writefln and ASCII

Georg Wrede georg.wrede at nospam.org
Fri Sep 15 05:01:02 PDT 2006


Steve Horne wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:08:52 +0200, Don Clugston <dac at nospam.com.au>
> wrote:
> 

Some three years ago, IIRC, (it was in August, that I do remember) there 
was a quieter time in this newsgroup, and we all started talking. I'm 
too lazy to go check, but I seem to remember that there were others too 
with this kind of background or "life".

I certainly am one of them. Your two long posts I could have written 
exactly the same, about myself. Now I'm 50 and while I've started to 
understand stuff in recent years, I still can't work in a normal office. 
Too much strain with the social stuff overloads me, and people just 
subconsciously perceive me as weird. So I'm an entrepreneur, not by 
choice but by force. Which is not good since I'm not greedy enough to 
work hard at this, I'm too shy to make successful elevator pitches, too 
nice to crowd prospective customers, and too honest to really sell 
myself or my products.

Virtually all of the people who know me (I don't use the word friend 
here, for the obvious reason), are Aspies whether they know it 
themselves or not. Both men and women.

Some people I have known had the strategy to wear weird clothing, thus 
advertising and emphasizing that they're not "one of you". Seems to work 
pretty well, since the neuro-normals automatically give you much more 
latitude "if it's tangible that you're Different". Alas, that seems to 
get harder by the day, as it is cool to be different nowdays, and all 
kinds of averagies pretend to be different. :-( :-(

Another tack is to become an artist. (What a joke, but I'm serious!) 
Slap some paint on canvas, take pictures and flaunt them everywhere. 
It's okay for an artist to be weird. I know a woman who has a really bad 
case of aspie, and she did this. For a while she actually made a living 
with it(!), her social life was bearable (in spite of all her romances 
ending within 6 months (including me) -- for reasons she never found 
out), but then she got bored and fed up with all this. So she quit, and 
became an electronics parts telemarketing rep. (No joke here either.) 
Well, at least she gets her daily share of social interaction over the 
phone, and then she goes home to solitude. (She lives in Connecticut.)

A third is to go somewhere where everybody is like us. What first comes 
to my mind is the Computer Science Department of any university. There 
the roles are reversed: most everybody is like us and the neuro-normals 
are an endangered species over there. Same goes for math, chemistry, 
engineering and such.

I always thought that with time I'd learn to mix in with the 
neuro-normals, but it turned out that for each year that I learn new 
ways to cope and be "same", they too grow up and the ways of expressing 
sameness become just that much more subtle. So I'm always behind. That's 
probably why everybody I know are 10-20 years younger than me. 
Obviously, that in itself also gives more latitude. Good thing is I look 
10 years younger than I should.

Ever since I was a child I had this thing for computers. And already 
then I knew that it's because they're rational, consistent, and 
predictable. (Microsoft Windows didn't exist at the time.) It was a 
haven, a refuge shelter to come to. No two-face double crossing 
backstabbers there, just silicon and logic. A bliss, peace and quiet.

My dad's the same, but he never understood it, and today he vehemently 
refuses to even discuss anything aspie related. He was lucky in his 
life, he got a pilot's licence in WW2, the war ended the day he got the 
licence, and he became an airline pilot. You're basically alone with the 
airplane when you fly, and since you're the boss nobody pesters you. And 
you don't have to play the social games, you just tell everybody what to 
do, period. And because you don't have to bother with all this human 
interaction, you end up having more time to get to know the plane, read 
the regulations, the flying theory, and conjure up emergency responses 
for a variety of (taken at a time) unlikely hiccups, some of which 
you'll invariably encounter during your career. Saved his butt a few 
times. And he ended up being recognized and admired for this.

He did admit the other year that had he been working with any regular 
job, he'd probably have ended up in the gutter, no question. And this 
he'd only realized recently, watching the travails of his 5 children 
(he's now retired with his 4th wife).

Being a long-haul bus driver is basically the same (even if somewhat 
less glamorous). Driving delivery vans, becoming a craftsman, or 
actually any job where you work alone -- and where you don't get 
tasks-to-do, as opposed to sitting at a desk and the boss telling you do 
this-and-this till Friday -- are probably a lot better choices for us 
than others. Jobs where the activity for the moment also arises out of 
that moment, seem to be better suited /for the well being/ of us. Oh, 
and if we have (or deliberately develop) a passion for what we do, then 
we become experts like no neuro-normal ever could. And that means the 
stuff we do starts giving and becomes interesting and we become 
respected and admired.

The Total Quality of Life should probably end up hugely better as a 
"painter - delivery van driver" than with any more conservative choice 
of lifestyle.

---

I've been here for some 5 years, I think. And only this summer I've 
written my first non-trivial program in D. Most of the rest of my time 
has gone to pondering on this kind of crap, my existence, why my ex wife 
stole my three kids and I don't get to see them, what I should do with 
my life, etc. Yeah, and it's so easy to tell someone else what to do, 
but when it comes to oneself, you just kinda don't see the forest for 
the trees. (Like knowing this made me see it any better.)

Well, the software is now actually in use! And the controlling hardware 
(that I both designed and assembled -- without any kind of education in 
such, and without any prior experience) works, except for a bug that I 
should be fixing right now, as opposed to writing here. :-) They control 
a plastics reprocessing machine that uses 20kW of power. That's /twenty 
thousand watts/, equal to the combined consumption of ten suburban homes 
in spring or fall. Someday I may (or not) write about it here. ;-)

---

Writing this took five minutes (literally). Proofreading took three 
hours: I kept wandering off. Oh, well, another day wasted.



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