Understanding the autistic mind

Here is a lady who appears to have "non-communicative" autism like my son. It is a little long, but well worth taking the time to watch it the whole way through. She uses a Text To Speech program to speak what she types.

She raises some good points, among them:

1. That non-communicative people still have thoughts, still have a desire to communicate, and can learn to communicate with the rest of us.
   
2. From their position, it is us who have the disability. (I've often felt that way. Like my son understands me just fine, it is I who doesn't understand him.)

If you have the opportunity to spend time with an autistic person, be thankful for the time they give you... you know, it's just as difficult for them to spend time with you, listening to you blabber, as it is for you.

Watch it here.

Her website is here.

Well done Miss Baggs!

Lessons learned

One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain: "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." It speaks to the value of experience. I am looking for a quote that I can use to reflect the benefit of learning from other peoples cat-astrophes.

Take this story in The Enquirer. There is someone who has clearly carried a cat by the tail and learned a lesson or two. My thinking however, is that I don't want to carry that cat by the tail. I think I can learn from his experience... and I hope that lots of people do.

When, oh when, will consumers punish these cash-grabbing companies for the games they play? When I get bad service at a store or restaurant, I punish that business by removing myself from their group of customers.

A few months ago, my Windows XP laptop blue-screened for the last time. This was the worst one yet, and when I couldn't recover and had to re-format the hard drive to make it usable I decided that I would no longer play the Microsoft game. I now have absolutely nothing installed on my laptop from Microsoft. Sure, there were some joke e-mails that I couldn't open because they contained MS media player files, but I look at that as yet another virus removed from my system. As a software developer, I can do everything I need to do on Ubuntu. I would encourage everyone who reads this blog to follow my lead on this. You'll be surprised how easy it is. I am continually amazed at how much free software is available from the Open Source community!


Sorry Bill, but you had your chance.

I love the simple things!

CAUTION:

This posting has high GEEK content.

How many times have you wanted to get a feel for how long a particular method takes to execute? Every time I wanted to do that I would create a long to hold the current system time at the start of the method, and then create another long at the end of the method. Then some basic math, and you know how long it took to run.

OK, so that's not super painful, but I just came across "StopWatch" in the org.apache.commons.lang.time package.

I was just about to write my own stop watch, and then thought "I can't be the first guy who wants this." Thanks Henri Yandell and Stephen Colebourne. I love NOT coding even more then I love coding!