Thursday Three

Screw the Friday Five, it’s the Thursday Three:
Answer the following:
1) What are the best three bands making music today?
2) What are the best three movie soundtracks ever?
3) What are the best three books that should be made into movies, but haven’t yet?
My answers:
1) Cake, Green Day, The Flaming Lips
2) Flash Gordon (by Queen), Apocalypse Now, Repo Man
3) John Carter, Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Duality

Continuing on the Meyers-Briggs Type meme, I asked my wife, Michele to take the this personality test.
Michele is an ISFJ. You can read up on ISFJ description 1, and ISFJ description 2. It seems to fit her to a tee.
Next, I looked at the page on relationships between different types. I looked up the ENTJ/ISFJ relationship and found we have the duality relationship. After reading the description together we were quite pleased.
Here’s a quote from the description:
These relationships are the most favourable and comfortable of all intertype relationships providing complete psychological supplements. Dual partners are like two halves of a whole unit. They usually understand each others intentions without any need to say a word. Dual will naturally protect your weak points and appreciate the strong ones without asking for anything in return. Interaction with your Dual allows you to be yourself without the need to adjust to your partner like in other relationships. This often saves both partners a lot of energy which they can use for their own interesting activities. Conflicts between Duals are very rare and if there are any, they are normally short lived and solved without pain. Your Dual partner will love you just for what you are and if there is such a thing as true love then it could probably only occur in relationships of Duality.
A number of people have wondered how our marriage of a geeky engineer and a flighty artist can possibly work. “You are so different.”, people say. It appears that our differences are our strengths.
YMMV. Don’t read too much into the intertype relationships, especially if it suggests that your marriage will implode and disinegrate…

ENTJ

After I got back to my desk from lunch, I checked out Lukwam’s recent entry on introverts. I was intrigued and decided to look up my personality type. I took this test online.
According to the test I am ENTJ. Check ENTJ description 1, and then check out ENTJ description 2.
When I read them I think ‘Holy crap, that’s me…’
Those of you that know me in Real Life, do those descriptions fit? Or am I delusional?
Secondly, what is your personality type? Take the test & post here.

Broken Toe

Around 10:30 PM Michele told me there was something going on outside with police & fire people. I usually wear headphones at the computer and hadn’t heard anything. I went outside in the rain to see what was going with all hubbub. There was a fire at an apartment building a few hundred feet from our house. After watching the flashing lights and smoke and gossiping with the neighbors for a bit I went back home.
I took off the rain gear and around turning off the lights in the house. After turning off the lights in the living room, I promptly walked into the book case. My left foot caught the lower edge of the bookcase. I heard a distinctive crunch sound and began to feel pain. Hobbling to the bedroom, I asked Michele to take a look. She said, “Sweetie, I think you broke your toe.” “I hope not.”, was my reply.
Ice was applied and 800 mg ibuprofen taken while I played at the computer for a while. I went to bed hoping my foot would feel much better in the morning.
Alas, after stepping on the foot as I got out of bed, I could feel the pain again. A quick inspection revealed a black and blue toe. Dang, I broke my toe on a bookcase. How goofy is that.
I need a much better story to tell people. Any suggestions?
Linkage:
blinktag.org – It’s farking familiar…
SoCal Wireless User Group Meeting this Thursday night in Pasadena. Some cool stuff being presented. Be there or be non-geeky.

