The Jay-Blog

Authentic Happiness 3

I just completed the VIA Signature Strengths Survey at the website that accompanies the book. I don't feel I'm the extremist these tests make me out to be.

My signature strengths are:

Creativity, ingenuity, and originality. I have the highest score of anyone who has taken this survey on the website.

Curiosity and interest in the world. I have the highest score of anyone who has taken this survey on the website.

Love of learning. I have the highest score of anyone who has taken this survey on the website.

Bravery and valor. My score is higher than 98%-99% of those who have taken the survey.

Zest, enthusiasm, and energy. My score is higher than 93%-97% of those who have taken the survey.

My signature strengths, and what they mean, are:

Creativity, ingenuity, and originality Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.

Curiosity and interest in the world You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.

Love of learning You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

Bravery and valor You are a courageous person who does not shrink from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain. You speak up for what is right even if there is opposition. You act on your convictions.

Zest, enthusiasm, and energy Regardless of what you do, you approach it with excitement and energy. You never do anything halfway or halfheartedly. For you, life is an adventure.

The $64,000 question is "Says who?" I tried to answer the questionnaire truthfully but self-evaluation is biased by definition. Creativity, curiosity, and love of learning come as no surprise -- although outscoring everyone else who has ever taken the test online was totally unexpected. The valor and zest don't feel as close a fit.

I continue to enjoy Seligman's book.

Windows Media Fun

ZDNet suggested I install Windows Media Player 9.

I followed Microsoft's directions to the letter and downloaded nearly 10 MB of code.

I clicked to install and received this message:

"objXML.parseError.errorCode:-2146697210 - The system cannont locate the object specified. Microsoft VBRuntime Script runtime error '800a00b' Division by zero. /9Series/code/Template0.asp, line 45"

This is a graphical user interface?

Do they test this crap before unleashing it on 40 million people?

Grrrrr.

Stephen Downes is axing Microsoft from his computers. Maybe I should as well.

Washington, DC

These folks are my parents. They are trying to fathom the gift they just received. Uta, Austin, and I spent last week in Northern Virginia, touring the sites and visiting my folks. The plan was to celebrate their 60th anniversary. Only after buying tickets did I discover that their 60th was last year. So we celebrated their 61st.

Snow fell several times, just enough to make things pretty. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Entering the Washington Monument these days is similar to getting on an airplane -- guards, metal detector, searches. The views from the top are spectacular.


Most of the Tidal Basin and half the surface of the Potomac were frozen.

Our son Austin is a sophmore at SF State University.

What Should I Do WIth My Life?

I'm reading Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? and learning from it. (There's a synopsis in Fast Company.)

Don't start by listing your strengths. Start by being what you are.

There's more.

But I'm only 1/3 of the way into the book.

The Sunday New York Times (1/12) printed a downright nasty review of the book under the heading Get a Job.

Most of Bronson's subjects share a crippling inability to choose the right job and stick with it. There's a young woman who has burned her way through a Hollywood production job, Georgetown Law School and a tour of duty in the Clinton administration, but still hasn't found that special something worthy of her talent and time. Another has achieved a trifecta of yuppie achievement: Stanford Business School, a post with McKinsey Consulting and a White House fellowship, but still there's that itchy feeling that she hasn't found her true niche yet. To a person, the interviewees share another remarkable trait: an indescribably powerful regard for the opinions, attention and affection of Po Bronson.

The Times reviewer clearly thinks she has her act together. Otherwise, how could she describe the quest of Po's interviewees as as "these dithering, whimpering neurotics [who] would stop thinking of work as a path to ultimate personal reward, if they would pick something they believed in and then ''hang on like grim death,'' they might actually amount to something."

I am an existentialist. I revise my job description every morning. One never steps in the same Jay-stream twice. Call me a whimpering neurotic, but I'll always be looking for a better spot to leverage my relationship with the world.

Dachshunds!

Uta and I live with dachshunds.

This is Smokey.

This is Latte.

And here are 200 more dachshunds in the recent Sprint dachshund/oxen commercial, a 2.2 MB Quicktime movie. Right-click to download.

Stephen Wright

Stephen says:

Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back. 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name. 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good. I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met. OK, so what's the speed of dark? Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. I intend to live forever - so far, so good. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Fog City

One of my New Year's visualizations is to become a better photographer. I snapped this view of San Francisco (that's the towers of the Bay Bridge on the left) from Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley on my afternoon walk.

Feeling McLuhanish

Marshall McLuhan
The Playboy Interview

PLAYBOY: To borrow Henry Gibson's oft-repeated one-line poem on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In--"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

MCLUHAN: Sometimes I wonder. I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

But I've never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory--my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences--until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

JAY: I can relate.

