Chip's Place

I find it interesting - my blog, my rules. (And incidentally, what do you think of the slightly altered decor?)

Lemmesee - stained-glass window is a good way to put it. On occasion (and with hindsight I can see what I was doing wrong) it's been more like a brick wall!

When we did some of the exercises in the HR session last week, the one for the N/S difference was the most interesting.

We were all shown a picture with quite a lot going on in it (from Kit Williams' Masquerade book). The Ns all immediately jumped in with things like "It's Snow White, happy smiley picture, reminds me of one I saw a few years ago, I've got this book" and all kinds of free-association references, whereas the Ss just stared at it and came up with "Confusing, too much going on, don't like it."

I've had quite a bit of fun in the last few days trying to work out what my friends are, and I've picked quite a few correctly (although Sarum, I still think you're a *P, not a *J!) I think the most interesting has been to see how they correspond to the circumstances and ways in which I relate to them. I'm not going to go into that though, because I'll probably offend some of them.
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A strange confluence of events occurred this lunchtime. I went to a restaurant, didn't get served last, and didn't get my order screwed up! Such a thing is almost unheard-of in recent times. (Except at Pastiche, but they know me fairly well there, so know not to offend me!)

Although it's not so nice out now, at lunchtime it was really sunny, so Lint, Flissy-loo, Iasonas and I went to the Tasting Room in town. It's very well-hidden, and has a very sheltered courtyard, which in the sun was really hot (and bright - I need to buy some sunglasses!) In fact, if you go to the website, and look at the picture in the top-left corner, we were sat almost exactly in the location where the photographer must have been standing.

I had the cheese plate with the cat, pepper and cheddar cheeses, which was excellent, and a Fentiman's traditional lemonade, and entirely failed not to be served with the correct meal or drink. I felt somehow cheated...
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Ones I didn't say this time.

For possibly the first time ever in the history of me, I managed to finish an entire cryptic crossword on my own today. I was very pleased with myself.

I also had a fairly successful 3-hour meeting, a sentence which I'm using also for possibly the first time ever. Things are going well this week.

An update for people interested in MBTI (that's everyone but you, Lint!) - I've found an on-line version of the test which gave me almost the exact same results as the one done at work (still came out an INTP, just with slightly different relative strengths of each of the four characters).
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That's my Myers-Briggs personality type. Well, after monkeying round with the letter ordering a little for comedic purposes.

I was a little skeptical about this when doing the questionnaire the other week. But having attended a session on it today, I'm converted. It's quite scarily accurate when it comes to describing me, and in how it "expects" I should interact with other people - I think I've wasted quite a bit of time over the last month or two with one of my team because I'm an N and he's an S, and I can see now exactly why we've had these problems.

Here's a full description of an INTP - among other things it explains why I'm happy to sit soberly in the pub watching everyone get drunker and drunker! I think it's quite telling that of the 16 types, this was the only one I could find a detailed explanation of. It's apparently fairly rare - only about 2% of men and 1% of women are this type, with only INFP and INFJ being rarer.

Unfortunately, since the standard tests are copyrighted and otherwise IP-encumbered, I couldn't find any proper tests online so other people can have a go and see what type they are. The first link has a very noddy self-test, but that's hardly worth bothering with.
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That's the number of separate bruises I sustained while playing paintball today, possibly the hottest day of the year so far.

It's very good fun, but I was appallingly bad at it. We had 8 games, with about 40 players (in 2 teams) in each, and I managed to be first to get shot out in 3 of those games, and in the first 5 in 2 of the others! I think I've played a bit too much Unreal Tournament and Doom - you get second chances when you get shot there, and it doesn't hurt as much (although it can be quite painful when you're surprise-attacked by an invisible pinkie and you jump so hard you fall off your chair. As I said, I've played Doom too much! Hmm...I can't find any pictures of invisible pinkies, only normal ones. I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere.)

My one shining moment was a sadly unsuccessful attempt to storm the opposing team's fort in a game of "Bomb the Village". 3 of us, Matt carrying the bomb and the other two of us running in front of him as fast (and as big!) as we could the 10 yards or so to get into the fort. Foiled at the last yard though - Matt got shot once, just a foot or two outside the fort's gates. I, however, having led the charge, am fairly certain I got at least 6 of my bruises in those 2 seconds - definitely one on each leg, chest, shoulder and two on my right ear!

These last two won me the title of "Only Bleeder", one I'd rather have done without. I do like it though when you get to make Fight Club references in real life - that doesn't happen often enough!
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Yes, I do get angry sometimes, I always know exactly what I'm saying, and perhaps in this case the sentence you heard wasn't the one you thought you heard.
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Like candy from a baby...

Played poker last night at Bert's. Won lots. About £10 to be precise (and I only turned up with £1.20!) OK, that doesn't sound like lots, but we were only supposed to be betting coppers! I let everyone else get a little carried away with trying to out-bluff each other while I just stayed in with my full house. The odd bit of applied psychology didn't go amiss either. But that's revealing some of my tactics...

Actually, it was only beginner's luck. I genuinely haven't played for money before, and I'm fairly sure I've not played the game since Uni, which is at least 9 years ago. But I don't mind playing again if I can get an 800% return every time.
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It's fun playing frisbee. I haven't done it for about a year - the weather's rarely been good enough for the last 6 months. Once again I had the extreme difficulty of adjusting to a normal frisbee, after using an aerobie.

Aerobies are great. They need no throwing skill whatsoever, they'll go for bloody miles and they always fly straight unless you try really hard to slice them.

