Hello

Post Reply New Topic

Signed in yesterday. Stopped to say "hello" because it looks like common practice and moderators will know I'm not a spam bot.

Thought I had posted this message yesterday but then couldn't find it, so I take it I must have messed up somehow. Anyway, excuse me if this is redundant.

Cheers.

Welcome MagicKnight,

Another one in their forties (assuming your age is being displayed right) - seems to be quite a few of us around!
How did you come to end up on the WrongPlanet?

Hello MagicKnight,

Welcome home, the place where I am sure you will enjoy the conversations that are hard to have anywhere else outside of this planet

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Welcome to WP! What are your interests?

Hey MagicKnight welcome.

Thank you all for the warm welcome.

@Trogluddite

I found Wrong Planet simply by Googling. I was finally moved by the curiosity of knowing how other Aspergers live their lives. I never met others "like me" in real life.
I was diagnosed by a former psychologist and according to her DDX I have some (serious) comorbidities I'd rather not discuss here.
I never tell anyone I'm Asperger first above all because I'm afraid of the stigma and social segregation. Also because from what I read there's no strict consensus on what Asperger really is and all "aspies" are very different from one another. By the way I don't like the terminology "aspie" that much and regard it a bit on the cheesy side.

Yes, I'm certainly a highly functional 41yo and I can be taken for a "normie" by others - or at most viewed as a very weird bloke with peculiar likes and quaint vocabulary but not an "autist".
That is a blessing and a curse because since I look reasonably normal, people expect from me all they would expect from a normal person, which certainly I know I'm not.

@TheAP

I am passionate about (old) computers and low-level programming with the use of languages like Assembly, C and C++.
I was once very passionate about the band The Cure but that interest isn't as intense these days. Still a fan.
I am able to learn a variety of things very quickly moved solely by my passionate interest but if for some reason I am not interested to some extent, I won't be able to absorb it.
I don't think I am what they call a "savant".
From time to time some random interest is sparkled and I become obsessed about it. It could take days, weeks or years before I give up on that. I never know when to stop.

I'll be lurking around. Thank you for reading this lengthy and badly written introduction. I tend to write a lot.

I know just what you mean about the "expectations" - even with the few people IRL that I've disclosed to, there are some that I wish I hadn't bothered to tell. The attitude is that I kept up the facade for forty years, so autism is just an excuse to become a slacker for the rest of my life, and I should just keep my 'normie' mask on so as not to scare the horses. Trying to get them to believe just how exhausting that can be falls on deaf ears, because I've never let them see that aspect of it. Even pointing out how it explains recurrent mental ill health, which they have long been aware of, makes little difference to some people.

When I hear 'aspie', I just think; "like an Egyptian snake". Or baby talk, like; Doggy, Kitty, Mummy, Daddy.

And a fellow 'low level' coder. Not often I encounter a fellow assembly writer these days - though I probably remember my old Z80 opcodes better than the endlessly extended x86 variety. I love writing what I would call library modules and tools. Very rare that I put a complete application together, but C++ DLLs for audio DSP, and little template classes are right up my street.

I do admire some coder's use of the high level languages, and I'll delve into Ruby or Python if its the pragmatic thing to do - but I much prefer getting into the nitty gritty of working with memory directly via pointers. Trusting automated garbage collectors makes me feel very insecure. I can still recall my middle teens, sat up all night converting opcodes and memory offsets to hex manually because there wasn't even a proper assembler built in.

Welcome to WP MK.

Had the urge to add an ultra on the end there.

I was trying to write a proper reply to all posts but looks like there were some quirks in the original message and the server wouldn't allow me to post without answering a reverse-Turing test that kept throwing me back to an empty page. I had to cut it short.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking if I'm using an excuse. There other times when I think that's what people want me to think because they can't understand and accept. Then I become stressed and confused.

I'm writing loads of Z80 code for the ZX Spectrum these days. I had to take a break because I wasn't neither sleeping nor eating so at some point my body couldn't stand it and I fell ill.

I work for the computer industry but I find it boring. I hate my job. More than two decades into it and still hating. Also I find the fellow IT co-workers a bit abject with all their competitive talk, bragging, knowledge of modern frameworks and all because what one needs to know about these things is really a matter of reading a manual. That people try to pass as wizards.

I was used to code in Perl in the past. Python really looks much better but I don't like that strict tabbing approach. I went from language to language, technology to technology as time went by. I don't like most commercial technology though. I don't like HTML. Don't like JavaScript. Don't like CSS. While C# is okay as a language, I don't fancy .Net, Asp.Net et al. Don't like Java either (the technology not the language).

That's what I have to deal with to pay the bills and put bread on my table but I find these things all a sorry waste of computational cycles and corporate-branded buzzwords. In my opinion all that technology should be ditched and thinked over from scratch. People are bodging and kludging these hideous technologies with duct tape to make the world work. Just my opinion.

MK-Ultra. That's a nice witticism. Cheers!

My first computer was a ZX-81, I feel your pain.

Ah, ZX81, ZX Spectrum - it all comes flooding back. Clive Sinclair was up there with Johnny Ball as my childhood heroes. Later, I ended up with a Memotech MTX512, another UK made machine (what ever happened to those?). It was about the nearest thing to a Z80 based BBC Micro. Having a proper keyboard, in-line assembly and Pascal were a revelation after Sinclair BASIC - and all my old Z80 routines still worked just fine with hardly any tweaking.
A Forth compiler was my biggest project on that one - hardly the trickiest language to compile, but a very satisfying project all the same once I'd used it to write a couple of games.

For the most part, I agree with what you say about the plethora of modern languages - too many languages with piffling little detail differences, or glaring omissions, that are just enough to make them a nightmare to inter-op with. Sadly, I'm usually a bit constrained by the host software that I'm writing for, as audio DSP and MIDI plugins, are my main output these days - calling through to a C++ DLL with a smattering of in-line assembly is my preference where I can.

Commercially, I've done very little. I have worked in a software development department, but mostly as a 2D and 3D graphic designer and documentation writer (I seriously enjoy writing manuals for some reason). The only code I wrote were tools to manage the resources I was creating, all very tedious. I could see from watching my team-mates that I wouldn't want programming to be my career, and I'm glad I wasn't tempted to aim for that, as I so nearly did when I left college.

Python - I agree. Significant whitespace, yuck, whoever thought of that. If I need a language like that, I use Ruby where possible - it is very similar in capability, but sneaks in big chunks of Perl as well. Handy for little file mangling scripts and the like, but I wouldn't want to write a whole application using it.

PS) Yes, the Captcha is incredibly annoying. Usually if you browse back twice to your original text entry, a second attempt does work though - saves a lot of CTRL-C, CTRL-V!

I was five years old when I got my ZX-81. It had the completely flat keyboard, no keys, so you had to hit it quite hard. It had modules connected to the back, and the pin sockets werent too stable. You'd hit the keyboard too hard and it would dislodge your RAM.
I still have flashbacks.

Ah yes, the dreaded RAM-Pack wobble - I can recall having a tantrum or two about that, it was a notorious problem.
The company that made the MTX512 machine I mentioned before started out making those RAM-Packs. Sinclair couldn't make enough of their own, and the machine was almost useless without one (1kB of RAM!) - so Memotech jumped in and got their first big leg-up as a business. Thankfully, I got a Spectrum not long after "borrowing" my mates ZX81, so I didn't have to put up with the problem for long.

Wow, I was so excited by my Speccy, a whole 48kB of RAM - I was sure I'd never run out of memory again as long as I lived! And squishy rubber keys instead of that awful membrane thing - oh, the luxury! (until all the lettering wore off the keys, anyway!)