Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Crazy Frog Ringtone
Last week, Pete Lyons posted about the annoying Crazy Frog animation. There's an interesting history to this "annoying thing" as documented on Wikipedia. It started out in 1997 with a recording by Daniel Malmedahl imitating sounds made by friends' souped-up mopeds. The recording circulated and eventually showed up on the web as in a Flash-based Insanity Test.Last year the audio was licensed as a cellphone ringtone by a German company. It eventually became the most commercially successful ringtone of all time.
Who the heck would want to use this as a ringtone?
Monday, May 30, 2005
Royal de Luxe 2005
Royal de Luxe, a theater company in Nantes, has created an incredible production that featured huge marionettes of a little girl and an elephant. The little girl arrives by rocket ship. The elephant joins the girl carrying the Sultan of the Indies on its back. The images are just amazing.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
The Sith Sense
Play Twenty Questions with Darth Vader. Amusing but not as impressive as Subservient Chicken (another BK tie-in). This old parody of the Apple switch ads is funnier — and after watching Revenge of the Sith isn't that far from the spirit of the film.
Incompetence Considered Harmful
Great post by Jeff Atwood on the competency paradox — the least competent people are the ones most likely to erroneously think they are competent. As Jeff points out, this certainly applies to software development. We're not talking about newbies. They lack training and experience. We're talking about software developers with many years of experience who grind out God-awful code — and have no idea that their code stinks. How did this happen? How is it allowed to continue? Posting samples of their bad code to The Daily WTF may be amusing to others but it doesn't help. Additional training or guidance often doesn't help either. As Jeff says in the comments:But this takes good technical management. It can be difficult to get managers to understand that there's a problem. To management, the person appears productive; possibly more productive than co-workers.
... the guys or gals writing Daily WTF code samples don't need to be trained to be better-- they need to be trained in order to recognize that they should probably find a new line of work
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Rank and File
At large companies job titles can be a big deal. For example, being promoted to Distinguished Engineer (DE) is huge. You're like a "made man" (or woman). At companies in the service industry where lots of people do the same job, companies often invent their own titles. This post on Deadprogrammer's Cafe describes some of the weird job titles out there.
I'm reminded of a job title controversy we had at my second start-up. Management wanted to promote an egalitarian approach. Everyone on the development team was given the title "Member of Technical Staff". A year or two after the company started we discovered that some people had quietly been given the title "Senior Member of Technical Staff". So much for equality.
I'm reminded of a job title controversy we had at my second start-up. Management wanted to promote an egalitarian approach. Everyone on the development team was given the title "Member of Technical Staff". A year or two after the company started we discovered that some people had quietly been given the title "Senior Member of Technical Staff". So much for equality.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Sarcasm brain areas discovered
According to this BBC News article, scientists have located the parts of the brain that comprehend sarcasm. Language areas on the left hand side of the brain interpret the literal meaning of words and the frontal lobes and the right side of the brain understand the social and emotional context.
This reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the notorious Piranha brothers Doug and Dinsdale. Dinsdale was a homicidal maniac but people were more afraid of Doug:It loses a bit in print but it's vintage Python.
This reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the notorious Piranha brothers Doug and Dinsdale. Dinsdale was a homicidal maniac but people were more afraid of Doug:
Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug. He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
Revenge of the Sith
I saw Revenge of the Sith last night. I enjoyed it very much. It's by far the best of the three "prequels". Yes, some of the dialog is clunky and some of the acting is pretty wooden. But overall, it did a better job of joining the two story lines than I expected. Was it a satisfactory conclusion to the series? I guess so. We already knew that it would be a dark story; darker than The Empire Strikes Back. But this film is less satisfying.
Revenge of the Sith is painted into a corner. We know the beginning and end. We know the "big revelation" before any of the characters. What we want is a plausible reason why Anakin chooses to join the Dark Side. And we don't get it. We get a petulant character who'd rather be evil. And in fact, given his actions in the three films that follow, he gets more respect being evil anyway. Hmm, what kind of message is that?
