Some dude with FAR too much time on his hands has modded an old IBM Model M “clicky” keyboard (the best computer keyboard ever built, in my humble opinion) to resemble an old Royal typewriter.
The guy’s very nearly Slashdotted, so it’ll take a while to load. But the end result is worth it — here’s a copy of the final pic.
… from Cenk Uygur, apparently of Air America. Don’t know who he is, but I can’t agree more with everything he’s said.
Nora and I got up this morning, and I got her some breakfast. Then I went to the bathroom. I heard her moving around out there, but didn’t really give it much thought. When I came out, this is what I saw.
Click it for a bigger view. Really, it’s worth it, despite the blurriness. She had gone to her room and put on her old Christmas dress with fluffy white collar, wool socks, ruby red slippers, and sparkly blue sunglasses. Then she clomped back to the living room, sat back down, and went back to her juice and Rice Krispies.
After I recovered, I spent an hour trying to dress myself as suavely as that from all my drawers of clothes, and fell well short.
A couple of weeks ago I posted something about Daniel Tammet, a highly functioning autistic guy who has written a book. I find his story fascinating, and he’s been so kind as to write a book about it all.
Now CNN is running a series of stories about a woman in Vermont who lives largely on her own and is considered to be a very low-functioning autistic adult. At about the age of nine, she started learning to type. She still doesn’t speak, is uncomfortable walking because the concentration on balance and navigation is too much for her, and so on, but she can type like a blue streak and is quite well-spoken.
Give it a good read. Keep in mind, if you haven’t seen the piece on CNN, that her physical situation is quite pronounced. If you watch her in live action, she really does seem (by our standards) to be largely disconnected from the world, save for a few violent reactions to information overloads. Watch the videos linked from the left menu bar of the CNN page — I wish I could link to them, but they’re all javascripty.
It’s alarming to think that there likely have been many other autistic people who were this intellectually formed and advanced but trapped in a body and/or a time that didn’t allow them to express themselves in this way. What’s scary to me as a parent is that she was a relatively high-functioning kid when she was young, and kind of slipped into a low-functioning autistic state in high school. Sleep well, daddy.
But she’s another hero, though — she’s doing her level best to tell us all what it’s like so we don’t keep making simple assumptions about autistic people. And I make dumb jokes about worrying about my kid, but honestly, this woman has a long row to hoe every single day. The world is very carefully designed to optimally suit the rest of us, and as a result it constantly stinks for her. I doubt any parent would wish that adversarial relationship with one’s surroundings on their own child or anyone else.
This is becoming kind of a focus for me around here, I know. But the workings of the human brain are so minimally understood that I’m thrilled that we’re starting to broaden our horizons about how we all think. Only in the past couple years have I started to see stuff on PBS and elsewhere that autism might not be the empty, vegetative state that we apparently used to think it was.
Keep an eye on this woman — she and Daniel Tammet (among others, I’m sure) are really the only educated advocates for autism. Scientists (and tubby bloggers) can blow wind all they want, but she’s the real deal. Someone who understands what it’s like to think differently (REALLY deeply, fundamentally differently, but not wrongly) from the rest of the people on the planet. And she has the skills and the drive to honor us all by explaining it. Seems the least we could do is listen.
This is something I wrote in response to a post on Megan’s blog. I didn’t want to post this there, as it’s very long and windy and in reading it over again, I thought it sounded too self-involved and self-conscious to inflict upon someone else’s blog. I’ll let her know it’s here, and if she wants to link to it, she can. On to my wind, though …
Before I start, I know I’m treading on thin ice. I’m a middle-class white liberal, and always have been. Life’s been good. I and my ilk are in many ways the bane of the average black person trying to get by in the world. “Here, let me make a bunch of racket and pretend to help you, whether or not you asked for it!” But here goes … some observations from around here. I do not mean to offend in what’s a very touchy subject. And I also apologize for my apparently compulsive lack of brevity. I’ve been typing here for some time, and realized that while I don’t want to “un-say” anything I’ve said, I’m about to post a big splat of text on your [my] blog.
I grew up in Evanston, IL, which was the suburban Chicago model for racial integration in a lot of ways at the time, so we did a LOT of Black History Month. In fact, just this morning we just went to visit Martin Luther King Lab School (a public magnet school here where we’re considering sending Nora), and there are Black History Month posters and signs up everywhere.
