Ten Tentacles - So many arms, so little time.

This was kind of interesting. Took this little brain test (yeah, yeah, I know…and hilarity ensued) and I’m actually comfortable with the results. Try it. It’s short…

Your mileage may vary…see my results.

Your Brain Usage Profile

• Auditory : 50%
• Visual : 50%
• Left : 63%
• Right : 36%

Mario, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant with a balanced preference for auditory and visual inputs. Because of your “centrist” tendencies, the distinctions between various types of brain usage are somewhat blurred.

Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor, unless it requires total spontaneity and ability to improvise, your weaker traits. However, you are far from rigid or overcontrolled. You possess a degree of individuality, perceptiveness, and trust in your intuition to function at much more sophisticated levels than most.

Having given sufficient attention to detail, you can readily perceive the larger aspects and implications of a situation or of learning. You are functional and practical, but can blend abstraction and theory into your framework readily.

The equivalence of your auditory and visual learning orientation gives you two equally effective sensory input systems, each with distinctive features. You can process both unidimensionally and multidimensionally with equal facility. When needed, you sequence material while at other times you “intake it all” and store it for processing later.

Your natural ability to use your senses is also synthesized in your way of learning. You can be reflective in your approach, absorbing material in a non-aggressive manner, and at other times voracious in seeking out stimulation and experience.

Overall you tend to be somewhat more critical of yourself than is necessary and avoid enjoying life too much because of a sense of duty. You feel somewhat constrained and tend to sometimes restrict your expressiveness. In any given situation, you will opt for the rational, and learning of almost any type should be easy for you. You might need certain ideas explained to you in order to fit them into your scheme of things, but you’re at least open to that!

Ok, this I just had to share because frankly there just aren’t enough good moons in the work week. Gotta love the facial expression too.

So, I’m a year out from San Diego, enjoying the country life here in the Blue Ridge. I get a call from a friend back west, over there on the left coast, and what? It’s all gone to hell in a handbasket. Literally. See the pic, above, shot from a buddy’s apartment window.

Just over that hill there, you know, the one ablaze in hell like flames? Yeah, that one. I used to live just on the other side of that hill and a bit north. Not tooo goood! As the saying goes.

I mean, I thought all the rain we’ve been getting here this year was something to complain about. For those keeping score we are one-half inch away from the all time record since they’ve been officially keeping track of such things. Well, I’ll take pouring rain over hellfires any day.

Much love and prayers to all my friends in SD. I’ve spoken to some and know you’re safe. The others, I hope all is well. Drop me a line or call when you can. You’re all in our prayers here.

Distance. hyperdictionary defines it as:

• [n] the property created by the space between two objects or points
• [n] size of the gap between two places; “the distance from New York to Chicago”; “he determined the length of the shortest line segment joining the two points”
• [n] indifference by personal withdrawal; “emotional distance”
• [n] a distant region; “I could see it in the distance”

[n] the interval between two times; “the distance from birth to death”; “it all happened in the space of 10 minutes”

• [n] a remote point in time; “if that happens it will be at some distance in the future”; “at a distance of ten years he had forgotten many of the details”
• [v] go far ahead of; “He outdistanced the other runners”
• [v] keep at a distance

I was quite surprised to find they’d included a definition of the word covering ‘emotional’ distance. That’s exactly what I felt like writing about today and I thought I’d be a little smarty and put a definition in that didn’t talk about that…and then I’d slowly get to my point and make this big ironic statement. But, they covered that base and I felt funny forcing my little trick. So, I just included their full definition and I’ll get on with the point making.

Being a Navy Brat, and later a US Marine in my own right, I was in the unique position, at a very early age, to understand the affect distance has on personal relationships. With my parents it only seemed to make their relationship stronger. At least from what I could see. While physical distance grew, with yearly West-Pacs, emotional distance shrunk. And this was before e-mail or cell phones. I remember watching my mom write letters every day. Sometimes twice a day. And, every day she had one or more letters in the mailbox. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that…

As the brat part of the Navy family I actually had the opposite experience. Friends made at the duty-stations we spent no more than three years at wrote when I left, and I wrote back. But, save for a few special ones I’m still in contact with, the letters slowly dropped off. Both on their part and mine. People change and move on, especially as you grow up, and physical distance drives a wedge and drags the emotional distance along with it.

But all that is really par for the course, isn’t it? Lovers often grow closer when separated, bolstered by plans for the reunion day which they know will come. Childhood friends, for the most part, grow older and apart; true friends being the few that stick together. No argument, and that’s not really what’s been on my mind. I accept those things.

Nope, nope. I’m talking about the strange gulf in emotional distance one finds when confronted with folks we have built relationships with over physical distance. That’s right. This here web thang. IRC, chat rooms, instant messages, web-chats, email, MU*s. You name it. A thousand and one ways to meet people you’ll never meet. Meet them? Hell, make them your best pals. Your confidants.