As the film ended, I felt a little sad. Most people in the theater got up and walked out before the credits finished but I waited. No more Star Wars films. As Revenge of the Sith ended, it almost felt like 1977 again. Weird.
Revenge of the Sith is painted into a corner. We know the beginning and end. We know the "big revelation" before any of the characters. What we want is a plausible reason why Anakin chooses to join the Dark Side. And we don't get it. We get a petulant character who'd rather be evil. And in fact, given his actions in the three films that follow, he gets more respect being evil anyway. Hmm, what kind of message is that?
As the film ended, I felt a little sad. Most people in the theater got up and walked out before the credits finished but I waited. No more Star Wars films. As Revenge of the Sith ended, it almost felt like 1977 again. Weird.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
The Future of Television
Funny Conan O'Brien piece on the Future of Television.
Google Vanity
My blog is the first match for Bob Congdon in Google. Not a big deal but I just noticed that it's the first hit for Congdon as well. I don't have that many readers, this is surprising.
Phone home
When I ran a utility for the first time the other day I got a familiar alert from my firewall software. The program was trying to "phone home". It's commonplace for applications to rely on Internet access to check for updates, verify software licenses, etc. It's also all too common for spyware and malware to attempt to access the network. The challenge is to be able to tell the difference between legitimate and malicious access. You can err on the side of caution by denying network access to an application but you may end up disabling some of its functionality. For example, a few weeks ago a developer on our team was getting weird error messages when using the source control system. It turned out that he had accidently denied network access to one of the programs used for source control.Back in the days before ubiquitous Internet access, I worked on a product on a Unix-based OS. One of our product managers had managed to get a Beta copy of a competitor's product. Several of us installed it to try it out. After launching the program, I noticed an odd message in my email system indicating a bounced email. The program had invoked /bin/mail to "phone home". It was sending a notice to indicate that it had been run. Fortunately email sent to the outside world had to include a gateway suffix so this particular email bounced. It would have been embarrassing if our competitor received a raft of messages from the Beta software that could easily be traced back to our domain.
Blog Down On Account Of Rain
My web site was down this morning. The network status page for my ISP explained what was going on. The outage was weather related. There were heavy rains in Kansas City a couple weeks ago. During the storm, the sub-basement of the building housing my ISP's data center was flooded causing a loss of all power, including emergency power. Due to this damage, scheduled maintenance by Kansas City Power and Light kept the power off for longer than would have otherwise been necessary. Everything seems back now.
Gloomy Spring
During the last few days a Nor'easter has blown through Boston with heavy rain and high winds. Leaves, branches and other detritus are all over the place. I guess the good news is that it wasn't cold enough for snow. This Spring has been really wet. It's also been colder and cloudier than usual. An endless series of rainy weekends. Gee, is this what it's like to live in Seattle? 
Strange Clouds
These photos were taken on Tuesday in Joplin, Missouri. They show two weather fronts converging. The lower clouds are being sucked up into the higher clouds.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
True Facts
True Facts has a lot of interesting items although without attribution it's hard to know whether they're really true or not. Here's a random sampling:Update: according to the Jell-O museum website — clearly an authority on this matter — the Jell-O / EEG fact is true: Oh it's lime Jell-O. That makes more sense. 
One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.
Seven percent of Americans claim they never bathe at all.
If you hook Jell-O up to an EEG, it registers movements almost identical to a human adult's brain waves.
Married men change their underwear twice as often as single men.
[On] March 17, 1993, technicians at St. Jerome hospital in Batavia test a bowl of lime Jell-O with an EEG machine and confirm the earlier testing by Dr. Adrian Upton that a bowl of wiggly Jell-O has brain waves identical to those of adult men and women.
SMS vs. Morse Code
Which is faster SMS or Morse Code? Watch the video to find out. One of the Morse code operators comments on the contest on this thread. (Via Waxy.org)
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Make sense of the law
A funny ad for attorneys.com, who claim they can help you "make sense of the law".
Stunt City
In a world known as Stunt City, stunts are performed mindlessly for their own sake, excitement is the mundane, and danger is around every corner.
