I have personal ads placed on both Cupid.com and Match.com and while there may have been a time when the two services were roughly equivalent, the latter is now superior in every way. It didn’t really matter to me when I just had an ad placed on Cupid.com (which is free), but I got a response to it and had to sign up in order to reply. Now that I’m a paying customer, I’m really steamed:

• Arbitrary and random censorship: in my ad, the word “someone” was “[CENSORED]” three times. What the hell?
• Cupid.com only allows one photo on a profile—one photo that they badly resize to 250×250 pixels and store with impossibly bad JPEG compression artifacts. You’d figure that with only one photo per profile, they could at least get it right.
• Terrible customer service. Only by correctly answering the right sequence of questions from their “help wizard” can I actually get a form that allows me to E-mail them a tech support question…
• … Which I had to do, because when I tried to forward a response I’d received to my own E-mail account, it arrived as a totally blank message.
• Totally unreliable server; at the present moment I’m unable to log in to my account. Even when I can, it’s rather slow; with so few users you would think they could at least make their server reliable and responsive.
• Their “auto-match” feature is idiotic. Apparently it only lists matches that it considers are “100%”… and they suggest increasing the number of matches by loosening one’s stated match criteria. Mine are extremely relaxed as it is!
• Extremely irritating “animated” banner ads on their website.

I think they must have blown their budget on their so-called “massive radio campaign” because although their radio ads are pretty funny, in every other conceivable way, Cupid.com sucks.

Past couple weeks have been busy but relatively uneventful… Saw the musical Urinetown in San Francisco. Attended a couple parties and barbeques. Otherwise, not much goin’ on—just another typical week in Silicon Valley, with typical weather (or lack thereof):