Author: Joey deVilla

Categories
It Happened to Me

Yet Another 4-Axis Personality Test

You’re probably familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is based on four axes:

  • Extrovert (E) vs. Introvert (I)
  • iNtuitive (N) vs. Sensing (S)
  • Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
  • Perceiving (P) vs. Judging (J)

I consistently rate as ENTP
(extrovert/intuitive/thinking/perceiving) when taking these tests, with
a strong tendency towards extroversion and intuition a milder tendency
towards thinking over feeling, and I’m only slightly more of a
perceiver than a judge. According to Keirsey.com, I straddle the line between Inventor and Field Marshall.

People in my line of work — computer programming — tend to lean towards introversion. In the book Tog on Interface, former Apple user interface guru Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote that 85% of the Apple engineers and developers were introverts, and that most of them tested as INTP.

The girlfriend tests as ENFJ.

(Guile, when he saw my ENTP rating in the sidebar of this blog, went up to me and said: “You? A extrovert? Nooooooooooooo!!!“)

Dave Ahrens (whom I had the pleasure of meeting last weekend) points to a different test that measures along these axes:

  • Wacky (W) vs. Sober (S)
  • Rational (R) vs. Emotional (E)
  • Constructive (C) vs. Destructive (D)
  • Leader (L) vs. Follower (F)

Here’s my test result:

You are a WRCL–Wacky Rational Constructive Leader. This makes you a golden god.
People gravitate to you, and you make them feel good. You are smart,
charismatic, and interesting. You may be too sensitive to others
reactions, especially criticism. Your self-opinion and mood depends
greatly on those around you.

You think fast and have a smart
mouth, is a hoot to your friends and razorwire to your enemies. You
hold a grudge like a brass ring. You crackle.

Although you have a leader’s personality, you often
choose not to lead, as leaders stray too far from their audience. You
probably weren’t very popular in high school–the joke’s on them!

You may be a rock star.

My only response to this is: Dude!

Give the test a try and post your results (and opinion thereof) in the comments.

Update: Want to see all the personality type possibilities for this test? They’re here.

Categories
In the News

This is either going to break my housemate Paul’s heart or turn him on even more

[ via Stereogum and someone who knows that my housemate Paul worships Britney Spears
] Someone I know suggested that one good way to prevent children from
smoking is to point out smokers and say “Take a good look at the kind
of people who smoke, kids. By and large, they’re poor, stupid or both.”

Or, in some cases, they’re pop stars who hit their zenith a little
while back and are now entering that part of their life that makes for
the more entertaining second half of their Behind the Music biography…


Excuse me miss, didn’t I see you on a recent episode of Cops?

Can we institute some kind of fashion law declaring that you shouldn’t cut your “Daisy Dukes” so that your pockets reach below them?


Cool! She has the same model cellphone as I do!

Why couldn’t she have stayed a classy lady, like that nice Debbie — oops, I meant “Deborah” — Gibson?

Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

But cockroaches are low-carb!

One piece of advice I got from my personal trainer (who, like 30 pounds of me, vanished never to be seen again) was to pick a meal plan (“Don’t say ‘diet‘, dude, call it a ‘meal plan‘,”
he’d always say) that worked and stick to it like glue. He also said
that the best way to stick to a meal plan was to have a once-a-week
“cheat day” where you could relax the rules and eat what you liked —
as long as you stuck to the meal plan for the rest of the week and
worked out often.

My “cheat day” was actually just a “cheat meal” at Chinatown Centre,
located only half a block from my house. They have an all-Chinese food
court, and I enjoy the friend rice, chinese pork and General Tso
chicken from the “any 5 items for $2.99” counter, where they know me
well.

That all changed with the news that the entire food court got shut down
by the health department, who made mention of “uninspected poultry”
sold by an “unlicensed meat store”.

Given my exposure to their stuff, I’m probably immune to food poisoning now.

“The liberals took our dates!”

