The demise of Gary Gygax has caused a wave of reminiscences in the blogosphere. Here's my contribution to the lot.

Some of my friends have taken this loss very hard indeed. One person in particular seems to be taking it like the death of a relative. Others are having a really hard time understanding what was so great about this guy - I mean, come on, what has he done for us lately? To that I say, imagine what it will feel like when Bob Dylan dies, or Mick Jagger, or what it was like to lose John Lennon. That's who Gygax is in the gaming world.

I started playing at about 10 years old - my parents got me the Basic D&D set (which hsarik reminded me came with blank dice that you were supposed to write on with a crayon that came in the set.) I ended up moving up to the Expert D&D set which my next door neighbor's son owned. Thus I had my first experience with being the only girl in a room full of boys gaming together. And so my role as the girl in the boys' club has remained until very recently.

There were never any other females that I knew who gamed. I played in high school, college, and after college with all guys. It wasn't until the late 1990s and early 2000s that I had a couple of gaming experiences where there was another woman present. I'm in a gaming group right now, with the highly capable JP as Dungeon Master, and it's all men except me again.

I also find myself in a male-dominated industry. Out of the ~30 people in my department, 4 of us are women. I don't think there's a coincidence here. I don't think technical ability and a proclivity for D&D necessarily go hand in hand. But I do think that what I learned from gaming with men is a very useful skill to have in a male-dominated industry.

The wonderful thing that Gygax and co-creator Dave Arneson invented was something that requires a lot of understanding and comfort with rules before it really starts to bloom. There's a huge learning curve there, especially if you were a child of my generation with no one there to tell you how to do things or to answer your questions. There were simply some not-always-well-written books. And yourselves. It requires a lot of cooperation amongst players, and particularly a very even keel for a Dungeon Master. These are not traits one finds in 10-year-olds of either gender. So we were all learning together.

I was at a distinct disadvantage, being a yucky girl. But I weathered through it, and I found to my surprise that while there were some things I could never do quite as well as the guys (yes, I am being sexist here, but it has more to do with my emotional bent than anything specifically gender-related), I also brought this strange mystical girl experience to the team that sometimes came as a real benefit. I tended to be, in the end, more of a leader to the group, and created a sense of team which helped us get through the advevnture together. To be blunt, I helped get us beyond the dick-measuring aspects of gaming and more into contributing our strengths to the team.

And honestly, that is the exact same environment that I see in the technical industry. I will never be a technical expert, although I do fine. I instead help to create teams and keep our eye on the prize.

So thank you, Gary and Dave. You created this marvelous, revolutionary thing, where we were able to pretend to be someone else, fight mythical creatures, win treasure, die and be resurrected. And you also taught me that the most fun thing about adventuring is what I learned about human interaction.

So I logged into Second Life for the first time a couple of days ago to check out my pal Jopsy's creations over there. I found the orientation process frustrating and broken and the TinyJerk* factor really repulsive (people running around with nude Avatars bumping up against you), but once I figured out how to get out of the intro training area and to Jopsy's space, it was pretty nifty.

I also found the character appearance alteration tools very easy to use and comprehensive. I gave myself an appearance that was close to my "first life" appeaeance, except thinner and with bluer eyes. In any case, here's the result:


Click for a larger view

The effect is more interesting in the virtual realm, since you can get a (psuedo) 3-D effect. It makes me wonder if my nose really looks like that. Which, of course, it doesn't quite.

I also managed to find my old friend wapini from DragonMUD on SL. Hi, pini! :)

*TinyJerk is an old MUD term for people who behave in insulting/stupid/assaultive ways online. I'm not sure what the modern term is - the term TinyJerk probably designates me as a Dino. ;)

I had the pleasure of participating in a game of Dungeons & Dragons this weekend - the first time in a few years that I've gamed with anyone. These were the original (I mean, prior to 1st edition) rules, and a world which my friend and Dungeon Master JP had created. It was a lot of fun. I hadn't played as a genuine 1st level character in a long time, so I'd forgotten how weak you are - my character had 3 Hit Points. I actually was incredibly lucky to have emerged completely unscathed - I suppose that, playing a Cleric, I was blessed by some higher power. ;) My friend Rob was not so lucky - his character was doubly poisoned, once by a poison arrow from the enemy, and once when we fed him some unidentified potion we'd found in the dungeon hoping it was a cure for the poison but turned out to be an even worse poison. :( The poor guy met his end nobly, having slaughtered many a slutty female drow elf in combat, and a rather menacing higher-order skeleton.