Growing up, at first I found it fascinating and sad. Let’s face it, you can’t sugarcoat accurate black history in America for little kids very much — at some point, the white kids really do just realize that their predecessors were bastards, and the black kids realize that their predecessors were totally screwed. And there’s nothing you can do to fix it if you’re six. Hell, there’s nothing you can do to fix it if you’re 35.
So I don’t know if it’s still relevant or necessary or right or whatever. But what it seemed to do around me was give the black kids a time to be proud and angry and sad and hopeful (all productive things to be about black history, I suppose). In Evanston, school integration (at the time) was very much complete, but there were still many of the same socio-economic gaps you see everywhere else. So it’s great to be friends with white kids at school, but when you go home to a small empty apartment on a busy street while they go home to their mansions on the lake, I’m sure you notice the difference. I had a friend named Brian who was working selling newspapers all weekend at the grocery by my house by the time he was twelve to support his family. His mother worked two shifts, and all of his brothers worked to pay the mortgage, too. They lived three blocks from me and my parents in our 2100 square foot apartment. We lived very differently than Brian and his family — we didn’t own our place, but it was a ridiculously different life nonetheless.
All us white kids thought it was over and done and equity and parity abounded, while the black kids still lived with a lot of confusing and contradictory BS. It took me a long time to realize that. By the time I was an adult, I realized that a LOT of it was lip service (not on the part of the teachers, who I still think were fairly earnest, but on the part of the white kids who talked a big game and did “moving” readings during the assemblies but then still had their very white cliques). EDITED THE NEXT NIGHT: Me too. In hindsight, I had a couple of black friends whose houses I played at, but mostly I turned out to be the same.
But I still think it’s a good thing to do (it’s not my issue to champion, maybe, but I’m just blowing an opinion here). The quick-and-easy alternative is to just move on and pretend it never happened. Great, if parity really exists. But the black kids in schools all over the country are still feeling the pinch of racism (if not in school, certainly outside of it), and I think it’s great to show ALL kids that there were a lot of unimaginable hardships that the black kids’ predecessors had to get through to get to even this imperfect place where we are now. I think it’s a hard lesson (and a deeply embarrassing but necessary one for the white kids), but it sure goes a long way toward explaining why life was different between the two races in question at the time.
I realized a few years ago that any attempt on my part to understand what it’s like to be a black kid/woman/man in this country is just silly liberal hot air. I don’t know what it’s like, and despite my best liberal intentions, I simply have no perspective on that experience. It could be that the right thing to do IS to move on and stop beating a dying (if not dead) horse. Dunno. But I feel like there was more racial harmony farther down the line in my schooling because of the early and consistent immersion in black history. It broke down over time, sure — but it broke down in group dynamic ways while (for example) white and black kids could date in high school. Not perfect, but maybe a sign of improvement?
I DO think it would be great to just teach it as the part of American history that it is and not have a month dedicated to it, which may be more your point. But that might take a few more years — in the meantime, I wonder if the current setup isn’t doing some good. And really, when we were kids, it was black kids and white kids and a few Hispanic kids. Now we’d have to have Huutu month, Hmong month, Assyrian month, Sunni month, Antarctic month, and who knows what all else. So perhaps it IS time to just suck it up and start teaching kids to like each other no matter what. I’m no child psychologist, but the problem of TOO many cultures doesn’t strike me as the worst problem you could have.
Sorry to go on like this — I just happen to have been thinking a lot about this lately. Nora’s pre-school is a nice mix of kids from all races and all over the world (I think Nora’s in the minority there, though I haven’t counted), but she’s still so sheltered from it all that I can’t help but think a lot about how it was when I got to kindergarten in Evanston (very racially, culturally, and economically diverse) from pre-school in Wood Dale. Wood Dale was backwoods white racist pre-mullet types — I kid you not, my dad was dismissed as gay, though usually using more colorful language, because he took a newspaper, let my mother have a life, went into Chicago where Those People were, and didn’t lie under his car and drink beer on Saturdays. They couldn’t get me and themselves out of there fast enough. (If nothing else, I’ve never been able to figure out HOW to lie under a car AND drink beer — seems like you end up all gritty and beery, more stinky than drunk.) AAANYhow, the point is that I had a little bit of adjustment to do — hair was different, language was different, and so on. But it took something like a week. That’s in large part thanks to my parents, but I also think that it was simply easier because I was a kid so the rules hadn’t dried yet. So I can see the logic of, “why not do a little reinforcement when kids are all soft and malleable?” Don’t know if it helps all sides, though.
