The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion.
All content is protected under copyright.
Search Archives:
"2.0"

Welcome to J.P. Stewart's Weblog!

Remember, the default view (which is what you get if you clicked on the main link) only displays a week of content. Use the archives link to read back farther.

For questions or comments send email to jp -AT- jpstewart.org.

Only one particular entry is displayed. Please use the "Next" or "Prev" links to navigate or click on "home" above if you want to return to the main page.

Wild Aspirations and Complications of a spotted mind...
Mon Mar 22 10:16:12 2004 | Prev | Next

OK, It�s that time again. It�s the time where I start questioning whether I am an INTP (1 or 2) or an INFP (1 or 2). Because it seems that I go back and forth quite often. You can almost tell just by reading my blog what phase I am in. I should really write a better interface for accessing archived entries. Even I have trouble finding much from the archives unless I use the search tool. Any ideas?

To elaborate more, all day all I have really wanted to do is sit around and think about things and write about even more than what I was able to think about. This yields an incredibly vicious circle. I have covered this in the past as well. This is that I can think a whole lot faster than I could ever type, and I type faster that I could physically write, and depending on how well I am typing (as that changes constantly), I can even type faster than I could talk. This basically means that this is the fastest medium for me to get the word out and its still not fast enough for me to really say what I want to in the right way. I think that this is one reason that I really like taking pictures. Sometimes the picture can say something much better than I ever would, yet it took so little time to produce. However, sometimes a picture is just not enough, and I want to be much more articulate with my words. This is where typing comes in because I can get down to the extreme details if I want to. But what happens if you are writing about something, or even worse WANT to write about something and the words just don�t come to you? I seem to experience this more and more often. Quite often it�s a song that will embody what I want to say, or as I mentioned a photo. Yet sometimes nothing seems to come out proper. Even though I can see a photo in my mind, it does not always come out that way in the end. Some of my photos come out the way that I want them too, but still most of the time, what I was actually seeing in the lens is not what was captured in the image. And sometimes when listening to the same song again, it just does not have the same �tone� to it, or does not instill the same feelings that it did the first time. This is where I feel I have been today. I feel that I want to write and write and write about something, yet I don�t really have to words to express myself with. So instead, I am trying to use my creative energies to explain the problem I am having through writing.

I am really not sure what makes me like this. I know that quite often feelings are my enemy and I am an INTP to the core focusing only on facts, figures, math and numbers. Yet now I want to explore them and contemplate them and to use them to understand myself better. I think the more and more that I try to understand this state, the more that it seems that something is missing. I am not sure what it is though. Many of you that know me know that I tend to buy a lot of stuff. Don�t get me wrong, its cool stuff, but sometimes I just wonder if its me trying to compensate for something else that�s missing. How do I know that or not though? How do I tell what it is that fills the emptiness? What do I change? This is a problem for me too since I am not much of a fan of change. I think that I can understand that change is good, but really I have a whole different outlook on it. I try to understand the cost to benefit ratio in change before changes are made for change sake. Why should I do something differently tomorrow that was working fine today? Well that seems to make perfect sense, but what if there is just one thing, or a few things that I could change that would make life so much better? What would they be? How do I know what they are so that I know that I should change them? How do I ensure that I do not change something that should not be changed to begin with? How do I know what I am doing that really is working out well for me? These are the questions and problems that I often have with the concept of change, and these are the things that constantly race through my head as well. I am always thinking through whatifs and other various scenarios. My life used to be full of these actually, and it took a lot of time and effort to run through all of the various scenarios, but lately I have noticed how much simpler things are that this does not happen much anymore. This of course has its good side and its bad. The good side meaning that there is not as much time wasted on thinking of pointless outcomes, the bad side being that there are not as many (or any) better outcomes to contemplate based on small changes. Does this make any sense? It does in my mind, but who knows what it is like to parse it all in on the other side.

Bottom line is that I think I am missing out on something in life. I think I know what it is, but I am not sure, and the problem is that it is something that I will probably have to endure the most change in order to realize and appreciate. Now you understand the predicament (and hopefully the previous paragraphs of babbling), do I spend all the energy to change just in the hope of making things better? Is the cost worth the reward? As time goes on, the more and more that I think about it, I think that the reward gets higher as the cost stays the same.

