Hey, look who was in Sunday’s issue of the Huntsville Times.

(Glenn Baeske of The Huntsville Times took that picture.)

The article touches on the Hermes system that we’ve been developing to help helicopters automatically pick up cargo and then guide them to the delivery point, which has a lot of potential applications for everything from medical heliflights to logging to resupplying soldiers in the field. I wrote our original proposal for the project back in 2005, and now, five years later, it’s on the cusp of being a real honest-to-goodness product. A lot of very smart people have put in a tremendous amount of work to make that happen, and I’m thrilled to see it all coming together.

So that’s what I saw on Sunday! How was your weekend?

Our inside sources have indicated to us that there will be a few one-off tour dates for Raising Up the Dead, but no tour is planned as of yet. There will be release shows in Houston and Austin that will be announced at a later date.

Would you travel to Texas for a Caedmon’s Call release show? Let us know in the comments. Maybe we’ll work up getting a group rate on hotel rooms or something and panty raid Bryan’s room.

I recently finished reading “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t” by Stephen Prothero. The book was primarily about the downfall of religious education in the United States, mostly over the past century and especially among self-proclaimed evangelical Christians. In it, he states that religion has become more about “feeling” and that the basic knowledge of doctrine that leads to civil debate among the different religions has been de-emphasized. The beginning of the book lays out his argument for why the nation needs basic religious literacy, the middle traces the downfall of religious literacy over the past four centuries, and the book closes with a basic dictionary of religious terms that everyone should know. I went into the book expecting to bolster my basic religious literacy, but, alas, that was not really the focus of the book — only a bit at the end. For that, I will have to wait until “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter” becomes available at the library.

However, Stephen Prothero made two points within the first ten pages that I thought enlightening — specifically about religious literacy but I think they are relevant to literacy in general — so I wanted to repeat them here. On page 4, he writes

In my world religions classes I told my students that before we could discuss in any detail the great religious traditions of the world, we would need to have some shared vocabulary in each, some basic religious literacy. In this way, I became, like [E. D.] Hirsch, a traditionalist about content, not because I had come to see facts as the end of education but because I had come to see them as necessary means to understanding.

This comment aligns with the books I have been reading by Susan Wise Bauer (“The Well-Trained Mind” and “The Well-Educated Mind”) about Classical Education. The classical education movement splits education into three phases called the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In each of the three stages, one studies the same types of topics, but at different levels. In the grammar level, the student is gaining basic facts — a shared vocabulary that the student can use when she learns how to reason during the logic stage and debate during the rhetoric stage. Following the trivium, you must strictly move from one stage to the next in order and, without that basic foundation, you cannot reason and debate intelligently on topics. While Prothero aimed his comment toward religious literacy, it holds for education in general.

On page 10, he writes

[Religious] ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

Once again, Prothero is talking about religious ignorance but I believe that the quote holds for ignorance in general. Recently, I listened to an episode of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense called “To Dum Two Vowt”. In this episode, Carlin made explored what would happen if the United States was too require literacy tests for voting — he was not seriously suggesting it, just exploring it from a hypothetical standpoint. Carlin makes the same type of arguments as Prothero. Basically, he says that an ignorant electorate is a dangerous electorate, although he ultimately comes to the conclusion that requiring a basic literacy exam is too reminiscent of Jim Crow laws to be workable.

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I always love my Tuesday nights with the crafty gals. This week was no exception. We has some serious crafting!

Eli created Super Mario characters to do battle on our kitchen table. Stephen caught the whole drama.

The end of the battle:

Liza showed her super remote skills:

Lastly, my finished crochet stash. It seems to grow larger by the day.

Driving to work the other day, I heard a story on NPR about eating healthy foods with a low income. The article mentions the following:

Elaine Livas, who runs Project SHARE, the local food pantry, says she sees it all time.

“A gallon of milk is $3-something. A bottle of orange soda is 89 cents,” she says. “Do the math.”

Livas says low-income families might know milk is better for their kids, but when it comes to filling a hungry stomach, a cheaper high-calorie option can look pretty good.

This quote led me to thinking about the relationship between eating good foods on a budget and the impact of the farm subsidies on encouraging the production of unhealthy food. After doing a bit of research, I found the following article in the New York Times, which discussed the changes to the farm subsidy in the 70′s. Apparently, instead of lending farmers money to keep their grain off of the market until prices rose, the government now provides a direct subsidy to the farmers, effectively incentivizing the production of corn for products like high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. The article goes on to state:

But as we’re beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes at a high price: first there’s the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there’s the economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world; and finally there’s the obesity epidemic at home — which most researchers date to the mid-70′s, just when we switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain. Since that time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day; each of us is, heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories per day. Presumably the other 300 — most of them in the form of surplus corn — get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building block of the ”fast-food nation.” Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70′s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald’s to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.

