chaos is in me
one step closer to the edge
trying not to fall
chaos confuses
wraps word order wrong and fails
to stop the echo
chaos surrounds me
closing in fog and laughing
when i disappear
lonely
alone all the time
i wish i knew how to be
different than i am
I am an autistic person with autism
I call myself autistic but if you call me a person with autism, I don’t mind. If you compare me to a puzzle it is ok. I think you are like a puzzle too.
I don’t speak for all autistic people. I don’t think anyone can.
I understand the reasons why person-first language can be damaging, and the importance of letting people know why that is. If you don’t know, Google it. You will understand too. Better yet, read the article Identity-First Language by Lydia Brown. It contains a well written analysis of why it is harmful to use person-first language, as well as links to other articles about the pros and cons of its usage.
It is important to educate people about these things, but I have been noticing a trend lately of articles that claim to speak for all autistic people, saying that we prefer to be called autistic. Nobody can speak for all autistic people. Not even other autistic people.
I have been an outcast for much of my life. It feels horrible. Even worse is feeling like an outcast in the autistic community.
In the 10 years since I have accepted the fact that I am autistic, I have met so many amazing people both online and in person. I have worked with many of them over the years to help us connect and find each other online. Now, I feel like I don’t fit in to a community that I helped to build.
It is possible that I am missing a big piece of the puzzle. I am not trying to be an asshole and piss people off by writing these things, but as I try to express what I am thinking, I realize that I am scared of even posting this due to backlash from a lot of people who I like to think of as my friends. I actually questioned using the word “puzzle”. WTF?
Today is Autistics Speaking Day and today I am taking the time to speak to other autistic people. I am asking us to keep our minds open to other people’s thought processes and realities, just as we ask them to do the same thing for us.
Disclaimer: This post is partly about educating people with good intentions who are trying to do the right thing, and respecting their processes if they come to a different conclusion. It does not apply to those who believe that autistic people are “less than” neurotypical people, or organizations like Autism Speaks who are actively spreading lies and harming people.
monday at five
painful confusion
i can not think in straight lines
thoughts crash and I fail
kicked
kicked hard while sparring
was an accident, but now
it hurts when I breathe
we remember
we mourn the lost ones
we honor the brave heroes
we remember them all
abyss
trapped inside my mind
three hours to get my shoes tied
unwelcome abyss
#laracon
socializing is
not always impossible
when in the right crowd
thank you laracon
for making this hardest thing
seem like a good time
conference
traveling alone
i don’t know how to join in
i hope i can talk
unfocused
mind jumping around
serial uni-tasking
need to stay focused
dust in the air
so many details
watching the dust in the air
i am mesmerized
stuck
stuck inside the house
too confused to get away
not living the dream
first step
so much work to do
a thousand steps to get there
start with the first one
doing it wrong
working at all hours
highly marketable skills
still hard to get by
code break
staring at the code
the lines begin to waver
time to go outside
Placeholder Text Generators
I generate a lot of Lorem Ipsum text when I am laying out websites. Usually I use a keyboard shortcut or the old standby, lipsum.com. I also like Fillerati. Those are nice because they include the option to add different HTML tags, such as <p> , <li> , and headings.
Today while I was being very distracted from work, I did a little googling to find some new placeholder text generators. Below are the ones I bookmarked for future use.
- Whedon Ipsum – Quotes from Joss Whedon movies and TV shows. This one has a “hidden” link back to the website of the company that (I assume) runs it. The link is not hidden at all in the code but is inside a div styled with display: none;. There are options to choose the number of paragraphs to generate and to add <p> tags.
- TV Ipsum – Generates text from TV theme songs mostly from shows that aired in the 70’s. Option to choose the number of paragraphs.
- Picksum – Generates lines from the movies of these actors: Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Depp, Michael Caine, Jim Carrey, and Clint Eastwood. Options for number of paragraphs and <p> tags.
- HodorIpsum – Generates Hodor text. I would probably only use this one for personal projects, but it is my favorite by far. Options for number of paragraphs and <p> tags.
Favorite One-Trick Utility of the Year
Before I found this tool, I would open images in Photoshop to get proportional values for widths and heights. There are definitely easier ways to go about that, but Photoshop was always the first to come to mind. My new favorite tool for generating proportional image sizes is the Aspect Ratio Calculator.
