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Meme Clobbered – Where Was I?

3 Apr

H has meme clobbered me and as I took the piss out of 37 Signals so mercilessly I can no loger cry off such things. Damn you karma!!

Where Was I One Year Ago?

One year ago I worked for a financial services company as their in house designer/developer. We were also getting our daughter established in a mainstream school, my wife was six months pregnant and I had gone through about 3 re-designs of this site in a month.

Where Was I Five Years Ago?

2001 right? Erm….I was working for a design agency (clients included Disney, Nat West, Jarvis and others) churning out very dodgy Flash based websites and living the dotcom dream. Shorlty afterwards I was laid off. The dotcom nightmare.

Where Was I Ten Years Ago?

Christ. In 1996 I was at University doing my degree and was doing a bit of web stuff to make ends meet. I had just met Naomi. I was thinner. I was fitter. I had a better blood pressure. Other than that I cannot remember/am not saying.

Its customary at this time for me to clobber three other people with this meme. I shall therefore choose one design blogger, one autism blogger and one skeptic blogger.

Announcement About Megan

21 Mar

As most of you know I stopped blogging about Megan publicly some time ago.

Well, I really miss it. It really irks me that I can’t tell people whats going on in her life and how she’s doing.

What I’m, going to do is set up a private blog which will require people to enter some sort of password to access. If you’d like to access that blog then please leave a comment below.

I’m also getting a bit ticked off with this design. It looks really poor on shorter posts like this. Thing is, I’ve customised WordPress so heavily I’m worried about screwing it totally. Damn. On the other hand Veerle has raised the bar and I’m getting a design itch that requires some scratching. It seems to be quite ‘cool’ to go for a dark bg so I probably won’t do that but all the blue on here is getting on my nerves a tad.

I’m thinking – background styled to look like a notepad and plenty of Comic Sans. Yummy.

Hating Sanity: My Very Own Sockpuppet

13 Mar

Someone (and its really not hard to guess who) has created a little sockpuppet site for me. Whomever (ahem) it is has also started sprinkling the blogosphere with spicy comments from ‘me’.

How cool is this? Someone (ahem) is worried enough about what I say to start a whole new blog to sockpuppet me!

I could get annoyed about such a thing but really, we have to look at it this way – I must be making a much bigger impression on someone (ahem) then I thought I was. Enough for them to be really worried about the success I’m having in getting through to people.

But lets not ruin the possible fun here. Lets have a bit of a Cluedo type blog post to work out the suspects….who is ‘kev’????

Is it:

a) JB Handley?

Evidence for: He’s got form for trying to coerce people to his beliefs. He’s also good for a bit of name-calling.
Evidence against: Probably knows I wouldn’t be anything but amused.

b) SueM?

Evidence for: Has the wit.
Evidence against: Lacks the motivation.

c) John Best Jr?

Evidence for? Has been repeatedly made to look foolish by a myriad of people on his own blog and other peoples but as I have adopted a position of purposefully getting in his face, I’ve probably stuck in his brain longer than most. Possibly because I continually post his racist (equates Muslims to terrorists), homophobic (believes homosexuality is a perversion which can be cured by a dose of ‘self-respect’) illogic (believes autism was invented by Eli Lilly in 1931) back in his face.

Lately I pointed out to Joseph that attempting rational debate with John was useless. His two crowning moments for me were when he said that there was no autism in China prior to 1999 (whereupon he was deluged with comments pointing to the many studies that predate 1990, let alone ’99 in China) and that autism didn’t exist before 1931 (whereupon I pointed out the diagnosis for case studies stretching back to the 1880’s) and it was at this point that I referred to him as ‘spectacularly stupid’ by which I meant that I was occasionally in literal awe of how stupid he truly was.

Evidence against: Can someone that stupid have a mildly amusing idea like this?

d) Sigourney Weaver?

Evidence for: Took umbrage at my post disagreeing with her statement that autism is a gift. Also annoyed that I confessed to lusting after Gillian Anderson and Geena Davis as well as her.

Evidence against: Is quite obviously in love with me.

So there we have it. Put on your deerstalkers, sniff your class A narcotic of choice, play the stringed instrument you like the best, indulge in a same sex relationship and claim its platonic, be insufferably condescending all the time and inspire lots of really good black and white movies starring Basil Rathbone.

Fire Cannot Burn Truth

9 Mar

Something of a departure in a way, I want to talk today about something that blogging friend Orac is talking about today, namely that a bunch of arsonists have burnt down the office of the Holocaust History Project in an apparent attempt to stifle the work that goes on there.

The HHP is a vital cog in the machinery that fights against the neo-fascist perpetuated denial of the Holocaust. It puts out educational material to schools in the US designed to educated about the nature and effects of the holocaust.