Our party was of good size with two Fighters, a Cleric and a Magic User, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. I was the only female in the crowd, but that's something I'm quite used to in gaming circles. It was a fun time, and hopefully we'll do it again soon. Thanks to JP for running things, and Maura for her awesome pasta fagioli that kept us well fed!

... I thought I'd update everyone on my standings in Puzzle Pirates:



Click for information on my character, including stats in various pirating games.

I just finished Harry Potter #7. It's been 23 hours and 45 minutes since I started.

This experience has been my first (at least partially) measured experiment where I was trying to figure out exactly how slow of a reader I am.

I got the book at almost the same time as my friend hsarik - she started reading about 5 minutes after I did. She finished in almost exactly 7 hours, which is a pretty rapid clip for a 759 page book. That breaks down to 108 pages/hour, and that includes bathroom and food breaks and such.

When I read, I don't tend to focus all that well, because random sentences or ideas that hit me while reading will lead me to spin off into potentially unrelated thought processes as I'm reading. I enjoy these mental excursions, so I never have trained myself to curtail them. I think it's part of being a Myers-Briggs N. Also, as I'm reading, I'm definitely critiquing the plot, the characterization, and general writing style of the book. Thirdly, I'm trying to predict where things are going to go, and more importantly, where I think they should or ought to be going, and if the plot has veered from what I think it should be doing. There's the J. :) And the N a bit too, as it helps me to see the overall patterns of the novel.

[Ok, I'm way too in love with the Myers-Briggs. I know this. I'll get over it someday. Maybe.]

I was going along at a pretty good clip (for me) at 50 pages per hour for the first 6 hours. I figured it would take me a little over 15 hours to finish reading. So I was already feeling a bit lame for being slow. But then I hit a really boring patch in the book and slowed down to a dismal 25 pages/hour for the next 2.5 hours. (I can hardly even believe that!) My interest in the book and the plot at that point was clearly waning, and I think it in addition set all these tertiary mental processes spinning, and plus, I was getting tired of sitting there and reading.

I stopped keeping as good track of what my rate was from there on out, although the book did pick up a bit. I stopped reading at about 12:30 am, and went to bed, thinking I'd pick up in the morning. But then my pager went off at 2:00 am and woke me up, so I stayed up and read until about 5:30. Then I woke up around 8:30 and had it finished by 10:30. It made for a weird, half-too-tired-to-focus reading experience, but in some ways that fit the plot line nicely.

So I figure I spent a total of 17 hours reading, which makes for an overall rate of about 45 pages/hour. It looks like most of the information I can find online about reading rates is in words per minute - perhaps I will look at trying to figure out that rate at some point.

What I know that I do that slows me down so much aside from my internal dialog is, at least from this Wikipedia article, a hell of a lot of subvocalization, and pretty much no chunking. A friend of mine in high school was dumbfounded to discover that I actually read every single word. She tried to teach me some chunking techniques, but I was pretty resistant.

I was actually a very advanced reader in my youth - I started reading at age three. Then we started moving around a lot, and whereas I still performed well above my grade level, I missed a lot of stuff (like sentence diagramming, learning cursive which I eventually taught myself, and who knows what reading techniques.) As I got older I displayed more aptitude for math and science than for English and history, although my French and Greek skills were good. I guess no one ever thought to teach me how to read quickly for content, and then I was past the point of changing.

I think there are times when my reading rate hampers me, and it's one of the only measurable things I can point to that makes me feel a bit stupid. Otherwise I tend to test on very high levels on other things. I guess we all have our limitations and specialties.

Oh, and the Harry Potter book was good. :) It could have used maybe 100 pages taken out during the boring section, but otherwise, I'm quite pleased with it.

Now I suppose I had better get on the stick with that Perl code...

