Blog of Doom

I decided to start posting the names on spam I received. I’m shaking my head at some of these. So, I have received email from the following people:

Retrospectively O. Meat
Shiners I. Resource
Garment B. Symphonies

I think this is going to be a regular feature.

The other day I had one of my most embarrassing moments at work.

I was in a meeting. It had been called by a man we’ll call John Doe. He’s from Africa, and is an engineer. When, at the end of the meeting, we began writing up action items, I kept referring to John as Tom (also not his real name). Tom Deer is another African engineer who works in another building, but who I deal with semi-regularly as well.

When I realize what I was doing, I stupidly said “Why do I keep calling you Tom?”

I said that because I really didn’t know why. Then someone else in the meeting said “You are calling him Tom because of Tom Deer.”

Well, needless to say, it was quite embarrassing. It wasn’t true, at least not consciously. I apologized and fortunately, haven’t seen John since. Two black African engineers. I can’t tell them apart? Except I can. It was just like when you call one of your kids by the other child’s name. It just happens. The child is usually in trouble so you don’t have to worry about it.

Sigh.

Is it the first stages of my mental decline? The voices in my head say that’s ridiculous.

This is something that bugged me the last time Morgan changed schools. You get a sheaf of forms from the new school, in which you need to enter all kinds of information. Name, who does the child live with, address (so far so good), phone numbers, emergency contacts, alternate people to contact if they can’t contact me or Ash (that would be nobody, btw, how pathetic are we! More on that further down, though).

“Why are you bugged by this?,” you ask. “It’s all good information for a school to have.”

You are correct, and thanks for asking!

It bugs me because every school he’s ever been to has exactly the same information. His kindergarden school has it. When we moved him to a new school, they asked the exact same question (sometimes on the exact same form! More on that later.) When he hit first grade, same questions. When they moved him this time, same questions.

Why not just have a group of standard school district forms and send them on to a new school? The information hasn’t changed. If it had, they could just ask before they forward the information. “Excuse me Mr. Shaffer, has any of the personal information we have on your family changed?”

“No.”

“Right, then we’ll just forward copies of it to the new school.”

“Great! Thanks!”

Nope. Well, we know its the same information, but we just need you to fill it out all over again.

“Why?”

“If you could just fill it out.”

“Sigh.”

Hmm. What else? Oh yeah, we have no backup person in case the school can’t call me or Ash. Well, all our friends are in New Hampshire or Maine. All our family is in New Hampshire, Maine, Houston or San Antonio, so who are you going to call? Why don’t we have friends here? Because we can’t get out! We have a son with autism and we can’t get a babysitter for him to have a nice night out and meet people! Shut up!

Anyway, that was a concrete example of bureaucracy and why I hate it.

Amazing!

Today the most awesome thing happened. My son slept in until I woke him up.

In fact, he didn’t even get up until after I went into his room to wake him. Normally, now that he’s on his new medication he will get up early. I mean really unbelievably early. I’m already getting up earlier to get him off to his new school, since the bus comes at 6:45 a.m. instead of 7:35 a.m. This is the first time in a couple of weeks that he wasn’t already up and making noise at 4:00 to 4:30 in the morning.

Let me tell you something. I don’t want to get up that early. Hell, I don’t want to get up at 5:15 in the morning if my alarm is going off at 5:30. Those 15 minutes are like golden drops of honey to me. I want to sleep for those 15 minutes, dammit! But, my son has other plans. He’s up. He wants to get going and start his day!

So, I drag my ass out of bed and tell him that he can stay out in the living room if he’s quiet. But, if he makes too much noise, he’s going back to bed. That usually works, but depending on how soon it is before I have to get up, I will either stay awake or fall back to sleep.

But, like I said. Not today! I woke to the alarm and no sign of Morgan. These are the days I go in to check if he’s still alive. Yep, he was. Still breathing, and rolling around on his bed like he does sometimes. He eventually got up and we started his day. After I got him on the bus, I took out the garbage and went back upstairs for a cup of coffee.