So, at this point, the government is encouraging the production of food that is having an unhealthy effect on society. While it may seem like we are able to get our hands on cheaper food, we are eating more of this cheaper food simply because it is available. These cheaper foods that we eat more of tends to make us, as a nation, fatter. The higher-quality foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables and dairy are not being subsidized (or not as heavily in the case of dairy), so the consumer cost is higher. Now, for me personally, the cost does not make that big of a difference. However, look back to that family in the first article. Since the orange soda is so much cheaper than the milk, that is what is being purchased when you are on a budget.

What can be done to offset this behavior? Well, I am not an economist, but I play one on T.V. and I can think of two corrections that could be made. One, reduce or eliminate the subsidies on grains and allow the prices on those foods to increase naturally. Then, subsidize fresh fruit and vegetables. This will encourage the large farms to begin producing those in greater amounts, since it will be more profitable for them. As the supply increases, the price should drop. Second, I would look at modifying the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program to increase the purchasing power of food stamps for healthier foods. In other words, track what is purchased through SNAP and reward purchases of healthy food by increasing the benefit for families that are purchasing healthy foods. Drop the benefit (obvious not below a certain level) for families that choose health-poor foods.

I am sure that there are downsides to both of the suggestions that I made — someone, please point them out to me in the comments.

Just about six months out from making my diagnosis known, and a bit over four months from when I got to a therapeutic dose, and things are going really well. I’ve gone through a stressful period in the last few months: Dad’s job situation changing, then mine not long after that. Have there been absolutely awful days? Yes. There isn’t a hangover, though. I don’t go through a run of just really, really, really shitty days where I can’t drag my mood out of the gutter if my life depended on doing so. I also don’t go through a week or two or eight where I think I can just rule the world, sleep four hours a night, and generally be a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

I just feel normal.

I’ll tell y’all, it’s really weird to feel normal after you’ve not been right for a decade or more. I’ve tried to figure out when the onset of my depression set in for me. I’ve just about pinpointed it to late in middle school or early in high school. I honestly don’t know how I got through high school and college like this, but I must admit that it was getting worse—way worse. That was the really bad thing about taking a while to get to a diagnosis—even though that is just going to happen, you know? I felt like we were doing a lot of the right things, and we were, but then it would go all apeshit and be even worse, and man … for a while there it just seemed like there was no fucking point to it all, really. Here I was, doing the right things, and it was getting worse? Really, God?

At this point, my blog is the only way that I know that the month of June 2009 exists in my world. I honestly don’t remember anything from about mid-May forward until early July. I don’t think I’m ready to face all that just yet. I realized a few weeks ago that I was anxious merely about going back down in that hole. Hell, it still scares me some as I’m sitting here thinking about it now. But it’s not anything that I can’t live through.

Here’s the main thing I don’t get about “reading electronically”: the enduring idea of the page. A page is a physical conception, and physical conceptions often lose their meaning in digital applications. I get that there’s satisfaction in flipping a page. I get that there’s some mental accomplishment in saying, “I’m on page 75 of 252.” But do we still need these constructs in a more digital reading medium? I argue that we don’t, and that this is a time to return back to the world of scrolling.

I don’t get why people hate the concept of scrolling. We’ve had scrolls as instruments of communicating the written word for at least as long as we’ve had pages as a construct. My favorite iAnything app right now is Instapaper, which doesn’t use the page metaphor at all. To the left is a screenshot from my iPhone of Instapaper. You can see that, on that page, I’m about 3/4 of the way through the document. I don’t need anything more than that. If I’m wondering, “Do I want to keep reading this?” I don’t have to check the page count — I just put a finger on the screen and can see where I am in the reading.

Some will argue that the page conception allows random access: “I know this is on page 74. I remember reading it there.” I will grant that, but in a digital medium, it’s not as if it’s difficult to search. You don’t need a codex to tell you that Le Châtelier’s principle is on page 96 of your chemistry text, when you can search for it just as easily.

Do we still need the page? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to listen to the page’s defenders.