I pre-ordered my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from the Regulator, and went to the opening night bash they were having, all dressed up. I got there a little before 11:00 pm, and the crowds on 9th street were just overwhelming, It was great to see, but I can't stand crowds and will only put up with them for something really important like a Duke basketball game or a Prince concert. So I took a few hasty, bad shots of the crowd and skipped off home.


This picture doesn't really do it justice - about half of ninth street was totally impassable and people were spilling out onto the street, which at that time of night was really busy already.

This morning I went back to the store and picked up my copy - not crowded at all.



I'm going off to the store to by nacho makings and a bunch of Cherry Coke Zeros, then I'm going to dig in. I really, really need to be doing Perl code this weekend instead, but I'm going to give myself today to do Harry Potter and will have to just work that much harder tomorrow.

The combination of this joke and this one have really made my morning.

If you have no idea what lolcat is, you must go directly to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

So, it turns out that Cracked magazine, which I read religiously when I was about 11, is no longer for kids. So this hilarious article about Harry Potter and what had better be answered in book 7 does not have appropriate language for kids.

In contrast to my last post, I'm a very big Harry Potter fan. At first it seemed overly formulaic to me, which, well, it is, but I think J. K. Rowling has done something very remarkable here. She's taken a book that maybe anyone could write (which is why I find it so intriguing - why didn't I think of it first?) and she has captured the imaginations of children everywhere, and adults too. I wish I could come up with something equally appealing. (Not for the money's sake - I'm just an aspiring novelist for this kind of book. Only I don't think I can write for children - the novels I've outlined in my head go to much darker places.)

So I'm really looking forward to the final book coming out, and I probably will even attend the midnight celebration at The Regulator, although I'm not planning to go in costume. I've even considered taking Friday, 7/20 off from work so I can sit there and read it. But I guess I won't go that far.

Correction: The book comes out at 12:00 a.m. Saturday, 7/21, which was advertised as midnight Friday, 7/20 - so I'll have all day Saturday to read it immediately without taking any time off.

SPOILERS ************ SPOILERS ************ SPOILERS

I saw the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie yesterday with my friend Chris. I liked it. Not as well as the previous ones, though. It was darker, which I didn't mind, but there was one thing that really ticked me off, which is who they ended up having betray the secret of the D.A., which was different from the book. And the darkness was unrelenting, which might be an appropriate change, but felt more to me like great gobs of storyline had been chopped out. The Cho thing was hastily done, there was very little, really, of Ron or Hermione, Draco was almost totally absent, there wasn't even mention of Quidditch, some of the best parts of the Department of Mysteries were chopped out, and some of the torturous methods of Professor Umbridge were either way underplayed or way overplayed.

On the other hand, the director did a remarkably good job of taking a 636 page book and distilling it down to just over two hours. Imelda Staunton did an outstanding job as the officious Umbridge, and Daniel Radcliffe is blossoming into a quite credible actor. And the book *is*, in fact, that dark. With good reason. Voldemort is back, The Ministry is trying to impose order and denial over everything, Harry is being possessed (they didn't show these flashes as being painful to his scar though - which I think is another real violation to Rowling's storyline) and Dumbledore is conspicuously absent and seemingly uncaring all of a sudden. So in some ways this is the darkest book of the series (until we see what's in book 7, of course.)

Here is what I think is going to be revealed in book 7. There's no justification for any of this - these are just hunches of mine. I am of the opinion that Snape is innocent. I think he killed Dumbledore because Dumbledore asked him to do so by saying "Please..." in book 6. Snape had revealed to Dumbledore that he had to make the unbreakable vow to protect Draco, and Draco was going to fail and be killed by the other Death Eaters. Dumbledore trusted Snape, and so do I. I think Dumbledore had a lot more inside information into Snape and his loyalties than we do as readers. Also, I have this feeling that Snape was in love with Lily Potter, so however much he resented Harry's father, he wouldn't harm Harry for Lily's sake. Like I said, I have no proof whatsoever of that. The only potential link is that both Lily and Severus were very good at potions.

