malvasia bianca

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character).

Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it a bit more closely next time.) But later in the movie, you see them differ in two important ways:

• Johnny is always coming up with ways to improve the choreography of the dancing.
• King engages in misguided behavior, sometimes seeming actively self-destructive.

About the first of these: dancing isn’t choreography, so one could imagine that they’re both equally skilled dancers, but Johnny simply happens to be a better choreographer. And that’s probably some of what’s going on. I actually have no idea to what extend dancers are, or should, be thought of as choreographers; Johnny’s explanation of why one of his suggestions was an improvement seemed to make sense, though, and suggested to me that good dancers should, at the least, understand the benefits of local elements of choreography and be able to refine them, even if their grasp of global elements might not be so hot.

But the other thing that’s clear from this is that Johnny thinks about dancing all the time, in a way that King doesn’t. Which is very important: if you want to get good at something, being obsessed with it is a big help. I just finished reading Musashi (quite good, by the way), and there, too, we see Musashi following his art with single-minded determination, constantly trying to improve his art, and applying lessons from all aspects of life to his art.

This is something that I am both good and bad at. I am a fairly obsessive reader, so, for example, I’m the only person in my software group at work who is reading books about programming or managing whenever I go to the bathroom. (Incidentally, I’m kind of running out of good books to read on those subjects. Though I do have books that I’d like to re-read, to be sure. But I also am in a bit of a rut, and should be spending more time broadening my programming, I suspect.) Which is, of course, hardly the only way to improve your skills, but reading definitely helps me.

The flip side, though, is that I will read all sorts of random stuff, and flit from topic to topic. Which can be useful for future career growth (not that one’s career is the measurement of one’s success, to be sure), but it also means that I’m quite unlikely to develop the level of skill that either Fred Astaire or Miyamoto Musashi had in their respective areas of interest. Not that they were necessarily narrow-minded; while Musashi was doubtless a better swordsman than artist, his paintings are lovely. (I wish I could find some good links to show you.)

Anyways, back to the movie: another difference between Johnny and King is that King makes a lot more mistakes, often engaging in what seems like actively self-destructive behavior. I make a lot of mistakes, too; some of them are simply areas that are hard to master, or areas where an expert could show me what I’m doing wrong and, with more or less effort, I could do the right thing. E.g. it took me a while to be able to successfully put the planning game into practice; I think I’m getting there now, but if I had a good XP coach, it probably wouldn’t have taken me nearly as long.

But I’m sure that I also could be seen as engaging in self-destructive behavior; for example, I’m sure that people could point out ways in which my actions while I was trying to be an academic were actively counterproductive. The interesting thing there, though, is that my actions may well have been quite productive/constructive at a higher level – academia wasn’t a good fit for me, so actions that look counter-productive in the context of me getting another academic job may have been ways in which my subconscious was acting productively to get me steered to a better path.

Or maybe not; maybe I just got lucky. (And I’m still very curious to what extent my current job is a good fit for me, and what I’ll be doing ten years from now.) There’s a similar ambiguity in the movie: at some level, it seems like being a dance star perhaps isn’t the best fit or King, so maybe it’s best if he gets out of that now.

I’m glad to see my local paper writing about the risks journalists face, but perhaps the article should have mentioned the risks that Al Jazeera journalists face. It bothers me a lot to see my government doing stuff like that. (Along with a lot of other things my government does these days, of course.)

Some nice rants. (Links from Rob Bray.)

Interesting article by Richard Gabriel. Something to add to my list of things to do when I have more free time. Or my list of things to consider creating time to do; maybe if I just tried to write one haiku a day, I could work it into my current schedule…

We did indeed make a new batch of curry paste last weekend; joy joy joy. Here’s a recipe you can use it in; extremely easy, though it wants to marinade from one hour to one day. So it’s not a bad strategy to take 5 minutes to prepare the marinade after dinner some evening, for use the next day.

Jeera Chicken, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook.

1 1/2 lb boneless skinless chicken breast
1 tsp turmeric
1 Tbsp mild curry paste
1/2 cup water
1 tsp salt
2 oz salted butter
2 Tbsp cumin seeds

Cut the chicken breasts into bite-size chunks. Mix turmeric, curry paste, water, and salt; marinade the chicken in this mixture for 1-24 hours.