Unfortunately, they would seem to break easily. I bought a new one today. We managed about 20 throws before it broke in 3 places. That's not meant to happen! I took it back to the shop the following day - "Oh, yes, they're all doing that. I'll get you another."

Badfriend and Lint have turned all kinds of funny colours in the sun.
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The annual event of near-musical nonsense has come round again, and for the first time in 8 years, I didn't go to Manchester for it. I went to Lint's house.

Some choice lyrics :
"If I wait, if I wait, I won't lose my weight"
"Shi-ri-di-ri-di-ri-na, shi-ri-di-ri-na-hey"
"I blend my blue in those colours of you"

When all that was finished, we also played the hat game. I really like this game. Everyone puts a few (4 or 5, say) names into a hat, and people from two teams take it in turns to pull the names out of the hat and describe them to their teams. The catch is that there are more restrictions placed on how you can describe the people in each successive round. Firstly, you are free to say what you like, then you have only 5 words, then just one, and finally none (i.e. mime).

Some of the people we had in the hat were rather oddly described, e.g. Fiver the Rabbit (described as "the character from Watership Down who's named after 2 + 3"), Victor Kiam ("oh, some guy or other, I have no idea who this is"), Fyodor Dostoevsky ("a Polish man") and Jerry Maguire ("an Irish guy"). And Neal's mime of Ian McEwan was surreal to say the least - he just sat there and waited for us to go through all 39 names until we got the one he had!
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Well, my usual system worked. Arrived a bit late for the race meeting, so I only saw three races, but in the first one, there was a jockey called Mr Bedding, so I had to go for him. £3, 14/1, £45 back, with only 2 minutes work! (I did get 2 dodgy Irish monopoly-money £20 notes though - have had them refused in several places.)

Things didn't go so well in the second race, where clearly there was some form of breakdown of humour - ImTalkingGibberish didn't win! Ah well.

Race 3, and we're back to form - Moon Emperor comes in 4th, netting me another £11. Net profit for the day, just over £30.

My presentations in the morning went OK. Had to stand in for my manager, who was off sick, so I ended up being third most talkative of the day (after the department head and the "world's least likely actuary"). I definitely deserved the races.
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There's a race meeting at York racecourse this week, and (for some reason - not quite sure exactly why yet), my department is getting a free afternoon off to go and speculate to accumulate.

I'm looking forward to combining my extremely well-honed horse-picking skills (look for the horse with the most amusing name, it's bound to win - oddly enough, in the 10 or so meetings I've been to, this "system" has never actually failed to win me money. I should patent it.) with those of the amateur jockey, D, who works in my team. I'm thinking his system may have just a little more scientific backing to it...

Sadly D was run over by a horse several weeks ago in a vain attempt to avoid having to sit an exam, so he still looks very scary with lots of scars and bloodshot eyes (well, just the one bloodshot eye - his left one, in case you were wondering).

Oh, and I've switched the comment set-up to use the new Blogger's comments function. I'll see how things go for a few weeks.
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No particular coherence to my life over the past few days - being 29, so far, seems to have gone by in a big blur. Here are a few paragraphs on all kinds of things.

Just finished watching a total lunar eclipse. Always been a bit of an astronomy aficionado, and I think that one of the most beautiful conicidences in Nature is that R_m/R_s = D_m/D_s. One of my aims in life is to see a solar eclipse properly. I was in Cornwall for the big one in 1999, but the clouds cleared about 2 minutes too late to see totality. I'd planned on seeing that one for about 20 years (sometimes I think I was a particularly hard child to parent!) The next easily accessible ones are in 2017 and 2024, which are both visible from the same small area in Arkansas and Tennessee. I should really start planning to see those ones soon...

Went out for Iasonas' birthday last Saturday in Leeds. It was an OK night, but I realised (for only about the millionth time) that I can't stand humanity en masse. Individual bits of it I can take, but put lots of people together, add in some alcohol and you just end up with something you might see on an Attenborough program. Still, I got 16 and 17 on the CNPS while standing starring out the window trying to avoid looking at the rest of the world.

In my spare moments over the weekend I've been reading a fascinating online book. It rings true with some thoughts I've had in the same direction recently myself. The broad premise - that the modern schooling system has arisen out of the desire by corporations to foster dependence on their products and the consumerist society by "getting into young minds while they're still fresh" - sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it has been difficult so far to see where any of Mr Gatto's logic falls down. Scary stuff.

God, the Net's slow today. Reckon it's all the Sasser traffic slowing stuff down. People should really use a proper operating system like Linux, BSD or OSX instead of Windows. There's always a lot of talk about how Windows is targeted so much only because it's so widely used. Well, firstly, that sentence in itself suggests a solution! Secondly, most other operating systems, being Unix-like, are usually written to be much less tightly self-integrated - Outlook Express's design to tightly couple the address book and the e-mail functions can arguably be blamed for pretty much every e-mail virus ever. Thirdly, open-source programs tend to get fixed a lot faster when problems like the one Sasser exploits is found - Microsoft knew about this in October, and took 6 months to release a fix, whereas there have been flaws of similar import found and fixed within 24 hours in the Linux world.

I'm not a Microsoft fan, as you might be able to tell.

Up to 96% on GTA Vice City. I've had this game so long (3 days less than I've been living in York, which makes it almost exactly 18 months), and I'm finally about to have it finished.

This is starting to get dull now, and I'm tired, so I'm going to bed. Good night!
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