A few days ago, I posted about my defective iPhone 3G. I received this phone last Monday, but by the evening, I realized that it was broken beyond repair. That night I went through some troubleshooting with a friendly and responsive Rogers iPhone specialist and she assured me that I would receive another unit within 48-hours. So, assuming that the phone would ship out on the Tuesday, I expected it to arrive sometime on Thursday. Thursday came and passed, and by midday Friday I felt something was wrong.

I called up Rogers and went through the usually steps to speak with a representative. After a couple transfers I was connected to an iPhone specialist. I told the representative that I was still waiting for a replacement unit, and he perused my file to see what had happened. After putting me on hold to chat with his boss, he came back to tell me that my order had been cancelled!

Apparently, the lady who submitted my request for a replacement iPhone did not complete the troubleshooting checklist correctly, and as a result her boss decided to scrap the entire order. Needless to say, I was a bit perplexed. Clearly, I was expecting the imminent arrival of a replacement phone, but I guess this didn’t concern someone in management who deleted my order without making any effort to contact me or to correct the mistake made by his or her subordinate.

Later that night, after my frustrations had died down, I looked over at my almost-perfect iPhone with somewhat mixed feelings. The thought that it was going back was good and bad. On one hand, I felt annoyed by the extended delay of receiving a replacement — I hate being stuck at home waiting for deliveries and it’s almost impossible to get a tracking code from Rogers — but on the other hand, I’ll have a brand new iPhone 3G to unbox next week!

So I’ve begun to see my current iPhone as much like a test model that I’ve been allowed to take home and review. I have it in a soft case with a screen protector so that it’ll remain pristine, but short of destroying or losing it, there’s really nothing holding me back from pushing it to its limits. I’ve thought of running some battery tests, like draining it from full charge under various settings, or seeing how many free apps I can install until it breaks or shows signs of slow down. There’s always a silver lining if you look for it, and I have to remind myself that dealing with telecoms is rarely a smooth process when you have issues.

Do you have any suggestions for testing my temporary iPhone 3G? Do you want to know how many hours of continuous Youtube it will play before dying or catching on fire?

When people think of psychology, they usually have a short list of terms that they know (or think they know) about the subject, including: relationship counseling, subliminal messages, Sigmund Freud, and personality testing. I was quite the same when I first attended school, so when I had the chance to enroll in a third year personality course, I couldn’t wait to learn about something that was mentioned so often in pop culture and the mainstream media.

Looking back, I don’t remember much from that course, but I do remember the Big Five model, which attempts to describe an individual using just five personality traits. These factors are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Perhaps I remember the Big Five (which can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN) because it was the easiest theory to recall and seemed to be the least flakey. Unlike a lot of what I learned in that course, the Big Five is backed by empirical research.

You might find it odd that you could describe a person by using just five personality traits and not the many other descriptors that you could easily list off from the top of your head. However, these factors weren’t chosen ambiguously, they were discovered by using factor analysis, which I’ll explain a little bit about.

What the researchers did was start off with a huge list of adjectives, such as: happy, anxious, creative, curious, moody, aggressive, etc. Then, through interviewing tons of people, they began to group terms that appeared to regularly coincided. For instance, a person who was deemed highly sociable had a more than likely chance of also being talkative and assertive. After this grouping had been completed, the researchers had boiled down their giant list of traits to what is now known as the Big Five. So going back to a person who might be described as sociable and talkative, this individual would probably rate high in extraversion.

I should note that a person isn’t categorized, black or white, as an extrovert (the life of a party) or the opposite (an introvert), but that they rate somewhere along the dimension of extraversion, often not at the extremes. Think of the Big Five as five separate point scales that run from positive to negative.

So does it bother you that your unique and brilliant personality can be (or attempt to be) described by just five factors? Or do you like the idea that something so complex and mysterious in nature can be easily summarized by using the Big Five model?

Are you a fan of Weeds? In these middle months, most TV shows take their summer hiatus, and thus, the cable channels are awash with reruns and filler material. This is how I found Weeds, the Showtime comedy series that’s currently airing in its fourth season right through the heat of late August.

It seems that Weeds may be the only decent show on right now, although I have to admit that I’ve not been much of a TV watcher since broadband Internet came along over 10 years ago. Still, compared to the other comedies that I enjoy, such as Entourage and Californication, the show holds its own as a fun half-hour of R-rated humor, stuffed to the brim with politically incorrect content and brusque one-liners that often have me laughing out loud.

Weeds is a show that relentlessly pokes fun at various ethnic groups, the rich, the poor, fat kids, ugly people, the disabled, Republicans and, well, more than I could ever list here. It never takes a moment to apologize for its offending humor, and this is partly what makes the show so fresh and exciting to watch. Oh, and did I mention, the show’s entire premise is about growing, selling and smuggling marijuana? Finally, a show for adults that’s a world away from the terrible sitcoms I grew up watching. 

Sometimes you’ll hear me mention that Aibal is a Do Follow blog. But what does that mean exactly?

A Do Follow blog allows commenters to drop a link pointing back to their own website when they comment on mine. In addition, a Do follow blog permits such backlinking to be fully recognized by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing. This benefits the target website, as search engines are able to identify the connection (link) between my site and theirs, which helps promote their site on these services (SEO).

The way this works – and bear with me for this is a gross simplification – is that all modern search engines count the amount of links pointing to a particular website to gauge its importance. There are many other factors besides this, but generally speaking, the more links that point to a particular website, the more traffic that site will receive from the various search engines.

The alternative to Do Follow blogs are sites that have No Follow links in their comments section. This style of linking forbids search engines from recognizing (following) the links posted by commenters. Using No Follow links, blog visitors can still see and click on a commenter’s link, but the search engines will ignore them.

Currently, the vast majority of blogs out there are set to No Follow by default, as this prevents spammers from promoting their shady websites on unmoderated blogs. Unfortunately, legit bloggers aren’t able to fully promote their websites when commenting on these sites.

The best solution, if you’re a blogger and want to support the community, is to set your blog to Do Follow and implement a decent captcha filter in addition to an automated spam filter like Akismet.

If you’re thinking of joining the Do Follow movement, you can request to get your site added to one the of various Do Follow lists out there. This will ensure a rush of eager comments to your site. But be warned, it will almost certainly attract spammers!

*UPDATE* After many months featuring do follow commenting, I’ve reluctantly had to go back to no follow links. The amount of poorly written and spammy comments was too much to moderate. If I can find a way to moderate comments more efficiently, I would consider going back to Do Follow. Hit me up if you have any idea.