I think that Harry is one of Voldemort's remaining horcruxes. (Horcruces??) Apparently this theory has been advanced rather far on mugglenet.com, although I'm waiting to explore there until after I get my thoughts down here. I think that when Voldemort killed Lily Potter, he may have splintered off a piece of his soul and put it into Harry. But if so, it must have been unintentional in some way - maybe that's what Lily's love did. But he wouldn't have tried to kill Harry immediately afterwards if he had known - but because Harry was a horcrux at that point, Voldemort's Avada Kedavra spell backfired and killed him instead. Except Voldemort couldn't actually be killed because of the existence of the other horcruces. So this is how they're both linked to each other. I think a lot of this is why "neither can live while the other survives" and which, unfortunately, says to me that some part of Voldemort will always exist while Harry does, and vice versa. Which may mean that Harry needs to die in book 7.

Then I'd like to take this one step further. I think that when Voldemort accidentally killed his own body by the backfired spell, Harry technically killed Voldemort. And I think that when this happened, Harry created his own horcrux, which either somehow resides in Voldemort's resurrected body, or else, more likely, in his wand. Which is why the Priori Incantatum (if I have that right) happened between their two wands in Goblet of Fire. I think this theory is a lot more tenuous and probably unnecessary since they would already be linked through Harry being Voldemort's horcrux. But I thought it was fun to play with. :)

I seriously doubt that Harry will die in book 7, though. There will be a happy ending. Voldemort will be killed somehow, and although a major character is supposed to die if I have the rumors right, I expect it will be McGonagall, one of the Weasley parents, or Snape himself who will sacrifice themselves for their loved ones.

And Ron and Hermione and Ginny and Harry will live happily ever after. The End.

I'm recording some things off of my DV-R that have been sitting there for months, which includes two Charlie Brown specials: It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Since I'm already on a Myers-Briggs kick today, I started trying to type the characters. Here's what I came up with:

Linus - INFJ. Anyone who can believe in The Great Pumpkin has got to be an NF Idealist. E/I is harder with him, but he seems not to initiate interactions with others aside from Charlie Brown. He is instead reactive and reserved. His tendency to be a bit of a counselor for Charlie Brown makes me think he's more of a J than a P.

Charlie Brown - INTJ. This one's a bit tricky. He's an I, clearly. His interactions (or lack thereof) with the little red-headed girl are a good example of this. I think he's an NT Rational, as he spends so much time thinking and fretting over things internally, which would make him an N. The T is iffy - I chose T because emotions seem to confuse him, whereas when he's in charge of something that's thought-oriented he seems to be more of a duck in water. I'm trying to come up with a good example to back this up. I chose J for him because he seems to have trouble with change, and is much more comfortable when things are stable.

Ok, I found something in A Charlie Brown Christmas that backs up my NT vs. NF argument:

CB: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus.  Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy.  I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.    I just don't understand Christmas, I guess.  I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy.  I always end up feeling depressed.

Linus:  Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.

In this exchange, Charlie Brown is trying to "understand Christmas", and he's trying to figure out his emotions from an intellectual standpoint - like it's a problem to be solved with thought.   So I stand by the NT choice.

Lucy - ESTJ. A general if I ever saw one. She doesn't have much interest in recognizing other people's emotions - she's there to make sure the line is toed. And she'll be loud about it. And effective. Because she has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 very good reasons why you better.  She does show another side of herself (sort of) with the whole Psychiatric Help 5¢ bit, but clearly she's very ineffectual in that role and is only doing it to make money and feel self-important. This is not a general knock on ESTJs so much as Lucy in particular. My grandfather is an ESTJ (see Orson Welles in The Long Hot Summer - that's Grandpa) and whereas he is very definitely the one in charge, he has always done a very good job at guarding his family and making sure everyone was taken care of, even if it was tough love at times. I have a lot of respect for him.

Snoopy - ESFP. He's definitely an adventurer and a thrill-seeker (Here's the World War I Flying Ace in his Sopwith Camel), which would make him an SP, and is also suave and outgoing, which would make him an E. He also reacts emotionally very easily (e.g., weeping while Schroeder plays piano), and is a bit of a performer with his Flying Ace story lines, playing Joe Cool, a vulture, etc.

