Bounded in a Nutshell

Via Kevin Drum (who worries that the web is becoming too smart) I've found The Typealyzer. You tell it your blog's URL and it does a Myers-Briggs temperament sorting thing. By its reckoning and based on the Nutshell, I'm an ISTP... which gets three out of four right, but the wrong letter is very, very wrong indeed.

Of course, it's always been my conceit that this me --- the writing voice that I use, the one that you're reading --- isn't the me of the outside world. As such, perhaps this isn't an absurdly wrong result so much as a reflection of how I construct this particular version of myself.

Lance Mannion is one of the many strangers whose blog I read. There's a connection, sort of -- he used to live in the city where I live now -- but it's pretty slight. Mostly I read because he writes well. And today he's writing about his new cellphone.

Here's what I'm getting at.

What do families of four and five and more pay for cell phone service every month? What do college students pay for their cell service every month and why do their parents put up with it?

And how come we don't find this ridiculous?

And so, a momentary reassessment: why do I have a cell phone?

Originally, I got a mobile phone because of my car. My first car was not, shall we say, very good. And after spending a night stranded by the side of the interstate ten miles outside of the Atlanta Bypass, courtesy of a failed alternator, having a mobile phone seemed like a fine precaution to take. And once I got it, there wasn't any particular need for me to have a land-line; when I moved to a new place a couple of months later, my old phone number didn't go with me.

But then I moved to the Midwest, and went back to a two-phone solution. At that point, the rationale was that I travel around enough to make a cellphone practical, but I'd conceived by then a certain dislike of the sound quality on most if not all such phones. (It's better now, but even now there are some people whose voices I just can't make out on my mobile; it's worse if they're on their cellphone at the time.) So I had a land-line for the purposes of having actual conversations, and a mobile for making plans on the fly.

My original Midwestern cellphone fell apart (pretty much literally) after a year of owning it... or more than a year, since it was out of warranty, but less than two because I didn't qualify for a free upgrade. Which brings me to my current arrangement: landline plus Canadian cellphone. Useful in that people in both Canada and the States can call me domestically (less useful for my peeps in Germany, Ghana, etc. but one can't have everything); I've considered giving up the home phone but between internet service and the necessity of a local number of give local businesses it just doesn't seem worth it.

So yes, I'm paying a fair amount for my phone services. I can afford it at the moment, and I enjoy the convenience.

Today's discovery: Books from boxes by Maxïmo Park. Smiths-y poppy goodness.

Oh, internet. You bring me so many good things.

In unrelated news, typing without using one's left ring finger is difficult.

I couldn't vote in the Canadian election three weeks ago --- I was registered to, but I've apparently fallen off the list of voters-abroad and hence my registration card got mailed to my parents' house (AKA my last official Canadian address). So I could have voted, but I would have had to get up to Eastern Ontario in order to do so… not impossible, but troublesome. (And ultimately irrelevant, since the incumbent MP cruised to victory.)

I did, however, take advantage of my second citizenship to vote today. There was actually a non-trivial line-up, which is a first in my (admittedly brief) experience of voting in my midwestern state. I had a little trouble with the guy checking the lists, because I knew the rules better than he did; my state requires government-issued photo ID, so I showed up with my (American) passport in hand. Dude sort of hems and haws a bit, and asks me if I've got anything with my address on it. Despite having no legal requirement to do so, I pull out my driver's licence, and instantly the guy's all "you should have just given me that in the first place". I make some comment about the passport proving I was a citizen, and his response is that the driver's licence does the same thing: demonstrably false, since I've had licences in two states well before I got documentation of my American-ness.

But hey, got it done in the end. No "I voted!" sticker, sadly.