Melt butter in skillet, add half the cumin seeds and the chicken (with its marinade). Stir-fry until cooked; towards the end of the cooking time, toast the remaining cumin seeds in another skillet, and add them to the chicken when done.

I was listening to the radio part of the way home; something I normally try to avoid, but I’d done more driving than normal today, and my glove compartment had run out of CD’s. Anyways, I caught part of a segment about recent Supreme Count confirmation hearings, and part of the gist of the segment was that it’s tactically a good move for nominees to refuse to talk about possible cases that might come before the court, on the grounds that doing so would be improper.

I don’t know if that is tactially good or not (and don’t really care), but why on earth am I supposed to believe that it’s even a good idea for nominees to avoid giving their views on upcoming cases, let alone improper? Is this some standard nicety of legal ethics, or something that supreme court nominees have just made up? On the surface, it seems really weird: if you’re hiring somebody for a job, you want to do everything you can to get an idea of how that person would perform in the job; with a job as important as Supreme Court justice, wouldn’t that go double? Do other professions do this in their job interviews? Do doctors refuse to speculate on how they would treat future patients, referring questioners to their previous work instead?

To be sure, people change their views on things all the time, and any decent Supreme Court justice would admit as much. And one would hope that, in evaluating the quality of a potential justice, senators would look for more than whether or not he (or she, but probably he) would vote in the ways that the senator would prefer, looking in addition (or even instead) to see what reasoning the potential justice used to come to opinions. But that’s no reason to not try to get all the information you can about a candidate!

Maybe it’s just senators wishing that they didn’t have to answer questions when they were running for election about how they would vote. Democracy would be so much neater if we didn’t have to deal with such rude inquiries, after all…

A bit clunkier than I expected, but I’m sure they’ll fix that in a future revision of the hardware. Anyways, interesting differences between the DS and previous Gameboys:

• Two screens.
• Bottom screen is touch sensitive.
• Microphone.
• Wireless.

Wireless is obviously a good idea; ever since the Pokemon games, Gameboys have been about communication, so we might as well make it as easy as possible. I don’t have much of an opinion about the microphone; it’s probably really cheap for them to add, and maybe there are good uses lurking there somewhere. (Blowing into the mike to get Mario Kart powerups does not, I think, qualify.)

The touch sensitive screen turns out to be an unexpectedly great idea, though. In my limited experience, touch-only games can be fun, but have a bit of a gimmicky taint to them. Most games these days involve you moving around some sort of avatar of yourself; you can make that work with a touch screen, but it’s not particularly natural. But it can be a quite natural way to manipulate other parts of your environment; in Animal Crossing, for example, the touch screen is great for managing your inventory, and is essential for writing letters.

Of course, the problem that arises is that, in most games, you want to both move your avatar and manipulate your environment. You can find ways to do this either only using the touchpad or entirely avoiding the touchpad, but it usually feels like an unpleasant compromise. Animal Crossing is a good example here; Liesl uses the touchpad exclusively (with the stylus), while I use the D-pad and buttons for normal movement, use the touchpad with my fingers for inventory management, and use the stylus for writing letters. Either Liesl’s choice or mine works well enough; both are somewhat ungainly.

I’ll be very curious to see how the Revolution controller works. Clearly, in retrospect, the DS is a testing ground for Revolution mechanics; but you’ll have both hands free to control things, so maybe some of these problems won’t arise. I can imagine that moving with a joystick in the left hand while pointing at objects with your right hand will feel very natural, for example.

And then there’s the two screens. Total gimmick, as far as I’m concerned; it doesn’t play a major role in any of the games that I have, and in most of them I’m completely unaware that the top screen exists while playing it. There’s a reason why media is moving widescreen, and it’s not solely because of legacy influences from movies: your visual field is wider than it is tall. I actually am perfectly happy with a 4:3 screen ratio, but I see no reason to double the height. There’s very little that can be usefully done with the second screen that couldn’t be done just as well by making the original screen a little wider, and using some of the screen traditionally and some of it for the extra purpose.

The one natural model that I could think of for a vertical form factor is paper; an interesting example, given the possibilities that the touch screen opens up. Even there, though, you have a workaround: if you’re going to be doing a lot of writing in a game, then it doesn’t rely on traditional controls, which means that you can turn the whole unit sideways. Which, apparently one of the most popular games in Japan does.

