Keep watching this space for a series of blog posts I will be writing.

The subject? “The invisible handicap that wasn’t”

If that isn’t cryptic enough, I don’t know how I could possibly improve on that.

The point, dear readers, is that at long last I feel compelled to write about something that’s been a part of my life for as long as I can recall. I have a handicap that is invisible, odorless, dissolves instantly in liquid and is one of the deadlier poisons known to man (okay, that last part is from “The Princess Bride”). The problem with this handicap is that it’s invisible.

An invisible handicap? How so? No one can tell I have it by looking at me. Most can’t tell I have it from even speaking with me, unless they take enough time to really start to notice. How is anyone supposed to even know how to deal with this if they can’t see it? In this day of politically correct behavior everyone wants to be sensitive to those with handicaps, but how can they if it’s invisible?

Have I piqued your interest yet? Wondering what it is that’s got me? I’ll tell you…

I am a High Functioning Autistic, or if you prefer, I am afflicted by Asperger’s Syndrome. (It’s kind of an either/or diagnosis).

But how can that be? Aren’t autistic people unable to interact with others? Aren’t they like “Rain Man” or something? The truth is that’s full-blown autism. High Functioning Autistics/Asperger’s Syndrome sufferers have only some of the symptoms of the fully autistic. If you really know me well, go and do some googling on the subject. Try “High Functioning Autism symptoms” or “Asperger’s symptoms“ in your favorite search engine. Read up a little bit. See if you don’t start to see similarities.

Meanwhile, to further whet your appetite for new knowledge and understanding, I suggest that you Take The AQ Test and see what your results are. From the article it is clear that:

1. Average people (the control group) scored an average of 16.4
2. 80% of those diagnosed with HFA/AS scored higher than 32
3. The test is not meant to diagnose HFA/AS
4. Those who score 32 or higher, and/or meet the actual criteria for HFA/AS can still lead a normal life, difficulty free
5. This test was prepared by the foremost experts in autism research

So. What did you score? I score a 37. I also manifest many of the symptoms of HFA/AS. A lot, in fact.

I took it upon myself to read up on the subject. I can’t actually self-diagnose as I’m not a doctor, but I’d put better than even money on the outcome, based on what I’ve read and based on my recollections and memories of past events (and how I acted in them).

Where does this lead, then? Why is this a handicap? Why do I call it the invisible handicap, even? People don’t understand that I have a very difficult time interacting with others, particularly in large groups. It’s hard to see this because I enjoy teaching and do well teaching in front of large groups. But put me in a social group where people are conversing and just having a good time and I become withdrawn. I offend people merely because I appear to not want to spend time with them (which isn’t necessarily true). I have difficulty looking people in the eye, leave alone maintaining eye-contact. This isn’t because I’m ashamed, it just makes me very uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean I’m shy, either. It’s exceptionally hard to explain to others exactly what’s going on in my mind when these sorts of circumstances happen. All they see is that I seem evasive, that I don’t want to be there with them, that I don’t want to talk to them, or any other number of apparently anti-social behaviors. They don’t realize that I do those things because I have a handicap.

I don’t want to write too much more on this subject now because I need to finish out the premise: The invisible handicap that wasn’t.

The other reason that people don’t see that I have a handicap is that HFA/AS sufferers are frequently gifted in a specific area, or sometimes multiple areas. They can focus on their subject or area of expertise in ways that others cannot, though this is a handicap sometimes too as it can be difficult to stop working on something you’ve started – the need for closure prevents you from stopping. I have been able to survive, thrive even, with my handicap. It’s lead me to the field of computers (machines and mechanical processes are usually one of the areas in which HFA/AS people excel), cars and other mechanical things. I have good work I enjoy. It doesn’t look at all like I have a handicap.

But, I do. And it’s about time I acknowledged that I have it.

I’m not fishing for sympathy. Nothing would offend me more than to have people tread lightly around me out of pity or sympathy, or even at all. What I crave is understanding. If people understood that I act the way I do not because I’m anti-social but because social interactions are difficult, painful even, then perhaps they’d be more inclined to accept me the way that I am and not think I’m odd because I don’t interact with others the way the other 99.99% of the population do. But then, being a part of such a small subset of the population, that’s why it is a handicap.

The invisible handicap that wasn’t.

After steam cleaning the carpet upstairs, it took me most of the day to shut down, disconnect, disassemble, move, reassemble, reconnect and adjust all of the computers. If I do say so, it was worth it! Now it’s family LAN party time!

I don’t often geek out over online services, but this is one I can get excited about — Dropbox.

Simply put, Dropbox allows you to synchronize up to 2G of data for free across multiple computers and platforms. Currently, Mac OS X, Linux and MS Windows are supported.

In addition to this, Dropbox allows you to provide quick links to your friends and family to view photos or to share files you have synced with the service. Future support for group sharing is forthcoming. They have a web-based tour here and a screencast here. The screencast is really helpful. I highly recommend it.

As a bonus, if you click on this link or the one above and sign up for free we both get an extra 250M of storage. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed! (You sign up once you’ve downloaded and run the installer. It’s part of the installation process).

Looks like I need to spend more time watching the updates from The Alamo Drafthouse theaters. I would TOTALLY have gone to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on the big screen again! Much more so for the experience these fortunate folks enjoyed!

While a world of Trekkers believed the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek would premiere in Sydney, Australia Tuesday, Leonard Nimoy made a surprise appearance in Austin, Texas Monday night to screen the film for an unsuspecting audience.

