Mambo Taxi

For a while I worked for a company called "Openflows" which did consulting on open-source for non-profits and leftist organizations. It was satisfying work- and I only stopped working for them when the University offered me a full-time job in 2004. Their founder in Toronto, Jesse Hirsch, has been a tech columnist for the CBC for 25 years. He just had an interview with Jesse Brown on Canadaland podcast to talk about his possibly last broadcast on CBC, in which he asks "why CBC continues to promote Facebook after we've seen what that company has done to undermine democracy. CBC refused to post the segment online, raising questions about what you can and cannot say on our public broadcaster." It's a compelling listen, and makes me wonder how to react to the morally awful behaviours at the top of facebook.

Before I worked for Openflows, I was self-employed and in a partnership doing web consulting, from 1996 onward- while I was still in my last year at University. To tell you how early this was, we registered the domain name coder.com. Last November I was approached by a startup based in Austin, TX, looking to buy that domain name. I had really stopped working on those projects after starting working at the University, so it made the most sense to accept their (I think very fair) offer. I just looked them up. Their project is in public alpha and appears to be a success. "It's like google docs for programming." You get a web-based IDE and a virtual server, hooked to all sorts of useful things you can easily install. If you want to run more projects, or you want to harness 96 virtual servers at once for really quick compile times, you'll be able to pay them $5 a month. I expect the most exciting part comes with what more tools they might hook to the back-end for their subscribers. They just raised a cool $4.5 Million from venture capital, so they are doing OK for themselves. I sort of wonder whether they will incubate some kid's project that will replace facebook... I will say that I have no regrets about the path I took out of school. I was never interested in working startup hours, or risking my half of our mortgage on a dream idea. Especially since these big dream ideas often turn into crazy nightmares, don't they?...

On Tuesday, I'm giving a talk at the University's annual tech conference, WatITis, titled Perspectives on co-op employment and user-centered web-application development. This will be interesting. I'm motivated to do this because I really like my job right now, which is largely project management and supervising co-op student programmers. This is certainly a shift from what I was doing a decade ago, which was solo programming and sysadmin work. I'm keen on programming things that make academics' lives easier; and on giving student employees the real-world experience as we do this.

I'm very curious what the people who come to my talk will be looking for. I wish I could ask them in advance.

I spent 20 minutes earlier this week filling out an online MBTI, and today I went to Career Services on campus to review it with their resident expert, Liz K. (Free for staff; and mah boss has told me it's job-related and I shouldn't count it as personal time. ...But wait till she hears I'm going back.)

It was an entertaining hour, and I took a few notes on things that tickled me. To be read with various grains of salt.

* One area the Myers-Briggs has no predictive power is in the workplace. People with widely different types can both be happy in the same positions.
* However, it is useful for identifying preferences that people might not realize, based on cultural assumptions against those preferences- and, to some extent, strengths and weaknesses for personal interactions.

* ESTJ is what employers almost universally want from their front-line staff. Though many of these companies seem to brand themselves as looking for ENFP. And Introverts get no respect in the workplace. (Which is why we get to impersonate the E/S/T/J types at the office).
* N's are stereotyped as creative, but S's are creative as well- one such area is toward efficiency, parsimony.
* S's prefer to work a project from bottom-up and use language for accuracy; N's prefer to design from top-down and use language to play.
* N's might buy a fast car as a status symbol; S's might buy the car because they like the sensation of driving fast.

* NT's might be energized developing strategies; NF's energized by nurturing people.
* NT's may be known for their sarcastic humour.
* NF's may be known for enjoying taking the MBTI and learning the psychology of others; whereas FP's hate how the MBTI questions try and box you in without any subtlety or context.

* A bad combination in meetings: EN's tossing out half-baked ideas one after another, and after everyone else is in agreement, the IS might come up with his/her best answer, which s/he has taken the time to hone and finish in his/her head; coming across as passive-aggressive.

* A meeting of all J's may make a quick decision that's wrong; a meeting of all P's make the same decision over and over and over.

* Couples usually pair a P and a J. If both are P's, one will probably "fake it" as a J in order to keep the household running and bills paid.

* For J's the T/F dichotomy becomes crucial for how they deal with the outside world (setting their structure/organization via logic/objectivity or values/subjectivity).
* For P's the S/N dichotomy becomes crucial (via present/concrete or future/abstract).

---

I've tested myself online every once in a few years, and I consistently turn out IN__ - neutral between T/F and J/P. Sure enough, this time I rated "T" but just one point away from being rated "F"; and I was rated a "mild J".

But that didn't satisfy Liz; she said this didn't make sense with what I told her. And if I was J, I would be dominant for Feeling/Thinking- I certainly wouldn't be ambiguous on that measure. So, yay! I'm an aberration! She said perhaps I operated as a "J" both at work and home, but they aren't my preference? This seemed likely. So, she had me read some summary descriptions, until we zeroed in on INTP or INFP.

And when I read the long-form descriptions, I identified most with INFP, the same type as I self-identified 4 years ago.

She said if I come back, she can print out the appropriate pages out of their guide for me, but as it was, my custom printout wasn't at all accurate.

A cynical person might conclude that I've been told to vote early and often. Or, roll my character stats but change them around until they look right.

We were supposed to talk about strengths/blindspots I might want to know about, but we ran out of time. Fortunately, the second hit is free as well.

One thread of thought I found interesting is that I will make to-do lists, and refer back to them, which is a "J" type activity. However, the system for lists that I have settled on, GTD, allows maximal flexibility for choosing on-the-fly what tasks you're up for doing next. Which is the embodiment of "Perceiving" type.