What I find interesting about it now is that the kids (at least so far on Nora’s planet) don’t seem to notice race until some well-meaning chowderhead adult brings it up in order to compliment them on their equitable behavior (to my entirely accidental credit, I haven’t happened to screw this one up — I’ve done a lot of dumb things as a parent, but I didn’t happen to do this one). Hopefully we’re closer than we think, as long as we keep our grubby hands out of it …
While I admit some basic curiosity about the silliness that occurs around American celebrities, my Google homepage is supposed to bring me the most important headlines of today’s news. Check out what it gave me today:
By my count, that’s five out of nine entries dedicated to either Britney Spears’ head-shaving madness or the continuing Anna Nicole Smith mess.
AMERICAN SOLDIERS ARE DYING IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. PEOPLE ARE DYING IN OUR CITIES. (As for the link, I know a woman from this family — she’s a very lovely person in an unimaginable amount of pain and this is a tragedy. I don’t know if this is more newsworthy or not, but it certainly addresses a crisis closer to home than Britney Spears and her flippin’ hair, or which opulent silliness of a burial plot Anna Nicole Smith should be planted in.)
Just saying, 55.55%* of our news should not be about these people. Tragic as their lives may be, let them alone and focus on stuff that matters in our areas, please. Grr.
* just for the entertainment of my more geeky readers (okay, Doug), anything divided into ninths is fun. 1/9 is .111, 2/9 is .222, and so on up to 8/9 being .888. A flawed pattern, as 9/9 is NOT .999, but it certainly speaks to an interesting and acutely fine difference between each ratio. I’m just now getting into reading about this kind of thing, but I noticed early on (maybe sophomore year of high school) how fun ninths could be. I forgot about it until a couple years ago. And really, it offers me nothing but fun — it doesn’t solve any deep life crises or anything. It’s just fun math that proves that tenths resolve nicely, but ninths have their own predictable and beautiful patterns as well. Whee!
And please be patient with me — most of you real geeks out there have discovered this years ago. I’m still catching up, so be gentle.
We’ve been without Internet access since Thursday. I’m currently at my parents’ place, using their Internet connection to do a site transfer that has to happen at midnight tonight. I am not pleased.
The upside is that I talked to a manager last night at Comcast who made me laugh out loud. He WAS Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. If you haven’t seen this movie, see it. It’s painful and terrible and hilarious all at once. But Comcast is giving us stacks of refunds and all kinds of other stuff (I still haven’t gotten any actual swag, but I bet I could dress in all Comcast stuff for a month if I tried). I appreciate what they’re doing, I suppose, but I can’t believe we’re still not up after four days.
It snowed a lot in the past few days here in the Chicago area. Eastlake Terrace, the Rogers Park street where my parents currently live and where we lived a few years ago is right on the lakefront. If there are no buildings between the lake and the street (as is the case for my parents’ place), fantastic snowdrifts build up due to high winds and lake-effect snow. They’re quite beautiful for a while, particularly under moonlight and the orange mercury streetlights — very fluid and sharp-edged. But then the wind starts blowing sand onto it, the plows come through, and it all starts looking like crap.
Another strange side effect of this is that it completely buries cars. So I went over today to dig my parents’ car out. I am now able to say with some certainty that I am not as young as I used to be. But I persevered and stopped for lunch, and eventually got it done. I forgot to take a picture of the car before I started, but I got a couple of the hole it left. There was two feet of snow on the trunk and about eighteen inches on the hood, and a three-foot-wide wall of snow the height of the car on the passenger side. I didn’t bother trying to get into the driver’s side — the car was parked on the east (left) side of the street, and the snow was piled up to the top of the car and several feet wide to the sidewalk on that side.
I finally got the front and right side up to the door edge dug out, and could get in and wrestle over to the driver’s side. Luckily it’s a ‘91 Tercel and not a ‘78 Lincoln — the doors on those things were a mile long. It started right up (wouldn’t THAT have been funny?), and I peeled it slowly out of its snow mold to park it somewhere less susceptible to this kind of weather.
So I pulled out my Treo and took a few quick shots — the red circle in the last one shows the Toyota logo. Doesn’t this make all of you people who don’t live in snow want to move to Chicago?
