It seems that iNTj’s are big into contingency planning and, in general, most other people aren’t; that explains a lot… Whenever I find myself in an unexpected situation the first thing I always think is “what’s the worst case scenario?”. Once I’ve explored the worst case and worked through an exit strategy from that I start to work on the more likely outcomes, but I always do the worst case first.

Why do any of us do this stuff? Why do we read so many books on the subject? Go to user group meetings? Fly across the country to hear people talk? Why do you code? Seriously. I want to know. Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com - WHY DO YOU CODE? Because I have to? I code because I can. I code because I couldn’t not code. I feel so at peace when my mind is immersed in building executable abstractions.

So, I saw all this stuff over on Scoble and Chris Sells’ blogs about Microsoft being full of ENTJ’s and wondered what the hell they were on about. Myers-Briggs personality types; I took the test, apparently I’m an INTJ… Well, the descriptions read about right; though I expect my Michelle and my sister might have something to say about them…

Who are you? and why are you here? `2003.09.05 11:11:45 62.188.56.137 ‘Len’ added entry #157 2003.09.05 11:45:49 62.188.56.137 ‘Len’ added entry #158 2003.09.06 13:26:52 4.64.105.117 Search: query for ‘FX’ 2003.09.07 11:00:14 62.188.56.137 Search: query for ‘udp’ 2003.09.08 00:32:01 62.188.56.137 ‘Len’ added entry #159 2003.09.08 14:34:02 82.69.20.81 Search: query for ‘ZOE BALL’ 2003.09.08 22:34:05 62.188.56.137 ‘Len’ added entry #160 2003.09.08 22:46:00 62.188.56.137 ‘Len’ added entry #161`

It’s amazing what a day or two away can do. I came back to the tests with a fresh mind this morning and dealt with the issues that had caused me problems at the tail end of last week before I got my morning coffee. Ok, so I don’t take coffee until 11.30. I still think I did pretty good… I’d written the bulk of the tests on thursday evening. Unfortunately I’d made one of those mistakes that you just can’t see until you walk away and come back with a clean brain.

Michelle and I had a skate lesson with Ben Roberts on Saturday morning. It was a group lesson that ended up being just the two of us and which was really good and great value for money. Ben was my instructor when I had my course at Citiskate. They’ve since gone their seperate ways but Ben’s been in the business for a long time and he’s one of those instructors who just wants to teach people, and it shows.

Further to my recent wailings about being responsible for family member’s PCs… I decided to deal with the internet connection sharing issue at the hardware level… So far the Netgear MR814v2 firewalled, DSL router, WIFI access point seems to rock… The MR814v2 is a nice piece of kit. It’s a DSL router with configurable WAN MAC address; you can make it pretend its the PC you’ve always been connecting to your cable provider with and neatly sidestep any issues regarding re-registering your MAC address.

My space bar got sticky. I bought a Microsoft Wireless Multimedia keyboard on impulse. Why Oh Why was the ’end’ key moved? The keyboard itself has a nicer feel than the one I replaced. It’s thicker, you pretty much have to use the built in palm rest with it and have it up on the little legs at the back. I’m got used to that surprisingly quickly (and realised that I dont actually use the palm rest most of the time).

I have a dream. I’ve just done coding for the day and I’m sitting in a hot tub on the deck of a glass fronted chalet overlooking the slopes; glass panels around the deck so that nothing obstructs the view. Think the really expensive places in Whistler and you’re on the same page. Well, maybe not yet. The great thing about working remotely for people is that you can do it from anywhere… The bad thing about being able to work from anywhere is that you want to work from somewhere else…

Eric Sink has an amusing piece on how his problem solving skills have been spoiled by Visual Studio’s F5 rebuild and run option. He obviously isn’t developing test first, because if he was then going for the instant gratification of a green bar is fine. That’s one of the things I really like about test first; you’re encouraged to do the things developers like doing. Write a test and then you can just write the code and run it to see if it works.