Waste of Space

…not that I celebrate it, but Happy Easter (Fröhe Ostern) to those that do!

Me? I’ll just nap the day away…

Got my 2.0 update done today at the Smart Center of Tampa… only had to wait 2 hours this time. I was still quoted that it should only take 45 minutes or less since I supposedly had everything but the transmission upgraded while Miranda and I waited for 5 hours on Saturday.

I’m done with this 2.0 update…. not going back to the dealer unless the car is dying or something.

The ONLY thing that I know for sure that they did was wash my car and modify my transmission…. and I’m not sure if this 2.0 update will be beneficial as far as gas mileage goes. The bobble-head factor of shifting isn’t as bad as it was… it’s still present though… and it seems that the car revs higher before shifting too. I’ll have to pay attention to that closer as I drive it more.

I’ll also have to look for some before/after shots of the VIN and VECI to see if those were changed… doesn’t look like it at first glance. I’ll also have to pull up the passenger floor to see IF they even changed the battery out.

….like I said, I’m done…. over it…. don’t care. The car runs, so I’m fine with that.

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Had a fiasco at the Smart Center of Tampa today trying to get my 2.0 upgrade.

They called me last week and told me about an event they were having today to get a bunch of 2008 owners to come in and get their 2.0 upgrade. I went ahead and scheduled my appointment to have it done today during their event… they even provided me with the best time to bring it in.

My wife and I show up @ 11:00am and there is a small crowd of others who had already dropped off their cars for the upgrade. So I sign the paperwork to authorize the work to be done on my car and my wife and I start walking around to pass the time…

Mind you, I was repeatedly told that the entire upgrade should take about “45 minutes to an hour”.

Two hours later, my wife started to wonder if we did the right thing by bringing it in…. 3 hours later, people were starting to ask if they could “borrow” the dealer cars in order to run errands that they had planned to do 2 hours ago.

After 5 hours of waiting, one of the people came up to me and my wife and apologized… “I’m sorry, but we had not planned for this big of a turnout. We have taken your car over to the servivce area, but it is still in the queue. Would you like to remain waiting here or would you like to take your car and bring it back another day?”

WHAT??!? Where was this guy 3 hours ago to tell us there was going to be a wait???

My AS prevents me from displaying most emotions, but my wife doesn’t… and was quite capable of showing her frustration. “Fine,” I thought to myself, “I work within a mile of the dealer, so I’ll just drop it off after work during the week.” Again, they gave me the spiel about it only taking 45 minutes to an hour… MAYBE even shorter as there won’t be such a crowd.

My advice to anyone who has NOT yet had their upgrade… if your dealer is holding some kind of “event” for the upgrade, AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS!! Just schedule it like a regular appointment and avoid the hassle.

There are apparently quite a few different “upgrades” in addition to the transmission being performed that varies on the type of Smart you have. I’ll post mine when I get it done… if ever.

Here are some iPhone pics from the day:

Miranda with a Smart to match her bag…

Miranda next to a TINY Subaru van…. Miranda’s 5′ 4″ btw…

LOL!

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For some reason, the ass decided that he should read a flippin’ newspaper instead of pay attention to driving.

Not only was he driving slow, he would hit the brakes or swurve whenever something caught his eye on the aide of the road… like pedestrians or bikes.

When I eventually passed him on Busch Blvd, I saw that his newspaper was covering the steering wheel and his eye fixated in it.

I mean really??? Was that article worth risking the lives of everyone you pass?

Ass.

After hearing about Asperger syndrome, my wife and I have joked that this is what I had and why I was the way I was. It wasn’t until later that we stopped joking and seriously started considering that it may be true. Thanks to more and more stories and studies done about this disorder, we were easily able to find out just how closely I exhibit the traits of those described with AS.

A friend of ours lent a book to my wife called Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s and I went out and got the audiobook version. I was amazed to find out that someone else had the same type of “thought pattern” and behavior’s as I do. I didn’t feel quite so alone in the world.

Many people that know me may not realize it, but social interaction (for me) is almost always “forced”. By that, I mean that I’ve thought about how a person is supposed to react to a situation and forced my fears to the side and spoke to you. In the mid to late 90’s, I went to various nightclubs and bars as a way to try and rid myself of this way of life that I been leading. I tried to make myself into someone I wasn’t and only found that I seemed to be role-playing a life that was never mine. I’m sure that I probably hurt a lot of people back then as a result, but I can’t really remember much of it.