The Nazi regime is estimated to have murdered approx 275,000 disabled people during its reign, reasoning that:

It was argued that allowing disabled people to live and have children, led to the “unfit” reproducing more quickly than “the fit”. It was said that this weakened society’s ability to function efficiently, placing an unnecessary toll on non-disabled people.

I’ll leave you to reflect on how disconcertingly familiar that sounds to some sentiments repeated today by a certain section of people.

On the grounds that disabled people were less worthwhile and an unfair burden on society, a widespread and compulsory sterilisation program took place. This began in 1933…..sterilisation was followed by an active killing program, which started in 1939

Under a secret plan called the ‘T4 Program’ (T4 was a reference to the address of the program’s Berlin HQ – Tiergartenstrasse 4), disabled people in Germany were killed by lethal injection or poison gas. The T4 Program saw a string of six death camps – called “euthanasia centres” – set up across Germany and Austria. These centres contained gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls.

This is why organisations like the Holocaust History Project are vital. If we are ever to learn from the mistakes of the past we cannot allow the ignorant and brutal to hold sway.

Who’s Blog Is It Anyway?

1 Feb

And so, the Signal vs Noise debate rumbles on – a company who’ve been mildly successful with some intriguing and OK products and who up until fairly recently were well respected in the design/dev blogosphere decided to play the ‘holier than thou’ card when tagged with the ‘four things’ meme.

For the uninitiated, a ‘meme’ is like a viral game, comprised of a series of questions that is passed from blogger to blogger. They’re far from the be all and end all of the blogosphere and being tagged can induce feelings of ‘do I _have_ to?’ but at the end of the day, its just a bit of fun. If you don’t want to participate and you get tagged all you have to do is simply not post your answer. No one cares, no one gets hurt and the meme rolls on regardless.

The ‘four things’ meme is a series of questions about four things e.g. name four jobs you’ve had, four movies you could watch again and again. Utter bullshit stuff for sure and about as important as a wet fart but still, mildly interesting on occasion when the meme lands on the blog of someone you know or someone you admire but don’t know.

So what was 37signals response to all this?

The listed each question with ‘pass’ written into each answer, making it totally clear they felt the whole thing beneath them. A few choice comments were left, particularly this one from Matthew Oliphant:

This is what I take away from this post: “I hope people stop writing what they want to write about on their own blogs and write only about things I find interesting.”.

Realising that they’d pissed a few people off, the 37signals guys decided to invent a whole new meme (one supposes as some sort of ‘reward’ for us peons), entitling the post A meme worth spreading.

Great name. As Jon Hicks commented with masterful sarcasm:

Pass. I bow to your far superior meme creation techniques.

Jon went on to elaborate:

You know how I said that one of my concerns for 2006, was that blogging amongst the design community was becoming too serious and worthy? Well there we go…..After all if you can’t arse around on your blog, where can you? C’mon!

In that spirit of arsing around, I offer my own thoughts to the debate – during an idle surf I stumbled across what looked like an intruiging product. I dutifully took a screen capture which you can see here.

Please watch this space for details of my soon-to-be-upcoming court appearance.

More Blog Housekeeping And Some Thanks

19 Jan

First the ‘thanks’.

I wrote a series of articles I collectively titled Project: New early last year. I wrote them to try and disseminate the idea of web standards to web developers who weren’t yet taking a standards based approach. The series takes you from taking an initial brief to cutting over the final project to the client – all with web standards, usability, accessibility etc to the fore.

After launch a few people emailed me to ask if they could thank me by way of making a financial contribution to which I replied that that was much appreciated but that I didn’t do it for the money but that if people really wanted to then they could buy me a little something from my Amazon wish-list.

Every so often then a little surprise package from Amazon drops through my letterbox and yesterday was no exception. I got back from work to discover a copy of The Elements of User Experience awaiting my return and a friendly anonymous note thanking me for my hard work.

So thank you Mr/Ms Anonymous, I’ll enjoy having a read of that, it was very thoughtful of you.

On a related note, I’ll shortly be starting work on Project: New Part II and will be again looking for expert contributors. I know Pierce from Distorte is up for it but if you, or anyone you know is also interested then I’d love to hear from you. This one’s going to be looking at server and client side scripting. You don’t need to be an out and out expert who knows everything – I want to discuss ways these things work for people new to them and how they can help a web designer/developer. Familiarity with Javascript or ASP or PHP or RoR is ideal.

Lastly, I’m afraid that I’ve been absolutely deluged with spam over the last few days. So much so that I considered turning comments off for a while but I think I’m getting on top of it now. This means that comment sensitivity is pretty high and thus you might stand an elevated chance of your comment being auto-deleted (in extreme cases) or moderated and placed in a queue. If your comments seems to disappear then give it a day in case I don’t get to it straight away. If its not there after a few days then its almost certainly been eaten – sorry in advance.

