DISC-world

*sigh* Myers Briggs, move aside. Apparently, there's a new quadrant available that more aptly describes personality traits, the DISC: Drive - Influence - Steadiness - Compliance.

Notice how they put my personality type last? ... Jerks.

I've known about this new assessment for a couple of years now, because every year, a few times a year, Amway (now called Amway again, thank God, and not Quixtar) sends in some trainers to Mike and Pinky Malovic's organization to help us improve. Our sponsoring rates are among the highest in the world — Mike and Pinky are very good disciples of their mentor, Rex Renfrow, who has the largest autonomous organization within Amway — but are sales rates are among the lowest in the world.

So, Amway comes in to teach us balance. For free. And then a week later calls up each participant, and interviews them for 1-2 hours to improve the course. And then they do.

Please read that last paragraph again and tell me of any other organization in the world that does the sum of those things.

One of their improvements is that brought in a successful sales distributor, Giove ("Joe") Pici, to talk about people. I like Joe; Joe is a very D direct person. If I'm going to be trained in something, it had better be somebody who is better than me in the subject matter, and they had better get to the point expeditiously. Joe does that, with confidence and with the surety of authority. Not many people get past first base with me in the "knowing the subject matter" department; Joe does. Did I mention that I like Joe?

So, I show up to the meeting at 8:55 am (breakfast starts at 9 am) with Gödel's Proof (studying the enumerable property of categories, don't you know). So, after Joe set up, he sauntered over to me in a friendly fashion and asked what I was reading. Getting to know his audience (of one, so far), as any friendly instructor would, you see. I handed him the book and explained:

Gödel's proof is a discourse about using the laws of the Principia Mathematica to show that it itself, and any system than claims completeness, is inconsistent.

As I explained, I watched his face and his jaw fall. I could read his thoughts — This is not what us eyetalian from Neu Joysy talk about over pasta on Wednesday nights... — so, instead he lied very politely by stating a fact made obvious to him: "You're really smart, aren't you."

I didn't see any point with equivocating with this guy. "Yes," was my answer. But then he did something I didn't like. He said, "Hey, Mic," calling over the conference organizer, "come over here. Doug, explain to Mic what your reading."

I sighed (I catch myself sighing often; I guess Nana was correct to call me her "Charlie Brown." God, I miss Nana. You had better be taking good care of her, please) and explained. Mic nodded, indulgently. Joe then went out to chat with Mike and Pinky, I later found out, because Mike relayed the conversation. Joe said: "There's this guy in the conference room reading a book that I didn't even understand the explanation of!" Mike's immediate answer was, "Oh, that must be Doug."

I hate that. I don't mind being recognized or praised, if my actions are worthy of such attention. But "Wow! a kid's reading a book to learn something; that's amazing!" I mean, shouldn't everybody be doing that? What's so laudatory about self-improvement. Isn't that what the purpose of this seminar was, at base, anyway?

Sandy Frazier came in with Sandy Foster (I'm still grieving; I miss Joel). Sandy (Foster) went out for some breakfast; that's when I noticed something about Sandy (Frazier). "You look happy," I told her, and she thanked me. No, that wasn't correct, so I tried again, "You seem to be radiating inner peace." She didn't flinch away, as people normally do from my weirdness. "Thank you," she said, "I got to spend some time with God this morning." Ah. I mentioned that we're told that special time is so vital, but that so few people make the effort to do that. "Yes," she responded, "of course, I read the Bible, but I've found that journalling has helped me listen more." Diane would be please with her confession: she, too, has been journalling, and I've seen the improvement to her equanimity. I agreed: "Hm. It can be easy, reading the Bible, to be an inactive participant, but journalling requires your effort." Sandy (Foster) returned, and we chatted amicably, about our plans to go to the Pink Bicycle for Isabel's birthday Tea. Sandy (Foster) asked what she should get for Isabel on her birthday, so I recommended a few books on mathematics that would help her down the road (because they would help me now). Others had arrived by then, Gene and Donna Dwyer, and Donna interrupted my monologue and Sandy' blank stare with a whispered: "Ask Diane instead!"

