test me! test me good!

this here colour blob is a representation of me. apparently i am full of “respect” as well as “prone to experiencing”. ever since the ultimate geek code i’ve been doing every test i’ve come across.

gotta luve all those tests. i did the personal dna test a while back, and the cool thing about it is that you can have other people answering questions about you – that way you can compare your selfperception with how others view you. no-one has yet done it on my profile, so i can’t really say how well it works.

if you know me, do take the ten minutes required and click on the link and do the psych you/psych me thing. i’d like to know how i come off. heck, even if you don’t know me other than through the blog, i’d like to know.

i think this is the link that you should use: http://personaldna.com/psychyou-psychme.php?for=992b806bc603

and for those who’d like to know, here’s my geek code (it hasn’t been updated in ten years, so it’s not all that accurate nor interesting, but still):

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.12
GCA/GFA/GH/GO d– s+: a- c++ U– P L+ E@ W++ N++(-) o? K- w— O? M+ V? PS+++ PE– Y++ PGP+ t+ 5++ X R* !tv b+++ DI++(–) D++ G e+++(*) h– r- z++(–)
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

—-update—-

the personal dna site is quite horrible to navigate, and as gudny pointed out in the comments, you seem to have to do the test yourself before you can evaluate someone else. it’ll take a bit of time, but if you do it while drunk or very tired, maybe you wouldn’t mind. tell you what: you do me, and i’ll do you. fair?

(yet) Another thing to feel guilty about

It’s always fun to see documentaries that trace everyday objects back to their origins. Usually those films are about bread or maybe books; one comes from wheat, the other from the forest. We get a nice line to follow and are given the option of keeping our hunter-gatherer ancestry in sight. (well, sort of)

I’m always baffled (well, again, sort of) when it turns out that the apples I’m looking at in a store have been shipped across the globe. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And if you try to track down the components and resources of high-tech stuff, you’ve got a lifetime of tracking ahead of you.

Take the example of tantalum, a metal powder extracted from coltan ore, and a required part of cellphones, computers and airplanes. It’s a rare resource: Prices are high and the supply is low. Market forces at work here, people. And those forces are at the moment, to put it gently, bum-raping the people of Congo where there’s a huge deposit of coltan ore.

You have a bunch of rebel groups fueling their civil war by selling the ore to refineries that in turn sell this to high-tech companies (Apple? oh, Apple i though you were a cool company! This shit aint cool! Not cool, y’hear?) and in the process killing people (or enslaving them to work in mines), destroying animal habitat (killing gorillas – your cellphone is killing cute baby gorillas) and generally making a muck of things and adding some more bad to an already quite baddish world.

What to do what to do? I love the quote from Outi Mikkonen at Nokia, when asked how they check up on their suppliers if their tantalum comes from Congo: “All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it.”
Yes, because we all know that Nokia just doesn’t have the resources necessary to check up on the supply chain.

I don’t know what to do, but at least I feel i should know where my stuff comes from. A good place to start on that is here: www.globalissues.org