Sally - ESFJ. Sally is definitely comfortable initiating interactions and showing affection, particularly with Linus, so that makes her an E, and also an F, since she seems emotionally-driven. She's more of an SJ Guardian than an SP Artisan, in my point of view, since she doesn't seem to have any particular artistic bent. She seems to be conscious of the material world and her immediate surroundings rather than living in her head like Charlie Brown and Linus do, which would lean more toward SJ than NF. For an example of her judging side, just watch what happens if someone cheats her out of tricks-or-treats. Blockhead! ;)

Schoroeder - ISFP? ESFP? He's clearly an artist, but he's not outgoing, so I'll go with ISFP.

There's not enough data on the other characters for me to make any sort of assessment.

I found this exercise fun - any thoughts or feedback? Should Charlie Brown be an INFP?

Mom wasn't able to make it down last weekend due to a death in one of her good friend's families. So while I was sad to have to delay Mom's visit for a couple more weeks, I did have an opportunity to host the recently-started Critically Hit gaming group.

We played a game from circa 1989 called Mall Madness which was cute for a few minutes but not something I'd want to play again - I don't like malls as it is. We started to play Lord of the Fries but then decided that Munchkin would be better - I didn't participate in that one. I set up a second table where I taught a few folks how to play Set, a game that I've adored for years. After the Munchkin game was over, we played Cranium for the rest of the evening.

I think some of the folks that came were probably disappointed that we were doing the more accessible games rather than the more hard-core ones, but I expect other nights will trend the other way.

Also, my old friend Trip gave me a box full of Dungeons and Dragons goodies that he recently rescued from his parents' attic. He had a set of 1st edition AD&D books, which I already had, but knew someone who wanted them. Also, there were a bunch of modules, posters from Dragon magazine, some dice and other stuff. But most of all, he gave me a huge number of models from the 1970s and 1980s which had been very carefully painted when he was a youth. I went through the box and kept a lot of the best modules and models, and gave the rest away to the Critically Hit gang last night, who were quite glad to get them.

Here are some pictures of the Grenadier models that I kept:



Thanks, Trip! Your things have found good homes. :)

Yesterday at JavaOne the sessions I attended were almost a complete loss. There's a fine line with these things where it can become total marketing, use my solution because I say so, or this will never apply to my situation kinds of talks. I fell into a lot of them on Thursday.

I did get to have dinner with my pal slemons, though, who was here for a Tivoli conference. So many conerences going on in SF at the same time this week!



It began to bother me more and more that there are so few women at this conference. I'd say there's maybe 10 percent women, and of those, my guess is the majority are Asian. I'd like to see the stats on the gender and race percentages of the population.

This became even more apparent at the After Dark bash during the evening. They had a lot of neat things, particularly Battle Bots, and games and bungee jumping and segway races and such. But then, as a half-time show of sorts for the Battle Bots, they brought out Grinder Girl, which is close to being a strip show. This woman dresses in a metal outfit and then uses a sander to shoot sparks off of herself in the most private of places. See the Flickr stream for the gory details.

I am really shocked and appalled that this is what a business conference devolves to. This is discriminatory against women or, basically, anyone who isn't a heterosexual male. (Although, I suppose lesbians might find it appealing too - search me.)

This whole week has gone a long way to prove to me that *nothing* has changed in the workplace as far as women's equality is concerned. Either we're not educating women properly or there's some other barrier to women entering the technological sector.

Today was a bit different from yesterday - I went to a couple of great sessions on Java Server Faces, Spring, and Hibernate; and Open Source SOA. I also got a chance to go to the Java Pavillion trade-show thing and also look around the neighborhood more properly.



I forgot to take a shot of the folks at dinner - I got to meet sto, and see hlf and bc and see how they're ajusting to the west coast. Rob and moose were also there, and we had a good time. We also ate some excellent sushi at Sanraku, and some locally-brewed beer at The Thirsty Bear. Yum!

Yesterday was an interesting day - for the most part. It was really very humbling to be in a sea of 15,000 uber-geeks, each of which could have been in my middle school gifted classes, and most of which are far smarter than I am about Java-related stuff. On the other hand, I was surprised to see how much more I know about Ruby on Rails than most of the folks who attended the JRuby session that I went to - I was explaining to my neighbors what Ruby is, what Rails is, and why it's useful. So at least I didn't come out of the day feeling like a complete moron.



