(Mostly) not a tech blog

Damn. I was so close. Missed it by *that* much. Charlie sees a behavioral councilor every week. He is helping Charlie as an individual and us as a family grow new skills to make sure Bear goes on to realize his full potential. We had an amazing session today. Charlie had a couple of rough events at school this week dealing with a fellow students negative behavior. He dug through these two events and really expressed how he felt, moment by moment, and in many cases linked those feelings to his behavior. This type of emotional awareness is rare amongst…

Fun Fact: Forty Eight. 48. Forty and Eight. That is the number of people killed by law enforcement officers in the United Kingdom since January 1st, 2000. 17 years and only 48 deaths due to police activity within a population of 65 million people. Fun Fact: United Kingdom police discharged their weapons at a suspect only 3 times in the reporting year ending in 2013. To be clear, they used 3 individual bullets against a suspects mortality. To compare this difference, Michael Brown was shot at least twice that number of times by one single officer in one single incident.

Autism is a constant reality. Some days are tough. There is a circuit pathway or two that just isn’t doing what it needs, and sensory inputs are doubly extra sensitive. Some other days are great. Whatever wires are involved are working in the direction of societal expectations. Things just “click” with the world of normies. The best of days are amazing though. Some of those wires are working at 90 degree angles to what “normal” says they should be doing. That right angle helps find aesthetically beautiful results. Charlie, for example, has a gift for language. When he needs to…

I've learned a lot in researching the flag, the anthem and the pledge. Did you know that the man who made it his mission to spread the daily pledge of allegiance to school, and wrote the canonical version, was a minister? He was also a leftist communist. He was fired from his pulpit for preaching about the evils of capitalism. Francis Bellamy championed the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus. He was staunchly anti-capitalism and believed in expanding public services to protect those things from…

Last night Charlie split his foot open. Playing in the living room, doing “donkey kicks” off of furniture, he kicked something so hard the blunt force impact tore his flesh. Fortunately it looks like the wound was pretty ugly but not particularly terrible. It appears that he will be back on his feet and running out in a couple days. When we left the house I thought he might be losing some toes. One of the difficulties Charlie faces related to ASD is how sensory experiences work. Pain can be a strange beast from my perspective as his Dad. I…

The word “fear” carries little weight in comparison to the look in her eyes. Every clap of thunder brought a sharp intake of breath, and a bracing of her neck muscles. “This is the end of days” she thought, “this is where it all ends.” Another boom. She felt herself jump before she even registered the sound. She fell sideways against the wall. Kicking against the dirt below her kept he upright, but it was a mad struggle. There was a sudden flash outside the window. Like the heavens tore reality from the ground to the sky. Moments later came…

The smell of gasoline was strong. This desert heat made sure the fumes were thick, even near midnight. The sloshing of can and the shuffling of busy feet made the darkness of the wastes seem safe by comparison. Curses where shouted. “Protect My Children!” “Immoral Literature No More!” “Burn the demon books!” Each shout was accompanied by cheers and more gas on the piles. In the century since the bombs fell, this cult of hate had hunted the paper relics of the lost age. Knowledge was surely the cause of the atom dropping on their great-great-grandparents heads. A torch was…

His heart was overwhelming his ears. Beating so loud he was sure the beast could hear it right through his chest. Suddenly the door burst open, shattering the frame into shrapnel. It was all he could do to hold back a scream. His last hope was that the creature couldn’t find him behind the false wall. He did not need to struggle to hear the lurching steps of the titan hunting him. Every step an earthquake. Every step made it harder to hold his piss. Breath. Heavy and wet. Just through the wall now. The beast had his scent. It…

I am fucking ashamed of myself. Stick around for the why after the exposition! When we decided to open up about our sons Autism diagnosis, we did so because we wanted to share what this looks like. It is a form of evangelization, a form of normalization and a form of therapy for our family. We love our community and we draw so much strength from it that we felt it was time to reach out and start sharing this topic. It has been the biggest part of our lives for a little while now, and it didn’t make sense…

I enjoy how easy programming a computer to do what I want is. It has simple, easy rules that it follows. Nothing alone is complicated. I have spent my lifetime learning how to generate incredibly complex behavior from very basic operations. Emerging complexity from a system of simplicity is delightful. But it has it’s pain points, moments that I see how limited a human truly is. Today I am working with a language and framework that has a lot of boilerplate code. Boilerplate refers to the crappy overhead code that you need to stick in place in order to get…