Tiny Music Makers
Music Thing has started an interesting series on Tiny Music Makers. Artists who have composed familiar corporate sounds. Walter Werzowa had never heard of Intel when they asked him to compose a 3 second jingle for them. He created the Intel Inside sound. Brian Eno created the Microsoft Sound that was first used in Windows 95.
I wonder about the origins of the system sounds found on MacOS and Windows. Who created them? It may be an apocryphal story but I remember hearing that the MacOS System Sound called Eep was voiced by one of the developers. What a claim to fame!
I wonder about the origins of the system sounds found on MacOS and Windows. Who created them? It may be an apocryphal story but I remember hearing that the MacOS System Sound called Eep was voiced by one of the developers. What a claim to fame!
Brian Levine
Brian has started a blog. All of that intense peer pressure finally got to him. I'm not sure what he plans to blog about but let's just hope it's not too much like this .
Note: The "Area Man" article I linked to was hard to find. The Onion has moved all of its older content into a "Premium" service. Fortunately it's still available on the Internet Archive.
You can subscribe to Brian's blog feed here.
Note: The "Area Man" article I linked to was hard to find. The Onion has moved all of its older content into a "Premium" service. Fortunately it's still available on the Internet Archive.
You can subscribe to Brian's blog feed here.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Why can't anyone throw a baseball faster than 100 mph?
According to this Slate article the 100-mph ceiling for pitchers is a basic property of human physiology. Any faster and the tendons and ligaments in the pitcher's arm would snap.
Dive Into Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. Mark Pilgrim has created a site and book about programming with Greasemonkey called Dive Into Greasemonkey.
Adding EXIF data to Treo 650 images
The Treo 650 doesn't stick EXIF data in the JPEG images it captures. Michael J. Radwin has a useful tip using exiftool to add some basic EXIF information.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Roman Numbers
Here's something I learned from my son the other day. He and a friend from school were writing down Roman number equivalents for various numeric values and got stuck when they tried a really large number. It turns out that Roman numbers only go as high as 3999 (MMMCMXCIX). Above 3999, new symbols are used. A V with a line drawn above it represented 5,000. Likewise, X, L, C, D, M represented 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 respectively.
Zombo.com
Zombo.com cracked me up when I first saw it a few years ago. Still does.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Back Better
As I mentioned on Thursday, I pulled a muscle in my back. It was painful. Grit your teeth, eye-watering pain. But it's getting better. The first day I used my back brace, cold packs and took Naproxen. On Friday it was a little less sore. I switched to a heating pad. This morning my back was still stiff but less painful. I still feel some twinges when I bend certain ways, especially ducking my head to get into the car. But I'm on the mend.
Everyone has their Achilles' heel. For me, it's my back. Fortunately, my back problems aren't chronic. The last time was in 1999 when I had sciatica. I had X-rays and an MRI done which showed a bulge on one disk that was pinching the sciatic nerve. My physical therapist took a look at one of the X-ray images and said "See there? That's vertebral arthritis". I responded, "I have arthritis?". She said, not to worry, everyone starts to show signs of arthritis in their back, starting around 30 years of age. I guess we really weren't mean to stand upright.
Everyone has their Achilles' heel. For me, it's my back. Fortunately, my back problems aren't chronic. The last time was in 1999 when I had sciatica. I had X-rays and an MRI done which showed a bulge on one disk that was pinching the sciatic nerve. My physical therapist took a look at one of the X-ray images and said "See there? That's vertebral arthritis". I responded, "I have arthritis?". She said, not to worry, everyone starts to show signs of arthritis in their back, starting around 30 years of age. I guess we really weren't mean to stand upright.
Hapland and Hapland 2
Robin Allen's Hapland and Hapland 2 are terrific flash puzzles. My son and I finished Hapland but haven't completed Hapland 2 yet. There are visual clues on the walls but we didn't notice them until after we had clicked around quite a bit. The solution requires that you time some actions just right, especially the ending.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Moovl and Processing
Moovl is a cool tool that let's you animate drawings. Great for kids. (Note: you'll need Java 1.4.2 or later to launch Moovl).Moovl was built by the same folks who did sodaconstructor. It was written using the Java-based Processing language. I blogged about Processing before. The Beta was released a few weeks ago. It comes with the Processing Environment, a simple IDE for writing and running Processing programs as well as documentation and a ton of examples. Very cool. You can download the Processing Beta from here.