The opening general session was really interesting, in my opinion, and very well done - it was hard to detect the marketing hype most of the time. I also really like the Chairman of Sun, Scott McNealy - towards the end when the Keynote speaker, EVP for Software Rich Green, was getting a bit too Marketing-sappy, ain't-we-great-for-sacrificing-our-best-profit-seeking-interests-for-worldwide-good, Scott said "Should I pull out a lighter?" and waved his arm around in the air. I appreciate that sense of humor. :)

I mostly attended the Web Services / SOA - oriented seminars, and found them to be very EJB-oriented - which is understandable. But since my department just uses Plain Old Java and not EJB, I'm not sure I'll be able to use much of it - we may have to go with an EJB solution if we want to do Web Services. Hrm. I'll have to do some more research on that.

I went to a local Chevy's for dinner, and immediately started to feel ill afterwards. I had a couple of hours until my evening sessions, so I started walking to the hotel and half way there felt like I was going to lose my dinner. I ended up buying a $5 cable car ticket so that I wouldn't have to walk uphill the extra 4 blocks to the hotel, and then the cable car guy acted like a royal jerk when I told him I was sick and needed to get off at Post street but needed some help figuring out how to get off the cable car at the right spot. My recommendation: AVOID SAN FRAN CABLE CARS AT ALL COSTS. Jerks.

I felt too ill to go to my evening sessions, and fell asleep in the middle of American Idol while trying to wait for House to come on. I feel much better today, thankfully.

Tonight's plans: eat sushi with bc, sto, hlf, rob, and moose. Should be a fun time. :)

I'll be really busy this week and won't have much time to write these up, but here are a bunch of photos I took yesterday on my travel day out to San Francisco for JavaOne:



The best part of the day was my visit to Pixar where my friend Moose works. He gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the place that unfortunately I couldn't photograph due to industry privacy, but let's just say there are some really creative folks over there, and it looks like a fabulous place to work. Moose and I had a good time visiting, and hopefully we'll see each other again later this week.

I also got to see my former college roommie Leila and her new husband Gavin. Leila is very pregnant at the moment so it was really great of her to make the effort to come into town to see me. :) I liked Gavin a lot - they seem like a good couple.

Off to the rest of my rigorous schedule!

A friend of mine (the scurvy dog!) introduced me to a new way to take your spare time and make it walk the plank. It's called Puzzle Pirates, and it really appeals to me since I enjoy puzzle-oriented video games. So basically you get really good at certain puzzles, then you do them with others as a crew on a pirate ship in order to raid ships and gain booty. Then you can spend the pieces of eight on clothing for your character, household items, pets, and eventually you can buy your own ship and enlist crew members.

Here's my character:



Click on the picture for more information on me. I've improved in levels on various of the tasks since this portrait was taken, and now have Distinguished merits in Distilling, Hearts, Spades, and Bilging.

It's only $10/month, so I figure, what the heck. The fact that the games are starting to appear in my dreams is a little disturbing, however.

You Are An INFJ

The Protector You live your life with integrity, originality, vision, and creativity. Independent and stubborn, you rarely stray from your vision - no matter what it is. You are an excellent listener, with almost infinite patience. You have complex, deep feelings, and you take great care to express them. You would make a great photographer, alternative medicine guru, or teacher.

I don't think I'm actually that good a listener. I think a lot of the time I end up doing more listening than talking with my close friends, but I'm not a good interviewer. I know this because my Mom is awesome at both listening and asking question to get one to open up further, and it's a skill I don't possess. But I am able to be very empathetic and a caring listener - that is, unless I'm feeling stressed, in which case I shut down. But that is in itself indicative of being an INFJ.

Anyways, for what it's worth, and as a somewhat quick-and-dirty Myers-Briggs test, this ain't bad.

This one's even more interesting:

Jung Explorer Test
Actualized type: INFJ
(who you are)

INFJ - "Author". Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population.

Preferred type: ENFJ
(who you prefer to be)

ENFJ - "Persuader". Outstanding leader of groups. Can be aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be. 2.5% of total population.