Gretchen first showed this to me, but Scoble commented on it as well. The Seattle Times had an article this weekend about women that were looking for Microsoft men. Heh, I think that it then proceeded to mention all three of them as well. I am sure that the number is not exactly that drastic, but I am really not sure that this warranted a story in the paper. I know why it is there. It gets people talking. It gets people to read the paper. But really, lets look at a few things shall we? 1. How many single men OR women (I want to keep this fair) do you know that look for high stressed, over working, introverted computer geeks that know more about a particular area of technology than they know about anything else and probably communicate better in languages that were designed not for communicating with humans, but for communicating with machines? That really does not make much sense. Ah, but what if you look at it this way? 2. Sure who would not want to be in a relationship with someone who has a well paying steady job, but at the same time, how many are looking for only part 2 without part1? This is what I see as more likely. Men and women that seek the non-technical, non-geeky men and women that work here. Well, that�s just fine and dandy. Way to paint the picture for everyone that MS men and women can easily find relationships. Way to misinform all those out there that kust don�t know any better. Well here is something else to think about. Think of how many people work here. (multiple tens of thousands right?) Now think about how many of them are single. (I don�t know, but even at what I would say is a conservative estimate would be 3000?) Somehow, I don�t even see there being 3000 singles in seattle willing to date a MS employee, let alone seek them out. I never like it when journalists paint pictures like this in peoples mind. Sure it�s amusing, but its not fair to anyone, not those that know better, and certainly not those that don�t. Oh, and.

Speaking of Gretchen, her blog has really taken off lately. There are just tons of comments and tons of mentions all over the place as well; now its time to see if Gretchen and Zoe and beat the statistics and keep up the great work. I sure hope they can.

Here are a few tests that I took today. The first one was shocking to me because I think this is seriously the most hard core nerd test I have ever taken. Normally, I score high on these, but in this case, I did not do so well. I think that for many of them, the questions are just not of my generation. For others, there is just too much detail I was not familiar with. But seriously�.you try it out, and see what I mean:
38.095238095238095% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?
(via sunnydev)

This one is completely pointless and utterly meaningless, but it was SO funny that I had to include it:
Caveman!
Nggghhaahhh!
(via revolving duck)

Also, I posted a pretty long comment to one of my friend`s blog about how we might solve the problem of having to re-type information everytime we sign up with a new service. Now all I need is someone to write it....since I dont have the time.

OK, so this last part of the entry held up me posting until the morning. I had the rest of the article ready last night around midnight, but it seems that my cable internet went out AGAIN for more than an hour again. I don`t know exactly when it came back up, but I am seriously getting sick of this. I am also sick of calling comcast about it, because everytime they play dumb, and after trying to blame it on me, and me showing them why its not my fault, they fall back to the "all I can do is send someone out in a few days" response. WORTHLESS! COMPLETELY WORTHLESS! They can`t tell whether they are working on the line since the engineering department does not have to tell anyone when working on the line. They dont have to log why connections go down, and when I call and say I have problems, they can say they see my connection going up and down, but never looked into it, and have no idea why. All they can do is send someone out. Then when they DO show up, they have no idea whats going on, and I have to explain it all to them again, only to have them say everything that they person on the phone did. Yup, looks fine now, yup, looks like its been going up and down, I don`t know why though, and everything is working fine now. SERIOUSLY PEOPLE, your company sucks at knowing whats going on. The pattern that this follows suggests that its not random. Why would it go down EXACTLY at midnight. And why will it sometimes go down just for a few minutes and come back? It seems to me that they are working on the line. But if there was a way for me to know that (or a way for me to protest and request that they only shut down the line once a year or so), then that would make sense wouldn`t it.

Also, some of you may have noticed that my site went down yesterday afternoon for a while. Well, I dont have time to go into detail now (blame comcast), but basically one of the last times that I copied files to a new hard drive, I was lame and forgot to setup the complicated system of ACLs that I have on the file system on one of my hard drives. This is important of course because I use a lot of perl on my site, and perl scripts are notorious for having holes in them. So, I shut down a while so I could patch a few holes both in file system acls (things are so tight now....it took forever to find the minimum set) as well as one of the perl scripts I had which apparently had a known exploit. I have a better story for later, but I will have to cover it some other time. While I was at it, I locked down the IIS and SQL ACLs as well.

J.P.

TrackBacks referenced:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/03/20/93263.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2004/03/20/93287.aspx
Posted by: j.p.





[Valid RSS]
� 2002 - 2024: J.P. Stewart, All rights reserved.