So: yeah. INFP inna ESTJ wrld.

The week so far has been fairly full.

Today I went for an all-day Emergency First Aid training. I'm curious how many of my friends are CPR trained? Either current, or lapsed? (I'd also be curious how many of you have ever used it? I know at least two of my friends have. What's that like for you?)

My training was led by an ex-US Marine, ex-firefighter, with just about as much authority on the subject as I might hope for. It was a really intense day. Hopefully I'll sleep OK tonight; I've been to the gym and had a strong drink, which I think has helped calm my mind down. :)

I wonder how the day's tone would be different with, dunno, a more "boring" instructor. He shared a lot of his macabre sense of humor. One story; he was working as an EMT in Atlanta at the Braves stadium for a big home game. They got the call about a man who collapsed; they got within a few hundred yards and started humping their equipment through the press of crowds, many clustered around the guy who was down. As they got there, they discovered two "good ol' boys" (as he called them) running a jumper-cable from their big truck, engine racing, just about to make contact with the old guy on the ground. Fortunately, they got there just in time; turns out he fainted from the heat, his heart was beating fine, though it wouldn't have if the two dudes had worked faster!

A few things I learned:

1) if someone feels faint, *don't* tell them to put their head between their knees, unless you're holding on to the back of their shirt. If they go unconscious, their head will hit the ground and then they might have spine/head trauma to deal with as well. According to Ian, slouching with head back is perfectly fine.

2) AED's, Automated External Defibrillators, are some really cool technology. The modern ones are designed so anybody can use them (though you can get going a bit faster if you're trained). They will talk to the user, flashing lights to tell them what to connect to the patient and where. They will detect a weak heartbeat and if necessary, send the shock to try and restart their pulse; but if they don't detect any pulse, they will guide the user through CPR steps, including sounding out the beat for chest-compressions.

3) The "First Aid Recovery Position" is the same as it was when I learned it at Cornell when I volunteered at Slope Day, a booze-fest on the last day of classes. Preventing someone from choking on their own vomit is timeless.

On that classy note, what about yesterday?...

Yesterday was the annual campus conference. I gave a talk, on one cross-campus collaboration project I'm involved with. It went ok; the best part was finishing and having lots of leftover time for conversations with people. I saw good talks and so-so talks, and ended on a great note with some students very energetically talking through some mobile dev projects they are working on in spare time. They made me, personally, feel completely not-cutting-edge, but that's fine. Sometimes other people get to be the sharpest knives in the drawer.

After work, I had a fairly difficult phone-call to make relating to some stuff that happened after Quaker Meeting on Sunday, but you know what? It was fine; and it was entirely the right thing to do, and I felt supported by a bunch of people in the Meeting in the process.

Just beforehand, I shoveled snow for the first time this year, and a bunny came over from a few lawns over and sat just across the street, sort of under a bush, watching me the entire time. It was still keeping watch when I went inside. And it helped me stay grounded as I went inside to make that phone-call.

And in the evening, dan took me out for all-you-can-eat tapas, using the thank-you gift-certificate from the talk that he gave yesterday, to a bunch of high-schoolers. (Next year? I think the school will try and avoid having a CS conference for some hundred students on the very same day that most of the technical staff are at their own conference. The combination went OK, but that took a lot of work from lots of dedicated people!)

Tomorrow is the local Pride Festival, which for me mostly means sitting in a park with friends and watching the world go past. It's a low-key Pride, which suits. Also, I'm going for my 5th Pilates exercise class (which seems fairly clear is doing good things for my back and shoulder and likely my overall body-tone).

Sunday is the local Quaker Meeting's summer picnic and outdoor Meeting for Worship, which I expect will be fun. I missed the one last year, despite being responsible for reserving the picnic area in Guelph. This year, in advance, melted_snowball and I went for a walk/hike with roverthedog and we all gave Riverside Park thumbs-up and/or wags.

This week has gone by quickly. It was "Commuter Challenge Week" which meant Monday there was a free breakfast for cyclists (wearing helmets) in the Uptown Plaza, which surprised me for not being lacklustre (after the poor advertising they didn't do). There were TV cameras but I didn't bother finding out if I was on TV. Tuesday I blew my green cred out of the water by driving to the airport to pick up a friend. Overall, I racked up 42km in 4 days on bike, which felt good.

Ideas for today:
- I heard (from someone who does not assert this is definitely true) that young chickens might be more capable of flight than adult chickens, before they gain their full body weight. I want to see a fable about a chicken who remembers the joy of flying, who's handy with tools (yeah) and builds a chicken trebuchet. (thank you for this idea, mrwhistlebear and nobodyhere). In my head it looks like a mix of this and that.
- Are we tool-using metaphor-flingers? (thank you dawn_guy, for a very non-sequitur meeting this morning...)

Oh, and after lunch with chezmax and nobodyhere we walked around the site where Mel's Diner was (until last month when the plaza it was in burned down). The tile is still there, and it was decidedly odd to see how small the footprint of the place actually was. Walking around there, and talking about the place with a few people: I don't think I'm overly sentimentalizing a not-very-exciting diner; I just have little exposure to "places" turning into "not-places" and my reactions to that happening are interesting to me. ...if it had been a family home, I would find this reaction intensely inappropriate, but since it's a commercial establishment, that somehow makes it OK.

Also, in the tile floor near the back corner, I found a charred penny from 1974, the year I was born. Lucky? Unlucky? Just a penny? Yet to be decided. :)