Things trully can change. :)
Although I know I haven't been around aidpage very much recently, I'm still very committed to the idea of people helping people.
In my own life, my ex-wife suddenly agreed to forgive a good portion of the child-support debt so I could move back to Texas to be near my children. We've been here for a few months and have had the children to our apartment several times. I missed a lot of their growing up (13, 10 and 7), so we've got a lot of catching up to do, and I'm really grateful that I'm here now to do that. :) I see some of my autistic qualities in all of them one way or another. Alex talks in a ramble the way I often do (if you get me excited). Nicholas doesn't hear his name until about the 4th time you've called him. (Not uncommon with autistic kids.) Calli is very shy but methodical. One day I looked to see what she was doing on the computer and she was playing Spore. She told me "this is as close as you can get to a pellican with this game." And believe you me, she knows. That sort of thing was never one of my interests, but she's all about it. My oldest daughter Alex on the other hand wants to be a writer and is hoping to work on the Sonic the Hedgehog properties.
I've almost resolved my drivers' license suspension, which had been ongoing for nearly a decade due to the child-support issues. And I'll have a car soon, which is important, since there's still no public transportation in Arlington yet. How they thought it was a good idea to build a new football stadium for the Cowboys in an area without public transit, I'm not sure. I think the city might be in for a rude awakening once they start playing. ;)
And I've found a lot of great books that have really helped me to learn how to help myself. Some of it is about autism specifically, but a lot of it has really just been learning new ways of thinking and dealing with challenges. One book I can't recommend enough is Carol Dweck's Mindset: the new psychology of success. This book has really challenged me and helped me to understand my own role in the job challenges I've had. You can read more about how it relates to the software industry specifically on my technical blog. I also finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and although I wasn't expecting to find information about autism there, I think I may have stumbled across the single most important piece of information I could find on the subject. He mentions a researcher by the name of Paul Ekman who's spent many years studying facial expressions. This is fantastic! One of the biggest challenges faced by people with Asperger Syndrome is the fact that the fusiform gyrus (the part of the brain that reads facial expressions) is underdeveloped and so we don't have the instinct to look at or read facial expressions. So my next step is to start reading his books and learning how to understand them: Unmasking the Face and Emotions Revealed. If you'd like to help me out, I'd be flattered if you picked one of these or one of the other books about body language off of my Amazon wish list, however, I'd be equally happy to hear that you bought one of these books for someone else you know who has Asperger Syndrome or who has a family member with autism. :)
I also recommend for anyone, but especially for people with Asperger Syndrome, reading Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism and Richard Wiseman's book the Luck Factor (preferably in this order after first reading Mindset).
In the next couple months I plan to start a local chapter of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP) and I'm spearheading this new project to get people on the spectrum employed. The company is named Autelligent Laboratories and we're using the world's biggest and best laboratory, the internet, to get pepole involved. And we've had a great initial push with an interview on change.org. Tell your friends, announce it on Twitter, post it to your blog and update the wiki.
And most of all, have a great day! :)
