Year: 2007

Autiblogger 1.2.1

Autiblogger is a free blogging community for people on the autistic spectrum. Since its initial beta release last August, many new features, themes, and plugins have been added. We have moved from a very unreliable shared server to an excellent dedicated server thanks to donations from the community and lots of help from my family. …

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WordPress 2.2 Upgrade

I am starting to believe that the days of the fast and easy WordPress upgrade have come to an end. Version 2.0 brought some problems for upgraders. Version 2.1 seemed to bring even more due to some database changes breaking certain themes and plugins. The 2.0 upgrade went very smoothly for me. 2.1 did not. …

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Useless 2.0 – Glass is half full version

One good thing about being useless for a couple of days is that my brain gets a rest and then suddenly I can do things! I have worked almost non-stop for the past 2 days and gotten tons of stuff done. I realize that working non-stop was how I got to be useless in the …

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Useless

I have not been able to do anything today. No work. No play. Couldn’t go out. I worked a bunch of long days and nights on the server move and the site upgrade for my client and now I am totally useless. I am pretty sure I have a bunch of work to do, but …

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Web 2.0 Expo Boring

I was very disappointed in the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday at Moscone Center in SF. I wasn’t expecting much since everything I was interested in was part of the conference and not the expo, but I thought it would at least be fun and interesting. It was not.

I was glad I left late for the city. I stayed home in the morning to work on the big site upgrade that I am doing. I reached about hour 25 of what will most likely be a 30 hour project that I will get paid $300 for. I suppose $10/hr. is a big improvement over the $2/hr. I was making last year. I am happy about the job. It is for a long time client who has sent me many referrals, and the updated site will make it much more usable for us both.

I digress. Back to the expo. So many of the things that I consider to be the future (and present) of the web are open source projects with large enthusiastic development communities. The small expo floor was filled with large corporations and smaller startups focused on selling their products to other companies. The people I spoke with were sales reps rather than developers.

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Dedicated $erver

My new meds are still working much better than the last ones. It is still hard to concentrate, work, play, and read, but for the most part, I am feeling about a million times better than I was just a short time ago 🙂

It is easier to be with people. I had a really good weekend that turned out to be very social and I didn’t even hate it at all. On Friday, I met D at the White Horse for a little while. It was very nice to see her. She is one of the very few people that I can ‘talk geek’ with. It is a rare and beautiful thing. We have other things in common too that make it easier for me to hang with her than it sometimes is to hang other people. She came over and had dinner with me and K.

After dinner, we all went to Velvet to meet Lorena and Tess. It was a good night. We played pool even though we were all sucking pretty bad, even D who is actually good at pool. There were a few obstacles like a giant pole and huge speaker in the way of making certain shots. Still it was fun, even though my knuckle is still a little swollen from smacking it into the giant pole while trying to shoot around it. Eventually, I completely lost all focus of what was going on around me and went into my own special world where it is quiet and stimuli is almost non-existent. I think D ended up in some other world too. I am lucky to be able to do that. Otherwise I would have needed very badly to get out of the bar immediately.

Yesterday, me and K went to Spin’s birthday party. That was lots of fun too. Happy birthday Spins! Nice people and a custom ‘Pin the Tail on the Tigger’ game with Spin’s features imposed on Tigger and magnetic tails for pinning that was made with obvious love for her by her guy. He even had a special ‘tail’ for himself which was actually a heart that matched the heart on the card that he gave her (at least I assumed that card was from him. Only saw the outside, but it had an identical heart). Very sweet 🙂 Other than that, me and K did some errands and even had a little bit of quiet time to watch Prehistoric Planet and for K to start a puzzle that she has wanted to do for a while, but hasn’t had the time.