Incidentally, I’m not completely sold on the widescreen form factor, either; I don’t own a PSP, so I don’t know for sure, but that thing looks too wide to me. I’m curious what the DS would be like if the top screen were wide, taking up the whole unit, and was also a touch screen; that seems to me like it might have potential. Hard to say without playing such a beast, though.

I’m definitely glad I picked up a DS, and Liesl is using it all the time. I wish the game library were a bit richer, but it’s getting there, and the touchscreen is a great idea.

A while ago, I went looking for Cole Porter DVD’s; unfortunately, there wasn’t much available. (For all I know, not that many of his musicals ever made it on film.) I ended up with a five-movie box set, which sounded good until I started actually watching them.

High Society is actually pretty good; I should watch it again. Kiss Me Kate is a wonderful musical; I might enjoy the movie version if I weren’t aware that it’s horribly gutted. (Fortunately, this version is available.) Neither Silk Stockings not Les Girls did much for me.

I put off watching Broadway Melody of 1940 for a long time; I’m suspicious of any movie whose title makes me think that they churn out one every year. But we finally got around to it yesterday, and it’s a lot of fun! Classic Fred Astaire black and white dancing. I’d heard almost all the songs before, but there’s a reason for that. (Though I don’t understand the popularity of Begin the Beguine.) Eleanor Powell is pleasant enough. I’ve seen better stories before, certainly, but I’ve seen worse as well.

Fortunately, there’s more Fred Astaire available on DVD now; I should work through that boxed set next…

(I should insert a rant here about how all stage performances of all time, or at least going forward, should be available for viewing, but I’m not up for it right now.)

Hey, this is cool. Makes me wish I were still teaching. Well, not really, but still.

I’m starting to really miss good food. I’m not up for going out to eat right now, I’m not up for grocery shopping, I’m not up for cooking, and my body is only just now up for eating. But I was watching Iron Chef last night, and my taste buds let me know that they were feeling underused, and that in particular the chef’s choice chirashi sushi from Sushi Tomi would be just fine right now, thank you very much. And today I’ve been feeling like Indian food.

There is a problem with the latter, though, totally aside from my condition: the Indian food that I feel like is from the Curry Club cookbook, and it depends on their excellent mild curry paste. Which we are currenty out of. I think that I’ll be up for spice shopping and paste making by the end of this week, though, at which point some Redang Degang, Pao Bhaji, and Jeera Chicken will be in order.

Here’s the spice paste; recipes for dishes to follow.

Mild Curry Paste, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook.

60g coriander seeds
30g cumin seeds
20g fenugreek seeds
25g gram flour (a.k.a. besan)
20g garlic powder
20g turmeric
20g garam masala
5g dried curry leaves
5g asafetida
5g ginger powder
5g cayenne pepper
5g mustard powder
5g black pepper
175-250ml vinegar
175-250ml vegetable oil

Roast and grind the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, and curry leaves. Mix together with the rest of the spices as well as the vinegar, adding water if necessary to make a creamy paste. Heat oil in a skillet; add paste, stir-fry until water is cooked out. Store in fridge and use as necessary.

After sleeping for about 14 hours each of the last two days, my flu seems to be getting under control. I’m not healthy yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the mend.

Anyways: when I was a kid, I read a lot. Miranda, however, hasn’t shown any real interest in reading yet. She has lots of books, and very much enjoys being read to, but for whatever reason she doesn’t feel compelled to do it herself. Which bothered me for a little while, but I’m used to it by now.

Over the last three or so months, though, she’s gotten very into writing. She has stories she wants to tell; they get carefully sounded out and written down. One of my favorite recent examples:

Once upon a time, a little girl went out into the woods. She went until she was tired. The next day she saw a ball. Luckily she had a gown and a pair of high heels, so she went inside. She danced with the prince for a long time. It was fun. [Something I can’t read omitted.] He decided to be a good pirate. So he filled out a form and got a boat.

(You can tell I’d been playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! when she wrote this.)

At least that’s the way I’d write the story; she spells it more like this:

Wos opm o tm a littl grll wit at in to the wos she wit in til she was tiyrbe.

Which is probably a bit hard for some people to read, but for those of us used to her writing, it’s pretty clear. I imagine her spelling will improve dramatically once she starts reading, though.