I have had, on occasion, the chance to meet people I developed relationships with like this. Inevitably we end up sitting across a table in some restaurant talking about the weather. Well, not really the weather, but you know what I mean. These are people who over the course of however long have learned personal details about me. The anonymity of the web gives us a freedom sometimes to share things with these people even those closest to us don’t know. So why do we act like strangers when we do meet? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the one driving a wedge and prying apart the emotional distance in these cases. Maybe I imagine that the other party is more comfortable with the distance and so I enforce it. Or maybe we’re all like this. I don’t know.

For whatever reason it’s weighed heavy on me these past few weeks. I’ve been in situations where I’ve poured my heart out to a window and then I come face to face and I have nothing to say, or I sense it’s best that I don’t. But if it’s best, why does it bother me? And it’s not just with people I only know through the web. This new age has us communicating with friends and family through IMs and e-mail. And sometimes they’re in the same city!

I don’t know about the rest of the Internet Generation, but I care about these people. And it troubles me that I am different, and they are different, when the windows and pop-ups are replaced with glasses and silverware. I had a point. Really, I did. Maybe that last sentence was it.

I have reached new heights of unmotivation. I don’t know if it was this ridiculously tedious report I had to start doing this week or what, but I am just in no mood to work. One good thing, my masculinity has been reaffirmed. So I guess that’s good.

In other news my friends are getting older, which means I’m getting older. Isn’t it fun? Halloween is coming, so there’s a few moments joy there. All in all…blah.

Well, the weekend was fairly uneventfull. The biggest news is that my little munchkin had a soccer game on Saturday morning (he’s almost 4 years old mind you) and they won again! They’re 5-0! And this last game was a massacre. I lost track after my son’s team scored their 13th goal. Now, granted, my son doesn’t do much of anything on the field. Oh, he runs at the ball when it comes near him, kicks it away from his team’s goal. But mostly he just has a good time running around with the other kids. Which, to me, is what it’s all about. I never expected him to even be on the field for games…but he’s having fun, and I’m having fun watching him have fun.

I spent most of the rest of Saturday coding. It’s what I do, what can I say. In any case, I put a code freeze on work for the bBlog Links Plugin until the guys at bBlog nail down the new Plugin API for the next version of bBlog. I also worked some on the site for my DW’s™ (read Darling Wife) home business. It’s coming along and should be up and running by the end of the week.

Sunday was my day of rest. After a week of sleepless nights, I slept in till almost noon. Felt really good. I got up and pretty much stayed in my jammies all day. I did a bit more work on the site for my DW™, and pretty much spent the rest of the day doing nothing. I did take some time out to show my mom-in-law how to use my riding mower. She’s been visiting this past week and has been dying to drive the mower. Don’t ask me. She’s cool like that. So, mom-in-law mowed the lawn and my DW™ even pitched in and then we all had Chinese for dinner from the new Chinese place in town. Food was excellent as was the movie we watched, Bringing Down the House. I love Steve Martin.

All in all it was a pretty relaxing weekend, which is good. I have this new report to do today that takes me three hours to prepare…damn, I need a nap!

I sent off an email to the bBlog dev team with my release canditate for the bBlog Links Plugin attached. I wanted to give them a chance to review it for any wacky boo-boos I made before I post it for download. If I don’t hear back in a couple of days I’ll go ahead and post it so you can try it at your own risk. It’s been working like a champ for me and the other two bBlog sites I manage.

I’ve got a few ideas for other plugins and expanding on this plugin, but I need to do a bit more digging around to see if they will be possible. I’ll post more as I get closer to development on those. For now, I’ve got my site up to the functionality I initially wanted so I’m gonna spend some quality time on look and feel.

Happy bBlogging!

UPDATE:

Heard back from the dev team. Looks like the plugin is good to go. So without further ado, here’s the link.

For your downloading pleasure: bBlog Links Plugin v0.0.1

If you download it and use it, drop me an e-mail at patch AT seraphworks DOT com or post a comment to this post and let me now. I’d love to know where it’s being used. Enjoy!

Well, necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and I had a need to process Smarty tags which were embedded in posts. So, an hour of hacking later and here is a new plugin. Hope some find it useful:

For your downloading pleasure: bBlog Smarty Post Modifier Plugin v0.0.1

Installation instructions are packed in the gziped tarball in the file INSTALL. This of course is offered without any warranty of any kind. You use the plugin at your own risk. If you download it and use it, drop me an e-mail to patch AT seraphworks DOT com or post a comment to this post and let me now. I’d love to know where it’s being used.

Enjoy!

Here’s the second screenshot. This is a shot of the link categories manager called Categories.

Here’s the first of the screen shots I promised. This is of the actual link manager, called Links.