In related news, the Stockholm Syndrome page is now public …

It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day lists of things to do before I can sit down and relax for a few minutes at night. So easy that I often forget that spending time with Phoebe and Sophie while they are awake is really the most important thing I can do. Last night Phoebe asked me to go sit in Daddy’s rocking chair with her (the recliner). I had already sat in the recliner with them for a few moments and was hoping to do the dishes real quick, so I told her no. Then Sophie toddles into the kitchen and starts pulling on my skirt and I realized that taking a longer moment to sit with them was way more important than the dishes at that time. So we all three sat in Daddy’s rocking chair for a little while. After a minute they both wanted down to do their own thing again. I tried to take in the moment as much as possible because I know soon they will not want to sit with me in a rocking chair anymore.

Babies had better watch out for guys in wheelchairs.

Lately, I have been giving a lot of thought to belief: what I believe and why I believe it. Since I have recently decided to fully explore and express my beliefs, I decided to share my thoughts with the community at large.

Around fifteen years ago, I became disillusioned with organized religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular. Ironically, these thoughts started to develop while attending one of my church’s youth mission trips to a small camp for underprivileged children. This was not my first time to go on this mission trip, but this time something just did not feel right. The expectation that we, as teenagers, would evangelize to the children — a scant seven or eight years younger than us — attending the camp did not sit right we me. After we returned from the camp, the youth group would generally hold a “Mission Night” where we were expected to share our experiences and how we influenced the lives of these children. I never felt comfortable attending these sessions but, that year, one of our seventh graders shared what was, to him, a profound experience. I came away from that night thinking that he was entirely too young to have felt like that and it really disturbed me. Let me clarify just a bit: I believe that we did some real good at the camp. However, I felt like I was helping more by maintaining and improving the campgrounds than by witnessing to the children. After this last mission trip that I attended, organized religion was never the same for me.

As I graduated high school and moved on into college, my religious views changed dramatically. As I became more focused on science and technology, I began to see the beauty of the cosmos as something that could stand on its own instead of being created for the sole use of humanity. With the thoughts and dreams of other worlds took hold, I strongly doubted the Christian mythos because, why with all of the worlds in the universe, would Earth be specially set aside with a Savior? After reading Gregory Benford’s COSM, my beliefs crystallized into the following: given the laws of the universe, a deity I could believe in would only be able to start the universe going. Once the universe began, the deity may be able to observe, but could not interfere — the laws of the universe would prevent that. I had become a deist at best and arguably an agnostic.

College was not the end of my spiritual and religious thinking, though. As time moved on, I started to believe that, given my thoughts on the nature of the universe and how a deity would be forced to behave given that nature, that the universe did not need a deity at all. Any deity that started the universe and could not interfere would be, by definition, outside of the universe. If the deity was outside of the universe and unable to interact with the universe then it may as well not exist. I had completed my transformation to a full-blown atheist.

I want to close with a quote from Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithrus, Baal, Thor, Wotan, The Golden Calf, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

Here’s the original post from my husband, Alex. I could have reworded it to better fit my blog, but he said everything I was feeling and more:

A few days ago, a colleague forwarded me a story about children with autism using the new iPad to communicate. For those of you not familiar with the DynaVox picture-to-speech device, it’s insanely expensive, and most people can’t get one because their insurance doesn’t cover it. Lo and behold, I found that a lot of parents with autistic children are interested in the iPad. Please see the articles here, here and here. You’ll notice a lot of references to the Picture Exchange Communication System– that’s the therapy that has been recommended to us for home use. I’ve linked the Wikipedia article for your perusal.

My son is 3 now, and he has a lot of work ahead of him. His communication impairments are severe, and it takes constant vigilance on our part to help him learn to speak. As of this moment, he mostly echoes what is said to him in the hopes that we will give him whatever he wants. If we are lax in our teaching methods at all, it starts a cycle of immediate regression. You can imagine how it feels to see him just locked in his own world, unable to respond to most external stimuli, and how I would do anything to help him adapt to our world.

A lot of you have asked how my son is doing ever since my post shortly before episode 27. I just want you all to know he’s improving, and we’re starting to get a handle on the scope of his disability. There isn’t a lot of hard data on autism, even though it’s one of the fastest-growing diagnoses in the world. That means that there are a lot of quacks out there who are more than willing to make a buck at the expense of your child’s health. Originally, I just dismissed this iPad thing as a fad.

Then I gave my kid a DS to play with.

It was incredible. He held the pen like a pro! You can see the gears turning, and I hope the possibilities are present in your mind. To you, he may just look like a normal three-year-old… but I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? Just like a normal boy. I wanted to cry.