There was a thread on Slashdot this morning about personal data on websites — the post itself wasn’t particularly compelling, but it inspired someone to post a bunch of statistics jokes. Thought y’all might like them …
I’ve been fiddling with a couple new things the past couple of days. Thanks to Jono at Humanized and his latest post, I discovered Google SketchUp. This is a free piece of software that is apparently replacing AutoCAD in several types of business who need something powerful but not as big as AutoCAD. It will never replace AutoCAD for dedicated users, of course, but it does some pretty cool stuff very intelligently. Here, hold my beer and watch this …
I just stopped writing for a moment, opened SketchUp, and (with all the training and wisdom of over ten minutes of previous use) rendered a very basic garage with attached workshop, a little guy (okay, it starts with him already there), and a green-conscious garden roof to comply with Chicago’s Mayor Daley and his great ideas about green spaces in urban areas.
So I’m just goofing around, and I have some minor background in drafting and rendering (rusty though it may be*). But this is incredibly simple — Jono uses his six-year-old sister as an example of someone who just opened the application, poked around for a minute, and can now build cities of stubby buildings while she waits for something more fun to happen around her.
It’s a great example of a simple interface that does what it should do and nothing more. It doesn’t interfere with creativity or thinking (or creative thinking), and works right out of the virtual box. And you can also upload your buildings/cities/whatever to their site and share them with others. Some of the stuff that’s out there already is pretty amazing.
(You’ll also see my sidebar — I left it in the screen capture image on purpose. That’s Desktop Sidebar — a great freeware version of the Vista Sidebar for XP. Both of my PCs have widescreen monitors, so I don’t really lose any real estate to the sidebar. It’s overwhelmingly useful, and fairly customizable. Check it out if you like this kind of geeky stuff.)
Anyhow, I hate to say it because my Microsoft friends (in other words, the two people who routinely read this blog) probably hear this all too often, but Google has another well-designed alternative to paid software. Whether it will stay free remains to be seen, of course, but it’s great fun and a good example of smart design for now.
Macromedia Contribute
I have a client who needs to edit her own website fairly regularly. I was doing the edits myself, but that often turned into a longer-than-necessary turnaround time if a) I was bogged down with other stuff, 2) offline for a day or at a meeting, or iii) in need of more information that caused two or three rounds of back-and-forth stuff. So I tried Contribute, and got her set up with a trial version of it today. So far, it’s great.
What’s nice about it is that it allows for levels of control. I am set up as administrator on her site, but I can set her up as either a publisher (someone who can change the site in major ways but not the core site settings) or a writer (someone who can simply make copy changes but not change layout). I think I could customize it more — I could specify things she can edit and things she can’t, and so on. I haven’t dug too deeply into it yet, and we’re going to play with it over the next several days while we both get used to it. But again, it’s a very intuitive and smart piece of software. You punch in a few settings into mildly intimidating setup screens, but then after that, it’s mostly point-and-click and highlight-and-type. It even grabbed my include-file-ridden code and understood it all, rendering it properly from a local version in its IE-driven browser. It locks files properly (as we discovered) when they’re open for editing on another machine. It just works like you would expect an Adobe/Macromedia product to, and works so identically between Mac and PC that I could explain to her everything I was looking at on my PC while she was going through it on her Mac.
Adobe/Macromedia (okay, I know it’s just Adobe now, but I’m still not used to that) offers free 30-day trials for all of their software — the best selling point of all. Plenty of time to get used to it or not. Give it a shot if you have a site to edit — I already find it a bit easier for basic copy changes than going through my own code (albeit fairly sparse and nicely indented).
These comments aren’t meant as advertising, though they kind of read that way — I have no investment in whether these products do well. They’re sure neat, though, and fun to play with if you have a rainy (or ridiculously snowy) afternoon. And if these things break on me tomorrow, I’ll come right back here and bitch about it. So stay tuned — so far, so good, though.
* I was, after all, the technical drawing representative for my high school’s JETS (Junior Engineering Technical Society) team. We didn’t meet a lot of girls, but a couple of guys on the team managed to circumvent the coin vending systems of every coffee and “Soup: Chicken Hot” machine in every building we competed in. Laugh if you will, but we were always set for ample amounts of Soup: Chicken Hot. If only girls were into that.