The All-Time Top 100 Voices in the Movies
Filmcritic.com published their list of the Top 100 Voices in the Movies. The main criteria is actors with "distinct voices (or special voice work)". It's a mixture of good and bad actors with some weird choices such as Charo. A lot of the people on the list do voice work or are imitated by others for voice work.
I heard an interview with The Incredibles director Brad Bird a few weeks ago and he mentioned how important it was to choose distinctive voices for characters. For example, he heard a piece by Sarah Vowell on NPR's This American Life and thought that her whiney voice would be perfect for the teenage daughter Violet.
Note: not to be too big of a URL geek but I recognize filmcritic.com's URL syntax. It's Domino!
I heard an interview with The Incredibles director Brad Bird a few weeks ago and he mentioned how important it was to choose distinctive voices for characters. For example, he heard a piece by Sarah Vowell on NPR's This American Life and thought that her whiney voice would be perfect for the teenage daughter Violet.
Note: not to be too big of a URL geek but I recognize filmcritic.com's URL syntax. It's Domino!
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Ouch!
I've had problems with sciatica a few times over the years. It's nasty. After experiencing severe back pain I could easily empathize with people who are clearly having a tough time crossing the street. Every movement is made slowly and carefully to avoid pain. Your back stiffens if you sit for too long. You feel 90 years old.
My last bout with sciatica was six years ago. This morning I woke up with back pain. I think I pulled a muscle or something. No sciatica pain; it's localized. I'm using ice packs, a back brace, Naproxen — whatever it takes to reduce the inflammation and ease the pain. I hope it feels better tomorrow.
My last bout with sciatica was six years ago. This morning I woke up with back pain. I think I pulled a muscle or something. No sciatica pain; it's localized. I'm using ice packs, a back brace, Naproxen — whatever it takes to reduce the inflammation and ease the pain. I hope it feels better tomorrow.
Dancing Citroen spoof
Remember the dancing transformer Citroen C4? Here's a clever spoof featuring an old Citroen CV2.
Inflection Points
Cringley has some interesting speculation on recent announcements by Microsoft, Google and Apple. Interesting stuff, especially his speculation that with the Xbox 360, Microsoft could be building a new platform; a Microsoft PC. The Xbox 360 will play video games, music and movies, instant messaging, surf the web, etc. Most of what the typical teenager uses a computer for. The distinctions between game system and general-purpose computer are getting blurred.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all announced new game systems this week at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). One thing all three systems have in common that didn't get a lot of press is that they all use IBM PowerPC chips — the same processor family used by Apple. Even if game systems morph into "electronic lifestyle" computing systems they won't kill off the x86 PC. But they may steal away a lot of the home consumer market. And it's interesting to note that even the Xbox was shifted from x86 to PowerPC. Another inflection point?
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all announced new game systems this week at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). One thing all three systems have in common that didn't get a lot of press is that they all use IBM PowerPC chips — the same processor family used by Apple. Even if game systems morph into "electronic lifestyle" computing systems they won't kill off the x86 PC. But they may steal away a lot of the home consumer market. And it's interesting to note that even the Xbox was shifted from x86 to PowerPC. Another inflection point?
Nirvana's baby
When 14-year-old Spencer Elden was a four-month-old baby he was involved in a photo shoot. He's the baby from the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind. Ironically Spencer is not a Nirvana fan. It must be pretty odd to be the subject of such a familiar image. An image that can be spoofed and still be familiar such as this Lego version or this Simpsons version.
Love, Peace and Java Harmony?
Last week the Apache Software Foundation announced a J2SE 5 implementation project called Harmony. It covers the virtual machine and the class libraries, and aims to pass the Sun specification. A lot of work. And they have no code yet. Huh?
I agree with Charles Miller's accessment of Harmony. The best way to start an open source project is with existing code. Building a spec-complete J2SE 5 implementation is an enormous effort.