PLAYBOY: Isn't such a methodology somewhat erratic and inconsistent--if not, as your critics would maintain, eccentric?

MCLUHAN: Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. I consider myself a generalist, not a specialist who has staked out a tiny plot of study as his intellectual turf and is oblivious to everything else.

...societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication...

JAY: So content is not king.

PLAYBOY: But isn't television itself a primarily visual medium?

MCLUHAN: No, it's quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV's tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. By requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his entire body. Since the point of focus for a TV set is the viewer, television is Orientalizing us by causing us all to begin to look within ourselves. The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense participation and low definition--what I call a "cool" experience, as opposed to an essentially "hot," or high definition-low participation, medium like radio.

JAY: I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear my trousers rolled. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

---

MCLUHAN: By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, I'm not suggesting that content plays no role--merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role.

From "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, (March 1969 ©)

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Small World Note.
JOHO pointed to the beginning of a "think like McLuhan" course that started four days after my post. Do you suppose my radar picked up a predictive signal?

BTW, the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto holds the old boy in rather high esteem:

Signs abound indicating that Marshall McLuhan lives now again, as the media and cultural transformations that he diagnosed continue to unfold. Wired magazine re-releases The Medium is the Massage. Lewis Lapham writes that McLuhan makes more sense now than ever in his introduction to the republished Understanding Media. TV and radio shows mention McLuhan. Plays are written, and performed in San Francisco and Ottawa. A CD-ROM appears, demonstrating how well McLuhan's ideas hold up in new media formats. Even the Economist routinely refers to the Canadian media guru in discussions of the meaning of new media.

McLuhan as intellectual and pop icon has become a fixture of late 20th Century and 21st Century thought. A computer-savvy generation turns to McLuhan as they explore the new media ecology. Baby boomers watch in amazement as the revolutionary impacts of television collide with the effects of the networked medium. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 346 references to McLuhan. His phrases turn up in surprising places. Take for example the U.S. federal court decision to overturn the Communications Decency Act: "Any content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the global village to roast the pig." Time Magazine (June 24, 1996). Everywhere his metaphors have new currency, his cliches have become archetypes.

Every day The McLuhan Program receives local and global requests for information, advice and speakers, as a result of this revival of interest in McLuhan and his work.

I still chuckle over the scene in Manhattan (or was it Annie Hall?), where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing in front of this blow-hard professor from Columbia who's blabbing about McLuhan when Woody pulls the real Marshall McLuhan from behind a sign to say, "You know nothing of my work." RIGHT ON! Wouldn't it be wonderful if life were really like that?

Hey, Doofus, here's (fill in the blank: Peter Drucker...Jimmy Carter...Stephen Hawking...Jack Welch...the Dalai Lama) to explain it to you. If only...

Posted by jaycross at 11:38 PM | Comments (2)

This morning in Berkeley

Today the gloom cleared and it began to feel like Northern California again. I took a three-mile walk from Internet Time Group headquarters on Poppy Lane into Tilden Park.

This is a 20-minute walk from home.

Tilden Park has groves of redwood, eucalyptus, spruce, and oaks.

A collage of natural colors along the way.

The Golden Gate from the top of Marin Avenue, not far from home.

Rosemary, baby.

Skeptics decry "soft" concepts such as intution because it is difficult to measure. Since it's tough to pin down intuition with words or numbers, some say it doesn't much matter.

Walking up the hillside after lunch, I passed a hedge of rosemary, beautiful silvery green. My fingers grabbed a sprig, which I rolled it around and held to my nose. Ah, the scent of rosemary. I flashed on the rosemary border at our house ten years ago and could almost taste the grilled chicken breasts with rosemary twigs sizzling on the back barbecue.

Smell memories can be like that, connecting up to past memories by following heaven-knows-what path. They are as unexplainable as intuition, but they makes them no less real.

Yeah, sure. Uh-huh.

This is a response to all of your recent emails complaining about the GEEWIZ.info unsubscribe link.

You were right, after hours of digging we have located a problem that prevented some of you from successfully unsubscribing, and we are so very sorry.

We would like to apologize for any headache we may have caused anyone. The programmers are working on the problem and it will be fixed within he next 8 hours. Be rest assured the next GEEWIZZ newsletter unsubscribe link will be 100% working.

I am sorry, I understand your frustrations. It will NEVER happen again.

Yours Truly.. the WIZZ

You bet. Why didn't the WIZZ just wait 8 hours and email me, "You are unsubscribed."