Martin is cool

I get back from lunch today and see an instant message from Martin. It says ‘you seen reverse cowgirl today?’. I link on over and see this post and say ‘Holy shit’.
To those not up on the blogosphere scene, Reverse Cowgirl is a well known weblogger in LA. She could be considered a weblog celebrity by many in the weblog world. Somehow she ended up on Martin’s site. She like the site and Martin. A lot. Enough to devote an entire post to how cool Martin is.
I guess I don’t always seen Martin as that cool. He’s one of my best friends and I take it for granted that he’s an actor and has plenty of cool stories. Our families hang out pretty much every weekend and we try to drink beers at least once a week sans wives. I even know what kind of pr0n he likes to download. But obviously, I underestimate his coolness. I mean he can’t even fix his own doorbell…
I guess I better re-edu-macate myself on what ‘cool’ is all about. I think I have long way to go. I’m the guy that brought a laptop and a cantenna to Hooters so we could surf the web from the bar…
Martin hosts his site on my web server. I looked at the bandwidth usage and his site’s sucking down the bandwidth. Gigabyte after gigabyte. I can only hope that some big Hollywood producer sees Martin and and decides to offer him a six-figure development deal ASAP. Previously, Martin had promised me a shoutout when he wins the oscar. Now I’m one step closer to being part of a real posse.
In an attempt to absorb some of Martin’s coolness & fame I will post this picture of us together drinking scotch.

My wife rocks

My wife regularly shops at Asian markets. I’m usually not suprised when I get home from work and find some strange assortment of Japanese candies, Chinese beef jerky, and Korean pickles.
On Friday I was greeted with this sight:

Years ago, when I was working in Hong Kong & Singapore, I picked up drinking Japanese style iced coffee. Japanese iced coffee is nothing like the weak ass shit you get at Starbucks when they dump hot coffee over ice. WTF is that?
Brew coffee, mix in sugar and cream to taste, then chill. No watery coffee in a plastic cup. Typically the iced coffee is found in a small can (see above)
Starbucks has copied the style and they call it Starbucks Doubleshot. It’s available everywhere. It’s good, but the Japanese brands are better.
It is amazingly refreshing in the heat. Cool and sweet with good flavor, you really can’t ask for more get you going in the afternoon. For a while I was drinking 3-4 cans a day and riding the caffine wave until my eventual wipeout. I don’t drink it regularly anymore, mainly because I crave it so much.
Besides three cans of iced coffee, she also picked up a bottle of Pocari Sweat. In spite of it’s name, it’s a great tasting version of Gatorade that I started drinking about the time I started with iced coffee.
My wife knows my love for these drinks and hooked me up. Who can ask for more?
In other news, I dug up potatos in the backyard today.

Several months ago I found a bag of potatos that were sprouting in the house. rather than toss them I took the girls outside and we planted them. Fast forward to today and it was time to dig them up. Here I am with Zoe plucking the spuds from the ground with my bare hands. Zoe provided the management as I dug.

After washing the dirt away, here’s is nature’s bounty. I am a rocking farmer.
Wife wierdness:
My half-Chinese wife was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati. She’s as American as they come, but she was raised by her crazy Chinese mother. The effects are slight, but noticable. She eats something called ‘lo sung’ on her toast. It looks like bacon bits. She also eats something called ‘stinky tofu’ which should really be called ‘smells like vomit tofu’ with her mother & grandmother. Most of the time I let it slide uncommented.
The other day I came upon this scene:

Yes, Mira is laughing. Both girls love this. In China they don’t use q-tips to clean their ears. They use this special bamboo stick that is curved at one end and has a puff on the other. Michele uses the hook end to scratch the inside of the girls ears. Then the puff end to draw out the wax, dirt clods, and small stones that get in there.
The girls CRAVE this. They ask for ‘ear scratching’ all the time. It’s fargin weird I tell you. Not as weird as shoving a lit paper cone in your ear, but weird none the less. When I question such things, my wife has a pat answer, “A billion Chinese can’t be wrong.”
The fight:
Martin wrote up a brief description of our viewing of the Tyson fight. Less than a minute. I’m sure glad it wasn’t Pay Per View. I have say that Tyson was amazingly candid in the post-fight interview saying that he wasn’t ready for Lennox Lewis.
Geekage:
I’ve been getting more and more interested in the use of XML feeds. After reading Lukwam’s and Argv0’s posts about using feeds, I had to give it a try.
I got Newz Crawler working, but NewsMonster eludes me. Newz Crawler works pretty damn good. Tight integration with XP to boot.
What I really want to build is my own page to aggregate RSS feeds, but I have much learning to do.
I think this entry is long enough, don’t you?