There aren’t a lot of accessibility apps for the DS, as you can imagine. With its giant hinge, it’s not exactly made for toddlers. To make matters worse, his therapy, the only therapy that has worked so far… comes out to $24k per year, with no insurance coverage.

I never meant to ask you all for help. I wanted to make a product I could sell you instead. But here I am, asking if you will ChipIn to help us get an iPad for my beautiful son. I promise to post videos of his brilliance.

Newsweek’s article on the “creativity crisis” has been making the rounds lately. It fits the usual template of such stories: extrapolation of a trend leads to prognostications of vague gloom. In this case, it’s that US kids’ Creativity Quotient scores have been falling since the 1990s.

The article is talking about a specific flavor of creativity, namely the ability to generate a lot of ideas, pick out and combine the most promising ones, and then follow through on them. The article contrasts problem-solving-based education that can foster this kind of thinking with US schools’ focus on rote memorization and test taking, and does a good job of citing research into creativity.

The article is less persuasive when it trots out the usual bogeymen of TV and videogames. The best videogames, and games in general, give you a set of rules and invite you to then solve the problems creatively, the kind of creative problem-solving that the article calls for in schools. And as fanfic and other transformative works show, people will watch TV and incorporate their stories into their own. The article approvingly notes that creative kids often make their own alternate worlds to play in. Can you get the same benefit from in part populating your alternate worlds with elements borrowed from TV shows? After all, most kids at that age are synthesists, creating those worlds from pieces of whatever stories they’ve heard, whether those stories came from books or TV or their family.

Programs exist to foster creative problem-solving, including Dr. Torrance’s Future Problem Solving Program. I’ll be interested to see if Eli and Liza’s schools offer such programs. But at least for now, I’m not that worried about them.

As most of America knows, our financial system started to implode in the fall of 2008. At that time, Ashley and I had a small one year old girl, a mortgage, and a car payment. While we were not struggling by any sense of the imagination, I felt like we were carry too much debt and that we could do better with budgeting our expenses. So, as I am wont to do, I began to gather information and develop a plan. One site I began to read fairly regularly was The Simple Dollar. While he posts a good bit of information on how to get your finances in order, I found that I tended to use his stories more as inspiration than as practical steps to follow. One book that I read that had a profound impact on how I look at our finances is Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. After I finished reading it, I immediately handed the book to Ashley and told her that she had to read it. Shortly thereafter, we both set down and began to follow Dave’s strategy for reducing our debt and increasing our financial stability.

After a year of work, we finally managed to increase our savings to a fairly comfortable mark of six months worth of expenses and eliminated all non-mortgage debt. Additionally, we eradicated the use of all of our credit cards and have migrated to a cash-only household (well, cash and debit cards) — we have not used any form of credit in around two years. Now, we are well on our way towards paying off our mortgage in another four years and have been able to expend a bit of capital towards household improvements. As we are doing this, I have been looking towards the future. The Millionaire Next Door has had an effect on how we are planning for the future. My hope is for Ashley and I to be PAW for the next fifteen to twenty years or so (just long enough to get Emily into college) and then to start looking towards my next career — maybe starting that business that I have been dreaming about.

Dear Need for Speed Shift:

Thank you for breaking NHL 10‘s months-long stranglehold on my Xbox 360. That said, we may have to renegotiate our business arrangement, because you once again soaked up four hours of my weekend night.

Your time is coming, as NHL 11 will be released soon,
Geof

Dear AppleScript:

Thank you for being fun and helping me manage all my audio stuff on my Mac. Thank you for also letting me pretend that I can program things from time to time. That makes me happy, even if it’s an illusion.

My only college programming class was in FORTRAN 77,
Geof

Dear long-neglected duffle bag:

Thank you for your many years of service in stowing my stuff. As I told Mom on the phone, I believe I’ve now had you half my life. You’ve been pushed out of service by bigger and better luggage, but I realized yesterday afternoon that you would be the perfect size for a recording gear bag.

Sorry about all the heavy mic cables,
Geof

Dear Waterdeep:

Thank you for putting out Everyone’s Beautiful. That was a perfect drive-home record last night.

Dear Don Chaffer:

Thank you for the final poem you read both nights this weekend. It made heaven more real to me than it ever has before. Your words were simple, but the imagery brought it home.

At least I waited until I got off the Interstate last night to start crying while thinking about it,
Geof

Dear melatonin:

I gave you up a few years ago when, well, you were contraindicated for depression. But now that I’m not a classical depressive, I’m allowed to take you again.

