SCI-FI GEEK

Here is a nice audio Sci-Fi geek test. Try and beat my awesome score.

Your Score : 85 credits
You're an extreme sci-fi geek! You're probably wearing your very own homemade TRON costume right now!

	I received 85 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds hereCanon powershot

Thanks to the wonderful ~J for the link.

ROUGE AND OR ROGUE DEVICE

The other day a user came to me and said she had an IP Address conflict warning on her computer. That is really weird since I hadn’t cleared the DHCP server cache lately so there should be no conflicts on my network at all. I went over and sure enough she had reported the error correctly. I did a quick ipconfig release and renew and watched what happened next. Within a minute she received the error again. Hmmmm, I thought, something is going on here.

I set the user to use a manually configured IP in a space I knew was free on my network and went to work sleuthing.

We had recently installed a device we are testing called the Cymphonix network composer. It’s basically a really fancy proxy server that sits in line between your LAN and your firewall. It sniffs all the traffic on the switch and builds a database of devices that allow the administrator to create rules for Internet access for different users and systems.

This was a good time to see what it had learned over the last few days. Armed with the MAC address from the event log on the users system I looked for any reference to this device in my composer database. *ping sound* There it was, and even more interesting it had a service port open. Port 21, that is FTP. Nice.

I opened an FTP client to the port and got a login prompt. I tried several of the more common username and passwords and got nowhere. Hmmmm, I thought, time to dig deeper. Examining the login prompt I noticed something that looked like a LinkSys product ID. A quick Google search revealed that this device was most likely a LinkSys wireless router. I peeked over on my Available Wireless networks and sure enough – there is a brand new Linksys wireless network visible. Unfortunately it was secured so I couldn’t log in to gain any more information.

Next step was to block it at the firewall. Using its MAC address I was able to block any and all packets to and from that device right at my border. That secured my network and would cause trouble for anyone connecting to the device wirelessly – at least as far as accessing the rest of the world.

Step the third, try and find the beast. I got on the switches and started looking in the tables there for a MAC address and a port number combination. I soon learned that the MAC address was coming from one of the ports on the second floor. We had recently sub-let almost the entire second floor to others but I had been lazy and not disconnected all the patch cords from the second floor hub. Grabbing the key I trundled downstairs to the switch closet and removed and coiled all the cords between my switch and offices I was no longer responsible for.

Back upstairs in my office I checked again for the offending FTP server… it was no longer on the network. YAY! I reset the user and all was good.

Lesson to learn here though is remove the physical access from unneeded ports. If this device had been configured properly so that it didn’t conflict with one of my users it would have taken ages for me to notice its presence, allowing whoever set it up to use our internet connection at will.

I’m not sure if it’s a rogue device or a rouge device because I’m not as smart as Roy (Ugh, which is a reference to one of the Order of the Stick (which I have written about before) comics but it's a print only one so I can't link to it but here is a link to todays comic), but I promise that if I ever find it I’ll put some red on its cheeks so that it’s both.

DR. WHO ALL THE TIME

I'm not trying to be all Dr. Who all the time, really, I'm not. It's just that it has seemed to come up rather a lot for me lately. Recently I was sent this link by one of my friends and I've totally been geeking over this one.


Like I've mentioned before my favorite Dr. was Peter Davison. The new seasons being done by the BBC have been great. I think both of the Drs. that they have cast (Christopher Eccleston as Dr. number nine and David Tennant as number ten) have been very fun in their own ways. And both of them have captured enough of the flavor of the other doctors to make them very believable as the Dr.

Anyway, back to the link. The BBC has produced a 7 minute webisode that fits in between their current programming gap to hype up the return of the show on Christmas. And what do you know it stars both Peter Davison revising his role as the fifth (and like i said my favorite) doctor and David Tennant again as the tenth doctor. Enjoy....



And for your amusement and edification here is a complete list of all the doctors.

MY BLOGS WEB QUIZ

While this isn't really a web quiz I also couldn't resist rating my actual blog.

Tip of the hat to the lovely and talented ~J for finding this for me.