A theater full of Trek fans showed up in the Texas capital thinking they were going to see a new print of the classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 10 minutes of Abrams reboot, all organized by Aint It Cool News. But, Nimoy shocked the house by announcing they would in fact see the entire new movie just hours before it made its international bow in Sydney.

via Nimoy Stuns Austin Crowd with Secret Star Trek Premiere | The Underwire from Wired.com.

It’s the first time I’ve ever tried to do something like this. I can’t say that it’s perfect, but I think it turned out rather well.

It definitely looks better full sized, but this should give you an idea.

Color in a monochrome world

Click to see the full sized image.

I saw this on the “new apps” feed I subscribe to the other day. It just barely became available in the ‘States. The home page is here: FlipContact and the link to the Apple Store is here.

The app allows iPhone users to send their contact info to another iPhone user without wires, WiFi or even cell connectivity. It effectively makes your speaker and mic behave like a modem, sending and receiving the information via sound. It’s not terribly loud, so it’s not quite as annoying as those old modems were on connect. I haven’t tested it in a noisy environment, but since the idea is that phones be placed within an inch of each other, end to end, I don’t imagine any but the loudest of environments would keep this from working.

I tested this at work with one of my co-workers and found it to work quite quickly and effectively. There are other contact “beaming” apps for the iPhone, but all of those require users to be on the same WiFi SSID. This is a great solution to get around this requirement, even if it feels a little 20th century.

Regardless of your political views or persuasions you are probably disturbed by how slanted political ads tend to be. Here’s a geeky look at political ads (sorry if it doesn’t fit the theme very well):

It’s true! Just like these people…

Of course, I’m also a Mac.

I haven’t posted anything here for a long while. I’ve been busy living. I recently updated my iPhone to the 2.0 software and yesterday WordPress released a blog client for the iPhone. I had to try it, of course. You tell me — is this going to result in more posts? Or perhaps just short ones occasionally? Time will tell. At any rate, this is being written from my iPhone.

All that you know is about to change…

That’s what Aslan said in the trailer. He was trying to warn you to not go see this movie. I won’t spoil it for you other than to say that this movie barely resembles the book from which it was derived. Please allow me to introduce to you a verb that we created a while back.

Eragon verb

1. To destroy what might otherwise have been a fine movie adaptation of a popular piece of literature, recent or otherwise, by radically deviating from the book’s plot or by changing a central character’s nature, motives, or personality. e.g. This movie was total crap! They totally eragonned it!

The movie Eragon was a horrible adaptation of its namesake book, which was rather unfortunate. The most recently eragonned movie was The Spiderwick Chronicles. If you saw the movie without ever having read the books you won’t know what I mean. But the original namesake and The Spiderwick Chronicles can’t hold a candle to what they did to Prince Caspian.

To say that they eragonned the movie is too kind an assessment. We were excited to see the next installment of the Narnia series. We even went to see the midnight premier. What we saw was more than merely disappointing. What we saw would have C.S. Lewis turning in his grave fast enough to power a small city. People actually got up and left the theater during the show. We sat through this train-wreck hoping that at some point it would improve but alas, it did not. We might have left too, but were too polite to get up in front of all the other viewers (we were in the middle of the row, 3 rows up from the walkway in a newer Cinemark).

If this movie makes all of its money back, I’ll be surprised. I will not pay full price to see another sequel directed, produced or written by the same team. In fact, I want my money back. I want my two hours and twenty minutes back. Disney and Walden Media should be ashamed of what they’ve done to C.S. Lewis’ work. Boo!

Or at least I wish I was. That was a really cool movie. I can’t wait for the sequel.

That’s it. No spoilers from me. You’ll just have to go and see it for yourself.

I was awestruck watching this:

This absolutely floored me. I have never thought that I’d be able to truly realize my creative ideas since I haven’t got a lot of time to work on practicing guitar or other instruments. This allows me so much wiggle-room in that department I can even envision creating an entire symphony orchestra from a few samples. This is simply amazing. I can’t wait!

I had some issues with my cable internet service, of late. I took the liberty of taking a screen-cap of the speed test results:

I finally had to call Time Warner to send someone out. I called at approximately 7:30pm, they had someone here at 2:15pm the next day. I am suitably impressed and pleased so far. My signal strength is excellent, so it turns out it’s the cable modem. The service guy replaced it and, well, you can see the results:

I am MOST pleased with RoadRunner’s new 15Mbit/2Mbit service. You can see I get all 2Mbit of my upload speed, and nearly all of my download. Me likey!

By the way, the exceptional ping time on the “before” picture was an anomaly. That tended to be in the 87ms range. Also, the “after” picture was going through my proxy server where the “before” was not. All things considered, keep in mind that this was going through a cable modem, a wi-fi router, 2 GigE switches and a proxy server. That’s a nice ping time by any stretch.

Blessedly, this is looking as though it’s finished. Maybe with a new look I’ll actually write some new content.

Update:

I have discovered that IE 6 does NOT properly display this site. If you’re using IE 6, you’re missing one of the columns. Please switch to any of the following browsers (each of which I have personally tested):

IE 7
Safari (Mac)
Firefox

IE 6 is not a very safe browser to be using anyway. You’re far more open to spyware and other nasty stuff if you use IE 6. Click on the button in the sidebar and download Firefox. It’s worth it. You won’t be sorry.

Untested browsers which will probably work include Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, etc. Why is it that MS can’t make a standards compliant browser to save its life?