Anthony Panozzo's Blog

If you absolutely must complain, I have found an interesting, and perhaps socially acceptable, way to do this. There are a few concepts that separate my method from ordinary complaining.

Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha is a challenging presentation format where presenters have twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each. Presenters are forced to practice and consider what they will say and how they will transition between sections, and are promptly jerked off of the stage after their time is up.

Complaining

If you can change your situation, change it. If you can stop yourself from complaining, don't complain. Always consider these first and consider your underlying assumptions again. What seems out of your control is often in your control but outside of what you let yourself believe. Considering complaining about your relationship or your job or your house? What larger problems are under the surface, and what can you do about them? Even if you don't believe you can change your situation, you can likely change your attitude about it.

I was wondering what people's standards for using tags in comments like TODO, FIXME, HACK, XXX, and the like were.

// TODO: implement the foo module here
...
// HACK here be dragons
...
// XXX
...
/* FIXME:  late at night, I need some sleep */
...

One advantage of using these tags is that they are easy to search for and give an understanding of where the code can be improved. Most IDEs even have a special view to look for these kinds of things.

There are numerous attributes that contribute to effective continuous learning and meta-learning, among them:

• where I found something
• how I found it
• who recommended it
• how long ago the information was published
• the context of techniques
• how surprising the information was to me

I contend that this meta-information is actually more valuable than the information itself.

It's helpful to think about these attributes to get higher signal streams of information. When I find that a particular blog or person has interesting content, I listen much more closely to what they have to say. While I don't turn critical thinking off, I don't need to spend as much time considering the source. Links and ideas presented from a trustworthy source tend to be of higher quality. Finding a good source of information makes it much easier to get good information in the future.

Conversely, remembering meta-information allows me to debug and debunk things that I have come in contact with. When I start to disagree with someone whose opinion I previously agreed with, I also think critically about other things that they said or thought. Perhaps there are other views that they held that are also incorrect, and I'm basing my thoughts on this incorrect information. This helps me realize when my mental models need to shift. Everyone has a bias, and I want to make sure that I understand their bias and that is it not harmful to me. If I realize that a much-read software pundit just started selling bug-tracking software, I might start to examine the quality of his articles because of a potential conflict of interest. Similarly, if I understand that the last time I read about something was five years ago and believe my information be out of date, I might preemptively decide to brush up.

Old people are consistently surprised when they hear someone's age ("I can't believe you are ten already! I can still remember when you were born!".) They also express surprise when they realize how long ago it's been since they have done something ("Hmm, now that I think about it, I haven't bowled in fifteen years!") One of my realizations came in the middle of the last decade when I realized that 1997 was not really all that recent. I needed to envision my whole mental timeline.

Had an idea for a for-fun app that regularly informs users of time-based facts. The problem that the app solves is the inability of the mind to consistently simulate the age of things. The app would take salient world events, people's ages and significant personal events (you bought your couch 4 years ago) and periodically remind users of how long it's been since those events occurred. This would allow users to continually shape their awareness of and reflect on the passage of time. It is an established phenomenon that time appears to speed up as one ages so this app could be helpful for dealing with this. Users could even state how surprised they were by certain facts to quantify the normally subjective passage of time.

When I heard GeoCities pages were being squashed, I breathed a sigh of relief. Thankfully, no more terrible banner ads, outdated content, and similar tripe.

But then I thought to myself that there was one page that I looked at recently that was actually pretty good. It was a page detailing the Myers-Briggs type ENTP, which I think most closely resembles my personality type. So I searched for it and pulled the remains from Google cache, and decided to repost it. I corrected some spelling and wording choices, added punctuation, and formatted a bit differently.

The first portion is especially good. No other descriptions on the internet got me nodding my head and laughing in agreement quite as much as this one did. While I don't think that this personality type defines me, it is a useful model to help understand what natural biases and unaware blind spots that I might have, as well as what my natural strengths and talents are. I would recommend doing this if you haven't already.

Enjoy!

ENTP - The Innovator

Profile by Sandra Krebs Hirsch and Jean Kummerow

ENTPs are known for their quest of the novel and complex. They have faith in their ability to improvise and to overcome any challenges that they face. They are highly independent, and value adaptability and innovation. They may be several steps ahead of others in encouraging and valuing change. They hate uninspired routine and resist hierarchical and bureaucratic structures that are not functional. They need freedom for action.

Living

ENTPs are lively children who question established truths and norms, dream and scheme, and develop unusual ways of doing traditional childhood things. The ENTP child is oriented toward doing the unique, which may mean taking risks and outwitting parental, school, and societal authority. They enjoy creating projects and following interests that are unusual and different.

ENTP children enjoy inventing new toys, dances, and languages. Because they are outgoing in their personality style, they often engage other children in their projects and assign them particular roles to play. ENTPs rarely accept things just as they are. They like to test or explore to see new meanings and relationships. When things do not go as they want, they use their ingenuity and cleverness to bring people and situations around to their point of view.

As young adults, when ENTPs choose a career for themselves, they tend to set flexible goals that allow them to incorporate new information and accommodate to new circumstances when they come along. It is hard for ENTPs not to be able to explore the road not taken. Their byword is "keep your options open." Sometimes this flexibility can look like indecision to outsiders.

As adults, ENTPs take advantage of opportunities. Because of their ability to see relationships and connections between seemingly unrelated things, they are able to realize the potential in many things. When they see and opportunity that others have missed, they set action-oriented strategies that allow them the greatest flexibility to achieve the results they want. The worst job for them is working for someone who demands considerable rule following or tries too often to tell or order, rather than make suggestions to the ENTP. Throughout their careers, ENTPs want their work to be enjoyable, with interesting possibilities for applications. Additionally, having their work widely acclaimed and accepted as a unique contribution would be highly gratifying for ENTPs. They also weave in vacations whenever possible and want a flexible work schedule.