Get a Cash Advance

START AT THE BEGINNING

I was reading over on Blues News today, which I am wont to do. There was a link to an article on a site called Gamershelp.com that I had never heard of. I don't know anything about gamershelp.com. I don't know what their biases are or what they usually cover. I don't know who writes for them, or what any of their industry affiliations (if any) are. However, the title of the article listed on Blues News really caught my eye. It said "The Greatest Video Game Intros of All Time."

WOW! I instantly reviewed in my head my all time favorite game intros and then clicked the link and was astoundingly disappointed because none of my favorites made the list.

Most game intros don't hold up well. Even the good ones aren't worth very many repeats. I always watch them at least once to see if they are any good but there are a very few that I will watch over and over. There are even fewer that I've thought about after the fact and wondered if I could just watch them again and again and even previously done some hunting for in the past.

Well isn't progress grand? Thanks to the Internet i was able to quickly locate two of my top three favorites.

Mechwarrior 2



and
Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bears Legacy





I also enjoyed watching the intro to X-COM: Terror from the Deep as well but I was unable to find a video for it online. It shows an alien submarine tracking and sinking a surface ship and then the launch of X-COM interceptors. Also a very fun movie. You can apparently pick up X-COM: TFTD from Steam these days. Details can be found here at the Home of the Underdogs.

ALPHA PRIME? NOT SO MUCH

I recently played and reviewed a game called Alpha Prime. The review is now up and available for general consumption at Strategy Informer.

The review in a nutshell: It's mediocre.

OK there you go... but in order to get all the wonderful clever comments you will have to go to the link and read the full review.

IT’S MY SUPER WHOS-ITS

I’ve mentioned before how I’m playing City of Heroes with my friends and also how I’ve never really groked super heroes. It’s just not my thing. I have no ranks in Knowledge (geek comics). Lots of other Knowledge (geek other stuff) ranks but just not the super hero comic genre.

But that didn’t stop me from taking a which super hero are you web quiz. Two of them even.

Your results:
You are Robin

Robin 67% Superman 60% Spider-Man 60% Hulk 50% The Flash 50% Batman 45% Supergirl 42% Wonder Woman 37% Catwoman 35% Green Lantern 30% Iron Man 30%

Young and acrobatic. You don't mind stepping aside to give someone else glory.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test


I’m not sure how I feel about being Robin. I mean part of it works since I do often prefer to play the support roles in most of my games anyway so I can see me being an assistant superhero instead of the superhero. But, I'm pretty sure I left my acrobatic days behind me - well for given definitions of acrobatic, I suppose. So Robin will work for me, just as long as the Batman isn’t to scary.

Next I followed the link to which supervillian are you? This turned out to be:
Your results:

Your results:
You are The Joker

The Joker 60% Riddler 54% Dr. Doom 50% Mr. Freeze 48% Green Goblin 40% Lex Luthor 39% Catwoman 37% Magneto 36% Mystique 36% Apocalypse 34% Venom 30% Juggernaut 28% Dark Phoenix 28% Two-Face 28% Poison Ivy 26% Kingpin 11%

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test


The Joker – hehehehe – not bad. I do tend to tell jokes and have fun (even goofy fun) while getting things done although I think the Joker is rather more over the top and malicious than I tend to be. I’m a kinder gentler Joker I guess so that is a sometimes fit.

DR. WHO? YES! PRECICELY!

I like the TV show Dr. Who. *boing boing boing big surprise alert* OK yes not a shock really. The iconic Dr. Who was Tom Baker.

Everyone seems to remember the scarf and long heavy coat. I really do like him a lot. But my favorite doctor was Peter Davison

OK now it’s going to seem like I’m changing gears here so hold on….

I’m playing a game called City of Heroes with my friends. It’s a massively multiplayer game where the players take on the persona of super heroes and fight the hordes of teaming villains running around the city streets.

The game itself is like most of the MMORPGs…. Basically it’s just Massively Multiplayer Whack-A-Mole. Game play wise it doesn’t do much for me. I never really got into comic books and the whole super hero thing. My tastes run more to high fantasy and science fiction. I have absolutely no interest in playing it when my friends aren’t online.