And then, tragedy struck… (not really. just having a sudden flair for the dramatic)

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Server Load, Share-This, and No Trip

Earlier today my site started loading crazily slow. I checked other sites on the server, and they were all like that. I called LiquidWeb and they told me that it was because of having a really high server load and using more memory than I am allocated. Hard to pinpoint the exact cause because it depends on everything that is happening on all of my sites. The guy said that if it keeps happening, I will have to move to a dedicated server (on a VPS now). I really hope that doesn’t happen! It will cost at least twice as much per month as the VPS. Not sure what to do, especially since my next client site will be using tons of bandwidth for playing huge mp3 files and I already agreed on a hosting price of $100/year because I had no idea about the server resource problem. I also didn’t know how gigantic their mp3 files were at the time. Dang.

I finally got the Share-This plugin to work nearly right. Problems in IE. Surprise. Sending email returns people to a blank page. I give up!

Sometimes, I really hate being me. Usually, I like it okay. I am very lucky in a lot of ways. Most ways. But once in a while, I get very down on myself and very jealous of other people. I get tired of having a hard time doing basic things like reading, traveling, talking, leaving the house, working, even playing video games! It makes me feel like an idiot. I know that there are lots of things I am good at, and that sometimes those basic things are not hard at all, but when they are, it is very annoying. How can it be hard to play video games? That is completely ridiculous!

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House of Tape :: The Photoshoot

The other day, K went around taking pictures of the many duct taped things in our house. Even though it is kind of pathetic, it also cracked me up to see them all at once. Sometimes you just have to laugh. I added a doorbell shot to the collection. Here are the very exciting photos…

Welcome to our house!
Please ring the doorbell before it falls off.
Doorbell
But wait! There’s more…

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More WordPress Plugins

The first plugin of today is not actually a wordpress plugin at all, but it works like one (at least like one that has a slightly complicated installation). It is called iBox. Installation is relatively simple if you are comfortable with uploading and modifying files. Kind of a pain if you’re not. There is some code that needs to be added to the header.php file of your theme, an image that needs to go in the root images directory, and two files that need to go into your theme’s main directory.

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Plugin Update

I have given up on the Share This plugin for now. No time to mess with it anymore. I am back to using the social bookmarks plugin, but I like the way Share This works and looks much better. When I have more time, I will try again. Yesterday, I added the WP-chgFontSize plugin, which …

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Good Things

I am finally feeling better! It’s only been a few days, but I am hoping it will last. So far, I haven’t had any trouble breathing at all with the new old meds. It has been easier to think, easier to work, easier to play. Still can’t read, but maybe that will come later.

Last night, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time. I actually called people to see if they wanted to go out. K and A and R were going to see AC/Dshe in the city (San Francisco). I didn’t want to go because the show didn’t start until 11pm and I thought I probably wouldn’t want to be out in the city that late.

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New Old Meds

So much going on. New meds. Well, not exactly new. Same as the last meds only in a different formula and dose of pill. Started yesterday. So far, so good. I can breathe. Hopefully the new kind of pill will not give me the same kind of allergic reaction as the last time. I realized when I picked it up this time that ‘trouble breathing’ is listed in the package insert as a possible allergic reaction, not as a side effect.

The good news is that the side effects of strattera are finally wearing off. My body feels more normal and the strange sores that I’ve been getting underneath the skin on my hands and feet has almost completely disappeared just as suddenly as they appeared shortly after I started taking the meds. Mystery solved. All those blood tests for nothing.

It has been very hard to work. Even hard to play. I am half playing while I am writing this. Turning in quests. It has been fun playing warcrack with the mac guild, the Reservoir Dogcows. Nice folks. I still haven’t played much in groups, but when I did, they were very helpful. Tsayad the night elf hunter (that’s me) is almost level 40. That is a cool thing in world of warcraft. For hunters like Tsayad, it means you can start wearing mail armor instead of leather. It also means you can get a ‘mount’, which is an animal that you ride on so you can go a lot faster. For a night elf, the standard mount is one of several giant cats. Cool.

I have so much work to do. I sure hope these meds kick in soon! I wonder if I will ever be able to read again. I suppose I should be patient. There are good things too.

