Genius In Progress

A couple of weeks ago, the topic of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator came up in a conversation with some friends. We were talking about what types we were and what it meant. I had taken the test once or twice before but didn’t remember my results, so today I decided to dig around to find it myself. For those of you unfamiliar with Myers-Briggs and too lazy to click the link above, it’s a personality typing system based on four dichotomous categories : Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. Generally these are determined by answering a series of questions (ranging from 40 questions to 40 pages of questions, depending on which test is used) to help fit each person into a group.

Anyhow, I found the papers from when I took one of the more lengthy tests in college, and I also took the test online, in in both cases I came out as INTJ (Introverrted iNtuitive Thinking Judging). According to the online test, I am a moderately expressed introvert, a moderately expressed intuitive personality,
a slightly expressed thinking personality and a very expressed judging personality. You can find lots of places online that will describe what exactly each personality type usually equates to. I like a decent amount of what this description of INTJ has to say.
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PBS has been kind enough to make available online the entire NOVA series “The Elegant Universe”, which is a 3 hour long program describing String Theory in fairly complex detail. Anyone who is interested in physics or other such things, or is just curious about the latest theories on how the universe works should take the time to watch this series. It’s well worth it.

All I can say is thank you God for this verse: “and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” Yeah, yeah, it’s only the night of the fifth / the morning of sixth right now, but it’s still the weekend, and after the amount of sleep I’ve gotten recently, I am certainly going to rest (ie pass out) for the next 12 - 14 hours. Maybe some time after that I’ll even post again. For now, goodnight.

Jason Upton, an excellent Christian musician and worship leader, has updated his web site recently. One notable addition is Key of David Radio, which is basically streaming radio of all of Jason Upton’s many CDs and recordings. It’s awesomely spiritual and uplifting music, and I’m finding it quite a relaxing thing to listen to at work. It’s almost like a prayer meeting in my headphones. Anyhow, I highly recommend at least taking a listen and seeing what you think.

It may be a blogging faux pas, but the last post was whiny and annoying, and I didn’t like it 5 seconds after I posted it, so I disappeared it. That’s what I get for posting when I should be sleeping. My apologies to anyone who may have been subjected to it. That version of me was beaten severely with a newspaper and has promised to go away.

Moving on, I was looking for good music to listen to, and realized I hadn’t listened to Torley Wong (awesome techno artist, though calling him just a techno artist is, I believe, a little bit like calling a composition by Ludwig van Beethoven or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart a song, as opposed to a masterpiece). I have most of his music, but decided to search him out anyway, to see if he had released anything new. He’s been kind enough to release all of his works under the Creative Commons License, and they are free for download courtesy of the Internet Archive.

If you visit the above website, you will find all 230 of his songs available singly for download, or lumped together in a 1.4 GB zip file of goodness. Sadly, if you read the contents of the page, he announces that he has an affliction of the ear called hyperacusis, which makes almost any sound seem excessively loud, prohibiting him from composing. This is very much a shame, but it seems like he has accepted it. Either way, I highly recommend you take the time to listen to some of his music. It will be well worth your time.

Update:

For those of you keeping score at home, the above linked album is titled The Final Selection, and is a different collection of songs than those contained in 1a, 1b, or 2a, which are all completely worth listening to as well. I haven’t listened to them in a while, but for those of you overwhelmed by the vast selection of songs, Torley would suggest (and I tend to agree) listening to Xristosphan, A New Piano [radio edit], thesmileinhereyes [alive], The Chinese Method, and FOOTSTEPS, to which I would add An Old Piano. There are many formats, so I highly recommend visiting the web site rather than taking my word for it. Enjoy.

So apparently it’s a small world. I just got a call from a friend who I work with. He’s getting married in August (congrats to him), and apparently was meeting with a family friend, or friend of a friend, or something of the sort, because she does slide shows or something of the sort, related to weddings. Anyhow, she showed them some examples, and he recognized one of the people from the pictures as the person I dated for quite a while. He had met her once up north, and though he recognized her in the pictures, so he called to ask me what her last name is / who she married. It turns out her husband knows the lady doing the slide show presentation fairly well, or at least his parents do, or something of the sort.

So, the moral of the story is, slow and steady wins… um, wait, I mean, it’s a small world. Crazy stuff.

Posting in a somewhat out-of-order fashion, as I normally do when I actually post, last night was a pretty cool night. Ann Arbor Assemblies of God hosted a concert as a fundraiser for their youth group. 4 bands played, including Dawn and Christopher Adam, who were both awesome, as they are every time I see them play. There were not a huge amount of people there, but the concert was still quite awesome. Some of us stuck around talking and various people jammed on some of the instruments. I got to talk to Dawn, which is always a pleasure, and I had to help my brilliant brother jump start his car… silly boy… someday he’ll learn to turn the lights off. Hehe, hooray for relaxing evenings.

Watching TV this afternoon, I saw a movie that reminded me of what I consider to be quite possibly the saddest movie scene of all time. Yes ladies and gentlemen, you might not suppose I watch those sorts of movies, but I do. The award goes to… drumroll please… Star Trek: Generations. The scene involves the Enterprise NCC-1701-D’s final flight. The warp core goes critical because of those darn Klingons (with the help of Soran), so they seperate the saucer section of the ship just as the other half explodes. The shockwave then sends the saucer section crashing to the planet, ending the reign of the coolest starship ever.

*sniffle* Anyway, I just wanted that stated for the record.

True to the last sentence of my previous post, here it is almost 2 months later and I am finally posting. As I have many other things to do, this will be short, but I figured since I spend the time to fend off the vicious comment spam mongers every day, I might as well actually post. Life has been somewhat busy for the last couple of months. Between work, other work, church stuff, moving things into my house, fixing things around my house, and all those other exciting things, I certainly could use a vacation.

At least, unlike last time I wrote, I now have a comfy bed in the bedroom. This is somewhat problematic actually, as it’s comfortable enough to make waking up for work in the morning just that much harder. However, it certainly does beat sleeping on a sleeping bag and ground pad every night.

Aside from that, the whole house thing has gone pretty well. The basement is going to rock some collective socks as it gains more and more instruments, microphones, guitars, amps, and all sorts of other useful things. The main thing we need now is a grill and some deck / patio furniture for if the weather ever happens to shape up and actually get nice again.

Well that’s all for now folks. Perhaps we’ll do this again in a couple of months.