Savage calls autism a "fraud and a racket," the blogosphere calls Savage every name in the book

And then some.

Freedom of Speech is being able to go on national television, and with no preparation or knowledge whatsoever, state that autism is a fraud and a racket, that 99% of autistic kids are spoiled brats. This is what Michael Savage did.

Freedom of Speech is also being able to say something like this: "Michael Savage is a sorry piece of shit that intentionally riled up one of the most vocal parental advocacy groups in the country in order to gain notoriety." That's what I just did.

You see, I don't have the burden of kindness that my friend Karla has, who wrote a very painful rebuttal to Savage's moronic rant, so I feel absolutely no guilt or remorse about calling him a sorry piece of shit.

I am one of the lucky parents of a child that has just mild autism. PJ doesn't rock himself for hours while staring at space, he hurts himself more by doing something stupid like climbing too high, than by hitting himself. He has made incredible advances in speech, thanks to the priceless help from the Fairfax County (VA) special education programs that he qualified for since he started school. He is emphatic, and most of the times he cheerfully meets new people. But he is still autistic.

My house is in an eternal state of disarray. We clean on one side while he wrecks havoc on the opposite end. He loves pizza, which means that he will ask us to order him two regular sized pizzas, enough to feed two or three people, and he will carry them throughout the house for the next day or so. Oh, and he is one of those people that like cold pizza straight out of the fridge.

When we have fried chicken, he has to be served exactly five legs. Not four, not six, five. He likes to fill up his own balloons with helium, a kit is $24. If he doesn't get at least two of those per week, he melts down.

Oh, yes. The meltdowns. Imagine a temper tantrum where the kid is not trying to blackmail you into doing whatever it is that he wants. A tantrum in which the child has absolutely zero self control. That's an autistic meltdown. PJ gets one or two per day, which is awesome. Almost everyone else I have checked with tells me of days with constant meltdowns from the moment the child wakes up until it is time to bed.

When the poor kids finally fall asleep, you feel sorry for them because you just can see that they are completely drained.

Karla is not exaggerating about the house damages. I also got the broken wallboards and the paint stains. I also got yogurt stains in my ceilings. Oh, and he is an escape artist. I am in constant terror that he is going to take off running and end up under a truck in Wielhe avenue. We have locks in all of the windows, the sliding door to the patio is blocked and the balcony is useless to us. The door has a lock on the chain.

About a month ago I realized that, if you don't count the kitchen cabinets, the fridge and the stove, and a shower sliding door, there is not a single thing in this house that is older than PJ. Everything else, even bathroom cabinets and BOTH toilets, have been replaced at least once in the past 9 years.

One autistic kid in the family is extremely expensive. Two? I can't even begin to visualize that. And PJ has no dietary restrictions, there are many autistic kids out there with serious gastric problems, and that means spending even more money for groceries.

By the way, the end result of this incident with Michael Savage is that he is going to come out and pour his heart out and tell us all how he did not mean to do that, and how he really feels the pain of the autistic parent. And it will all be a crock of shit.

The car won't start

And there I was, with a really sore throat, which made me cough like crazy (and that hurts even worse), when I heard somebody knocking just minutes after Ivette left for work.

It was Ivette.

"The car won't start."

Had this been in the middle of winter, I wouldn't had panicked (it's a no-brainer). But a drained battery in the middle of summer? It opens all sorts of possibilities.

Of course, Ivette being a woman, her immediate reaction was to call roadside assistance. That wouldn't work yet, so I told her I would take a look at the Jeep.

The sonofabitch was dead! The car's power locks would not even work, the only light inside the car came from the odometer, which is obviously powered by a small battery.

Fine, I thought, I'll pop the hood. The battery terminals were covered by neat mounds of acid foam. It looks as if the battery simply blew up from the heat, it was not the kind of acid residue I would have expected.

Fine, I thought, let's get a can of soda. With the terminals now clean, I tried again. Still dead.

Part of me prayed that it was only a dead battery, and not a fried alternator or worse. I called the local service shop to see if they had the battery in stock.

$100, and they would return $15 once we handed back the old battery. Oh, and they did not deliver, there was no way to get the battery unless I went to pick it up. I only have one car, so this is definitely a problem.

Ivette called a coworker, and 20 minutes later I had the new battery. Oh, and it was now over 90 degrees.

Overweight + sore throat + coughing + black car + 90 degrees < > fun

One would think that this is the end of the bad luck, but for some reason, some piece of shit with a sense of humor decided to specify metric bolts that were so close to their English equivalent that it took me almost half an hour to be convinced that I had the right socket.

On top of that, there is a plastic wedge, kept in place with one of the magic metric bolts, that is used to keep the battery clamped down. That bolt was exactly two inches deeper than the extension that I had at hand, so for half an hour (or so it felt like) the wrench was making three clicks per attempt. I was not using my own tools, so I had not noticed that the kit had a universal joint, which was not needed but did add another two inches to the total reach of the socket wrench. I was finally in the game.

