Asdquefty’s Journal

I was at the post office this morning to ship an eBay sale, and bought some stamps for mailing to the US.

There’s a character on the stamps, “Miga”, and a story on the back which reads:

Miga is a young sea bear who lives in the ocean with her family pod, out past Vancouver Island near Tofino, British Columbia. Sea bears are part killer whale and part bear. Miga is part Kermode Bear, a rare white bear that only lives in British Columbia.

It’s followed by a French translation of the story. Apparently “Miga” is a mascot for the Vancouver Olympics next year.

http://www.vancouver2010.com/mascot/en/profile_m.php

Seriously, Canada Post, I think you need to share that weed with the rest of us.

I have moved the forum from autismtreatment.asdquefty.com to autismdiscussion.asdquefty.com, as I will be reworking it to be meant for general discussion about autism.

As most of you know, I am working at my university for the summer to help with research in mathematics. I am working on comparing the quality of meshes and their solutions. (If my supervisor sees this, correct me if I’m wrong in describing what I’m doing.) I am blogging about my work because I feel it’s an open process and people should know what goes on with research, it’s all in the public domain anyway.

Anyway, we recently have been working on some code to figure out which triangle in a given mesh a point belongs to, and if it belongs to none, then whichever one it’s closest to. At one point in the file, my supervisor wrote the following code for finding the maximum of the 6 numbers in three coordinates: (I would probably write similar.)

biggestSoFar = x0
if(x1 > biggestSoFar): biggestSoFar = x1
if(x2 > biggestSoFar): biggestSoFar = x2
if(y0 > biggestSoFar): biggestSoFar = y0
if(y1 > biggestSoFar): biggestSoFar = y1
if(y2 > biggestSoFar): biggestSoFar = y2


I decided to compare it with the running time of Python’s built-in max() function:

biggestSoFar = max(x0, x1, x2, y0, y1, y2) (continue reading...)

I found two ThinkPad A31 laptops in the trash at work today, and brought both home, in the home of building a working machine between them and a broken A30p I have.

I have managed to make one usable laptop from the parts I have with the following specs. (It’s staying in my family, already been claimed, lol)

1.6GHz Pentium 4M
48GB HDD
Radeon 7500 gpu
512MB RAM
DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
Ports: 2USB, parallel, serial, VGA, Ethernet, modem.

I will be looking to see how much RAM is in the two broken machines and hopefully bring the working machine up to 1GB.

I’ve decided to broaden my forum a bit, to make it for discussion of autism as that is more appealing to many, and it sits better with me as well. I’ll be making the move over the next few days, and will post a link here when I’m done the move.

I was surprised when I logged into my blog today to find it had a veritable wall of spam waiting, it seems like people want to slip through some advertising for heartburn, even though I don’t recall mentioning heartburn here. It seems like spammers can’t spell, either. Bring it on, spammers, I have akismet! :p

I’ve changed my mind, the project I discussed last post has become a forum. I put it together last night.

http://autismtreatment.asdquefty.com/

Hi everyone.

I think it would be good for people to have access to a simple, clear, guide to treatments for autism or co-morbidities based upon anecdotal experience. I am willing to accept information on any treatment, medical, psychological, social, or otherwise, with the exception of anything that’s dubious or tortuous. I won’t accept any experience with chelation, hyperbaric, or lupron therapies as those are just torture and the science around them is rather dubious, if it exists at all.

You can submit your experiences via email or through comments on this blog. Be sure to include the name of a treament, whether it worked or not, side effects if applicable, and a rating from 1 to 10. For email submissions, I’d like to know what permissions you give me in regards to what you are submitting, more specifically, whether I can post the info in a blog post anonymously, and whether I can include the information presented in the summary pages.

I will have two summary pages, one each for children and adults. Participation is entirely voluntary.

For non-medical treatments, it would be appreciated if you could submit a link to a site describing the treatment. For medical treatments, the name of the treatment or the generic name of the medication should be sufficient for me to find a link to it.

I eagerly await to hear about your experiences.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to give the email to send to. It’s asdquefty [at] gmail [dot] com.