Blogging Housekeeping And David Kirby

12 Jan

I’ve been in email communication with David Kirby over the last week or so. You may remember that I wrote awhile ago about how a New York Times interview quoted Kirby as saying that if the amount of cases of autism didn’t decrease before the end of 2005 then that would be a severe blow to the autism/thiomersal hypothesis.

The confusion stemmed from Kirby claiming 2 months later in an email conversation with blogger Citizen Cain the exact same thing but this time with a date of 2007. I wondered why Kirby had moved the goalposts.

At the time I was predisposed to put it down to trying to wriggle out of a stated position but the more I thought about it, the less likely that seemed so I mailed David Kirby to ask him. He responded:

Many thanks for your note. The Times misquoted me. I actually asked for a correction, but did not receive one. What I told the reporter is that “we should know in the next few years.” I believe this is also what I said on Meet the Press.

Which is true. The transcription shows that thats exactly what happened. Kirby went on to say:

The Times wrote: *Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child’s third and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year, he said.* When I said “the next few years,” I meant by around 2007. I would never say “this year,” and that is why I requested the correction.

All in all then, I think I have to apologies to David Kirby in this instance. Its pretty bad of a prestigious newspaper like the NYT to actively mislead people like this and its very perplexing as to why they wouldn’t issue a retraction or correction in such a vitally important matter but thats not Kirby’s fault any more than it is mine so I think we have to take Kirby at his word here and go by what he wrote in Evidence of Harm and repeated on Meet the Press.

What we can do is take Rick Rollens to task though. He actually _did_ state that the first fall off would come last year. David Kirby again:

I did, however, quote Rick Rollens as saying “the first impacted birth cohort should start showing up in 2005.” But that is Rick’s opinion, not mine.

So – confusion alleviated. We can all go back to watching 2007.

A Very Autistic Xmas….

30 Dec

….hurrah!!!

First off, its traditional to talk about what your stash was so here’s mine. First up was the traditional Dad pressie of socks. A nice 3 pack of Pierre Cardin beauties. I’m wearing them right now and can report positively on their efficient and comfortable foot covering qualities. I don’t think my socks will ever reach the same heights of fame as some socks have in the past but hey – they work for me.

Next up, my kids each got me my most favourite of Xmas pressies – a book. Each reflects my abiding love for all things historical, particularly British history, so I look forward to cosying up for the next couple of weeks and getting immersed in Tudor England, Norse legends and the British military.

My beautiful and wise wife got me 2 gifts, first was the new David Gray CD which is hauntingly good. The man has a voice that is as ‘right’ as the clear note one gets from tapping the side of a crystal glass.

The second pressie was a rather spiffy camcorder which means we’ll finally be able to make movies of the kids, something we couldn’t afford until we saw how cheap this camera was.

Life over Xmas is an interesting time when you have an autistic family member. Its a hell of a lot of change to have to deal with when you are someone who doesn’t cope well with change and the change in routine (parents home from work who usually aren’t, the bewildering concept of ‘presents’, a bloody great tree in the front room, lots of people dropping off or picking up pressies, cards all over the place) can be very confusing.

We try to maintain a balance. Our non-autistic kids need and deserve a Xmas with all the trimmings but our autistic kids can’t deal with too much Xmas so we scale back the decorations to a tree and a wreath on the front door, autistic kids presents aren’t (or are only partially) wrapped and we tackle the Xmas dinner in stages so that everyone who can cope with Xmas has enough materialism and face-stuffing to suffice and those who struggle don’t get too overanxious. For those people, doors to bedrooms are left open and favourite items are prominently displayed so that retreat is always available if needed.

Sometimes it gets too much no matter what you do and when you also have a young baby who picks up on emotional excess that can result in a run of bad nights. At these times, parents fall back into the ‘shift sleeping’ pattern of one staying up through the night and one taking on the day. For the one taking on the night this can have unexpected benefits as this parent has the chance to watch an entire footy match from start to end without any other adults complaining! Indeed, on particularly bad nights, this parent can watch _all_ the scheduled matches over the Xmas period thanks to Sky’s excellent ‘Football First’ program and the magic of interactive TV. This parent is happy to report that the lads have done well in the last few games and seem to rising clear of the relegation spots that looked so inevitable a couple of months ago.

One of the main areas to monitor is the social aspects of Xmas. Understandably, friends and family want to pop over to see the family, drop off and/or pick up pressies but these visits aren’t as simple as ‘popping over’ to an autistic person. The ground rules for each visit must be established with the visitor before they come over so that the purpose and length of each visit can be understood and tolerated and those rues must be adhered to. Depending on your social circle this can sometimes result in a few people who grumble but screw them – just don’t invite them next year. They take us as we are, not how they want us to be. Our friends are all magnificent in this respect and 95% of our families are as well. One or two can’t commit to putting others needs first but thats their loss. People popping over ad hoc is forbidden in our family. Its just not fair to our autistic kids and our kids come first.

