Sad Robot

sad robot

I am in a bad place. Not the worst place by far, but it keeps getting worse. My brain is starting to shut down and it is getting harder to come back. It happens whenever there are too many things. It has always happened, and no matter what kinds of medicines I take, or therapy …

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The Autistic Freelancer :: Autistics Speaking Day 2011

I have been running my freelance web development business for over 15 years, the last 8 of which have actually involved a business license, paying taxes, and making money. Each year, I do a little  better than the last. Running a business can be challenging to everyone, and as with most things, can provide extra …

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Busy Bee in Baltimore

Things got off to a rough start, but I think I am starting to get used to living here. I thought I was busy in Oakland, but somehow seem to have gotten way busier here. It is wearing me out. Business has been great since I got here. Working on 2 projects now, one from …

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BeeDragon.com 2010

BeeDragon Web Services

2010 has been the most successful year yet for my business, BeeDragon Web Services. I have been getting a lot of work from other web developers and designers. It is very exciting getting to work with talented people who do similar work. When each person combines their unique skills, we make each other’s work shine. …

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Baltimore

LB and K at the party Mon 9/22/08 10:46am On the plane from Baltimore to Oakland, stop in Denver. Had lots of fun in Baltimore. We went to an overnight birthday party for a couple of K’s friends that were turning 40 and had a great time. I really like K’s Maryland people. I am …

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Taking Care of Business

I have officially given up on voc rehab to help me with my business. I’ve been working with them for over 3 years and am tired of not doing other things because of waiting for them to help. The last straw was when I was going to do a 10 week business program in my …

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Work, WordCamp, Dolly, Autiblogger, and .me

This week started out kind of insane. Nearly all of my clients wanted things at once. It hurt my brain pretty bad, but somehow I managed to get almost everything done. To make matters worse, my work environment has become somewhat of an ergonomic nightmare. I fixed my wrist problem by switching to a trackball, wearing …

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Idiot

Maybe that is an unfair title. I think that most of the time, I am not an idiot. But there are a few things that I am repeatedly stupid about and no matter how many identically bad experiences I have, I do the same thing over and over again. The first thing is having too …

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if $brain >= $fried ? ramble : $code;

I am too busy. I suck at being busy. It is my worst thing and it always ends badly. I am not sure how to not be busy. It is a vicious cycle. As soon as I start feeling better, I want to do things. All the things that I can’t do when I am …

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Too Many Things

I am starting to wonder if it is possible for me to really have a “normal” life. Things are so much better than before and my meds are finally working again, but even though I can do so many more things now, I am realizing that my limits and tolerance are still pretty low. Things …

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Back In Business

I have finally updated my business site! I last updated it in 2004 and it was so out of date that I had to unpublish half of the pages because the information was no longer accurate. The focus of my business has changed over the years. When I first started out, I made mostly static …

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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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December

Red Wave
I dropped my classes. i am very sad about that, but relieved too. It was too much. So much work and trying to deal with meds (or lack of them). I just couldn’t keep up. It is very similar to what has always happened when I’ve tried to do school, but with one major difference. Since we actually learned by doing things, I still know everything I learned and can use it for my work.

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Work, Weariness, and Warcrack

Work has been very busy lately. I have one very big job, and possibly several other smaller jobs coming up. I am hoping to be able to partner with d. We will try a test run with one of the smaller jobs. We have almost completely opposite skills and completely opposite ways of working. I think that is a good thing. She is very organized about the initial process of signing up a client, including managing expectations, writing contracts, and charging realistic prices based on actual time worked, rather than pulling some random number out of the air like I tend to do. She is also skilled at graphic design and has experience making web sites. If I had my way, I would stick to the (x)html/css and back end coding for the site and do technical support for the client after the site is complete. I would leave the business stuff, front end design, and client management to someone else. Could be a match made in heaven if we can somehow merge our oppositeness into a working business.

It is getting harder to keep up with school. The ‘side-effect’ of feeling better lately is that I have lost the super-focus that I was having when I was undermedicated. I have also been very twitchy and shaky which is quite annoying. It is a strange balance. It is still hard for me to get out, but not as hard as before. The main difference is that I am not completely exhausted like before. I can do a wider range of things, but am back to having a one second attention span. Going to see the doc on wednesday, but not sure if I am ready to continue experimenting with new meds and/or doses and timing of meds.

I am tired of waiting and waiting to find the right combination of drugs and going through long periods of terrible side-effects until the next drug or dose kicks in. I will probably keep experimenting, but am thinking of taking a break for a while and going back to figuring out ways to make myself feel better even when things aren’t so good. It has been very hard to do that while continuously messing with my meds, and I am hoping that taking a break will help, at least in the way of keeping things stable for a while. One of my best skills is adapting to life under less than ideal circumstances. It is impossible to adapt to something that keeps changing.

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10 Things That Are On My Mind

Side effects. They have come and they are annoying. Hopefully, they will go away soon! Autiblogger. Added user level plugins and a nice new theme today. School. Almost done with the CSS class. Maybe the best class I have ever taken. I learned so much in 8 weeks and got every question that I’ve ever …

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Quiet Time

It is quiet here. K and B just went out to get a mani/pedi. I have NO work to do! Nothing is broken. Or hacked. Bills are paid. All there is to do is clean up for the party later. And then party 🙂 It is nice to have B here. Shiki is especially happy. …

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New business site is finally up!

After many months of changing my mind about the design and technology of the new BeeDragon site, it is finally done! It’s a custom design, and is powered by mambo code. If you like, you can check it out here. Tell your friends ; ) It is still in the “public testing phase”. All feedback …

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