The parts of the game that they do best are the costume design phases and the ability to play with friends even when there are many levels in differences between you. I love being able to play with my friends and not worry about being out leveled and becoming a useless fifth wheel like I’ve felt in previous MMORPGS. Some of the missions are interesting and the special events are fun.. Things like killing some super-giant-deadly villain or the Halloween event or what not. The rest is just whack-a-mole.

So in the most recent Halloween event the reward for picking up some special salvage was an additional costume slot and like I said I like the costume design part of this game.

One more gear change then we’re there….

My primary character on CoH is called Cherenkov Glow. When you design characters you can pick from a primary and a secondary power set. I had heard that there were radiation power sets and having some familiarity with radiation and nuclear power decided to use them for my character. I was somewhat disappointed to discover that all the radiation effects are an icky green instead of the more accurate and really cool very pale blue… the blue color of Cherenkov radiation to be precise.

Cherenkov has three costume slots now. I have my bunny outfit, my fairly normal laboratory scientist looking outfit and now proudly presenting (and not to mention bringing all the threads back home) my new Peter Davison Dr. Who outfit.

WOW SPIFFY

I have a very talented friend who kindly upgraded my engineering art page into a really cool new site. Thank you very very much Kelly - you teh awesme! Her amazing work can be found here:

I CAN HAZ TRIBBLZ?

My sense of humor is often simple and direct. I can crack myself up by just about anything. I'll often remember a joke I heard or a comic I read hours after encountering it and just start giggling to myself. This isn't to say I don't appreciate and enjoy sophisticated comedy as well but some types of humor find an easier path to the giggle ganglions in my brain.

So it should not surprise you that I love the lolspeak sites. They totally crack me up. The first one I found was Icanhazcheezburger but since then I've discovered Meme cats as well as a few other less active sites.

There is something about the cute little kitteh faces coupled with the often snarky comments that just tweaks my cognitive dissonance funny bone. You can even teach yourself how to lolspeak by taking this easy online kitteh as a second language course.



However, in my lolspeak googling I stumbled across a masterpiece of long form lolspeak. A retelling of the classic Trouble With Tribbles story done in lolspeak. Without any further ado I give you:

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY

Well, I can't claim to be breaking the news since the first offical post was up on Paperclippings but I can confirm it. Last night my wonderful dear friend ~J agreed to marry me and I couldn't be happier. And while our secret identites as Bunny and Kitty remain hidden I have created a (full of engineer art) web page for us here but it does have lots of pictures of bunnies and kitties in case you need them.

TO COOL FOR MY COMET

Sometimes things are just to neat not to share. This is one of those things.

This is the comet Encke. It's official name is 2P/Encke and was named that way because it was the very second periodic comet discovered (The first was halleys) and because its period was determined by the astronomer Johann Franz Encke.

The picture above is a link to a time lapse move on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Each frame is approximately 45 minutes apart. It shows the comet being approached and passed by a coronal mass ejection. As the mass passes the comet it rips the tail right along with it. The APOD site states that the tail was probably ripped off by the magnetic forces in the coronal mass ejection and not the physical interaction - which is in itself interesting since that implies that the tail is electrically charged. I always thought it was evaporated matter from the comet itself - but perhaps it is, rather, some ion.

EDIT: found this story about it too - adds more to what could have happened to that poor tail.

PSSST.... Hey, buddy.....

..... Wanna try a web quiz?

Well you know that I do. This one vectored by my girlfriend and good friend ~J. Our results show us as quite the pair - and really - that is no surprise. We are busy learning that IRL and probably don't need a web quiz to confirm it - but it is very amusing to see. A previous web quiz had us as a bunny and kitty and we've definitely adopted that for ourselves and have had just a wonderful time with it. The secret of who is a bunny and who is a kitty is left as an exercises for the student.

You are The Hierophant

Divine Wisdom. Manifestation. Explanation. Teaching.

All things relating to education, patience, help from superiors.The Hierophant is often considered to be a Guardian Angel.