That was the first good night of sleep in almost a month,
Geof

Dear Audacity:

Thank you for crashing my iMac on Sunday afternoon. I mean, really? This is one bad-ass computer, and yet you brought it down by being very un-Mac-like.

Something is fucked here, Dude,
Geof

Dear Red Toyota Prius, Virginia Plates “BAMA 13N”:

The sign says SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT for a reason, dammit. Your slightly-above-the-speed-limit-but-not-really-in-the-fast-lane-speed choked traffic for at least 15 miles. I kept wondering what asshole was slowing things down, and then I realized that it was you.

The Bear would have pulled over into the slow lane,
Geof

Dear Christiana:

Thank you for the fine selection of a brewpub for dinner. My bison burger was excellent, and hey, I love a good Belgian witbier.

I still can’t believe Don hated on Belgian beer with both of us sitting there,
Geof

Dear Chattanooga:

Thank you for being in the Eastern Time Zone but yet being less than two hours from home. Your time warp effectively means earlier shows for me, which allows me to get home before midnight.

I hope you enjoy living in the future,
Geof

Dear TVA Bellefonte:

Thanks for being my favorite driving-home-from-Chattanooga waypoint. I love the way that your blinkenlights play off of the sky for miles and miles before I reach Hollywood. I’m just sad that TVA can’t get you completed.

I still believe in our nuclear energy future,
Geof

Dear Check Engine Light:

I don’t believe you. Last time you came on, it was my fuel cap being slightly loose. Thought I tightened that good and hard last night when I filled up in Falkville, but maybe I didn’t. But really, couldn’t you have come on tomorrow when I wasn’t 45 miles from home?

Sad that Subaru makes the Check Engine light cancel the cruise control,
Geof

Dear law enforcement officer who passed me and blipped his lights just east of Paint Rock:

Dude, seriously? I was driving 2MPH under the limit when you hit me with your radar. Sure, if my cruise was on, you probably catch me speeding at 6-9MPH above the limit. Thing is, I wasn’t speeding, and blipping your lights as you passed me was really disconcerting and made me jump.

I don’t know why you did it to the next three cars you passed, either, you asshole,
Geof

Dark Night of the Soul

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I’m now working from home, but I can’t stand not having music going when I’m working. I often answer the phones, so it was important to me to have an AppleScript that would quickly do the following:

1. Mute the system volume so I can focus on the customer.
2. Pause iTunes.
3. Setting my Adium status as On-the-Phone so my co-workers know I’m on the phone.

The fun thing is that I’ve got to get the script to do the reverse when invoked again. Otherwise, what use is it?

My first step was to use Leaf Raker’s suggestion for how to mute the system volume with AppleScript. The approach there works fine; the only issue is going to be that the system volume returns to 50 when it’s invoked a second time. If you’re always using this script during the day, though, that shouldn’t be a problem. Thanks, Leaf Raker, for getting me started!

The second step is pausing iTunes. If you read the iTunes Applescript Dictionary, you’ll see that it has a verb “playpause” that toggles the status of iTunes. This is helpful for me when I’m listening to a podcast while working, because I would like to not lose my place while I’m on the phone. So it’s tell application "iTunes" to playpause to make it happen.

The last step, of course, is the Adium status change. The Adium wiki has a page on their AppleScript support, and after a number of tests, I found that this worked:

tell application "Adium"
	set thisStatus to the status type of the first account
	if thisStatus is available then
		set the status type of the first account to away
		set the status message of the first account to
		"I'm on the phone; be with you shortly"
	else
		set the status type of the first account to available
		set the status message of the first account to ""
	end if
end tell

Now, this only works for my setup because I have the one account in Adium on this machine—Adium, for me, is dedicated to the IM support I have with work. Multiple-account setups would take some sniffing; this is done with of account "somename", rather than “the first account”. Of course, if you’re in my situation—working from home, wanting to set your status away when you’re on the phone—you probably only have one account in Adium that needs toggling. [You better not be on multiple IM channels if you're telecommuting, or you won't get anything done!]

The whole script is as follows:

set curVol to (get (output volume of (get volume settings)))
if curVol > 0 then
	set volume output volume 0
else
	set volume output volume 50
end if

tell application "iTunes" to playpause

tell application "Adium"
	set thisStatus to the status type of the first account
	if thisStatus is available then
		set the status type of the first account to away
		set the status message of the first account to
		"I'm on the phone; be with you shortly"
	else
		set the status type of the first account to available
		set the status message of the first account to ""
	end if
end tell

You can also download this: on-phone.scpt.