I don’t know how much her desire to write instead of read is just the way she is and how much of it comes from the fact that she’s been doing so much kid writing at school over the last year and a half. Either way, it’s a lot of fun to be around.

Forty minutes or so ago, I turned on the computer (actually, Liesl rebooted it out of Windows), and when I selected ‘Linux’ from the boot menu, it wouldn’t boot. Either things went black immediately or it said “GRUB” at the top of the screen and froze. Not good.

At least Windows was still booting. So I did some browsing to remind myself how I had dual booting set up in the first place. This page is a fairly accurate description; it suggests that the boot sector isn’t right. So either a bit went bad on the copy of the boot sector I use or a formerly functional boot sector magically stopped working.

I actually had two copies of the boot sector lying around: the one that actually gets used, in an NTFS partition, and another copy, in a FAT32 partition that exists only to transfer files between Windows and Linux. But I don’t know how to compare files in Windows, so I couldn’t directly test the “bit went bad” hypothesis. So I ended up just copying the version from D: to C:, and rebooting.

Which didn’t work. So either a formally working boot sector has simply stopped working, or something worse has happened.

So: the next step is to generate a new boot sector from the actual contents of /dev/hda7. (And if that fails, reinstall Linux, I guess? Good thing I backed things up a couple of days ago.) But how do I do that? I don’t have anything useful like a bootable rescue CD around; that would be too sensible.

But there’s a Linux distro called Knoppix that boots from a CD; maybe that will do the trick. Easy enough to download an ISO image for that; surely if I stick a blank CD into the drive, Windows will give me an option to write the ISO onto it?

Well, no: it gives me three options for writing music CD’s, and one option for assembling files myself to burn onto a CD, but no option for burning a preexisting image. Can it really be the case that Windows doesn’t come with a tool for that? After some googling, the latter really does seem to be the case. Sigh. But I can find a free program to do it easily enough.

So: burn Knoppix CD, boot from it, it comes up. Yay. I can’t say that I’m thrilled with the design sensibilities, but the functionality is great; I could look at all the filesystems (both Windows and Linux), browse the web, etc. So, at the very least, if I need to reinstall Linux, it will be easy enough to back up my home directory first. And I compare the two saved boot sectors I have; they are identical, as suspected.

So I should generate a new boot sector; what I need is the first 512 bytes of /dev/hda7. Hmm: I’m not root, so I can’t read /dev/hda7. What’s the root password? It turns out that there isn’t one, but you can run root commands by doing sudo. (Among other mechanisms.) So now I have a copy of the boot sector in /tmp.

And it’s different from the one I had been using. Which is good! Now: how do I get it onto my Windows partition? It’s mounted read-only, but the FAQ tells me how to fix that. So now it’s on D: (the FAT32 partition; writing to NTFS from Linux isn’t recommended).

Reboot into Windows, copy it to C:, reboot. And here I am, everything is working fine.

I still don’t know what happened between yesterday and today that cause the old boot sector to stop working. Admittedly, I’ve reinstalled the OS at least once (I think?) since I created the original one, so it’s not a complete shock that the boot sector has changed. But if that were the case, it should have stopped working a long time ago, not yesterday.

Ah well; it’s working now. Yet another sign of the fragility of my computer setup; I’ll improve matters over the course of 2006, honest I will.

When I was looking for podcasts, I ended up going to iTunes and browsing the top rated ones. I found some that I like, but the best is the They Might be Giants podcast. Only one episode so far, but it’s really good; I should go and get more of their albums.

Other podcasts I found on iTunes that I’m still listening to: This Week in Tech, Next Big Hit, All Songs Considered, and Motley Fool. I’m not sure I’ll stay subscribed to all of them indefinitely, but they’re entertaining enough for now.

I’m in the habit of, when going on a plane trip, picking up a copy of Games magazine. (If I can find a copy; it doesn’t get very good distribution, and in particular airport stores almost never have it.)

Which I just did; it turns out that the magazine has changed recently. They used to have several articles and maybe 15-20 pages of puzzles; this issue has fewer articles, I think, but 40 pages of puzzles. Good ones, too; there are several new puzzle variants that I’ve never seen and that I like. Nurikabe seem like a nice idea, for example. I think I’ll subscribe to the magazine, given that my brain seems to be in a puzzle-solving mood these days.