And even if the project attracts enough developers and they succeed in building it, who's going to use Harmony? Sure, open source is good but what problem will Harmony solve? Are there platforms that are not served by existing Java implementations?
That said, I thought that some of James Gosling's comments about Harmony were odd:What open source projects let "any old person" check in stuff? Certainly no successful ones. Do these Enterprise developers who Gosling mentions use Apache, Linux, Eclipse or any of the hundreds of other open-source projects out there? Maybe Gosling was misquoted?
I agree with Charles Miller's accessment of Harmony. The best way to start an open source project is with existing code. Building a spec-complete J2SE 5 implementation is an enormous effort.
And even if the project attracts enough developers and they succeed in building it, who's going to use Harmony? Sure, open source is good but what problem will Harmony solve? Are there platforms that are not served by existing Java implementations?
That said, I thought that some of James Gosling's comments about Harmony were odd:
Gosling says Sun has received negative response from the enterprise development community regarding the idea of open-source Java. "We've got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project—where just any old person could check in stuff—they'd all freak. They'd all go screaming into the hills."
Friday, May 13, 2005
Paraskevidekatriaphobia
If you suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) then I probably don't have to tell you today's date. Fortunately for paraskevidekatriaphobes, this is the only Friday the 13th in 2005. There won't be another until next January.
ThankyouGeorge.com
ThankyouGeorge.com is a web site to thank George Lucas for his movies. They want to gather 1,000,000 signatures on a letter of appreciation to be presented to Lucas later this year. Looks like they have a long way to go: currently they've only collected 7139 signatures. But these aren't really "signatures" anyway. They're collecting contact information. Second, they want your location as well as an email address. And the domain is registered to Decipher, Inc., a company that makes "Trading Card Games".
Hmm, what could someone do with a collection of 1,000,000 email addresses? Thanks George!
Hmm, what could someone do with a collection of 1,000,000 email addresses? Thanks George!
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Computervision and Prime
Dave Delay has a good post on his days at Computervision. If you're relatively new to technology or Boston you may never have heard of the company. It was a major player back in the 1980s.
My first job out of graduate school was working for Applicon, a Computervision competitor. I worked for a couple of CAD/CAE startups after Applicon and then decided that I neeeded a saner life with a slower pace. I joined Prime Computer to work on their solid modeling product called PrimeDesign.
The pace may have been a little slower at Prime but there was no lack of drama. One week after I started, Prime made a hostile takeover bid to buy Computervision. When the deal was completed, Prime replaced Computervision's management team with its own and merged the two development organizations. The merger was handled badly. There was a lot of anamosity on both sides.
From the perspective of a Computervision employee, Prime was an aging minicomputer vendor. What could it offer? But Computervision wasn't in such great shape either. The company had a lot of customers but also had a large aging, unweildy code base. And its market share was being eroded by PC CAD vendors at the low-end and more aggressive companies such as Parametric Technology at the high-end.
To further complicate matters, Prime bought CALMA, another CAD vendor, from GE. Needless to say, merging three development organizations was harder still, especially when one is located in San Diego, quite distant from the other two.
To add insult to injury, Prime had spent a lot of its cash when it bought Computervision. This made it an acqusition target. A lot of Prime's remaining cash and management attention was spent defending the company from a hostile takeover bid by MAI Basic Four. This was followed by a leveraged buyout by J H Whitney and more management turmoil. Around that point I left Prime. In the time since then, the Prime portion of the company (and the Prime name) was jettisoned, retaining Computervision which was eventually sold to Parametric Technology.
My first job out of graduate school was working for Applicon, a Computervision competitor. I worked for a couple of CAD/CAE startups after Applicon and then decided that I neeeded a saner life with a slower pace. I joined Prime Computer to work on their solid modeling product called PrimeDesign.
The pace may have been a little slower at Prime but there was no lack of drama. One week after I started, Prime made a hostile takeover bid to buy Computervision. When the deal was completed, Prime replaced Computervision's management team with its own and merged the two development organizations. The merger was handled badly. There was a lot of anamosity on both sides.