[ via Relapsed Catholic ] Bernard Chapin blames his dateless status on his being a conservative in the liberal city of Chicago:

For the paraphernalia displaying conservative, unexpected house
guests can make for dangerous situations indeed. I had this hammered
home to me last weekend. Upon our entrance, I wisely spent the first
five minutes frantically cleaning the bathroom for my guest’s approval
but I neglected to realize that the rest of the apartment is heavily
mined with all sorts of visible “buzzkills.” With a heavy aroma of
Clorox perfume I walked into the front room and found my guest pointing
at a portrait of our President smiling from a podium and wearing a
Carhart style coat. It was addressed to me on behalf of the RNC.

“What is this?” she spat.

Now
a man of true principle would have stopped right there and pointed out
George’s merits to his guest but some things are more important than
winning political debates so I opted for the weaselesque, “I have no
idea. I don’t know who that person is. I wonder why he’s hanging on my
wall.” This answer at least produced a smile from the Bush-hater before
me. I considered myself lucky that she missed the framed picture of
Charleton Heston hanging just below George. However, later in the
night, she called me over to the area near the front door and inquired,
“Whose face is this that you wipe your feet on?” This was really bad
news. She had incidentally stumbled across my “Hillary Clinton Doormat”
one the way to the bathroom. In the spirit of Bill’s autobiography I
answered “I have no idea”–although I kicked myself later for not have
said, “I cannot recall.”

Overall, it is wise to adopt
Clintonian standards for discussing politics if you wish to get along
with most Chicagoans and this is particularly true regarding the
shapely and form-fitting women who ornament our city to summer
perfection.

Admittedly, while political leanings can be a factor in romance, I think Chapin was more undone by:

  • Having to perform emergency cleaning on the bathroom.
    There’s really no way to do this discreetly, and disappearing for a few
    minutes when you’ve invited a lady friend over for a nightcap is the
    best way to kill any momentum gained during the date.

    By the bye, learn this mantra, Mr. Chapin: Chicks dig bathrooms that have been cleaned in advance. It says “grown-up”.

  • Going overboard with the political paraphernalia in the house.
    The Bush photo alone wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The Charlton
    Heston photo alone would’ve been no obstacle. The Hillary Clinton
    doormat wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker either; I once had a liberal
    girlfriend who couldn’t stand her.

    However, the combination of the three is a bit much: it screams political junkie,
    and unless you live “inside the beltway”, that’s just damned
    unattractive. It just makes one imagine that you haven’t yet gotten
    over losing the election for student council president (only in D.C.
    could George Will and James Carville be sex symbols).

    That’s the great lie of politics: “History is written by winners”. No,
    history is written by political junkies, the sort of person who doesn’t embody “winner”, but rather, its opposite.

    Pictures of
    politicians who’ve lived within the past 25 years are as much a warning
    sign as a bookshelf full of nothing but Stephen King and Anne Rice novels, possession of too much cat paraphernalia or
    ownership of a LiveJournal.

What do you think?

(The title of this entry is borrowed from a scene from one of my all-time favourite movies, Animal House.)

Categories
Geek

Don’t forget: I write another blog…

…on matters programmer-y and geeky. It’s called The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout,
and it covers all sort sof news of interest to software developers and
other folks interested in that sort of thing. In the Monday, July 5th
edition, the articles are:

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Scenes from a Sci-Fi Convention, Part 1: The Photos


Looks like there’s hope for the goths after all.

I’ve posted my photos from CONvergence, the sci-fi convention to which I was invited to play accoridon pied piper for the Dystopia Party. You can check the slideshow, but be sure to view them in album form, because I’ve written some back story for each of the photos.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day to all my American readers! Hope yours was fun.

I spent mine saying some good-byes to my friends at CONvergence/Dystopia, joining Dave Ahrens’
family for a barbecue and then getting dropped off by him at the
airport. Here’s a shot of me from earlier this afternoon, ready to
celebrate the 4th American style: lookin’ stylish with a
stars-and-stripes tie, resplendent in my Elvis sideburns and ready to
rock, and posing beside a ridiculously large automibile.


It doesn’t get more “American Badass” than this.

The tie got raves at the airport. A number of the staff at the
Northwest Airlines counter came to check it out, a young woman at the
security checkpoint winked at me, gave me a thumbs up and said “Great
tie, dude!” and the stewardesses on my flight were all over the tie.

Maybe it’s time to start a “flags of the world” tie collection.