The Phantom City

Seems like a lot of these floating around right now. I got tagged by Too Many Topics, Too Little Time. It was originally seven things, but I decided to modify it a little to see what happens.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven (and a half) facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven (and a half) people at the end of your post by leaving their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Here we go…

You ready?

This is so exciting…

Feel free to back out at any time…The safe word is “Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften”.

Spoiler warning…

Okay, let’s do this…

1. Post-college, I’ve never worked for any length of time in a non-public-service-related environment. My job trail goes association > newspaper > nonprofit news organization > association > government contractor > government contractor. I didn’t intend it that way. It just happened. Kind of makes me wonder what I’ve missed.

2. During that period of time, I’ve lasted through something like eight major layoffs without getting hit. Not sure how that happened, either.

3. I got a Wii Fit the other day. NewEgg.com had them for list price. Balance is very important to the Wii Fit. I think it was laughing at me when I tried it out. My center of gravity is apparently two feet behind me, possibly at some sort of Lagrange Point between myself and the Earth. (Either that, or it’s the fact I have the posture of a 19th-century Bavarian burgomeister.)

4. “Misanthropic introvert who doesn’t like to be alone” describes me well. The last time I took a Myers-Briggs test for work, I hit 30 (the highest) on Introversion. Yet I suspect some folks would consider me chatty.

5. INTP. In case you were wondering. I also scored 30 on Intuition. We got cards with our letters on it. I could never remember what they meant. They don’t have a Memory score.

6. I don’t remember high school very well, and hanging out on Facebook I’m starting to think that might be abnormal. I remember people from high school, but not a lot of specifics about me or things that happened around me. I’m not really sure those count as my formative years. I’ll bet they would if I hadn’t liked them, though, which is why I’m glad I went where I did. (There was something cool about walking into a 9th-grade classroom at a school I hadn’t been to since the 6th grade, and having one of the guys say, “Hey, Shane’s back!”)

7. Speaking of high school, I do have at least one vivid memory: I was going to ask someone out, and ended up walking past them, going into the bathroom, and throwing up because I was nervous. Luckily I stopped doing that sort of thing by grad school.

7.5. I’m really proud of my ability to…

Anyway, time to tag 7.5 people. I’ll copy this to Facebook, where many of them reside. Y’all can figure out the half-person thing amongst yourselves, but remember…It could be that I just consider everyone else to be 15/16ths people. (Although, technically, if I went by mass, and the unit of measurement were me, I could easily see some of my friends being one-half.)

Let’s see: Adam, Astrid, Carolyn, Chris, Katy, Lorrie, Melanie, Sarah.

This meme is wandering around on Facebook, but I thought I’d copy it here just to stay true to my old dislike of walled gardens like Facebook. (Even though I check it every day.)

Anyway, it’s a list of sixteen things people might not know about you. I can do this, because there are at least sixteen things even I don’t know about me.

1. When I was young, my mom used to send the cat upstairs to wake me up in the mornings. That worked the 50% of the time the cat decided he wanted the bed to himself.

2. My wife only has one regret. I’ve got more, but if I didn’t have any regrets, I’d have to make some up. Otherwise life wouldn’t feel particularly normal.

3. When I took driver’s ed through a private driving school, I learned about driving in a 1970′s-vintage Cadillac Tank. During my first lesson, I ran a guy off the road. He was unhappy. My old, chain-smoking, raspy-voiced, female driving teacher was unfazed.

4. I decided a while back that I wasn’t handling my periodic depressions and memory problems any better in my 30s than I did in my 20s, so I decided to try counseling. Despite my original misgivings, it actually works! Guess it depends on the therapist. And whether you’re paying attention.

5. My ratio of personal intelligence versus the mental challenges of life peaked when I was in elementary school. Now it’s getting closer to 1:1. That makes me feel dumber.

6. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a pirate. I still do.

7. I’m meaner and more quick-tempered than most people think, but it costs, so I try not to be.

8. Like my wife, I’m also a sucker for unrequited love, but only if it’s requited after a while. Otherwise it just sucks to be that person.

9. If you asked me, I’d always say family and friends are more important than work. The balance of my actual efforts seem to give the lie to that, though.

10. If I yawn in your face, it’s not because you’re boring me. It’s because I’m sleepy. If you’re boring me, I concentrate on not yawning.

11. Hamburgers are nature’s most perfect food…or bacon…or potatoes…Yeah, I’m healthy.

12. I still read comic books. The new ones aren’t as good as the old ones, though.

13. I make other people be logical with their arguments, but personally I rely on intuition.

14. 75% of my clothes are plaid…Yeah, I’m fashionable.

15. I am not an elegant programmer…yet. I’m better at solving problems than creating masterpieces.

16. I’m really, really lucky and blessed.

If you go to this site to rate your own blog, take a look at the results code before you paste it in. Mine had a link to a cash advance site.

Link courtesy of the ACC Basketblog.

It are these people’s birthday too:

• Sir Christopher Wren, English architect
• John Dewey, American philosopher
• Bela Lugosi, Hungarian-born actor
• Jelly Roll Morton, American composer
• Grandpa Jones, American banjo player and singer
• Tom Petty, American musician
• Scott Hall, American professional wrestler
• Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda leader
• Snoop Dogg, American rapper

As well as these two who are exactly as old as me:

• Chavo Guerrero, Jr., American professional wrestler
• Michelle Malkin, American political commentator and author

On this day, by the BBC and The New York Times.

I just upgraded to release 2.3 for WordPress, named “Dexter.” Seems to have run pretty smoothly, and the new release has a plugin checker that lets you know about the latest versions of your plugins. (Also, integrated tagging! Which I might use at some point, maybe.)

However, just in case you run into the same error I did, mentioning the non-existence of the “post2cat” table, upgrade your Google Sitemap plugin. The plugin checker doesn’t recognize there is a new version yet, and the older one isn’t entirely compatible with Dexter.

That’s probably about right, although I’ve been known to be an INTJ depending on the day.

Mingle² – Free Online Dating

Huh, how do you like that? I like to think of it like Wallace and Gromit, or Tim Conway and Don Knotts movies from the 1970s.

And yes, I just ran across the online dating site and its quizzes in my blog travels. I’m married, and would have been too introverted for online dating anyway.

Just in case you don’t know what I look like, I offer here an accurate representation of myself:

Handsome devil, that. All yellow and…ahem…a few pounds less heavy than I would have thought.

It’s from the Simpsons Avatar Creator, on The Simpsons movie site. Their application works even better than the one for South Park, but South Park’s does let you become a pirate, which is cool.

Link courtesy of Best Week Ever, which tries for Paris Hilton, but I think this might work better as Paris in the Simpsons universe:

The Inanimate Carbon Rod.

EWeek lists their 15 geekiest vacations. I’ve only done one of these — maybe two, if your count going to great places for geeky reasons — the National Air and Space Museum. I was 100 feet away from the International Spy Museum on our most recent trip to DC and didn’t want to walk over there due to the rain. I can’t help but think I need to be more ambitious.

Link courtesy of Raph Koster, who is more accomplished at geek vacationing than me.