For the Math inclined, it uses this formula:
original height / original width x new width = new height
Interview on Laravel News
I got interviewed by Eric Barnes on Laravel News about the Baltimore Laravel group and other web development related things 🙂
Mother’s Day Wish
Wish I could take your pain away
Wish I could take you out in the sunny day
Wish I could make you stronger
So you could come home for longer
Wish I could hurt instead of you
I’d give anything to make that true
Wish I could hold you and make things right
Wish I was there with you tonight
Hope you are having a happy day
I’m there with you, in spirit anyway
You are the best mom, I know it’s true
Can’t wait ’til the next time that I see you
Favorite Codex Tip Of The Day
To remove meta boxes created by plugins,
'admin_menu'is fired too early, use'do_meta_boxes'instead.
Such a simple thing, but I wasted at least 15 minutes by using the wrong action hook. The meta box in this case was not created by a plugin, but by the parent theme of a child theme that I am building.
2013
Craziest year ever. Not even sure what to write about it. 2014 looks to be more of the same.
So many things. K’s dad. I hope he has a better 2014 than 2013. Same with K and her mom and her sister, L. And me.
Too many things have been going on for so long, I can barely remember what is like to be able to think clearly. Tired of being so confused and tired all the time.
It is not all bad. There are breaks. Every now and again, K and I get a day, or part of a day, off. I get more breaks than K, but when she is not here, I tend to spend all my time working. This year, our definition of “a break” has changed. We were noting that having some time to scrape the ice off the car and shovel it out of the snow now feels like a break.
Work has been crazy for both of us. Pretty sure that my business will make more money than last year. Happens every year, but I still end up working very many hours for very little money. So little that it seems like madness to keep going year after year, but I am short on other options. It is very hard for me to work a “real job”.
I know my job is a real job. I know that I am good at what I do. I work very hard. My web development skills get better all the time. Having a screencast addiction helps.
But my business and organizational skills are almost non-existent. When you run a business, those skills are at least as important as being able to do your job. Maybe that is the difference between a hacker and an entrepreneur.
My gross income this year is about $5K over the 2013 poverty level. This is due to a combination of undercharging, not charging at all, and a near complete lack of project management skills.
At this point, after reading approximately a million articles about project management, business organization, and every other possible subject that may be of interest to freelancers and small business people, I am pretty sure that these are skills that I can not acquire. I need my ever elusive “Magic Business Partner” more than ever.
Some Highlights:
- On 2/4/13, Karen and I got legally married, 13 years to the day after our first date!
- In May, we had a great party with our families and friends at the Ottobar to celebrate our marriage. Special thanks to Chuck for making everything so awesome, to Colleen for making the best cake ever, and to everyone who came to join in the celebration, especially my parents who came all the way from Florida for the occasion.
- Every time that Karen and I have gotten to spend time together relaxing and/or having fun. They are few and far between, but nothing is better.
- Snow.
- Another year with Nikkyo and Buster.
- In July, I got a black belt after doing martial arts for 16.5 years.
- K’s cousins came for a visit from Canada. Very nice to see them 🙂
- Several social occasions with new and old friends. Special thanks to Kim, Tarun, Lisa, and Dave.
- Co-working at Betamore for many months. Met some great people and got to go to the harbor almost every day when the weather was good.
- Lease on my computer ended and started a new lease on a maxed 15″ Macbook Pro retina. It is awesome!
- Learned Laravel. I have been learning Laravel for over a year. I will continue learning it, but I actually know what I am doing now.
Favorite Apps of the Year:
- Once again, Komodo IDE tops the list.
- iTerm2 – Terminal replacement for mac
- QuizUp – Very fun mobile trivia app.
- Bejeweled – Still an awesome distraction and mind-numbing tool.
Happy New Year everyone!
This is Autism
This is autism.
Sometimes I can’t talk, but I can think.
Sometimes I can’t think, but I can feel.
Sometimes I don’t fit in.
Sometimes I am just like you.
This is autism.
Thoughts crash.
Never-ending attempts to organize the world into separate parts.
The lines are blurred.
When all things are one, everything fits together.
When one thing is many, blurred lines clash, and overlap defies logic.