From the perspective of a Computervision employee, Prime was an aging minicomputer vendor. What could it offer? But Computervision wasn't in such great shape either. The company had a lot of customers but also had a large aging, unweildy code base. And its market share was being eroded by PC CAD vendors at the low-end and more aggressive companies such as Parametric Technology at the high-end.
To further complicate matters, Prime bought CALMA, another CAD vendor, from GE. Needless to say, merging three development organizations was harder still, especially when one is located in San Diego, quite distant from the other two.
To add insult to injury, Prime had spent a lot of its cash when it bought Computervision. This made it an acqusition target. A lot of Prime's remaining cash and management attention was spent defending the company from a hostile takeover bid by MAI Basic Four. This was followed by a leveraged buyout by J H Whitney and more management turmoil. Around that point I left Prime. In the time since then, the Prime portion of the company (and the Prime name) was jettisoned, retaining Computervision which was eventually sold to Parametric Technology.
Does the Beast Live In Michigan?
The number of the beast has changed. It's not 666 it's 616. A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the 3rd century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Anti-Christ.
Area code 616 is in Michigan. Given the beast's new number I might worry if I had an "interesting" phone number such as 616-LUCIFER. According to the reverse phone directory the number is in use in Holland, Michigan.
Area code 616 is in Michigan. Given the beast's new number I might worry if I had an "interesting" phone number such as 616-LUCIFER. According to the reverse phone directory the number is in use in Holland, Michigan.
One of those moments
My wife has been out of town for a couple of days at a conference. We swapped cars; I've been driving the minivan to shuttle the kids around. They're in school so most of the time was covered except for this afternoon. I picked up my younger son at school and we took the minivan for a drive-thru oil change. Then I took both boys to swimming lessons. The minivan started acting strange. Each time I started it, smoke came out of the exhaust. And there was noticeable hesitation when accelerating. Not a good sign. As we returned from swimming I noticed a large growing cloud of black smoke off in the distance. It was in the direction of our house. I had an odd moment of irrational panic: our house is burning down and somehow I've ruined my wife's car too. As we rounded the corner I realized that the black smoke was off towards Winchester, away from our house. And the oil change was the cause of the exhaust smoke. The attendant had put in too much oil. Crises, real and imagined, averted.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Making Peace With Autism
Many of my blog posts have been silly or geeky. This one will be more serious.
Susan Senator has written a book about her family's experience with raising an autistic child. It's called Making Peace With Autism. The book is coming out in September. In the meantime, you can read Sue's excellent articles published in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere.
We met Sue through her husband Ned Batchelder. As I've probably mentioned before, Ned is a friend. We worked together at Lotus, Iris and Blue Ripple. We also share a similar family challenge: raising a child with special needs. My younger son Matthew was diagnosed with development delays at eighteen months. My wife and I were devastated. Knowing that Ned and Sue had been through a similar experience, my wife sent an email to Sue. Sue's first response was somewhat scary. She told us how we needed to aggressively push for services and specialists. That we needed to work hard on getting him good services as early as possible. We were still trying to accept the fact that our son had development issues. It all seemed overwhelming. But we quickly learned that she was right. We learned how important it was to get the right services and get appointments with the right specialists. It was time-consuming and very frustrating. As a result of our initial experiences, my wife has started working with Early Intervention; giving talks to parents on what to expect.
Matthew is not on the autism spectrum but his issues are most similar to children diagnosed with PDD-NOS. He also has a seizure disorder which began when he turned two. After a long process of finding the right medication, his seizures are under control (knock on wood!). It's easy to dwell on negatives; we have successes too. Matthew's milestones are different from his "typically developing" brother Benjamin but we celebrate them for both. Matthew is a wonderful kid and he's making good progress in preschool. Our challenge is to figure out the best ways to help him to learn and continue to flourish.
Raising a child with special needs is hard. It's difficult to describe the challenges. I hope that Sue's book will help people understand.
Susan Senator has written a book about her family's experience with raising an autistic child. It's called Making Peace With Autism. The book is coming out in September. In the meantime, you can read Sue's excellent articles published in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere.