As always: shared without license and support. I’ll help if you ask questions in the comment, but I am under no obligation to get you to done. I worked to figure this one out, so you can work, too.

Unlike with my Mail scripting, I invoke this with the excellent Launchbar, although I’m sure that Quicksilver will invoke it for you, too. I just put this in ~/Library/Scripts for safe-keeping.

• Kids with autism are not bad, naughty, or wild hooligans that are a danger to society. They are not products of bad parenting or unloved children. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find better parents than a lot of the parents of autistic kids. Most families have a single autistic child and other neurotypical kids - proving that it's not logically the 'nurture' that is missing. Our kids do not need physical punishment. Here are some studies on why physical punishment is a bad idea anyway, let alone with children who have problems with relationships and development as it is.

• Autistic does not mean Rainman. Yes, some autistic children are savants. But not every autistic child has a "gift".

• On the same note, not all autistic children are mentally retarded. Quite the contrary, most autistic kids are just average IQ. It's just hard to test when you can't tell what the child understands because they don't speak.

• Our kids may look the same, but they're not. Autism is a hidden disability - meaning that if you looked at a photo of an autistic child, you wouldn't be able to tell from their looks they had a disability. That doesn't mean it's not real. Type 1 diabetes is an invisible disability, too. Keep in mind invisible doesn't mean it's not there. You just have to look closer.

• Autism is not a cop-out. Visit a household with an autistic child during the day to witness what autism REALLY is. I promise, it will blow your mind.

• We parents are not martyrs. If you think special needs' parent's patience extends to rude and/or ignorant people, think again. We are very protective of our children, and we get defensive and angry just like everyone else. Don't be the one to push that button.

• Our kids can hear you, even if they're not looking. And odds are, they understand exactly what you're saying. They don't respond to things like other kids. Watch what you say, because autistic kids also have fantastic memories.

• Stimming may seem odd, but it's perfectly natural. You probably stim, too. Click your pen? Chew on your pencil? Play with your hair? Chew gum? Yeah, that's stimming, too. My kid likes to run in circles more than click his pen... It's a matter of preference. But everyone does it.

• We are just parents. They are just kids. We will make mistakes. So will you.

• You have no idea what really goes on in our lives. We are juggling meetings with the school district, doctor appointments, constant barrages of evaluations along with therapies and teacher meetings. We get crushed at least once every six months by evaluations that compare our child to others and note their massive failings (rather than their progress, in most cases). We go through it so much that there's not even enough time for us to heal. There is a constant gaping hole in our heart from hearing about how our children are not the same.

• We want to know about our kids just like every other parent. Please don't think that we use autism as an excuse. We can't fix a problem unless we know about it. It is more of a challenge to teach our children, but we want to teach them.

• Pride and ego left us long ago. Go to a grocery store, doctors office or meeting with an autistic child throwing a tantrum and you would totally understand. It fails to phase us parents after a few hundred trips, although the stares and uncaring looks still sting.

• Despite the challenges with our children, we love our lives. We love our kids. We don't think they need to be 'fixed' - just 'helped'. We want our children to succeed - on their own terms. We don't ever want pity, although a kind ear is appreciated more than you could ever imagine.

• We hate talking about the "could have's" or "should have's" of autism. Especially if they can't be fixed. We can't go back in time and change whether or not we got an epidural, had a c-section, had preterm labor or fed our child formula. If there's nothing we can do about it, there's no use telling us. We guilt ourselves constantly anyway, we don't need anyone else's help. There's a difference between helpful and hurtful. If you walk that fine line, remember to be kind.

• We love our kids with all our hearts. Because of (not in spite of) their differences. They have taught us more than we ever imagined we would know. To us, different is our normal.

• We know our kids love us. We don't need hugs or kisses to prove it (although some autistic kids are affectionate!). We know anyway.

• No two autistic kids are alike. Some kiss everyone they see. Some hardly stim at all. Some rock in the corner. Most are very happy. If there's a diagnosis, there's no need for second guessing. And if the parents think that their child has autism, they're probably right. Disabilities are frightening to parents, and it takes a long while to accept the possibility. If a parent voices a concern, they have already analyzed it to no end. Accept the possibility.

• Autism diagnoses are not handed out easily. It takes months to see a specialist, and usually several appointments to get the autism diagnosis. Doctors are very sure before they label a child, and won't give a diagnosis if there's any question whatsoever.