What I did learn at this conference was that polar opposites in the DISC types can, in fact, work together to achieve so much more than if they worked separately. Michael (the definition of a D) and Faye (the textbook of an S) Edmonson are the strongest organization in the Malovic team. Just like Bill Britt storms the castle walls, busting right through them, and Peggy follows right along, smiling at her Bill, making sure everyone's okay, Mike and Faye stormed and cruised right up to and past their level of success. Amway has taken note of this couple, and for good reason. It happened to be their anniversary, and I happened to know, because it happened to be my anniversary. So I thought it would be nice for the team to wish them well on this special day. I purchased a greeting card, and handed it off to more capable hands: Gene Dwyer's and Pinky's, both strong I's, both polar opposites to me. It took them three hours to work the crowd, discreetly avoiding Michael and Faye, but they loved every minute of it, because they like people, and they got everybody in the conference to sign the card.

That result was a vast improvement over anything I would have accomplished. They like people; my feelings about people, qua people, are the dual. I have a Comonadic relation with liking people. On the other hand, I types are impulsive — they had no idea about their anniversary, after 15 years of associating with them; calendar? planner? What's that? — whereas C types are always calculating, always sizing up the situation. Working together, we made a very nice gift for them. Mike Malovic led the singing of "Happy Anniversary" (he's a professional opera singer) for them. And then, of course, Sandy Foster, in on the game ("Doug, how did you know it's their anniversary?" "Because it's ours.") signalled for Mike's attention.

Um, no. I would not allow a well-meaning, but spur of the moment, action cheapen the gift to Michael and Faye. Sandy was going to have everyone recognize my own occasion, but I wasn't having any of that. I hsst her into silence.

But Sandy, another Über-I, is always in my good graces (I hope I could say the same for the contrapositive case). She had earlier asked Joe a question, in her inimitably I-style, about selling to an AVON™ lady; Joe's answer: "Products do not have politics."

Huh! Just simply seeing an AVON™ sticker on the back of a car gets my back up, for no other primordial reason than enemy! I just learnt something from Sandy. I leaned over to her and soto voced "Good question!" She looked pleased.

Pinky interviewed me after the conference. "Did you learn anything here, Doug? Not that I'm pushing you to build your business more. No, really, I'm not, but I was curious if you got something from today." *sigh* It seems that more than of the few people close to me are I types. I smiled at her and turned the question around, as I didn't think my answer would be helpful, having a near-perfect memory and having had this material at least three times before from these special Amway conferences. "Oh, yes," she answered me breezily, but knowingly. She's known me long enough to read my hesitancies, "I learned a lot about TINs, 30-day B2B deferred payments and sales!" So, I challenged her, "But don't you have those already set up in your business?" She smiled in return. It appears two could play the circumspection game. But, of course, my business wouldn't exist without Mike and Pinky's guidance. It was Mike who introduced me to Joel who got me my first job in software. It was Pinky who goaded me with my one successful sale, "You should order ten more and sell those." They were model train sets, deeply discounted post-Christmas from $150 to $20. I didn't sell ten more; I sold seventeen more. That's when I learnt that I am the greatest salesman in the world. And I used that learning to help me break into the field of artificial intelligence and helped me to help the company for which I'm currently working close a contract that could become a multi-year multi-million dollar. C's and I's working together. There is a God.

The happy postlude to my silence about our anniversary is that Diane was the lector for the Filipino Mass, she read from Isaiah in clear Tagalog, and then, the offertory prayers included the following:

That Douglas and Diane Auclair have a blessed wedding anniversary. Let us pray to the Lord.

As many Filipinas know us from Paaralang Pinoy, we had half the congregation wish us a happy anniversary, and then we celebrated with some bing soo at Le Matin de Paris (that is French), and so it was indeed a happy one.

News Epigrams

A renaissance writer sent a long missive to a colleague, apologizing for its length because he "didn't have time to write a short letter" -- I have the modern-day problem: I don't have time to write a long post, so the below epigrams must do for now.

• This contract has got me working again; so now I'm working on everything again: last week I set aside time to play a game of go during the evenings -- I was able to play through three games last week. Not very satisfying, because "Cosmic Go" Takemiya didn't have any challenge winning the games I played through. I love his go, but I love playing through games where he faces an earnest challenge. This week will be much better, as I'll be more selective: when "Thickness" Otake and Takemiya play, some very entertaining games are made.
  
  I did, however, get to play through the magical game between Yamabe (one of the 三羽烏 ("Three Crows") of which Fujisawa Shuko and Kajiwara are also members -- Shuko created an opening that accentuated thickness and became so popular when he demonstrated it in China that it is now known as the "Chinese opening") and Go Seigen (the co-author of the new fuseki (opening) that so revolutionized go playing throughout the world that its effects are still being felt today, 50 years later), and that game was scintillating, as it always is when I play through its moves.
  