I think my lacking memory of most social interactions in my past is because it wasn’t “me” in those situations…. I was playing the role of someone else that I thought people wanted me to be. It’s like that saying about how it’s easier to remember the truth rather than a lie. I think this is the cause behind my lack of memory… I mean, how could I remember so many details from my early childhood and NOT recall my life from 10 – 15 years ago?? I’ve even had relationships that I only remember because of pictures.

If you were hurt by me, I’m truly sorry….

In retrospect, I wish that I would have been diagnosed with this (or whatever I have) sooner… so I could have told people why I am the way I am. Instead, I chose to hide it and be someone else. Having to “learn” how to interact with people on my own has NOT been an easy/quick journey. It’s only been since the last couple of years that I’ve been able to understand how to interact with people… and it almost seems natural to me now. Almost.

There’s still the fact that I think EVERY little thing through… beyond whatever was intended. I seem to take forever to answer simple questions like ‘What kind of vehicle do you drive?” or “How do you feel today?” If I didn’t bring my wife with me to the Doctor’s office, I’d be there for hours trying to fill out their forms. Literal interpretations of things and thinking too much into something have got me into a lot of trouble. When I took my SAT’s in high school, I don’t think I finished in time because I found too many faults in the questions being asked…. thus resulting in my low scores. I think I got a 600 or 700… combined score. I usually failed most of my classes and attended summer school every year…. despite having set the grading curve on many exams and passing my tests.

It was my thinking that if I learned how to do something, why should I have to bring it home and do it again? I hated homework, but couldn’t express my views to my parents because I didn’t know how and was ashamed of myself for being “broken” (in my eyes).

Just a little earlier today, on our way home from Target, we passed a car that had a magnetic sign on the side that was advertising something that mentioned “Save the Planet”. I started to chuckle and tell Miranda how incorrect that statement was. “It should really read ‘Save the Humans’.” I told her, “The Earth will be fine, even if we kill all the animals and humans on it. Look at the other planets in the solar system, they are fine without us. The Earth has been through a lot worse than we can imagine living through, so it should really read ‘Save the Humans’.”

“You’re reading too much into it.” she said. I can’t help it…. it’s how I am. I don’t pretend to be saving the “planet”…. we are trying to save the “environment”, but I suppose “planet” sounds less selfish than “humans”. It’s like this for pretty much everything…. I find myself keeping my mouth shut about a lot of things because of this.

Sorry… tangent.

I even feel that these traits of mine are becoming noticed at work. I’ll nit-pick every little thing…. I was recently asked if we could install Winzip 12 on a server, but I could not provide a straight answer. Our Windows servers are built with Winzip 10, so I started thinking “…are we licensed to install 12 on a server? we may be able to on our laptops, but what does the EULA say? Has it been thoroughly tested/approved in a Lab environment before putting it on production servers?”

If only that person would have asked someone else…. maybe they would have just said “Sure, we can do that!” Instead, I find myself constantly telling people that they’ll have to ask my manager. I’m a stickler for procedures in a world where it’s hard to find any.

Some other AS traits I have seem to be the “rocking” back and forth or repetitive movements that drive my wife nuts. I’ve also found that I’l start getting fidgety when in social situations or groups of people. I’ll often have to hold on to my hands to prevent them form moving about and grabbing my ear repeatedly. I also find solace in being buried under pillows (especially on my head) or while under the bed. For some reason, that sort of thing relaxes me….. but put someone else in there with me and I’ll get anxious and claustrophobic. I have an unusually high sensitivity to sounds…. hearing things that others can’t. I have been able to tell people when an electrical appliance was turned on in another room…. or in a different apartment. I can hear clocks/wristwatches ticking in other rooms. I had to take the battery out of a wristwatch I got as a present because stuffing it under a bunch of socks at the bottom of a drawer didn’t silence it enough. I have an aptitude towards science and many other concepts/ideas, but don’t have vocabulary to explain what’s going on in my head to others.

I’m on some meds that help tone down the anxious feelings, but I still have to resort to popping a Xanax every so often. I don’t like having to do that, but if it means making me appear more “normal”, so be it. As much as I may seem to enjoy the solitude, I like to be around people and involved in conversation… I’m just really bad at it.

I hope that some sort of “cure” is found for AS, because I wouldn’t want my kid(s) to go through this. At least I’ll have the experience with it to be able to identify if they’ve inherited it.