Attraction type: ENFP

(who you are attracted to)

ENFP - "Journalist". Uncanny sense of the motivations of others. Life is an exciting drama. 8.1% of total population.

Take Jung Explorer Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


I would certainly like to be a lot more extroverted than I actually am, and sometimes I can fake it pretty well. Depends on the crowd. I'm also definitely attracted to people who are extroverts. Interesting.

This has to be the funniest wikipedia article I've ever seen. I mean, baba ghanoush?!?!?!?!!

A conversation about 1200 baud modems started me down a set of reminiscences about computers I have owned or worked with before, back in the dark ages when there were no hard drives and services like Prodigy were the major players in the ISP space. With a little research, I have come up with a partial history of my systems.

I first started programming when I was in 6th grade (1981), in a class with the SIGNET Gifted program in my middle school. We programmed in Basic, and had projects like flashing your name up on a screen which took maybe 100 lines of code, at most. At this point, Dad (who has an EE degree) decided to buy me my first computer, a Timex Sinclair ZX81. We used to plug it into the back of a black and white TV. I think Dad got as much of a kick out of it as me, if not more so.

Around that same time, I got the premiere game-playing box of all time - none other than the Atari 2600. Actually, the Atari may have come first - the order is a little confused in my head. I still have fond memories of playing Yar's Revenge on that thing.

In the summer of 1982, I went to Computer Camp somewhere in Northern Virginia. I remember it was the summer that Tron was out in theaters - we went to see it as a group. We did Basic programming in the classes, and got to see the Really Big Computers with the reel-to-reel tapes, and the punch card machines. Oooooh.

Then along about 1983, Dad and I put together a Heathkit Zenith. Dad did most of it, but I got to solder in a few resistors and generally feel like I contributed a little. I remember thinking the amber screen was *so cool*. I used it on occasion, mainly for word processing and also playing ADVENT. Dad bought a couple of prefab Tandys when I was in high school, which I used extensively for writing papers (Wordstar 3.0) and keeping track of my checkbook (Lotus 1-2-3).

When I got to Precollege Program at Duke in 1987, my roommate had an original Apple Macintosh which she let me use. I remember that it had so little memory that it was very difficult to use, and you had to keep your paper in three or four files in order to be able to load them into memory.

Finally, when I started at Duke as an undergrad in 1988, Dad sent with me his Datavue 25, which was very conveniently portable, but the display was almost impossible to read. I had an external monitor for it which made it more usable. By my senior year, I got my first (external) modem - 1200 baud - and started using Prodigy. I kept with that until switching to a real ISP after college - Digex, in particular.

I feel quite spoiled to have this lovely Macbook Pro today. I wonder how I ever got along without it.

For more memory-lane computers, this article from PC Magazine is pretty cool. And so is this one. Could there *be* any more links in this post?</chandler>

... and a complete waste of time.

So since I have a DVR now, I record the series "Friends." Yes, I am that kind of loser. I have been re-watching a bunch of reruns over the past month or so, and a question occurred to me - exactly which of the Friends have kissed each of the other Friends (on the lips) over the ten seasons of the show? So what follows is my probably incomplete list of who kissed whom from the plot summaries on wikipedia, along with www.friends-tv.org (since only the first 4 seasons are thorough on wikipedia.)

FRIENDS	Chandler	Joey	Ross	Phoebe	Rachel	Monica
Chandler	X	The One with the Monkey	?	The One Where Everybody Finds Out (they do actually kiss)	The One with All the Kissing and The One Where the Stripper Cries	The One with Ross's Wedding, Part Two (or thereabouts, we don't see them kiss on screen immediately)
Joey	above	X	The One with Barry and Mindy's Wedding	The One with Two Parts, part two and The One Where They All Turn Thirty	The One in Barbados, Part Two	?
Ross	?	above	X	The One with the Flashback	The One with the East German Laundry Detergent	The One Where the Stripper Cries (Ross was Monica's first kiss!)
Phoebe	above	above	above	X	The One with Rachel's Big Kiss	?
Rachel	above	above	above	above	X	The One with All the Haste (not sure if this actually happens or not)
Monica	above	?	above	?	above	X

Filling in blank spots is appreciated. :)