The Hierophant's purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. Where the High Priestess between her two pillars deals with realms beyond this Earth, the Hierophant (or High Priest) deals with worldly problems. He is well suited to do this because he strives to create harmony and peace in the midst of a crisis. The Hierophant's only problem is that he can be stubborn and hidebound. At his best, he is wise and soothing, at his worst, he is an unbending traditionalist.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I AM WHO?

Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?

Reno. Apparently I am Reno. I have no idea who this character is. Should I be happy to have this comparison with me? I like the playful part but not sure about the cocky description. I would have said of myself – playful and shy maybe.

In case it’s not painfully obvious yet, I don’t play FF games. I am a long time PC gamer. One of my favorite types of games are the RPGs. I’ve been playing them on my computer as long as I’ve been able to. Now, this means that I’ve been playing western style RPG games. My first exposure to the Eastern style came shortly after I started working at a company making PS1 games, Singletrac. I had never had a game console up to that point.

(Tangent: well that is not strictly true – my computer gaming development went like this: Intellivision -> Apple IIc -> IBM PC so technically I have had a game console before this point).

Anyway, shortly after starting work at this company I found myself with several PS1 games and nothing to play them on – so I got myself a play station. Our games were pretty darn cool but they weren’t really my favorite genre and after the novelty of playing things that I had contributed to (although in a minor way – I am infrastructure not production but my name IS in the credits and that is totally wicked cool). I started looking around for something else to play on this system.

FF7 had come out fairly recently and according to the marketing onslaught and the scuttlebutt at work it was the big daddy RPG of the PS1. So one day I came home with it. I loaded the game up and started trying to play it. I thought the movie sequence at the beginning was pretty darn cool but then came this train ride. Holy heck – would this thing never end? Read click x, read click x, read click x, oh no panic run to another car, read click x, read click x, read click x, oh no panic and jump out of the train.

The game felt…..weird. I had a hard time identifying with the characters and it was clearly something I was watching not something I was being. I’m not sure if it was the culture differences that did that to me or just the style of game play. I never felt that I was the hero, ummmmmm Ash? Rokuku? Reno? Whatever. I never felt that I was the hero, what’s his name.

The other thing that bothered me was the stylized combat. I think I could have managed to swallow that after a while. But during this learning curve when I was struggling with the strangeness of the game and trying to decide if I wanted to go where the designers wanted me to go I ran into the weirdest thing of all. I was attacked by a house.

Apparently, somewhere along the line I had angered the house gods and they sent a sentient angry house to get me. It shoot bombs out of its chimney and bounced around cheerfully trying to kill me, the hero Toshiba, errrr whatever my name was.

I could no longer take it. I never even tried to finish that battle. I turned the game right off and have never played any FF game again.

I was watching my son play Paper Mario this weekend and reflecting on how similar the style of the game was – especially during the combats and do you know what? I don’t regret walking away from FF at all. I guess I’m just not cut out for eastern style RPGs. I’ll stick with something more serious like the Fallouts, and Baldurs Gates and heck even stupid ones with auto leveled creatures like Oblivion over the option of following Fuji, errr, whatever his name was around the planet Surreal.

OBLIVIOUS

By now anyone into the PC gaming scene has heard about the ridiculous anti-piracy methods that were implemented in BioShock. And while the SecureROM protection is certainly not a root-kit, it does install software without explicit permission from the user and it makes the assumption that anyone who installs the games is a bad evil crook.

The purpose of this software is to attempt to control how many times the game can be installed before requiring the user to contact tech support, beg forgiveness for to many installs, and receive another serial number.

I was planning on getting a hold of this game. I am not willing to pay for the privilege of being treated like a thief.

(OK, well technically I DID play for the privilege to BE a thief before, hmmmm)

Anyway, this is a game that I was seriously excited for. I am a huge fan of the System Shock and System Shock 2 games. BioShock was touted as a spiritual successor to these games. I did install the demo and geeked out over it since the game play reminded me strongly of my old SS memories.






I’ll go no more into this because it’s been discussed by much cleverer people than I.