This is autism.
An explosion of color and light and sound and texture.
Every tiny detail is a universe I can get lost in forever.
I try to learn your ways and to teach you mine.
We all have something to learn and to share.
Set Line Height in Komodo
Have I mentioned that I love Komodo IDE? Still, I occasionally come across an annoyance. One very annoying thing is that there is no way to change the line height in the editor other than changing the font size. I like to have a larger than average line height for better readability. I recently noticed that PhpStorm has a line height setting. I also love PhpStorm and think it has advantages over Komodo for certain tasks, but I still like Komodo better overall and use it more often. After some googling, I found this great tip on the ActiveState forums:
Add this Komodo JavaScript macro to the toolbox to increase the line height:
/**
* @type {Components.interfaces.ISciMoz}
*/
sm = komodo.editor
sm.styleSetSize(sm.STYLE_BRACEBAD, 16);Change the 16 to any number you want (as long as it increases the line height – does not work for decreasing line height). I set mine to 21 because my font size is set to 14, and I like a line height of about 1.5em. Even though the setting is for the bracebad style only, it has the effect of changing the line height for everything else too.
How to add a macro:
- Open the toolbox pane in Komodo
- Right click and choose Add > Create new macro
- In the Macro tab, name the macro, choose JavaScript as the language, and enter the code above into the main text area.
- In the Triggers tab, check the box that says “Macro should trigger a Komodo event”.
- Choose ‘After file open’ as the event and click ‘OK’.
These instructions are for the latest version of Komodo IDE (8.5.2 at this time) on mac. They may vary slightly in other situations.
To edit the macro, right click on it in the toolbox, and choose ‘Properties’.
Black Belt
After 16.5 years of doing martial arts, I finally got my black belt a couple of weeks ago. I am still a little shocked, but it is very exciting. I’ve been very close a few other times and have a collection of brown belts, but I had mostly given up on getting a black belt. I love doing martial arts no matter what color belt I am wearing, but after 12 years of wearing a brown belt, it starts to seem like you have reached the limit of what you can learn.
I am a slow learner. It can get discouraging when you are learning something with other people, and at some point, they all pass you and move on. Sometimes people who you used to teach become your teacher. Sometimes things are extra frustrating because no matter how hard you try, you can never make it to the next level.
After leaving my first school (Tuyê’t Tan dojo in Berkeley, CA) due to a change in medicine making it too hard to go to night time classes, I tried a few other schools. It is the teachers that make the school. There are many styles of martial arts, and people will always argue about which one is “the best”, but I really don’t think it matters in most cases. I think that no matter what martial art you are doing, having a good teacher is the most important thing.
I think if I kept doing Cuong Nhu, I would have gotten a black belt. Cuong Nhu is awesome in so many ways and I am very lucky to have stumbled into such a wonderful dojo with such amazing people. Those people are still my friends and I thank them all for being so patient and helpful to me for so many years.
Had some not so ideal experiences with a few other schools, but didn’t find another great school until we moved to Baltimore a couple of years ago. Palanzo Martial Arts in Pikesville. Seemed random at the time, but turns out that Karen and several of her friends passed through there at some point while they were growing up.
Once again, I was very lucky. Mr. Palanzo’s school is awesome. Mr. Palanzo, aka Mr. Joe, is awesome. Every instructor I have had there has been both a really great martial artist and a really great teacher. That is a very rare combination, even though you would think it would be a requirement in order to work at a karate school.
Mr. Joe thought I could be a black belt, and I did not completely believe him. I didn’t think he was lying, but that he really didn’t have any idea how bad I am at learning. But he found ways to teach me, just like my teachers at Tuyê’t Tan did. It takes a special kind of teacher to figure out ways to teach students who do not learn in the standard way. Just being willing to try to figure it out is a big thing, and the appreciation I feel toward these people for doing that is really more than I can express in words.
Thanks to Mr. Joe, Mr. Chris, Mr. Marcos, Mr. Tom, and classmates at Palanzo Martial Arts, and to Master Allyson, Senseis Amy, John, Raimi, and Anastasia, and Lavina and other classmates at Tuyê’t Tan. Special thanks to Karen, to my family, and to TC for above and beyond extra special awesomeness.