All this organisation puts paid to the traditional British pastime of ‘getting bladdered’ for tired parents but luckily this means one learns to appreciate the glass or two one manages to get of the nice Soave or Chiraz. It also means that your Xmas’s become much more family-centric. Indeed, our whole lives have become much more family-centric since autism entered our collective life. Thats a present that is beyond value.

A Statistical Year in Blogging

20 Dec

Its that time of year when we all look back at the year from the perspective of your own blogs/ideas/thoughts etc. I’ll have some more to say about that in a bit but firstly some incredibly dull fascinating visitor statistics for this site this year (excludes Bots,spiders and feed-readers):

This site has received *112,412 unique visitors* this year.
It has received *272,008 total visits* this year.
It has served up *2,609,187 pages* this year.
It has received *5,292,786 hits* this year.
This sites most popular day is a Thursday.
More *Americans* visit this site than any other nation.
This site has been visited by people from *152 countries*.
This site has *approximately 220 subscribers via Feed Readers* (most from Bloglines but an increasing amount from Rojo).
The most popular browser is *IE 6.0* with Firefox 1.0.? coming a very close second.
The site has been indexed by *45 Search Engines and Directories*.
The site’s most popular referrer is *http://cssvault.com* with nearly 20,000 unique referrers this year.
The site’s been found by searchers utilising *15,111 unique keyphrases*.
The most popular phrase to find me is ‘autism blog’ which brought 429 people to the site.
*52 people* have added this site to del.icio.us
I currently rank: 13,387 (285 links from 110 sites) on Technorati.
The site has a PR that fluctuates between 6 and 8 on Google.

Thats all very interesting and confirms my theory that my amount of readers vastly outnumbers my active commenters. As an aside, I’m very curious as to who all these lurkers are – if you fancy dropping a ‘hi’ to the comments of this post that’d be great – you can do it anonymously if you so desire :o)

This year saw me start blogging more about autism as a social/medical issue and less about it as it relates to my daughter. This is something of a shame as I know many people enjoyed reading posts about her. There are a few reasons why I stopped which I’ve discussed in other places.

Also this year saw the launch of Project: New which was an attempt to provide a starting point for new web designers and web designers new to web standards to get a good start in the field. It didn’t end up quite how I expected but I was very pleased with both the response it received and the end product itself. I plan on starting Project: New Part II at some point next Spring. Part II will concentrate on client and serverside scripting.

More recently, I came to the conclusion that whilst the blog was good for provoking discussion that that discussion frequently become bogged down in side issues (I’m as bad as everyone else in that respect) so I started up a forum to deal with autism from a scientific point of view to create a calmer and more rational place – the blog is more heat than light. I’m hoping the reverse will be true for the forum.

As for next year, I have plans. As I say, Project: New Part II is crying out to be written and I’m planning a ‘from the ground up’ revamp of the blog and forum. I want to present a more accessible environment and besides, I’m getting bored with this design ;o)

Autism/Science Forum

9 Dec

I’ve set up a new resource.

Its a forum which I intend to use solely for the discussion of the science that supports/refutes various things under discussion that are alledged about autism.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of where one stands on the issue and all science is allowed to be discussed – whether its peer reviewed or not, I would imagine though that science that is not peer reviewed should be questioned by those who disagree with its conclusions.

Forum rules:

The forum rules are very simple. These forums will only be used to discuss the science that is used to support/refute certain allegations about autism. No discussion on any other topic will be entered into. As this will be a science based environment, the atmosphere should remain polite, with no profanity, abuse, short-temperedness, sarcasm etc. Polite disagreement is encouraged but you must be prepared to back up any quotes you provide with a scientific source. Journalists don’t fall under this category.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons.

Firstly, blogging software isn’t really up to the the task of ongoing discussions. Forum software is perfectly suited to that task. Secondly, it seemed to me that whatever subject I start to talk about lately always falls back to a discussion on the state of the science underpinning autism – providing this forum will hopefully mean a lessening of the inevitable dilution of the subject.

The forum is easy to use – create a username and password and then go and post or read.

Now, the thorny issue of my own beliefs come up and how impartial I can hope to be in allowing some things to be discussed. I hope I’ve shown that I don’t edit or delete anything unless its plain old abuse, illegal or if I’ve asked people not to. However, if the forum takes off then I _may_ need a few moderators to help with crowd control etc. In the interests of impartiality I’ll try and get mods from both the neurodiversity *and* biomedical belief systems. Thats for the future though.

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