It took me over an hour to remove the old battery, and I don't think it took five minutes to get the new battery installed. By then I was already resigned to the idea that the car wouldn't start and I would still need to call roadside assistance.

The sonofabitch started on the spot. It was the stupid battery after all. By then I was so drained that I could barely carry the dead battery to put it in the trunk so we can exchange it later.

By the way, the car is 5 years old, and that was obviously its first battery, so I am amazed that nobody tried to sell my wife a new battery the last three times she had the oil changed. You can always count on them to try to up-sell, so it shocks me that none of them noticed that the battery was on its last legs.

WTF is going on in the US Air Force?

What the hell is going on in the Air Force? Loose nukes, breakdown of military discipline, top leadership firings, and now they are trying to spend millions because their top generals don't fly with enough comfort already?

Did these dumbasses forget that they work for a branch of the military instead of a Fortune 50 company?

And worse, even after they are told not to do it, they still keep on pushing? What about a half-dozen generals wasting valuable time bickering over the right color shade for the leather in their flying Lazy boy chairs? I flew across the god damn Atlantic Ocean in a C-141 in seats made with canvas or nylon strips. It's funny because this was also the flight where I had the most leg room anywhere, since we were sitting in the cargo bay, and our baggage was strapped down on the floor in the middle of the cargo hold. I had at least one yard from my feet to the closest object.

I flew in the opposite direction in a C-5 Galaxy, the biggest cargo plane that we have. I actually had an airliner-type seat, which faced backwards and was slightly tilted down. It was a miserable flight.

And it was free, since it was a space available flight.

Why are the US Air Force Generals burning taxpayer money in flight accommodations that are even more luxurious than one of our DoD owned small executive jets? And why not keep using the silver bullets?

The silver bullets are small trailers that fit inside most of our cargo jets. A VIP, say Jack Ryan, can sneak into a cargo plane with a silver bullet, where he can work for most of a transatlantic trip and still have a chance to take a quick nap and a shower. The end result is that the VIP gets to use most of that idle time for work purposes, and is mostly ready for action once he lands.

They could have probably bought a few more of those trailers and keep them low profile. The emphasis on this approach is comfort and convenience, not luxurious excess. I am sure the mattress probably sucks, but sleeping in one has to beat the hell out of sleeping upright in a god damn parachutist jumper seat.

If your VIP can remember the specific shade of the color of the leather seats, then he is the wrong guy for the job.

Another thing that is bothering me: why in the fuck are we ferrying around top USAF brass? What is it that they need to do that can't be done with a secure video link? We are not building new strategic Air bases out of the US, so it is not like they need to inspect these (what you need for that is a good civilian engineer). The Air Force is fighting their wars with strategic bombers dropping non-nuclear ordinance, and UAVs that can be piloted from across the world. So, why do they need to go outside of the US? Any why aren't the Army and Marine generals being treated with the same kind of concern about their comfort?

Do you remember the last time a Marine general complained that he did not like the shade of the leather in his Lazy boy chair?

And for the record, I would rather fly in the cargo hold of a C-141 than in a MATS charter jet that feels like it is about to disintegrate as soon as it takes off. The C-141 was louder, but it felt rock solid, while the charter jet felt like it was falling apart.

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

Lulu.com is advertising a "limited offer" for a distribution package that includes a free ISBN. ISBNs are usually $125 when you buy them one at a time, and you can only buy them in batches of powers of ten. I thought that it sounded too good to be true, after all, I had to buy my first two ISBNs.

Well, the reason that it sounded too good to be true is that there is no way to get this free ISBN unless you purchase a hardcopy of your book from Lulu.com. If you don't buy the hardcopy, you don't get to move to the final step, where the ISBN is submitted to bowker.com.

No free ISBN for you.

Why not just advertise the package for whatever it costs to print one book? Th end result is the same, but you are not lying to people.

How not to ride a Segway

Don't do this with your Segway (from The Fail Blog):

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

Both of my novels are now available at Amazon's Kindle Store:

Book #1: Shining Star, first published July 2004

Book #2: Pulling Strings, first published January 2006

If you are either published, or self published, and you are interested in publishing your books through the Kindle, all you need to do is join the Amazon Digital Text Platform. It is free, you retain full ownership of your work, and the royalties are no worse than what you can get elsewhere. I did it because I can't turn down the opportunity to open one more sales channel for my books.

From the technical standpoint, the process is very simple. For each of your books you do the following:

1. Fill a section with the ISBN (as far as I can tell, it isn't mandatory) and a few more details about the book, including five categories plus a list of keywords. You also upload a cover image.

2. Upload your final copy of the book, they accept most common formats. I tried with MS Word, HTML and PDF. I got more control by using PDF. Amazon provides plenty of documentation for those that would like more control of the formatting.