But, the thing that I keep wondering about is how this decision was made. I keep imagining a conference room filled with clueless morons and deciding that it couldn’t possibly have happened that way. The people making the decision to treat legitimate users as plundering hordes must have been made by intelligent and educated people. How then, could they have made such a stupid mistake? What could have blinded them to the fact that the only people who will be harmed by this decision are the legitimate users? How could they have thought that the people engaged in software piracy won’t just remove any protections?

I suppose someone must have made the analogy of putting a home alarm system on your house. The point of a home security system (for most people) is to shift the risk reward ratio so that bad guys will choose to rob the house next door instead. This strategy actually works pretty well for a situation where there are multiple targets of equivalent value.

If this was the thinking they choose to use then they were wildly wrong. Each piece of software is a unique target. Thinking that the pirates will just hack someone else program instead is a serious logical blunder.

Anyway, since I never finished Oblivion, after removing the Bioshock demo and all traces of SecureROM from my system I re-installed it. I guess I’ll just play that instead.

ILLUSIONS & PHANTOMS

I’ve heard some stories about people that blog about their works and get in trouble for it. So this is definitely not about my work in any way. In fact it was something that happened to someone else. In another work place far away. At a completely different era than mine. Ummm, on a different planet. It, errrr, all came to me in a dream where the ad was shot in the server room, ahh, in my dream.

There.

Anyway, I got to watch part of the process of creating a TV advertisement the other day. I’ve seen lots of ads on TV. I mean, who hasn’t? They are everywhere. I have never seen one shot before though. On TV the ads take 10 to 60 seconds and, if they are done well, are seamless and smooth. The reality behind that is wildly different than the perception.

The server room I have has a nice big glass window and someone along the line decided it was a perfect setting for an ad they had come up with. I got involved by first of all being asked to clean it up. *grin* Yeah, this dream had me spending some time cleaning a room.

On the day of the shoot crew members started showing up around 11 AM. They had a truck. A big truck. They started wheeling huge carts loaded with stuff to the lobby of the building and prowling around looking at lights and angles and windows. The evicted one worker from her cube and I opened the server room for them. I pointed out the things to please not touch and the things that were OK to use taking care to point which power outlets were on different circuits and therefore available for them to use – no problem they said there is a generator they will use for their own power anyway.

They then commenced to setup lights. And reflectors. And filters. And giant pieces of cardboard. And cables. And signs. And a giant camera. And lots of tape to hold everything in place. All in all I counted 20 crew members working on setting up.

The actors showed up and were cast – three made the show the rest were sent off. Two girls came and setup a bunch of chips and soda and crackers. I watched people asking them for gum and to help with tasks on the set. I guess they have the entry level job that gets all the little tasks. Props were set up and the lighting was completed in my server room. I have never seen my server room look so cool with the spiffy red and blue glows coming from it.

It was now approximately 2 PM. Makeup had been applied, angles chosen, and props setup. The actors were in place and the director called for rehearsal. .About an hour later they were ready to for actual shoots of the ad. Places were taken again and off they went.

Frankly, I couldn’t tell much of a difference between rehearsals and takes except that there was slightly less fiddling between each attempt. This is where my brush at fame almost occurred. The art director decided that he wanted someone walking in the hallway opposite the actors and asked me to come along. I was supposed to walk down the hallway and give the actor a bored hi five as he passed. WOOHHH! That was cool – I’ve never been filmed like that so it was exciting. We did four takes with me doing that before the art director said that it wasn’t working for him and they asked me to leave. Drat – so close to fame and fortune. Oh well I’ll have to stay with the salt mines.

Finally, around 4 they had finished and gave each other a round of applause and put everything away. All this was for about 15 seconds of film. I have no idea how much goes into post production, not to mention the rest of the ad with all the phone numbers to call and the rest of the pitch.

This whole experience gave quite an insight into what goes into producing the calls we all see every day to buy things or to choose this product over another, or to a certain course of action. What looks simple on the surface is simply the veneer over a complex and time consuming process requiring hundreds of man hours to create a few seconds of viewing time.

My server room never looked as good as it did on the TV monitor that day. That is a lesson I’ll take from this experience.

