VOIP chaos

It never rains, but it pours - isn't that what they say?

In South Australia, it seems, it pours somewhere else but never here - but that's another story.

Voice over IP - well, it seems that the Linksys WAG54G router has a generic problem of losing its Ethernet connectivity. That, apparently, had happened to ours. Alas, there appeared to be little alternative to replacing the unit. So now there's a sedate looking little box in its place that boasts not only the wireless that was working fine before, the ethernet that wasn't but now is, but a VOIP connection as well.

Now it gets interesting. Our service provider responded, a year or so back, to my partners request to invoice her instead of me for its services by creating a new account. They left, apparently, the NodePhone service on my old account, and they never told me they'd done it. So the voice over IP account I'm working to activate is actually not attached to the account on which I'm trying to activate it on.

Confused yet? You're not alone.

Smartphone chaos

Have you ever noticed that that first week back to the office after a break is a bit different? This one certainly was for me - while work itself stuck pretty much to the script, the world around work was transformed by a blizzard of technology.

I don't much enjoy making gadgets work any more, but I'll step into the breach if there's noone else who's enthusiastic around. I like that smug glow that follows on from solving a curly one.

We have a VOIP setup that hasn't worked for a year.
We've acquired a new wireless print server that should make it easier for our wired household to put stuff onto paper.
We've acquired a pair of smart phones - a Samsung Omnia and a Nokia E71, just to keep all the axes of choice open.

Just to start to get to grips with the E71 is more than a little effort. Working through the script to setup the print server a few times without success is worse.

Still, steady patient effort has never failed me in the past. I can practice the new skills of bringing other people into the conversation as I work through it.

Which way did they go?

You'll probably recall the scenarios from the "Bugs Bunny Show" - the fuzzy little dude - a dog? - following his dreams into ever darker situations while others pursued simpler goals around him.

Never mind. It's all history now. But the underlying disaster always pursues me - how could I have done better given the information I had, and how come I'm not doing better now that I've improved the information I'm working on.

Asperger's is a really crippling - subtle, but crippling - disorder. Undiagnosed asperger's leads each sufferer into life as a hall of mirrors. Eventually, we work out some accommodation with it, and sacrifice our dreams on the altar of what has to be, but the underlying sense of injustice never goes.

At some point, perhaps, we arrive at a diagnosis. Usually it's too late to make any real changes, and so we apply the adaptability that has kept us afloat thus far to the newly redefined problem and go around again. Nothing (expletive deleted) changes.

Yes, I can learn more. I can practice swallowing frustration, desperation, you name it. And always there's a point at which I choke, and spray disaster around me. And wish I was anywhere, anyone, but me. It's really a shit hand to try and play, but then, there aren't a lot of alternatives.

Happy new year

There's a curious inevitability about this time of the year. The sands are running out on the old year, the dice are cast for the new one, and we just watch in awe as the whole thing rolls by.

A bit like a market shakeout, really. But, somewhere in amongst it all, each of us is making choices, or failing to make choices, every moment of every hour of every day.

I've been known to be a bit gloomy sometimes. There's a cast iron sort of resistance to change that infects nearly everything I've ever known about. And yet, the only reality that enforces that resistance to change is the behaviour of individual human beings.

At least this time around the clock I can see some small gains from the year gone by - compared to the stock market, I'm doing pretty well - but none of things I really wanted to change are changed. I've begun to write, and the last time I tried that was around 1969. I've remapped my brain, a little but that hasn't made a lot of difference. Well, not in the real world outcomes, to date.

So, another round. It's what we do that makes the difference in the world. Even when we do it without acknowledgement or recognition, without the doing there can be no change.

Fighting the diagnosis

There are a number of patterns that become distressingly familiar as the years since diagnosis pass - "if only it were different" is a frequent participant, and "it's not my fault goddamnit" gets its share of the airspace too.

Here I am at the end of a year where my team fought a runaway project to a standstill, and led it - quivering and docile - back into the exercise yard. I got the boot from the team leadership, and am forced to fight as a grunt - I'm just following orders - once again.

It's not an unfamiliar scenario, although it's the first time I've had to go on doing the job after the axe fell. It just seems unfair.

Deep background

So, how does one get to a sixth decade without ever suspecting that something like aspergers even exists?

Not so hard really, in the twentieth century. The last decade was nearly over before aspergers even became a respectable diagnosis. Even then, it was assumed to be rare and interest in it was confined mainly to parents trying to work out why their little darling wasn't performing as expected.

When I was young I spent a lot of time in hospitals. Tonsils at the age of two, mastoidectomies a few times during the next half decade, lost hearing, various other minor distractions. That lot, coupled with my dad changing locations every few years and me changing schools even more often, meant that noone ever paid a lot of attention to my existence as a social being. I scored well in exams and that was all that counted. 11+ at ten, GCE O levels at 15, and then Australian university entrance at 16. That was it for education, of course. Once the enforced structure of school was taken away I was gone.

A year or two into the wandering minstrel thing, I tried university again. Still hadn't mastered basic skills like talking to people, though, so it didn't go much better. My fundamental take on life was still that everyone else got by with the same equipment I had so there wasn't anything to complain about. Sad.

Meanwhile, I'd soaked up a lot of what was in print or freely available on the nature of life, the universe and everything. It seemed that, since everyone else got by with the same equipment I had, there must be important things I didn't know yet.

It all went together rather well. Eventually, the government very kindly paid for me to learn programming and I had it all.

For some things, aspergers helps

I mean, it's not all grim news. We have to look on the bright side, don't we? Dazzled, we're easy work for the slaughterman.

For example, I'm a diabetic. Without fairly rigid behaviour patterns it's hard to be insulin dependent. After a few decades, there's precious few of us staving off the disabling and deadly long term effects of the disease. Aspergers helps with that.

Knowing about aspergers? Well, in part that's bad because it's a distraction. Equally, knowing about it opens the door to better understanding of - perhaps eventually even better success at - the business of life. Of course, that's a distraction too but one has to have a reason to go on trying.

And, of course, there's systems work. I'm not yet convinced that one can live normally in the people world and still get along well in the depths of information systems. All the people I've met down here are strange in one way or another.

There may be exceptions. One can only go on evidence.