So this is how the left side of my Mac screen looks these days. Dock on the left—the bottom, with the 3D shelving, is for sheep—with is shifted up to the left, with hidden dock items transparent. At a glance, I know my system state. Here’s how it’s done and what’s there:

Dock shifting and transparency: TinkerTool is how I pull that one off. As new programs are opened, the Dock lengthens towards the bottom of the screen.

Dock apps: Finder, Drobo Dashboard, Mail, iTunes, Safari, Seasonality, TweetDeck [sigh], and a Fluid instance for Fever. If my machine is up and running, that’s what’s booted.

That shiny thing next to the Dock: that would be iPulse, which despite not being updated for a couple of years now still works great. It beats the hell out of any other “What’s my Mac doing?” apps that I’ve found. The only thing that I haven’t been able to consistently do is live in that spot on the Desktop, but not exist as a window, like …

That album art thingy at the bottom left: CoverSutra. That shows me, at a glance, what song is playing in iTunes. Also, it pushes data to Last.fm for me.

The blank space in between is stocked, during the workday, with a slide-out Adium instance: if I hover over the left edge halfway between the Dock and CoverSutra, I get my Contact List for Adium. I mainly use Adium as a status awareness tool for Matt and Nathan using my on-the-phone AppleScript. The co-workers all look at my IM status to know if I’m on the phone or not before calling me, transferring people to me, or deciding to take the incoming phonecall themselves. It’s pretty fun.

What’s in your Dock? How do you manage it? Windows (l)users need not respond.

Business and marketing — those are funny subjects for an engineer to study, aren’t they? As I see it, though, it is my duty to try and gain some business sense. Understanding how the product I am developing fits into the broader marketplace allows me better develop the product. My prior employer thought so, since the graduate school curriculum that they endorsed had courses in Strategic Management and in Cost Accounting.

In the far future, I will probably start my own business. I am not sure whether I will pursue some kind of engineering company or branch out into a completely different field. I just know that, some day, I want a business all of my own. Until then, the business reading that I do is for my company and my own edification.

What do I study? Mostly, I read weblogs such as Seth Godin, Pamela Slim, and Michael Lopp. I also tend to devour books on various topics such as Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (yes, I know me reading books different topics is a huge shock — I like to read, get over it).

If you know of any other really good business weblogs, please let me know in the comments. I am always looking for more information to consume.

Yes, another Computer Science related Jack of All Trades post. I promise that this is the last C.S. related post for a while. Why do I like studying algorithms? Probably the same reason that I like studying Mathematics; both are very precisely defined and have interesting characteristics for study, but no matter how much you learn, there is always more to discover. Recently, I read an article in ACM Queue called You’re Doing it Wrong that discussed performance trade-offs between two algorithms and how, given the traditional understanding of computing systems, one algorithm clearly performed better. However, under real-world conditions with modern processors, secondary effects caused the other algorithm to perform better in this particular use-case. This article has gotten me thinking about how particular algorithms are chosen for a task and how much effort should be put in to choosing the appropriate algorithm.

In my studies, I am of course consulting the honorable Knuth and his venerable The Art of Computer Programming. It is slow going; if I ever finish it, I will probably be an aged man. However, I will know more about Algorithms that most people should. I am not sure that this study has any practical consideration outside of my field of interest other than training my mind to think logically. Maybe that is reason enough to study it.

Here’s Liza eating her birthday cake at the giant locals kid birthday party we had a few weekends ago.

Here’s Eli pretending to be a robot in the box of one of Liza’s birthday presents. A pirate, my little pony robot.

And lastly, here are the two monsters I finished last night. They are going to my nephews when they visit in a couple of weeks.

Of all the subjects in Computer Science to grab my interest, it is the study of programming languages that holds a place closest to my heart. Honestly, I am not entirely sure why. It probably hearkens back to my AP Computer Science course in high school. The particular assignment is not really important, but the class was allowed to implement it in either C or Pascal (the two languages being taught at MSMS at the time). After everyone turned in their assignments, which took several pages of code to accomplish, the professor showed us his implementation is a weird little language called Lisp. His version of the program took around 3/4 of a page &mash probably 1/4 of the length of any of out versions. Seeing the simplicity of the code made me want to understand what it was that was unique about Lisp and sent me off to the library to get whatever I could about the strange little language.