We met Sue through her husband Ned Batchelder. As I've probably mentioned before, Ned is a friend. We worked together at Lotus, Iris and Blue Ripple. We also share a similar family challenge: raising a child with special needs. My younger son Matthew was diagnosed with development delays at eighteen months. My wife and I were devastated. Knowing that Ned and Sue had been through a similar experience, my wife sent an email to Sue. Sue's first response was somewhat scary. She told us how we needed to aggressively push for services and specialists. That we needed to work hard on getting him good services as early as possible. We were still trying to accept the fact that our son had development issues. It all seemed overwhelming. But we quickly learned that she was right. We learned how important it was to get the right services and get appointments with the right specialists. It was time-consuming and very frustrating. As a result of our initial experiences, my wife has started working with Early Intervention; giving talks to parents on what to expect.
Matthew is not on the autism spectrum but his issues are most similar to children diagnosed with PDD-NOS. He also has a seizure disorder which began when he turned two. After a long process of finding the right medication, his seizures are under control (knock on wood!). It's easy to dwell on negatives; we have successes too. Matthew's milestones are different from his "typically developing" brother Benjamin but we celebrate them for both. Matthew is a wonderful kid and he's making good progress in preschool. Our challenge is to figure out the best ways to help him to learn and continue to flourish.
Raising a child with special needs is hard. It's difficult to describe the challenges. I hope that Sue's book will help people understand.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
ATOYOT
The other day while driving, my son asked me what ATOYOT meant. He was reading the text on the glass of his window. It's reversed but all of the characters in Toyota when written in caps are symmetric. We enumerated the full list of symmetric letters: AHIMOTUVWXY. That's nearly half the alphabet. What if the entire alphabet was symmetric -- and digits as well? Imagine the confusion that would cause.
Windows codenames
Wikipedia and Bitzenbytes.com have compiled lists of Microsoft Windows codenames. The latter is more complete but the Wikipedia list has more naming arcania.
It's odd to see Windows NT 4.0 listed with the codename of Cairo. That may have been the original codename but NT 4.0 wasn't "Cairo". Many of the features that were envisioned for Cairo when it was announced in 1992, especially the Object File System, have yet to materialize. More recently, OFS morphed into WinFS which was slated for release in Longhorn but has been pushed out again. In the meantime, Microsoft has shipped a 64-bit version of Windows XP. The massive hype around 64-bit Windows computing has begun. I'm not complaining; 32-bit computing feels pretty cramped when even handheld devices can hold 4GB of storage.
It's odd to see Windows NT 4.0 listed with the codename of Cairo. That may have been the original codename but NT 4.0 wasn't "Cairo". Many of the features that were envisioned for Cairo when it was announced in 1992, especially the Object File System, have yet to materialize. More recently, OFS morphed into WinFS which was slated for release in Longhorn but has been pushed out again. In the meantime, Microsoft has shipped a 64-bit version of Windows XP. The massive hype around 64-bit Windows computing has begun. I'm not complaining; 32-bit computing feels pretty cramped when even handheld devices can hold 4GB of storage.
Monday, May 09, 2005
AndreaMosaic
AndreaMosaic is a freeware program that creates photomosaics. I used it to create a photomosaic of my sons made from photos taken of them. I had a 10x15 print made from the result.
The program is pretty easy to use. There's a tutorial on Engadget that also covers a Mac OS X photomosaic app called MacOSaix. The real "art" of creating a good looking photomosaic is collecting a nice set of photos and finding the right balance between tile size and overall image size. In my case, I used my own photos.
One thing I might experiment with for other mosaics is using images from Google or Flickr. It might be cool to use Jim Bumgardner's Flickr Colr Pickr to find appropriate images in color ranges. (Via Brian)
The program is pretty easy to use. There's a tutorial on Engadget that also covers a Mac OS X photomosaic app called MacOSaix. The real "art" of creating a good looking photomosaic is collecting a nice set of photos and finding the right balance between tile size and overall image size. In my case, I used my own photos.
One thing I might experiment with for other mosaics is using images from Google or Flickr. It might be cool to use Jim Bumgardner's Flickr Colr Pickr to find appropriate images in color ranges. (Via Brian)