Not that I actually am on a trip. I couldn’t possibly need a flu shot, since I’ve already gotten the flu once this year, right? Oops. I could do without this, though I could certainly think of worse ways to use up my stock of bad luck…

WordPress has an option to do ‘pingbacks’ on links referred to in your blog.

I thought I’d had this turned on for a while, but I don’t really know; at any rate, when upgrading the blog, I found that I’m now pinging back my own blog.

Which, on further reflection, is probably actually a good thing: if I write post A and then have further thoughts about it in post B, I probably want readers of post A to be able to find post B as well.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2. I still don’t know what was causing the problems I had the last time I tried this, but it seems to work now.

Let me know if there are any problems.

In an RSS feed, you get some text plus a link. The link is the link to the original article that the entry in the feed corresponds to; the text is either the entire original article or an abbreviated version of it.

Or at least that’s the way it’s conventially done. But in Simon Phipps’ The Daily Mink, while the above is true for some articles (ones that Simon wrote himself), there are a fair number of entries where the RSS feed just contains a sentence or two of introduction/commentary, and the link sends you straight to the article (written by somebody else) being commented upon.

Which led to a couple of minutes of confusion – I normally always jump straight to the original article, skimming (at best) the text from the feed – but it seems like a reasonable enough way to do things.

I finished reading an introductory SQL book. (Which seemed decent enough.) So now I don’t really have many excuses to avoid starting the transition of dbcdb to an SQL back end.

Which I don’t really feel like doing, even though it’s clearly the right thing to do next. This means one thing: I should split my stories.

So: what are the steps? I have existing data stored in a custom representation, and I don’t want to throw away that data. So I need a tool to dump the data to SQL. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the most robust tool in the world, but it’s hard to do without.

I could imagine writing a tool to go the other way as well, but I don’t really see the point of that. So let’s skip that step.

After I have the data in SQL, I should transition my software to generate the web pages straight from the database.

Once that’s in place, I won’t have any more need for my custom Java representation. So I’ll need to write tools to update the database directly, instead of updating my custom representation and dumping it to Java.

That’s the high-level plan; let’s drill down a little. The first part is to dump the data into an SQL database. So I guess I need to come up with a database schema. And I need to learn about ways to interact with SQL from Java; JDBC seems to be the tool to use. I should think about how to test this; I guess I can do acceptance tests by sending SQL queries from a shell script, but I’ll need unit tests, too. (I could skip it, given the throw-away nature of the code, but I don’t think skipping it will save me any time.) Michael Feathers says your unit tests shouldn’t interact with the actual database; I could either look into an in-memory database, or I could ignore the advice. I think I’ll do the latter until it starts biting me: right now, build times are much longer than test times, and I doubt the database-level unit tests will take that long to execute. I think writing the data out is conceptually straightforward, though I can’t quite envision what the abstractions will be in my code.

Next: generate the web pages straight from the database. For books, this will be completely straightforward. For authors, it will be almost as straightforward; I’ll have to redo the way I generate my list of books by an author, but that’s no big deal. And once I have all the individual objects under by belt, hopefully the indices will be straightforward enough. So there should be an easy task breakdown there, with a natural order of the tasks.

Updating the data is an interesting issue. I could actually just go and edit the database directly, using some tool like phpMyAdmin. Or I could write a Java CLI tool. I don’t think I want to write a custom web tool for this just yet: that will come much later in the project. Honestly, it will be a little hard to write a CLI tool that’s as easy to use as my current format (there might be a lesson to be learned in that), but I guess the CLI tool will be easier to use than mucking with the database more or less by hand. Shouldn’t be too hard to do; I’ll plan it in detail once I come to that.

Sounds like a plan; hopefully there’s enough detail here to get me to stop procrastinating. Clearly I should start learning about JDBC, at any rate.

Martin Fowler just revised his The New Methodology paper; it’s a nice introductory exposition/justification of agile methods.

Some management writers that I respect think that it’s worth learning about Meyer-Briggs personality types, on the theory that you need to realize that most people are different from you, and that there are concrete differences in their motivations, approaches, and so forth that can be helpful to know. The Meyers-Briggs types categorize your personality along four dimensions:

• Extrovert or Introvert
• Sensing or iNtuitive
• Thinking or Feeling
• Judging or Perceiving

So you can take a test which will give you a four-letter type: ESTJ, INFJ, ESFP, etc. And you can find various descriptions of the sixteen possibilities.