3. Use the book preview utility to verify that the book is rendered the way you want it to.

4. Enter your sale price.

5. Hit publish.

You are done. From the moment that you hit publish, to your book first showing in search results you can expect anywhere from 12 to 72 hours. One of my two books made it to the search results in ess than 24 hours, the second one is up and running but it is not showing up in searches yet.

A cool thing I noticed is that since HTML gives you the most control, you don't really have to waste time agonizing over your layout and then generate the perfect PDF. I was using Open Office 2.4 (had to downgrade from 3.0, it ran like shit even on this Mac Book Pro 2.33) and I remember how much trouble it was to get the stupid formatting of the headers, footers, pagination, etc. done right. Now I know this is trivial, so I can go back to writing and not having to worry about formatting.

Things I did not like:

1. Some things are done with AJAX functionality that actually works better in Safari than in Firefox, a first for me. Uploads in Firefox worked maybe half of the time.

2. The cover upload failed about half of the time.

3. I did not see a way to buy an ISBN. ISBNs can be bought directly from Bowker for $125. You can get them as cheap as $50 from other sources, but then you won't have control over the publisher name listed with the ISBN. I got my two ISBNs through Lulu.com, it was less than $100 each.

Except for those three things, it is pretty nifty.

Veraperez.com is back on business

After four very stressful days, Veraperez.com is back in business.

The good news is that the Google mechanisms to detect and block malware distribution sites seems to work.

The bad news is that the Google mechanisms that detect and block malware rely on the cooperation of your browser. Safari loaded my site every time, there was no warning. Firefox would not load ANY of the subdomains, or even the control panel. I did not bother to try with IE because I could not risk infecting my XP in Parallels.

Still, I have two huge concerns:

1. How the fuck did I get infected? I was using the most current version of Wordpress, and I never work on my sites from Windows, so how the hell did the IFRAME get injected? Wordpress 2.6 came out AFTER I was informed that the site was infected, and I did not see any security advisory, so I can't tell if it was injected through a direct exploit, or through the comments.

I really want to know what happened, because I know too many people that use Wordpress, including a lot of my customers, and I need to be prepared to help them.

2. The cleanup process is way above the heads of most normal Wordpress users. I am a nerd, and it still took me four days to completely clean the site. I don't even want to think what would happen to the thousands of people that installed Wordpress because it promised them a simple, 5-minute install. On top of this, the Google diagnostics page gives you very little details on what was wrong, or so it seems. All information that I needed was right in front of me, but I did not notice it. Had I searched my Wordpress database for the IP address of the malware site that the IFRAME was loading from, I could have fixed this mess in half as much time.

If you are running Wordpress, and you are stuck with it (more on that later), then search your posts and comments for IFRAMEs, and make sure that you are on the most current version of Wordpress. There should be a feed that tells you when new releases are out, so you might as well subscribe to that too. If you are not using Spam Karma 2, go get it. It's free software, so all you have to do is download and install it. If you are running multiple copies of Wordpress, consider switching to Wordpress mu, so you only need to update one copy.

Stuck with Wordpress: that should be a very small percentage of users. In my case, I need Wordpress because I use a custom plugin for my text link ads. The only blog system that they support is Wordpress, so that is what I need to keep using. If you don't belong to that group, then maybe it is time to consider letting somebody else to run it for you. Wordpress.com has free Wordpress hosting, and Blogspot is not that much different from the workflow perspective. When was the last time that either Wordpress.com or Blogspot botched an install, or got pwned?

Also, just because you use a free blogging account doesn't mean that you can't use a personal domain name for it. I am on Blogspot, yet I am using Pedrovera.com for it. Wordpress.com has a similar feature but I don't know if it is free.

Will the iPhone 3G blend?

The only reason that I can stomach this is because I haven't upgraded my iPhones to 3Gs:



(found through TUAW)







God Bless The Internet.

Veraperez.com got PWN3D

Yup, it happened.

It doesn't matter how hard you work at it to keep a site up and running with proper software, somebody always finds a way to go around and exploit it. In my case, somebody, somehow, managed to inject one blog posting with an iframe that points to a known malware distribution site.

Assholes.

The sad thing is that the site was compromised just four days before Wordpress 2.6 came out, not that I know for sure if this new version has fixed that problem.

And people still ask me why I am blogging from Blogspot instead of hosting my own Wordpress. When was the last time that Blogspot was compromised?

Happy Birthday, Trinity!

Trinity was the first test of technology for a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The Fat Man bomb, using the same conceptual design, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a few weeks later. The detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered as the beginning of the Atomic Age.

[From Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The threat of nuclear annihilation for us all became real 63 years ago. Since then, we have all been sons of bitches. Mutually Assured Destruction came and passed us. Now we are living in the age of the dumb bomb and the dirty bomb.

And social networks. Just think what a pain in the ass archeologists are going to have 1,000 years from now, trying to figure us out.