I woke up in my chair at 9:00 a.m., two hours later, feeling somewhat refreshed but an hour late for work already.

Am I starting to have “faith” because I’m intellectually lazy? Do I want to shuffle off responsibility for things on to some remote god that I can blame for things? It sure might take the pressure off me if there was a god. Things happen. They have nothing to do with me (or are not under my control). I need to just accept this. I don’t need for there to ba a higher power to explain that things aren’t always going to go my way. The big problem, however, is how do you justify morality or objective standards of behavior if there is no god to spank you for misbehaving?

Morgan and School
Our school asked to have a meeting on Wednesday about Morgan. They want to move him to a new school that deals with behavior problems. Morgan’s behavour problem is wantering off (link to October story). They daid this would be a temporary move. Ash and I were concerned about disrupting his routine, especially near the end of the school year. For those of you who don’t know, routine is the mothers milk of autism. People with autism are daily assaulted with sensations they can’t block out or filter like you or I can, and they are in stress mode all the time. Routines and habits make things better for them, because that is one less thing for them to worry about. They know how their day is going to go, because they have a routine.

We thought this would be a couple of weeks, but it turns out this could be for the entire next school year. Temporary is a relative term here. On Monday, we will visit the new school to see the classroom and meet the teachers and principal. Right now my main concern is how they plan to change his behavior. What are their methods? Do they involve restraints? I just don’t know. I need to see what they do before I will agree to send Morgan.

If we decide to send him there, I’ll be speaking to someone about whether he will even be going back to his regular school when he’s done at this new school. Should he go back to his current school? If the problem is only with him, then yes. But is it? I don’t know.

Here’s something about me that has never changed.

I like to watch traffic. At work I look out of my window and I can see one of our major highways. One of my favorite things is to look out of that window and watch the cars going by in the distance.

I like watching airplanes do the same thing. Out of my back porch there is a line of airplanes that go by every evening. I like sit and watch them.

When I fly, I like to look out the window and see the cars on the ground driving around on the roads.

When I was a child on the military bases, my favorite sound was the airplanes taking off in the distance. They were heading somewhere and I just liked to listen to them.

I wonder what, if anything, that says about me. I’ve thought about it and I don’t know. Maybe it means I’m detached from my fellow man and prefer to watch people going somewhere from afar rather than dealing with people face to face. Who knows? I’m usually good at self examination and I can be brutally honest with myself. When I thought about this I was stumped.

Anyway, that’s something about me that you probably didn’t know.

Morgan is trying a new medication. We started him on a free sample presciption on Monday March 6, when he was on Spring Break. We wanted to start him out when we could watch him ourselves and assess the right dose. We started him on one 5 mg pill for a couple of days, then upped it to two pills a day. After a couple of days we went to three a day, but quickly backed down to two a day.

We found that on one pill, there was really no difference. On two pills, he responded well and we saw a really positive difference. We finally went to three pills, but that was too much. He went into hyperactive mode and went overboard. Now he’s back to two pills (10 mg) a day and we’re waiting for his 3 months prescription to arrive now.

Giving him his pills is a real bear in the morning. He really doesn’t like taking these pills, mostly because they are larger, caplet sized. His old pills fit nicely into a mini-peanut butter cup. These new pills are larger and he’s not supposed to chew them, either. In the beginning, giving him the pills was a major drama. It usually ended with me raising his voice to him and then Ash waking up and weighing in.

Recently, he’s been getting better, and I don’t have to raise my voice. It takes a while to try and convince him to take the pills, but I don’t have to really raise my voice for him and we don’t wake up Ash any more.

Today, I read an article on LewRockwell.com about attempts to open an all women’s health club to men. I think Wendy McElroy puts it well for men. Are you more interested in revenge against women who forced their way into all men’s clubs, or are you more interested in justice.

If you disagree with all-(insert sex, race, religion or whatever) clubs, then refuse to associate with them, let them know you are refusing to associate with them and why, and show your disapproval with people who join these clubs.

Forcing people to accept members can ruin businesses and causes more bad feelings than the original exclusivity ever did.