Seriously, does anyone else find that House has gone past it’s prime and is in decline? House spends most of his time blithely ignoring the medical case/patient until he miraculously solves the case. It’s so aggravating to see a once-great show in decline, it’s like a cruel agony, less and less medicine, more and more pointless static drama.

Does anyone else notice, that as a character, House hasn’t changed in the whole length of the series in any appreciable way?

Oh, and until he left, it doesn’t feel like Wilson changed much either.

It also constantly annoys me how they always offer the first few diagnoses out of the gate when the first differential starts, despite the fact they’re always thusly ignored at a now-poor attempt at mockery by House.

The problem with House:
It’s not lupus.
It’s not a brain tumor.
It’s not encephalopathy.
It’s not a impossible-in-real-life case of hyperserotonemia. (Episode 2.12, bonus point for first 5 people to tell me why it’s impossible.)
It’s HOUSE himself. He’s such a static predictable character, he sucks the life out of the show. Oh, and Cuddy, too, along with the rest.

Colour me obviously biased, but episode 3.04 was one of the best they did.

P.S. Colour has a u in it, those who omit the u are wrong, sorry. I will edit your comments to include the u if you spell colour wrong. Bwahaha.

After much trial and error over about two days, I finally have my iBook working with Xubuntu Jaunty at the proper display resolution. To save myself a headache in the future as I don’t know how exactly I got it working, I will include the contents of the xorg.conf file below. This should work on any distro, so long as your iBook has ATI graphics. Change the screen resolution as your machine requires.

Contents of xorg.conf

Section “Module”
Load    “bitmap”
Load    “dbe”
Load    “ddc”
Load    “dri”
Load    “glx”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier    “LCD”
HorizSync    60-60
VertRefresh    43-117
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier    “Default Screen”
Monitor        “LCD”
Device        “Video”
DefaultDepth    24
SubSection “Display”
Depth    24
Modes    “1024×768″
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Mode    0666
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier    “Video”
Driver        “r128″
BusID        “PCI:0:16:0″
Option        “PanelWidth”    “1024″
Option        “PanelHeight”    “768″
Option        “UseFBDev”    “true”
Option        “NoInt10″    “true”
EndSection

With exam time over for both me and a good friend, we’ve been hanging out a lot over the last few days. Last night we went out and had some drinks with a bit of food to help them down, and something I ate really messed with my stomach acid levels and I woke up at 0530 despite having gone to bed at 0200 or so, with a stinging/burning sensation in my stomach. Those of you with acid reflux, GERD, and the like know what I mean. I ended up taking some pepto-bismol with a large glass of milk, and didn’t go back to bed because it’s better if I stay upright. So, I’ve been tired pretty much all day.

After a few hours of doing nothing, I was about to catch a bus when a distant family member showed up to have me fix his laptop. Took about half an hour, then he gave me a ride to the local mall where I had my next stop, the local Bell store. Here, I activated a prepaid cell phone for my grandmother, which cost about $50 and I had to sign my life away on a few forms. Odd how they let me put it in her name without her present at the store with me, but it’s going to save her some headaches down the road if she goes to the store with the phone.

After this I spent most of the day hanging out with a friend, and herein lies the main point of the post. I really exceeded my social limit today. This friend tends to be draining on me as he’s a really outgoing person, and I find much of what he says and does confounding. It’s more exhausting to socialize the more I have to inhibit my reactions and figure out what to say. He left for a while for supper, and I passed out on my bed for two hours before I had supper. Ended up cancelling our plans to go out because my stomach still wasn’t feeling well, we took a walk to the local cafe instead.

The point here is that I have a smaller social limit then most people, and I reach it sooner, often after only 2-3 hours. It’s hard for aspies to deal with people for several reasons including problems with auditory processing (hearing is fine, brain muddles the words, think hearing-dyslexia), reduced ability to read body language, inability to read eye meaning, distraction, problems following the topic changes in a conversations, having to remember not to get stuck on a topic, anxiety, and frustration. I find when I reach my social limit, I get distracted more, I don’t hear all of the words, sometimes I can just tune out for a few seconds, I keep more quiet, and my mind can feel really tired and in need of something soothing such as a rote activity or comforting food.