• I'm suffering a case of "Logician's Absurdity": that being (re)defining Number. This seems to be a phase logicians experience, much to the amusement of their mentors. The crisis for me is that the things computers call numbers are of little value to the things I need to do, computationally (because, unlike normal software engineers who are satisfied with the IEEE standard, I need computer models of numbers to model, you know, Number, not some extra-logic compromise packaged in N bits ... and, yes, I'm always pushing things to their breaking points). The first step in the crisis is to (re)implement the peano series, which works perfectly well with infinite induction, but in practice gives one a bad aftertaste (after all, 1,000,000 has 1 million successors to zero), so I've gone ahead to the "next" kind of logical representation of Number ("next" being defined differently from one logician to the, *ahem*, "next"). I'm going in the Gödel numbering direction; not in the functional Church encoding. Yes, I am feeling rather silly, but I'll stop when I think I'm not getting any more utility out of this endevour.



• There is this thing ("thing" is a technical term) in mathematics called quantification which I am, again, currently exploring, because when unified with type theory may yield the expressive power I need to do the following task:
  
  

  There is some concrete type T that I will define at a later time where the following predefined properties hold [...].

  
  
  My problem is that the predefined and at a later time are usually reversed in (mathematical) problem-solving (you have a predefined type with properties expressed at a later "time", not the way I'm going about it); so I'm hoping that existentially quantified types will allow me to express the problem and then to solve it.

Okay, enough of all that [oh, yes, I'm also doing paid work in XML, but that a different story, with not much to tell] ...

• I was ferrying Elena Marie about one day when she asked: "Papa, why did you need to scrape your car windows? Why?" ... she often asks 'why' more than once, just to show her sincerity. [Diane, to me, when I gave her an extra bit of ice cream after a firm denial to her entreaty: "She's turning into a master negotiator" Me: "I get to see you and the children on the weekends: your sadness has 5 times the affect on me; so I'd rather see you happy." Diane: "*Harumph!*" (but it was a slightly pleased harumph)]. My quick answer: "Because Jack Frost covered the windshield with his magic faery dust."
  
  I need hardly mention, given my wild imaginings and a 5-year-old's curiosity, that my quick answer turned into an hour-long deconstruction of Jack Frost's motives (Elena Marie calls him "Jack-the-Frost", like we Christians call the Big Guy, "Jesus-the-Christ"), his appearance (including clothes (green seems to be a favourite) and hair (wavy and shockingly bright red-orange)), his skittishness, his size (EM: "Is Jack-the-Frost small?" Me: "I'm not sure, as I haven't seen him, but I remember reading a story of him being very tall, towering over other people"), and his wealth. Elena Marie made plans to catch him the next morning so she could throw him into her jail (?!) until he surrendered his pot-o'-gold. Okay, so I was more than a bit liberal in my story telling, but I figured that was that and put it out of my mind.
  
  The next morning, Elena Marie presented me with a present: a cut out drawing of a man in green wearing a pointy green hat over a shock of red hair.
  
  My, my, my!



• Isabel Marie has learnt a new skill: when I arrived home Thursday night (to work on taxes ... Beki called during one of my "I've got to get this third corporate form done on time!" spates and crowed: "I hate to tell you this, but I've already done my taxes -- I filed them in January. Teehee!" Me: "Okay, you must explain how you hated telling me that, because I heard what sounded like triumph." Beki: "*snicker*") she greeted me with "Papa, watch what I can do!" as I watched her skip away from me down the hall [Diane, soto voce, "She just learnt to skip today"]. So, everywhere we went this weekend, we did so at a stutter pace: to the baño, to church (Me: "Okay, Isabel, but no skipping in church", Isabel: "okay, Papa" skip-skip-skip), in church (Me: "Isabel, no skipping in church", Isabel: "okay, Papa", skip-skip-skip), at the restaurant for breakfast (Isabel: "Papa, I'm hungry" skip-skip-skip); yes, everywhere.
  
  It doesn't help that she has those big-big eyes (Isabel, correcting me: "Beautiful eyes, Papa"), and killer curls.

God, yes, it hurt driving away this morning to go to work 150 miles away.

See, like I said: a short post ... *cough*