The following short quiz consists of 4 questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a professional. The questions are NOT that difficult. [Ed: the answers are in the extended. It's best if you read the answer to each question before proceeding to the next]

1) How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

2) How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

3) The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals attend.... except one. Which animal does not attend?

4) There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?

reformatted from Jeremy Zawodny's blog (I had trouble not reading the answers with the question).

though my dad's snoring is much louder than a mouse.

I already posted this on LJ over a week ago, but I'm reposting here because I'm bored enough to revisit my previous answers.

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE 1. Ice cream scooper 2. Code monkey (very similar to #1)

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER 1. Dead Alive 2. Happy Gilmore 3. Better Off Dead 4. Yojimbo

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE LIVED 1. Alexandria, VA 2. Okinawa, Japan 3. Boston, MA 4. San Diego, CA

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH (currently on-air) 1. MythBusters 2. The Daily Show 3. Colbert Report

I struck Dirty Jobs from the list because I've decided that these are the only three shows that I must watch every episode of

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION 1. Sasebo, Japan 2. Maui 3. Malaga, Spain 4. Smith Mountain Lake, Virgina

FOUR WEB SITES YOU VISIT DAILY 1. kwc.org 2. waxy.org (via bloglines) 3. movabletypo.net 4. bloglines.com/chameleonreader.com

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS 1. Tonkatsu 2. Curry 3. Fred Steak 4. Mashed potatoes

FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW 1. Chicago (never been) 2. Okinawa 3. Bilbao (never been) 4. Hawaii (just like #2, but closer, and less pig poop)

Some of you may have done this before, but it's a fun little experiment that takes only several seconds to do.

1. While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

(via the coffee list)

Following up on parakkum's entry, I was tempted to list something like, "born in a country that I was never a citizen of," or "been in the eye of a typhoon," but I didn't really accomplish those as much as they happened to me. Similarly, I was also tempted to get really specific and say things like, "drank chianti with a nice coconunt-mango-vegetable salad and chili last night," but that perhaps defeats the purpose of this meme as well. Depending on who reads this entry, at least two of these could easily be disqualified (Push Stars and public transit), but we shall see:

1. Burned myself with a homemade EKG
2. Found a deadly poisonous mushroom while mushroom hunting
3. Ate an entire pumpkin pie in one sitting during a pie-eating contest
4. Performed in an opening act for the Push Stars
5. Hiked to the top of two extinct volanoes (Mount Fuji and Vesuvius)
6. Played videogames at an arcade as a typhoon approached (<200 miles) (cheating, yes, to get around the "accomplished" vs. "happened to me" qualification)
7. Snorkeled off the coast of Okinawa
8. Had coffee in the Captain's quarters of a US Navy vessel
9. Flew three times between Japan and DC in two weeks
10. Commuted on public transportation from Berkeley to Mountain View/Menlo Park/Anything past Millbrae (observing my fellow passengers, I'm pretty sure on this one)

Even less likely to be unique, due to fellow participants:

• Filed a patent covering a novel mechanism for establishing secure connections in both the US and Europe (oh wait, DARN YOU BP!)

• co-founded a failed startup company that made it to the front page of the WSJ

Nigritude Ultramarine

(Anil Dash is a MT developer, so I cast my vote for him)

There's no test for this - you have to rate yourself. It's like the Political Compass, but more amusing. Are you:
1) More Elf or Dwarf?
2) More Pirate or Ninja?

For descriptions, visit From pirate dwarves to ninja elves...

I rate myself 85% ninja (b/c ninjas are sweet), and 10% dwarf.

(via blogdex)

I don't like posting quizzes to my blog, but I have to post this one b/c meta was trying sooo hard to get this result intentionally, while I got it the 'honest' way on the first try:

You are Pig Pen!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

One of the things I was noticing in my feed aggregator was how the "visited US states" meme has been propagating into the various blogging communities I am part of. BP was nice enough to generate a thumbnail for me so that I could view this at a macroscopic level. (He used PARC's Popout Prism to quickly generate the image).

Unfortunately, there's so many other entries in the feed reader that the maps end up squashed, but if you look at the bottom, you can see the first cluster of maps, which is mine, then BP's two maps, and tonya's. After that, there is a slight lull. honeyfields and I bugged meta to do a map as well, so then you see meta's near complete map, followed by jrc's (who reads meta's blog), and ginfiend's (who also reads meta's blog). You can tell by the amount of red in the images that meta clearly wins the contest :). You can see the full feed here (link no longer valid).

As Popout Prism has this neat (and central) feature that highlights keywords in the thumbnail (example of this on the left), I was thinking that it would be interesting to integrate this feature into a feed aggregator. As people in your community start talking about visited states, orkut, or a party you went to the other day, you'd be able to quickly see how hot a particular topic was. If you aggregator was especially smart, it could show you a list of what topics seemed to be hot and let you click on them to highlight them in the thumbnail and on the page. If only there were a freely available server-side toolkit :).

This isn't as cool, detailed, or information-rich as ps's visited counties map, but I went ahead and generated a visited states map just to check up on my progress. The influence of a southerly cross-country trip is obvious, and will hopefully be fixed sometime in the future. My criteria for filling in a state was that I had to have at least driven in the state -- airport layovers don't count -- but even that is fairly loose criteria.

create your own visited states map

create your own visited country map

I've had discussions two nights in a row about the nature of my blog posts, so I went back to this kuro5hin article called Portrait of a Blogger, which I found fairly amusing because it managed to nail some aspects of our blogging perfectly. For example, for my personality, it says

Just found a site here, here, and here, regarding what I posted a couple hours ago regarding this. I'll post more links later!

INFP: "Habitat: Cute little bungalows in low rent districts across the U.S. with picket fences and groovy colored houses."

INTP: "Habitat: Usually a messy desk type area with lots of caffeine nearby. Techie Bloggers have been known to be nomads, though, with the advent of wireless internet technology. You may see them anywhere as a result, although most tend towards urban areas."

I also found another analysis that's less humorous but useful:
Bloginality: the INTJ personality

An IQ test I can actually score well on. I scored a 201. Would've been a little higher if I had a PDA. Also, in true nerd fashion, I have to point out that one of their questions is wrong. "The idea of the mouse, icons and point-and-click was introduced by: (a) Apple (b) IBM (c) Xerox (d) Microsoft" is an incorrectly worded question. Xerox PARC had the latter two, but the mouse came from Doug Englebart while at SRI. The writer could argue that "introduced" is different from "invented," but by that argument Apple/Xerox are both correct answers.
take the digital IQ test (requires flash)
(via mhuang)

kuro5hin.org || Top Ten Internet Fads

Any others people care to add? Two posters on Kuro5hin (Frozen North and MSBob) suggested Friendster and Frames, which both seem to be good candidates. I would also add live streaming video, and possibly AOL.

Aw yeah, I'm Neo.

You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.


What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Results of the alignment test:

me: neutral
amanda: neutral good
will: chaotic evil (i should be frightened of this one)

Just took the political compass test. If I read their graphs right, then I'm most like the Dalai Lama.

The results aren't too accurate, as I felt the questionaire used too much connotation rather than denotation. It also referred to specific programs rather than the abstract ideas of the programs (thus making it difficult to agree with a statement about a program that I believe is poorly implemented).

Where do you lie?