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It's been exactly 7 months since I signed up to the online dating website match.com. During that period I contacted 11 girls who I felt I had quite a bit in common with. Of those 11, 2 replied, 9 ignored me and the 2 that replied ignored me on the next message.

I haven't really been too serious about dating until this summer and I wouldn't even consider it that serious (Yes I'm a hypocrite).

After a similar experience with two girls, whom I got their numbers from local bars, I began to wonder what life might be like if I were attractive?

Building My Fake Profile

Before building my fake profile, I decided to do an inventory of girls between 22 and 32 in an 80 mile radius around my region. Check out my data source for more on this. What I discovered from this data is what the "average" girl is like in my area:

Average Girl

• Smokes: No
• Drinks: Social Drinker
• Religion: Catholic/Christian-Other
• Has Kids: No
• Wants Kids : Definitely
• Marital Status: Never Married
• Exercise: 1-2 or 3-4 times per week
• Age: 25
• Education: Some college, associate degree or bachelors degree
• View my data

My Test Profile

With this data in hand, I created a male with all of these attributes:

• Smokes: No
• Drinks: Social Drinker
• Religion: Christian-Other
• Has Kids: No
• Wants Kids : Definitely
• Marital Status: Never Married
• Exercise: 3-4 times per week
• Age: 27
• Education: bachelors degree

Picking a Profile Picture

I just discovered that one of the most important things on an online dating site is the profile picture. When I was creating my fake profile, my most important criteria was finding a series of pictures of an attractive male model, especially if some of the pictures are lower in quality and probably not done using a professional camera.

After scouring through modelmayhem.com search results (and being subjected to more pictures of shirtless guys than a guy should ever have to see in a lifetime) I found my guy.

Included with the picture to the right were numerous low quality, non-professional photos available for me to use. Excellent!

After running my main profile picture through Photoshop to degrade its quality and not make it look so professional, I was ready to move on to registering!

Final Result

Click on the image below to view the profile in its entirety.

The Results?

After creating the profile, match.com gave me some grief and rejected the username I had chose. I forgot about the profile for another couple weeks and then a few days ago I decided to check on its status and I was able to get it approved.

Again, I forgot about the profile for a couple of days and decided to check it again recently. I WAS STUNNED.

The fake profile had exceeded my own personal profile in every measurable statistic in a mere 4 days to my profile's 212 days. Based on those numbers, the profile I had created was 53 times better than my own.

By The Numbers

Out of single guy boredom, I decided to do a quick comparison of the two profiles. The first set of data below is a 4 day to 212 day comparison of the two profiles (essentially their lifetime). The purpose of this data is to show how the fake profile exceeded my own in a matter of 4 days.

The second set of data shows an apples-to-apples comparison of the profiles by using a weekly average.

Desirability of Match.com profiles (life of profiles)

	My Profile (212 days)	Fake Profile (4 days)
Messages from Girls	1 message	9 messages
Girls Messaged	11 messages	0 messages
Girls Winked At Me	3 winks	16 winks
Girls Favorited Me	1 favorite	1 favorite
Profile Views	184 views	214 views
Desirability of Match.com profiles (per week)
	My Profile (per week)	Fake Profile (per week)
Messages from Girls	0.03 messages per week	15.75 messages per week
Girls Winked At Me	0.10 winks per week	28.00 winks per week
Girls Favorited Me	0.03 favorites per week	1.75 favorites per week
Profile Views	6.08 views per week	374.00 views per week

Graphs!

From this data I created two nice looking graphs to illustrate how far away from attractive I am. The disparity is pretty obvious.

And here is a graph showing profile views per day of the two profiles. Again the disparity is pretty obvious.

Messaging Girls

I've had a heck of a time getting girls to read and reply to my messages on match.com. I only had 1 girl message me the entire 212 days and only 2/11 reply to my first message. With my fake profile, I had 9 girls messaged me within a mere 4 days. Two girls I replied to and one replied back within 15 minutes and the other the next day. It's obvious the girls are much more engaged with my fake profile than my real profile.

Lessons Learned

I was absolutely shocked by the disparity between the two profiles! I mean sure, the fake profile was probably close to the "perfect profile" but I don't feel like I'm the elephant man. I certainly don't feel 53 times uglier/less worthy than the fake profile, but that's what the numbers bare.

I used to think that girls just didn't like interacting with guys much on dating sites, but I've now completely eliminated that theory. I also used to think that my profile picture wasn't all that important and that my profile information could make up for a less than perfect picture. Wrong! In my fake profile, I wrote nothing about myself and yet girls were grasping for straws trying to make conversation with me.