Fast forward 13 years. Now, I have done a bit of serious programming in C and C++ and dabbled in Lisp, Forth, Python, SmallTalk, and Haskell. Each of these languages has their own pros and cons, but learning about their differences and their implementations fascinate me. So, I have bought several books on language (and compiler) implementation and have allowed my math studies to be directed towards the theory of Programming Languages. I lurk a good bit on Lambda the Ultimate, a programming languages weblog. I have played around with some simple implementations of Lisp and Forth clones and want to ultimate build one of those two on a machine from the ground up &mash that is, make the language implementation into the Operating System for the computer, like it was in the old days.

I am interested in making programming more accessible to everyone. I am not sure what form that will take, but I believe that it come out of the concept I mentioned in my AI post about Fuzzy Literate Programming, something that does not yet exists but I bank will occur in the future.

• UAH is looking for three to four students to work with the Sports Information Office for the 2010-2011 school… http://fb.me/DZtF6AZq #
• There will be a press conference for 1:30 p.m. on
  Friday in the Varsity Room of Spragins Hall to announce the new… http://fb.me/EqXqRlt5 #
• There will be a press conference at 1:30 p.m. on Friday in the Varsity Room of Spragins Hall to announce the new… http://fb.me/BXDEOLLB #
• http://fb.me/BX39XWtG #
• Chris Luongo will be the next UAH hockey head coach. #
• @BigMamaAJ Lou will do a great job. I know that he's who Danton wanted to replace him. in reply to BigMamaAJ #
• @luongodotca Wrong Luongo, my friend. in reply to luongodotca #
• And so begins the reign of King Louie I. Congratulations Coach Luongo! #
• Chris Luongo Named Head Coach of UAH Hockey | UAHHockey.com http://fb.me/D6VU6bSA #
• Luongo named head hockey coach | UAHChargers.com http://fb.me/yQv8Ipco #
• Our favorite comment from Coach Luongo after the press conference, to us: "Couldn't you have found an NHL photo of me?" #

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Artificial Intelligence has fascinated me almost as long as computers have fascinated me. I do not know whether it was C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars, the ship’s computer from Star Trek, or Johnny Five from Short Circuit that interested me in AI, but it was surely one of them. Actually, most of those characters also got me interested in robotics as well. The thought that we (read: humans) could build something that could interact with us like one of us is very appealing to me. While I have often dreamed about AI, I have never really had a good opportunity to study it in depth. So, I am attempting to correct that. I have, sitting on my book shelf, The Emperor’s New Mind (Roger Penrose), The Society of Mind (Marvin Minsky), Programming Collective Intelligence, and AI: A Modern Approach.

Getting on a bit of a soapbox, though, I do not believe that true artificial intelligence or artificial consciousness is something that we, as a society, want or need at the moment. Putting aside doomsday movies like the Terminator, Wargames, and Colossus: The Forbin Project, how would we as a society deal with a machine that cam up with, and stated, “I think, therefore I am”, à la Bicentennial Man? Could we ethically cripple a machine that is capable of thinking by forcing it to obey our commands through something such as Asimov’s First Law of Robotics? Luckily, I do not believe that computer scientists are any closer to achieving true artificial intelligence anytime in the near future (it has only been 10 years away for the last 50 years). If I believe all of this, why strive to understand it better? Well, I believe that there is a place for some intelligence in machines, such as the Computer in Star Trek. Ideally, I would like to see something like Fuzzy Literate Programming — a way to specify what we want a computer to do in more flexible terms (read: more English-like) with the caveat that we won’t be specifying exactly what the computer must do; some sort of stepwise refinement must take place. I will probably write more about that concept as it continues to gel further down the road, but that idea is the main reason why I have an interest in AI.

Multiple sources close to the situation have advised SaveUAHHockey.com that UAH assistant coach Chris Luongo will be named the head coach of UAH Charger Hockey at the scheduled 1:30 p.m. press conference at Spragins Hall on Friday. Luongo replaces Danton Cole, who took a coaching position with USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program in June.

Luongo came to UAH two years ago, joining his former Michigan State teammate Danton Cole in Huntsville after a sixteen-season professional career. After a three-year stint in the minor leagues, Luongo made his NHL debut for the Detroit Red Wings during the 1990-91 season before spending time in the Ottawa Sentors and New York Islanders organizations over the course of the next five seasons.

A member of three U.S. teams (96, 97, 00) in the World Championships, Luongo spent seven seasons playing in Germany. Following his professional career, he served as an assistant coach at Wayne State University prior to joining the Chargers.

A Fraser, Mich., native, Luongo along with his wife Cheryl and two sons, Anthony and Christopher live in Madison.