Saturday, August 23, 2008

Still no pig

"Alas. No prob this end."
"We have cheese."
"Still no pig."
"Next."

Crack me up! Sarahlynn discovered the "drafts" folder full of unsent text messages on her phone. These were the last four message that she hadn't ever sent. Something makes me think thank her T9 didn't guess quite right on that second to last message.

I think this is almost as good as the infamous Lester-family game of Balderdash where Ben Jett defined "mopoke" as something like "what a red neck says when asking for a second helping of bbq, as in the quote: I said, mo' pork!"

Monday, August 04, 2008

That Time Again

You'll notice a new feature on my sidebar - the read-out from electoral-vote.com.

It's that time again. I don't know what we'll do in this house with the debate and election season. The last two presidential election cycles were pretty dramatic for us:

In 2000, we were on the last night of our honeymoon, on a magical Disney cruise in the middle of the Caribbean, trying to learn if we should ask the captain if he would drop us off in a different country or if we could return to the States. We spent the evening at a dinner table with some very un-likeminded guests, and all took turns heading out to the lounge to see where things were on the TV. Sarahlynn stayed up all night; I gave up in the wee hours. As we all remember, the results were still unclear the next morning when we docked. So, we disembarked anyway.

In 2004, we rented a huge 52" rear-projection TV that looked like a martian ship in the middle of our little living room; and we hosted debate parties. We had to rent the TV for at least a month, so we decided to host an election night party as well. Everyone was required to bring a food item that was either red or blue -- lots of interesting concoctions showed up. We all remember where that election went as well.

So, here we are in 2008. Seems like we're on the cusp of change. I sure hope so.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

INTP

As most who know me would probably expect... I'm an INTP.
...
My team at work has a couple of challenges. First, 80% of the people in the department we're part of have been there for less than a year. Second, people don't understand much about what we do. The department is only 3 years old.

So, there's a lack of trust between people, a lot of inefficiency in process, not a lot of camaraderie sometimes. Since other managers in my department were complaining about things not getting done well and people not working together effectively, I decided to try to fix some of those issues, with join team meetings.

This latest meeting was a lot of fun. Everyone participated in a simple "Meyers-Briggs for programmers" personality inventory.

I'm an INTP:
E=2 Extraversion
I=9 Introversion

S=7 Sensing
N=13 iNtuition

T=12 Thinking
F=7 Feeling

J=9 Judging
P=10 Perceiving

INTP - Physicists, chemists, biologists, photographers, strategic planners, mathematicians, university professors, computer programmers, computer animators, technical writers, engineers, lawyers, forensic researchers, writers, artists, psychologists, social scientists, systems analysts, researchers, surveyors. Highly analytical, they can discover connections between two seemingly unrelated things, and work best when allowed to use their imagination and critical thinking.

What I found really interesting was that the largest majority of people in the room were in a category with career notes including "mob boss."

I do think those team meetings have been effective!