Why be serious when I can have fun with it?

Out of all the sites I frequent, SFGate definitely has the highest ratio of people whose heads are firmly wedged where the sun doesn't shine.  One topic that tends to bring out the worst in people, for example, is fast food -- the whole Bay Area as a whole has a high ratio of jackarses in that regard, but I saw the worst example yet a little bit ago:
"Ugly" to describe fast food? I'm pretty sure it's the result of consuming that garbage that makes someone ugly. Inside and out.
At first, I only noticed the first 90% of what had been said -- the sheer magnitude of idiocy in such a small space was too much for my brain to handle -- and posted this in response:
Right, because people that eat only the "right" food are always much nicer than ones that would ever go near a fast-food joint, and would never ever do something vulgar like judge how good a person is by their restaurant choices.

(That was sarcasm, in case you were too busy enjoying your superiority complex to notice...)
After pasting his words here, I realized my mistake, and knew I had to fix my oversight, so I added this:
I overlooked the and-on-the-outside aspect of your bizarre comment... Without making the obvious insult, I'll just give you some "advice" -- you shouldn't make comments suggesting you can't see other human beings while sounding like a troll, or eventually you'll be asked whether you suffer from cranial rectal syndrome...

Autistic acceptance infinity ribbon images

Original "Autistic Pride" symbol/ribbon
I've looked many times in the last few years for a new image of an autistic advocacy/pride/acceptance ribbon... The official design for the movement is a rainbow spectrum chasing around an infinity symbol, but the lone accurate graphic I keep finding just doesn't feel right, and specifies "autistic pride" which tends to be a big turn-off for newbie parents.


The alternatives all boil down to taking an infinity symbol, then having a linear rainbow gradient run across it... That's nothing at all like how a ribbon or even how the infinity symbol works (it's not flat!), and I'm kind of picky about things like that, so it wasn't quite enough.

Last night, while writing a comment at Slate's Dear Prudence column, where a woman had written for advice on ensuring her newly-identified-AS daughter gets to enjoy Thanksgiving, I felt frustrated at the inability to find an appropriate avatar. I liked the spectrum Moebius Strip one that Oddizm made many years ago, but few people would realize it wasn't just a pretty picture

Just blurring it didn't look quite right even with the edges sharp. I tried using it as a guide for the Path Tool (which I'd then Stroke with a rainbow), but I never did master Paths and soon gave up.  I ran through all of the available filters that looked remotely applicable, but didn't get results I liked.  Eventually, I tried Gaussian Blur + the hand-controlled Smudge tool to mix colors.

A while of working later, I had an acceptable (not gorgeous, I'm not an artist!) ribbon in both original proportions & a more condensed version that fits in a square, plus had one square version with text (shown).  I'm picturing the basic image here, and clicking on it will bring you to a gallery of the other variants/sizes. Feel free to use it as an avatar online, to edit it, or whatever you want.

Ignorance isn't curable by living naturally

I just ran across this comment by a bozo at SFGate:
Medicine? LOL.
What, like Pry-zagothon-D, for mind worms?

Or "the little purple pill for little purple... problems?"

Eff all that JUNK.

Live naturally, live well. Aspirin is white willow tree bark, in nature.

TV is for selling things. Remember that.
Yeah, you know me, I couldn't just sit back and keep quiet in response to that... Thankfully, it was one of those moments where I've written many similar comments in the past, so I was able to easily rehash the idea with this:
Wow, so if I just 'live naturally' I'll stop needing hormones for my lost ovaries, asthma preventative & treatment, pain control & meds for birth defects? So all of those war veterans with PTSD, depression, pain from injuries, etc. would be just fine with no meds needed if they 'lived naturally'?

Because of attitudes like yours, I spent a YEAR trying every natural treatment for depression I could get info on, thinking I'd be 'weak' or 'drugged' if I took a single pill, and slowly getting worse the whole time. I finally asked for help when the pain was unbearable as suicide would put my pets in the pound.

Check out this NYT article - when an author did intense research to write a book on overmedicating kids, she found the ones on meds needed it as nothing else was helping: We've Got Issues by Judith Warner

I don't have TV & I block web ads; I read, write, and learn. Maybe you should do the same: living naturally sure isn't fixing your ignorance!

Nooo, not my monitor!

When I was using Fedora, one of the more bizarre issues that started cropping up is that when -- and only when -- it was left unattended for several hours, my external/only monitor would shut off and refuse to come back on for several minutes.  The power light would flicker for about two seconds when I asked it to turn on, and my sharp (likely autistic-linked) ears could hear all kinds of weird (and now predictable) electrical fluctuations, but no picture.  Turning the screensaver off, turning it on, changing it, etc. didn't help.

I switched back to OpenSuSE, left it overnight, and to my shock, the monitor was still on the next morning.  I figured that I'd just solved the problem, saving me the very real possibility of having a dead monitor, especially since I can't afford a new one and don't know how to fix it yet. That is, until today, when I found the monitor in "sleep" state and it shut itself off for several minutes when I moved the mouse to bring it back up. This is really frustrating -- there's a ton of non-optional expenses in the next few months (and I don't mean presents), and this was the second Westinghouse to pull this on me in a row.  Bleep Westinghouse.


Time to do some serious research on fixing LCD monitor power issues, I guess.  Well, I had planned on learning how to fix electronics via soldering iron sometime, and I'll be thrilled for a week if I pull it off!!

OpenSuSE, Fedora, argh

I wrote quite a while back that I'd settled in OpenSuSE 11.3 Linux, and was extremely happy with it.  Well, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but a couple of months or so ago, a stupid mistake on my part updated it to 11.4 Alpha, breaking my ability to run a huge number of programs and generally making me unhappy.

So, after a lot of frustration one day, I decided to try something else entirely: Fedora 13.  Aside from some initial hassle, and a few things I hadn't managed to puzzle out yet, that went quite well, enough that I recommended it to a fellow novice.  So I was quite pleased when it turned out that, hey, Fedora 14 was out!

I used the little updater that runs in the background, then does its magic after a reboot.  The next morning, I merrily rebooted the computer...and was told I didn't have enough disk space -- but not which partition it wanted space on.  It also, as I soon learned, did something so I couldn't boot into the still-untouched 13; fixing the free space issue didn't help.  Meanwhile, the Fedora 14 Live CD I'd downloaded for kicks inexplicably makes the screen go blank after filling the "F" logo in.

So much for that idea. I didn't know how to fix 13, or if it could be fixed, so I put the OpenSuSE GNOME 11.3 live CD in -- and installed that instead.  I'm typing from it now, noticing the interesting mix of things it does better than Fedora & things Fedora definitely has a huge lead in.  I can't figure out for the life of me how I got their bizarre problem with Firefox's failure to respect the font hinting settings (a non-issue in Fedora) fixed last time, and the solutions I've found/tried aren't the one I used last time.

It's at times like this that I actually do understand claims that Linux will never conquer the desktop, or why Ubuntu is ahead (though it has the same stupid Firefox font issue, they also have a ready-made fix). Arrgh.  Maybe I'll just find a fix so Fedora 13 will boot, or the way to forcefully reverse the screwed-up "upgrade" from OpenSuSE 11.3->11.4alpha, since both installations are still sitting peacefully in their own partitions on my drive...