Finally, I learned that despite what we're told about girls (and their apparent priority of personality over appearance) girls care more about looks and are just as shallow as their male counterparts.

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Re-Education

Before jumping to the solution, we should first re-review the font-weight CSS property. Historically speaking, we've used font-weight: bold; and occasionally font-weight: normal; to reset an element's font-weight. Eventually numeric values were added that allow us to pick font-weights ranging from 100 to 900.

Numeric font-weights definition from Mozilla's development network is as follow:

Numeric font weights for fonts that provide more than just normal and bold. If the exact weight given is unavailable, then 600-900 use the closest available darker weight (or, if there is none, the closest available lighter weight), and 100-500 use the closest available lighter weight (or, if there is none, the closest available darker weight). This means that for fonts that provide only normal and bold, 100-500 are normal, and 600-900 are bold.

Font-Weight Keyword Values

Like other property values in CSS, there are also keywords that can be used for font-weight. Historically, we've all been using bold as the de-facto font-weight, but each keyword behind the scenes maps to a numeric value.

font-weight: lighter

One font weight lighter than the parent element (among the available weights of the font).

font-weight: normal

The normal keyword corresponds to the numeric value of 400

font-weight: bold

The bold keyword corresponds to the numeric value of 700

font-weight: bolder

One font weight darker than the parent element (among the available weights of the font).

The Solution: Reseting Element's Default Font Weight

Historically, there have been a handful of elements in HTML that are rendered as bold by default. In IE9, if you happen to nest any of these elements within another bold element, the double-bold font effect occurs.

Below we have a TH element with a H3 nested inside of it. This will trigger the double bold effect in IE9:

<table> <tr> <th><h3>Table Column Heading</h3></th> </tr> </table>

View Example of This In IE9 »

What appears to be happening in IE9 when nesting bold elements, is it's changing their font-weight from bold/700 to bolder/900.

To overcome this undesired effect, simply reset all of the standard bold elements back to font-weight: bold:

th, b, strong, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-weight: bold; }

Voila! Problem solved!

Further Reading

• Bugzilla - strong and b are cumulative with Arial
• W3C - New: b and strong should be font-weight: bolder, not font-weight: bold. IE9 RC, Firefox 4b11, and WebKit all agree, with only Opera differing.
• Mozilla Developer Network - font-weight

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Pop Punk's not dead? For the last 10 years the genre of pop punk has been dying a slow death. In the early 2000's Emo, Screamo and Metalcore took over as the predominant genre in the scene and because of that, pretty much every pop punk either disbanded or converted to another genre. Probably the best example of this is Blink 182. Their self titled CD wasn't even close to pop punk, the genre they helped create and popularize. So for the last 7 years, I've been listening to pre-2005 bands.

Enter The Wonder Years. I did a random Google search one day on the term "pop punk's dead". What I found is during the last couple years there's been a revival and The Wonder Years are one of the bands leading the charge. Their second CD, The Upsides is a perfect example. After my first listen, It sounds eerily like The Starting Line's "Say It Like You Mean It" which has always been on my list of top 10 CDs.

No surprise, the band grew up a mere 30 miles away from The Starting Line in a Philadelphia suburb. While the lead singer sounds almost exactly like Kenny from The Starting Line, the band does have some differentiators.

The Wonder Years are a bit faster in tempo than The Starting Line. Their lyrics are also a bit more personal to the lead singer. He frequently makes references to friends, inside jokes and locations that the average person would know nothing about which is somewhat of a drawback but I've never been too lyrically focused with music.

The guitar riffs are the real standout on this CD. It's melodic punk to the extreme. There is seldom a second on the CD where there isn't at least two guitars playing two separate melodies to combine them into one great sound.

The overall arrangement and song selection is pretty good. There are 2-3 songs that I don't "love" but when compared to other bands releasing music now days they are well ahead of them. The songs that are my favorites are REALLY my favorites. They're of the charts on a 1-10 rating. Say, a 15/10. I've found that their faster songs seems to fit into this category more than their slower songs.

My favorite songs are well spread out through the track listing:
2. Logan Circle
4. Dynamite Shovel
7. Hostels & Brothels
9. This Party Sucks
11. Washington Square Park

Overall I give The Upsides a 10 out of 10! It's by far my favorite CD purchase of this year and I'm extremely happy to have run across this band. View Comments (0)