The specific approach that one of the sources recommended is Keirsey’s, so I read his Please Understand Me. Keirsey actually thinks that not all distinctions are equally important: he focuses on whether people are SP (“Artisan”), SJ (“Guardian”), NF (“Idealist”), or NT (“Rational”). He talks about how authors over the last two and a half millennia have divided people into four groups which can easily be made to correspond to these categories.

Before reading the book, I took an online test (I can’t remember the link); it had me as I, N, and P, but I was tied on the T/F axis. Looking at the description, I thought it was pretty obvious that I was a thinking instead of feeling, making me an INTP. But then I took the personality test at the front of Keirsey’s book; it actually had me marked as an INFP.

This would make me an Idealist instead of a Rational. I will admit that I do have idealistic tendencies, but that still seemed a little strange; maybe the part of me that was answering the test would like to be an F even though I’m not. Keirsey, however, had different meanings for the letters, thinking that Meyers’ original descriptions weren’t the best:

• E: expressive or I: reserved
• S: observant or N: introspective
• T: tough-minded or F: friendly
• J: scheduling or P: probing

Looking at the T/F distinction that way, it’s not so clear to me. And, reading more of Keirsey’s descriptions, I definitely have some F in me: I find conflicts quite unpleasant, for example.

Still, whenever I see something like this, I’m suspicious: is this really a natural division, or is it just one way among many to divide up people? Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, but it’s perhaps not quite as interesting. And if I can’t even figure out which of Keirsey’s four main types I am, then that adds to my suspicion.

Reading more, though, it was at least clear which of the types I’m not: I clearly have the least sympathy with SJ’s, and I should probably work on understanding them better. And I’m not an SP (e.g. flamboyant artist types), though at least it’s an idea that I find attractive. I could definitely see myself in parts of the NF description, but I’m pretty clearly an NT. What sealed the latter for me was his description of INTPs’ parenting styles; it wasn’t a priori obvious to me what, if anything, INTP’s would have in common in their approach to parenting, but his description says:

Architects [INTP’s] are devoted parents; they enjoy children, and are very serious about their upbringing. Each of their children is treated as a rational individual, with rights, privileges, and as much autonomy as that child can handle safely. INTPs encourage their children to take responsibility for their own lives and to chart their own course. They do not visit their own expectations on their children and never attack them physically or verbally. When safe to do so Architects let the natural consequences of their children’s actions teach them about reality. When this is unsafe, they somehow contrive to design logical consequences to inform their children’s actions.

And I would have to plead completely guilty to that. So: INTP (“Architect”) it is, and maybe there’s something to this sorting method after all.

To him, the most important distiction is the S/N disctinction, which he frequently characterizes concrete versus abstract. The significant majority of humanity fits in the former category, though doubtless most of you are in the latter. (And doubtless most people who like to think about this sorts of categorization are in the latter category as well; maybe that has something to do with why they consider it an important distinction, even if most of humanity is on one side…) For example, his claim is that, in most successful marriages, the couple is either both S’s or both N’s, but that for the other letters their being the opposite works better. Beats me; I haven’t closely observed enough marriages to have an opinion about this. I don’t even know what Liesl’s personality type is, though it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s an N; if she’s an S, I don’t think she’s too strongly on that side. (I suspect Miranda is an INFP, but I could be wrong. He does claim that INTP parents and INFP children get along quite well, which is nice.)

At the end of the book, he has a “four types sorter” designed to tell you if you’re an SP, SJ, NF, NP. The results there were interesting: I was an NP, but my scores were something like 32 points for NP, 35 for NF, 37 for SP, 56 for SJ, with the lowest score winning. So the lesson here is that, whatever I am, I’m not an SJ, which fits with my observations earlier.

I’m not sure quite what to take out of this, but I guess I should spend some time observing my coworkers and seeing how they fit in. We’re a bunch of programmers, so we may well all be NT’s. But perhaps I’ll be able to find situations where I’d been inappropriately treating people as having similar motivations and feelings to myself, and use that knowledge to work more effectively with them. Or perhaps the mistakes I’m making have nothing to do with these types, and my idiosyncracies lie along different lines. Or perhaps I’m not making mistakes! (Yeah, right.) We’ll see.

Do actual psychologists find these divisions useful? Jordan, what does Tanya say?