Tickle Tests

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I found a site called Tickle that has a slew of career oriented tests, many available for free after registration. I became curious so I decided I would take the time and take some of the tests, just for the hell of it. The first was the Right Job / Wrong Job test, which purports to tell you what kind of personality you have and therefore what type of position you would fit best in.

After taking the test, here are the results:

As an Analytical type, you don’t want to be limited by established rules and regulations. Your inquisitive nature demands that you sometimes question authority. Otherwise, you might not be able to find fresh approaches, or come up with new solutions to a problem. It’s not that you act without weighing the pros and cons of a situation — it’s more that you’re more willing than others to take justifiable risks if they’ll further your career success.

You’re smart enough to know when you need help and are confident enough in your abilities to ask for it. You understand that sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers, and that’s just fine with you because you tolerate gray areas better than most. In fact, pondering potential outcomes can sometimes be more interesting than coming up with the definitive solution for you.

Your right job doesn’t have to be about self-expression, but it needs to be a job you can be proud of.

Is it accurate? I would say I agree with most of it, except that I don’t think I’m driven so much by furthering my career success as I am by knowing that I’m making a difference and creating positive results. I definitely feel that established rules and regulations limit the effect one can have in an organization, because in many instances the rules can’t be changed because they exist, no matter how much they don’t make sense in the current environment. In these instances I rarely have the patience to debate with someone who doesn’t recognize that the established rules and regulations go against common sense.

There’s a good leadership development opportunity for me …

Build Google and Yahoo Maps Without Coding

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I stumbled across MapBuilder as I was browsing the Google Code site today. MapBuilder was referenced as one of the sites featured projects. The application is pretty interesting, allowing you to visually create a map using either the Yahoo Maps or Google Maps API and then to export the source code for inclusion on your web site. There is also an option to host your maps directly on MapBuilder and reference them from your site with a button that links to a list of all of your available maps.

There are quite a few things that are really cool about the site:

  1. Supports both Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps.
  2. No need to learn the details of the mapping API’s – just create your maps and go.
  3. MapBuilder does geo-coding, using the Yahoo! Geocode API’sand geocoder.us while Google Map API’s require lattitude and longitude in order to do anything with them.
  4. MapBuilder does the “driving directions to / from here” for you. No need to create custom code for this functionality.
  5. MapBuilder will also do custom development for you if you want something different from what the basic services provide. I’m assuming there is a fee involved, but I couldn’t find reference to it.
  6. The site facilitates building communities around maps that people create on the site.
  7. Best of all, it allows the “common man” to include mapping capabilities on their web sites without having to know how to code in Javascript and HTML.

MapBuilder is a really good example of new, unintended possibilities that are exposed when web applications are designed as a set of API’s using the web as a development platform rather than the siloed approach that we have used historically. This application was written by a third party not affiliated at all with Google or Yahoo!, but because of the way their applications were written they have the possibility of an audience that they did not originally target by allowing someone to build applications around their base functionality.

One should note that creation of a user account is required in order to use the full functionality of the MapBuilder site. They basically ask you for a username, password, and your email address. Thats it. Registration for either a Google Maps API key or Yahoo! Maps API key is also required if you would like to host your map on your own web site rather than hosting it on MapBuilder directly.