We got a harness and a long lead for Nikkyo and have been taking her outside in the backyard. She likes it 🙂 Mostly she sniffs the other cats and eats grass. Cats sure do like to eat grass.

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Duct Tape, Plumbing, and Bad Medicine

Our house is held together by duct tape. Ordinarily, I am a huge fan of duct tape, but using it to hold floor tiles together, lock doors, and replace drywall is getting kind of old. On the other hand, it works pretty well for all of those things, so I am also thankful for it.

Unfortunately, duct tape will not fix everything. After a month of increasingly regular visits from roto rooter, we now have a lovely home video of the inside of our pipes which was taken by them yesterday. In the line between our bathroom and the city main, there are several breaks, some roots, a couple of fractures, cracks, and one large hole. Nice. The entire line needs to be replaced if we want to be able to remove roto rooter from speed dial.

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Web 2.0 : The Video

The term Web 2.0 has been overused to the point of barely having any meaning. Some people use the term to refer to the way in which the web is changing into a more personal and interactive environment where anyone with access can participate without having to be a computer geek. Other people use the term to refer to the individual technologies that are bringing these changes about. I have no idea what it actually means.

While I am not a big fan of the actual term Web 2.0, I am very excited about the trend of providing people with easy access to cool technology and letting them run wild with it. The best explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve seen yet is this video that I stumbled across on youtube today and watched 4 times in a row. I think non-geeky types might enjoy watching it too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Happy Anniversary

Seven years ago, my life changed and my world was turned upside down. Sunday was the 7th anniversary of Karen and my first date. Tomorrow is our 3rd wedding anniversary. I do not have the words to describe what having Karen in my life for the past 7 years has meant to me, but the first two that come to mind are love and magic.

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Meetup

Last night, me and d went to a meetup of the Albany Asperger’s Syndrome meetup group. Six people showed up at Au Coquelet Cafe in Berkeley and I am pretty sure it was a good experience for everyone. This meeting and group were different than anything I have experienced so far.

The conversation went pretty smoothly and covered some interesting topics. One person is about to undergo a bunch of testing in the hopes of getting an official diagnosis so that she can better explain to her family that she has Asperger’s. She feels that she needs the official backup in order to be taken seriously and believed.

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Surprise!

A long time ago, Karen promised that she would never throw me a surprise party. She also promised that she would never lie to me. Today, after a surprise party last night which followed about a month of deceit, I find myself surprisingly (and pleasantly) not angry at all.

I was surprised to say the least! Me and Karen and TC were hanging out in the living room when the doorbell rang. I answered it and looked outside to see about 10 or 12 people who I know and like standing there holding balloons and smiling at me. I honestly did not know what to make of it. I think I figured it out about a minute later when they all quietly yelled “Surprise!”, but my brain was still trying to make some sense of it as they started coming inside the house.

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Interesting Things

I was an insomniac again last night, but I didn’t really mind. Got some good rest anyway. Me and K had some laughs in the middle of the night, mostly due to to Nikkyo falling down behind the bed repeatedly. I watched some online tutorials at lynda.com. K is getting me the very sweet birthday …

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Macworld 2007 | Last Day

I am back in the microsoft blogger lounge for the last time. I got to the show a couple of hours ago and have been wandering the expo floor to see all of the things that I hadn’t seen yet and the things that I wanted to see again. Curiosity drove me to purchase a …

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Day 4 | Microsoft Blogger Lounge

I can’t resist. i am in the ‘microsoft blogger lounge’, blogging. Here is something that microsoft has truly done right. A small oasis smack in the middle of macworld chaos. Round tables with back to back 17″ imacs. Groupings of comfortable soft black chairs and couches arranged around matching oversized ottoman tables. Powerstrips. Ethernet cables. Free drinks. I love it here. The noise fades into the background. Not fades exactly. More like becomes a blanket of white noise.

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