Ash posted on No Place Like Home about my little oopsie this week. The short story is that I went in to work on Monday when I had the day off. I didn’t realize it until I pulled into the deserted parking lot. I was not looking forward to going in on Monday anyway because I was feeling sick, but I hauled my tired ass out of bed (more on that later) and dragged myself in.

I stopped at Starbucks first for a wake up call (Venti Latte, which means Large Latte). While I was in line, I saw that they had the cups Ash was looking for! I told someone a month or so ago that I was looking for these cups, and they told me they didn’t have them and couldn’t get any. Someone else was listening in and I guess they took it on themselves to order some. When I got in, there were only two left. I got one because I knew that we already had one.

So, I was feeling like the day wouldn’t be a total loss, since even though I had to work I got a cup for Ash. Check out No Place Like Home for information on the cups and why we like them.

When I finally got to work and saw no one was there, my first instinct was to just turn around and go straight home. Instead, I decided to go in. I brought my laptop back to my desk and was thinking to myself that I could get in a couple of hours of work today, when I finally said “To hell with this!”

I didn’t do any work, I didn’t even turn on my computer. I just hooked it up for easy startup the next day, and went home. When I got home, it turned out that Ash had already locked the top door lock, which you can only open from the inside (this is one reason we can’t leave Morgan alone for a second inside our apartment). When I unlocked the bottom lock and tried to open the door, it didn’t budge. Morgan heard it and came up to the door. He was upset because he couldn’t let me in, so I tried to get him to open the top lock.

“Morgan! Unlock the door!”

Clicking sound of the lock. Morgan has re-locked the lower lock.

“No! Morgan, unlock the door!”

This time it worked and I could walk into the apartment. As I was walking in, Ash was getting up and starting to yell at Morgan for unlocking the door and opening it. I explained to her that I didn’t have to work that day after all. She seemed a little confused at first, but it finally sunk in and she said “Good.”, then went to bed.

So, I got a day off I wasn’t expecting, Ash got to sleep in another day, and Morgan got to have his daddy home with him all day. Overall, win-win-win.

Wireless Security problem I didn’t know about

I use a wireless router for my laptop connection. On my iBook, I have an Airport card. My son, Morgan, has an Airport Extreme card for his connection, while Ash connects with a cable to the router. I learned a couple of things the other day while listening to the Security Now podcast.

First, I learned that disabling SSID broadcast doesn’t work for security. It also makes your network run slower because the router is invisible. That makes it not worth the supposed benefit. The other item I thought was good, but isn’t, is Mac Address filtering. On most routers, you can tell the router which Mac Addresses are allowed to connect to the router. This means I can tell our router that only my iBook, Morgan’s Mac Mini, and Ash’s G4 can connect. The way it can tell is by looking at the Mac Address the computers tell the router they have.

So this doesn’t work at all. Why? The mac address of a computer is in the packets of data being sent back and forth between the router and computer. All you have to do if you are a hacker is sniff and collect the packets. You now know the mac addresses that are allowed to connect to the router. The kicker is that most any computer these days can report any mac address you tell it to. By default, they report the correct one that is actually assigned to your computer, but you can change it.

What can you do? Encryption. Almost all routers can do WPA encryption. Note that this is different from WEP encryption, which is better than nothing like closing a door without a lock is better than nothing. You want WPA encryption, which is basically unbreakable by hackers. You just use the same password for the router and your computer and you are all set. Remember that this means the password is your weak link in the security chain. You absolutely must pick a good password. WPA passwords can be up to 63 characters, and you should use them all. The 64th character is automatically a dollar sign, so you can’t use it.

Find a good random password generator that will handle a 63 character password. I know, you’re saying “I can’t remember a 63 character password!” Remember that you don’t have to. Put the password in a text file. You only have to type it in once on the router and once on the computer and you’re done. You won’t have to type the password every time you want to connect. Once you have the password in, you can copy and paste it from the text file if you need to set up a new computer. If you do this, set up a really really difficult password, your network will now be as secure as you can get it while still being connected to the internet.