HI I AM DRAKE....

chorus: Hi Drake.

....and I'm a blog addict.

With a tip of the proverbial and electronic hat to ~J here is the latest in my on going quest to add every even mildly amusing web quiz in the world to my Blog.

57%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Minneapolis Singles from Mingle²

I'm not sure I entirely agree with it since I don't think I blog _that_ much but it may be weighted heavily on just having one that gets semi regular posts. I'm averaging about 5 posts per month right now, which is below the goal I had when I restarted this (trying to hit more like 8 posts per month). In addition to that, though, I regularly check several blogs in my favorites list every day to see if there is anything new.

I thought I would have a lower score because I don't use a feed aggregator or RSS / Atom type feed to keep track of blogs I like. Instead, I just roll through my favorites list at lunch time checking up on sites.

JUST WANNA WRITE

I have absolutely no topic burning a figurative hole in my mind to write about today. Well, that’s a pretty good thing I guess. I mean I really don’t want anything to burn an actual hole in my head and I suppose that if it were I wouldn’t be in the mood to write about it anyway.

Sometimes, I just feel the need to start writing something down. This weekend I had a little bit of time when my kids were away and the house was quiet and I had finished what I was reading and I hadn’t written in a while and the journal was right there and and and. I wrote a page of stuff and learned a little bit about myself in the process

Anyway, writing is usually an enjoyable process for me. Sometimes I’ll write something just because I want to write. See todays entry for example.

Sometimes, I’ll write because I can’t figure out what I’m thinking. No seriously, I sometimes have no idea what I’m thinking about or feeling and in order to get in touch with that I have to start pouring it out on paper….errr or electrons. Whatever.

The process of making the fingers try and express what is going on in my head forces a … well not a simplification… but a crystallization. I can no longer just feel or think I have to express. This flows the mental stuff through a filter of language. That process of filtering often gives me insight into what the heck it is I am feeling.

Plus there is a power to naming your thoughts and feelings. Once they are named and described you can look at them and decide to keep them or not. You can more easily see where they came from. You can choose to change them or just accept them as they are.

I think that this crystallization process is probably the reason people are encouraged to write journals or do any therapeutic writing. It’s important to get in touch with your own feelings before you can relate to anyone elses or even to handle your own with any skill.

The writing on this blog is for fun. It is almost like scratching an itch to sit down and compose something and put it up. Maybe it’ll never get read (heh heh except I know I’m in several friends RSS feeds so it WILL get read) but that isn’t the point anyway. I love that people read it – it’s a fulfilling feeling but the primary point of writing here is just for fun.

Writing for fun is therapeutic as well. It’s important to take some time to do the things we enjoy. Spending even a few moments doing something just because it’s fun for you to do is extremely healthy. It sends a message to your brain that you like you. And this sub-conscious message acts to improve your mood and your outlook on life and strengthens yourself image and confidence. These all have positive effects on your relationships and other bits and pieces of your life.

So I’ll keep writing every now and then thanks for tuning in.

CHEWY STORIES

I was talking with a wonderful friend the other day about some of my favorite books and mentioned how the one non-church book I had taken with me on my mission was Neuromancer by William Gibson. This was is 1989 but I had just recently discovered this book first published in 1984 and subsequently winning the Hugo, Nebula and Phillip K. Dick awards.

Neuromancer was for me, a ground breaking book. I had read a great deal of science fiction and fantasy up to that point in my life but this book had such a different feel than what I had read before. The scenery descriptions were very wordy and elaborate. The characters were believable and easily imagined and yet they seemed sparse as if there were hidden depths to them that were merely hinted at. The mythos of cyberpunk created an atmosphere was moody and disturbing and yet not completely hopeless for me.

That was my first exposure to cyberpunk and it’s still my favorite example of the genre. For a time there were quite a few cyberpunk like stories being published but that has since slowed or stopped. Some of my favorite cyberpunk style authors are the aforementioned Gibson, of course, and Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Neal Stephenson, George Alex Effinger, and Phillip K. Dick. Some of L.E. Modesett Jrs future books have a cyberpunk undertone to them and the influence of the genre can be found in many modern Sci-Fi stories although often without the darker view of the future that characterizes most cyberpunk.

