

The Inn for Chronic Wanderers

Chronic wanderers are those who are never happy with staying in the same place for too long. They must experience working in one place, studying in another, exploring the endless urban jungles of the world… I started to feel this itch as well, which is one of the reasons I've decided to take my life in a new direction and move to Vancouver.

Vancouver seems to be a city of chronic wanderers. Most people I meet here came from another place: Some from just around the corner, some from the other side of the world, some locals who went and came back. Many of them are already planning their next venture.

When I was chatting with new people on dating sites before coming here the regular questions were "What do you do for work?", "Where do you live?", "What do you like doing for fun?". Here another question pops up: "How long are you staying?"

I've asked this question myself, especially after someone tells me that he came from afar. Or sometimes they just answer the question without being asked: "I'm moving to Toronto to jump start my career", "I'm going to travel the far east for a year", "I'm going to Amsterdam to learn how to speak Dutch".

I've been asked this question as well; "At least two years" is my standard reply. I'll be studying for a masters degree in Computer Science. What will happen after that is anyone's guess. Will I find someone here that would make me want to change my plans, whatever those will be after a while? Can this beast be tamed by finding the so called "one"?

I've often wondered how chronic wanderers handle love. Although I have met a few chronic wanderers who are in a relationship, I could never find a pattern. Sometimes their love is swift; ending just as fast as it started. Sometimes it's persistent; Keeping the relationship alive with Skype and facebook and expensive bi-monthly visits. Sometimes it's exclusive and sometimes open. Sometimes it's delusional and hurts one or both sides more than either are willing to admit. Sometimes it's more real than any other love.

“If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.” —Brawne Lamia

From Hyperion (1989), by Dan Simmons

My love/hate relationship with Christmas

My hate towards Christmas begins annually around October when Starbucks replaces their standard white cups with their festive Christmas cups. The cups don’t explicitly celebrate Christmas, they celebrate the “winter holidays”, but in reality they use a red/green theme with drawings of snow flakes, evergreen conifers, and triangular hats with a pompom at the top. Of course, none of these is individually a Christmas thing, but no person with the slightest shred of critical thinking will doubt which holiday Starbucks really wants us to celebrate.

The white-orange traffic cone logo of VLC (a video player desktop application) dons a Santa hat throughout December. Some people complained on the support forum that they find the icon offensive. The lead developer at first defended his position saying that the Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas (take a moment to let the irony of this statement sink in), completely dismissed the complaints as overly sensitive, and told people that if they don’t like it they can wait until the end of December or rewrite the app since it is open source. Later on they added a setting to disable “automatic icon changes”. The setting is hidden deep inside the advanced settings menu and is enabled by default. The developers assume that I want to celebrate Christmas, because they assume the only users that matter are Christians or have a Christian background.

Facebook added snow to the chat heads. Now I can’t chat with anyone without being reminded of Christmas. What if I don’t want to celebrate that holiday? What if I don’t live in the northern hemisphere, or a region where it snows at all?

Going outside is just as bad. Being surrounded constantly by Christmas trees and lights, hearing Christmas music being blasted from every speaker, reading the thinly veiled “holiday” greetings on shops, are all constant reminders that my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are only secondary here. I’m being tolerated, not respected or celebrated.

People who celebrate Christmas always try to play down the Christian part of it (have you noticed the shared stem of those two words?) and insists that it’s a Canadian holiday (or American, or whichever country you’re from) — in effect this just ties Christianity to the entire country even more.

Of course, Christmas isn’t inherently bad. People celebrate it by being with their family and friends. They exchange gifts, they enjoy good food, they are having fun.

I celebrated Christmas this year with my boyfriend in Paris. Everything around me was pretty, the food was incredible, my boyfriend and his family were happy and I received more gifts than I could imagine. I was genuinely happy. How could I complain?

But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m celebrating someone else’s holiday.

I use yellow sticky notes as bookmarks for the books that I read.

You should try it, it’s easier when your bookmark doesn’t accidentally fall when you open your book on the bus and lose your place in the book!

This one no longer sticks after being used in 4 books. The black dots are ink stains on the glue strip.

Isn’t this awesome? 😊