I could go on for quite some time, but I think that this will do for now. I’m going to make myself a PB & J sandwich.

Cheers,
Mark

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A few years ago, I bought a 500 GB external USB drive called a “My Book – Essential Edition” made by Western Digital to store my personal data on…. you know, as a backup of stuff on my computers.

….well, about a year after using it, the hard drive inside it failed…. and I mean the old “grinding disk clicking noise of death” failure. Numerous systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) couldn’t even tell there was a disk present when it was plugged in. Data Recovery software could also not find a drive…. so I bought a newer, more “advanced” version.

The 500 GB “My Book – Pro Edition”…. one specially made for use with Mac’s…. thinking it would be better….

WRONG!!!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing a problem with the external drive ceasing to be recognized by my Mac Mini. I have been using it to store our MP3’s and other media for use with our iTunes & AppleTV.

…it’s worked fine as that for at least a year or more. Now, it’s starting down a path that I fear could lead to another disk failure.

I started getting errors on the AppleTV saying that it couldn’t play whatever files because it couldn’t recognize the format…. it would even stop playing in the middle of a song/movie because of the issue as well. When I looked at the Mac Mini, I found that iTunes had stopped “responding” to anything and that I couldn’t browse to the external My Book either. The Console would show tons of “Disk I/O Errors” for the stupid thing.

Only when I unplugged the My Book did the Mac return to a normal operation state and iTunes functioned again. However, since all the media was on the My Book, I’d have to shut down the Mac, unplug the power to the My Book, plug it back into the Mac, then power both items on…. and even then, the Mac would only recognize the external drive 80% of the time.

So rather than risk losing everything, I decided to just copy it all to another drive. Well, it turns out it wouldn’t be THAT easy…. the My Book would act up a few minutes into transferring data and I’d have to repeat the whole unplug process all over again.

Thinking that an OS upgrade may help, I upgraded the Mini to OS X Leopard….. but that didn’t help.

After a bit of Internet searching, I found varying accounts of similar stories… but nothing the same. A key point that many of the stories had in common was the mention of a bad power source for the My Book. So…. I removed the hard drive from the My Book enclosure and plugged it directly to the Mac Mini via SATA-to-USB cable.

So far, so good…. it’s transferring data to the other drive without issue and has already lasted 3 times longer than it did when it was inside the My Book enclosure.

I’ve learned my lesson… sorry WD, but I will NEVER recommend or buy another external drive system made by your company again. Your internal drives have never given me an issue in the past, but the external ones? … never again.

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Just installed the Beta of Windows 7 that I downloaded from MSDN (no shady downloads for me!) on my MacBook Pro…. and it runs much better than the version I have on my IBM ThinkPad with XP Pro.

Granted, I used Microsoft Virtual PC on the IBM and VMware Fusion on my MBP, but it was light years faster and more “stable” on the Mac.

When I tried to install the “VM Tools” on the Windows laptop, Windows 7 spouted the lovely BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH error and proceeded to restore itself to the previous version. Seems that Microsoft has a bit of a graphics driver problem… presumably…. that VMware doesn’t seem to have.

I still find it funny that I can run a virtual instance of Windows on my Mac and have it be faster than one on its own hardware.

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So…. it looks like we own 350+ DVDs! WTF???!!

I know that isn’t as much as some people I know (Master Tim Jacobs holds the record too my knowledge), but it’s still @ $3,000 worth of friggin’ plastic.

Sad.

This is part of my grand plan to document most of what we own for insurance purposes. I mean, should we ever loose the collection due to theft or disaster, that’s a lot of $$$ to try and replace it.

Here is a link to our online library: MFdN Library

Currently, it only contains our movie collection…. soon it will also house our MP3/CD and book collections as well!

This site was made using some remarkable software I bought called Delicious Library. Sorry Windows/Linux folks…. it’s only available for the Mac (…for now). It uses the built-in iSight camera (or external iSight) to scan the barcode of whatever item you are cataloging… making it sooooo much easier to create the library.

Cheers!
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Unless you’ve seen the magnificent fireworks displayed every night at Disney World or EPCOT, you’ve never seen a “proper” display.

Happy Gregorian New Year!

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My amazing wife, Miranda, decided that she wanted to decorate our apartment patio for a decorating contest that our complex was holding. With only three days to decorate and barely anything for a budget, she was able to throw all of this together…

My wife = teh awesome

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