One of the most appealing things to me that this style of story had to me was how “chewy” the stories were. These were not light, happy, and goofy stories but they were serious and dark. They often showed individuals with a profound lack of control over their lives struggling to find peace with their external realities and find a measure of control or safety. Not that there weren’t moments that weren’t laugh out loud funny but that the feel of the story was heavier.

The first anime series that I’ve ever really liked (many others were OK or pleasant to watch but this one is compelling and induces a desire to rapidly promote the next disk up my Netflix queue after each viewing) is Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has a definite cyberpunk flavor to it. This series is feeding my need for chewy stories lately.

Funny enough, thinking about the other books I’ve liked in the light of these musing on cyberpunk reminded me of the fictional detective stories of Phillip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler. Those stories were also heavy on the descriptions and hinted at complex and imperfect heroes. Those stories also had a protagonist who was searching for his own measure of peace and control in a world that was hard to understand – leaving him somewhat jaded.

While I love all sorts of stories and read voraciously I often find my favorites to be the flavorful and chewy stories like the ones I discovered when I found cyberpunk.

RISO-HUDSON

A few years ago I was introduced to the Enneagram method of personality testing. This is a fascinating construct of personality types created by Don Riso and Russ Hudson. Its premise is that there are nine major personality types that people can fall into. It further posits that there are nine levels of health within each major personality type with distinct and noticeable behaviors and attitudes at each level. Finally, it rounds out the personality descriptions by adding a “wing” to each personality type. (That was my description, their description is here.) Let me illustrate with my type:

My predominant personality type is #9, the Peacemaker.

free enneagram test

The easy-going, self-effacing type. Nines are accepting, trusting, and stable. They are usually creative, optimistic, and supportive, but can also be too willing to go along with others to keep the peace. They want everything to go smoothly and be without conflict, but they can also tend to be complacent, simplifying problems and minimizing anything upsetting. They typically have problems with inertia and stubbornness. At their Best: indomitable and all-embracing, they are able to bring people together and heal conflicts.

I knew I was a nine when I was reading the book and ran across a description of the 9 personality type that described nines as someone taking a bike ride through a beautiful park on a lovely day. They are admiring the scenery and the people and the whole experience of the ride, with no one aspect rising above the other. The nine is so into the entirety of the experience that they don’t notice that both tires on the bike are flat. They are getting somewhere but not efficiently and without being aware of themselves.

That fit me perfectly; I’m perfectly able to ignore problems by immersing myself into the rest of the experience of life. Much of the rest of the descriptions of the nine also fits me well. In the book each personality type is also given nine levels of health.

I’m not the “At their Best” level of health but I do believe I’m on the healthy side, I would put myself at level 3 of the 9. I am reasonably in touch with my feelings and instincts (being out of touch is a flaw that nines are vulnerable to) and have managed to become more of myself in the process. Ironically, it was by becoming more into me that I have been able to become more aware of others and more able to support and nurture them. It has also given me increased motivation to pursue my own interests and hobbies and passions.

The nine has two potential wings. A wing is a tendency towards one of the personality types on either side of your primary type. So my potential wings are 8 and 1. Type 1 is the Reformer – a rational and idealistic personality type. Type 8 is the Challenger – a challenging and domineering confident personality. I have a weak one wing – which oddly is labeled the Comfort Seeker in the book – which is also a fairly accurate description.

This whole process of learning the personality types was a very powerful tool for me. I needed an intellectual framework to understand my own ways of thinking because at the time I learned these I was very out of touch with my own feelings and thoughts. Having a structure to attempt to compare my own thinking against opened my eyes to how I think – not just what I was thinking and gave me practice learning what I was feeling instead of reacting to my feelings without even knowing what they were.

I suppose these types of tests aren’t for everyone. But I found it a wonderful tool for understanding myself and those around me. You can take a free sample test here if you are interested in learning more. The sample test isn't scientific like their complete battery but it will likely give you a good idea of your primary personality type.