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Risperdal is a dopamine blocker, I think, and helps my concentration.

Last fall when I was hallucinating and paranoid because of my schizoaffective disorder, I was completely unable to focus on my work for several months, and got absolutely nothing done.

The psychiatrist I saw about it said that I had psychotic breakthrough symptoms, and this would make it difficult to concentrate. Such symptoms are the result of too much dopamine activity in the brain.

My dose was raised from 3 mg a day to 5, and after a few weeks of time off to recover, I was able to start working productively again.

I'm a musician too but I play the piano rather than sing.

I use my middle name to distinguish myself from that OTHER Michael Crawford. I shouldn't have to - he changed his name for the stage.

Thanks for posting those links. Yes, it's the same Michael Crawford as at Slashdot.

I also have it on my personal site, with somewhat more pleasant HTML design and a few photos:

• Living with Schizoaffective Disorder

I want the OP to know there is hope for his sister. Things were pretty grim for me at one time, but I do alright now. I've been employed as a programmer full-time since 1987, and since 1998 I've operated my own consulting business.

I was really sick in my early twenties, but had several good years until I cracked up again when I was thirty. I thought the CIA was tapping my phone. I'm forty now. I had some trouble with paranoia and hallucinations last fall, but I knew well enough to get help for it and all it took was a simple adjustment to my medication. I'm doing really well now.

One can recover from mental illness, but it takes patience and a lot of hard work. There are many effective medications for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, however, not all the medications work well for everybody, so basically what you have to do is try them out one at a time until you find something that works. To make it more complicated, most people need more than one medication, so you have to find the right combination.

...and I like to write.

I just signed up for a userid so I can take the exam online, but after submitting my info it said I may have to wait up to two days to get an account.

Curious that they can grade essays with a computer but it looks like they have to have a human pass out the user ids.

Anyway, I'll see if I can submit one of my articles to the exam, and will post here how I did. Since I have to wait for my user ID, you'll have to look back here later to see how I did.

Do you realize many musicians provide free downloads of their music that are perfectly legal? We provide such downloads to publicize our work. Here are some MP3s of me playing my piano compositions.

If you're tired of searching for new music on the Intarweb, why not just run iRATE radio and let it download MP3s for you. iRATE will even learn to download the kind of music you like!

iRATE's server has a large database of MP3s that are kept on the musicians' own websites (or MP3 hosting services, like IUMA). There are over 50,000 tracks in its database, with 3,000 Creative Commons-licensed MP3s recently added from Magnatune.

iRATE downloads a few tracks, and then you rate the tracks according to your preferences. iRATE's server then compares your ratings to those of other users, and selects new tracks based on your rating patterns. That is, if you and I like the same kind of music, iRATE will download for you the same music that I like. If we disagree, your iRATE will avoid my favorites.

This process is known as "collaborative filtering".

iRATE's client and server are both licensed under the GNU GPL, and are written in Java. For Linux, there is a native binary compiled with GCJ, so there are no non-free dependencies.

There's going to be a native Windows client, but GCJ is not presently able to build a stable Windows binary - so you could help by helping the GCJ team fix that.

There is a Mac OS X ".dmg" disk image, that runs using the Java runtime that comes with OS X. It looks like any other OS X application. For those who install the Java Runtime Environment, you can use the Java webstart version. You just click a link on iRATE's download page and it installs and runs.

iRATE's team always welcomes people who want to help with development and testing.

I think it's wrong that calling somebody that could be construed as an insult.

I've been working for quite some time to change that.

• Living with Schizoaffective Disorder

The copy of Living with Schizoaffective Disorder that I have on my own website has much nicer presentation than was possible with Kuro5hin's copy, as well as a few photos.

It's been #8 at Google for a while, for a search for schizoaffective disorder.

It was quite a life-changing event for me, to write that article.

You can enjoy free music downloads without getting in trouble by listening to the music that many artists make available on their own websites in hopes of attracting fans. And you can tell the RIAA to kiss your ass.

But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.

This problem is solved with iRATE radio's collaborative filtering:

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.

iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)

The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.

iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.

Here's some screen shots.

While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers

You can enjoy free music downloads without getting in trouble by listening to the music that many artists make available on their own websites in hopes of attracting fans. You also won't be bothered by any of that pesky digital rights management.

But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.

This problem is solved with iRATE radio's collaborative filtering:

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.

iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)

The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.

iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.

Here's some screen shots.

While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers

Want to try out astronomy for yourself, but don't have the cash for an expensive telescope?

I've been an avid avid amateur telescope maker since I was twelve years old. It led to me studying astronomy for a time at Caltech. While I'm a programmer now, it's still a very enjoyable and intellectually stimulating hobby.

While a basic newtonian is a straightforward instrument that can be built by anyone who's good with their hands, telescope making can get as complicated as you want if you're really looking for a challenge. Optical design is still a wide open area of research in mathematics, software engineering, and physics, and some of the more interesting designs take quite a bit of skill to fabricate. That means anyone can make a satisfying telescope, but the hobby will yield a lifetime of interest because there's always new things to learn.

You can construct your own telescope with a primary mirror of 8 inches in diameter for less than $200. It will take quite a bit of work, but it is enjoyable and meditative work. Grinding mirrors is one of the things I do to relax and relieve the strain of coding all day.

A good place to start looking for information is the ATM FAQ. The procedures for grinding, polishing and figuring are pretty involved - you should buy one of the books from astronomy publisher Willman-Bell.

There are a number of people and business who sell inexpensive mirror grinding kits. They will come with a glass mirror blank and an assortment of different sizes of abrasive grits. I would recommend asking on the ATM mailing list (that you can find in the FAQ) when you're ready to order your first kit.

The 8" plate glass kit I bought from Dan Cassaro for my current project set me back $64. When I get done working on the mirror, it will cost me about $35 to have a vacuum coating laboratory aluminize it. Good quality eyepieces cost about $50 - just one will do to start with but it helps to have more.

While fancy equatorial mountings can be expensive to make, it's possible to make a quite servicable altazimuth mount out of common materials like plywood and a few hand tools.

You can avoid being sued or arrested if you download legal music instead of getting your tunes from the p2p networks.

Many unsigned musicians provide free downloads of their music on their websites as a way to attract more fans. Here's mine for example. Many such musicians, while relatively unknown, are as good as any major label band and certainly an improvement over the pablum they serve up on ClearChannel.

You can find many more examples in my new article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

The article also explores some of the historical and legal issues behind copyright, and suggests steps the file traders can take to make file sharing legal.

If you're a musician who offers downloads of your music, I can link to your band's website from the article if you give my article a reciprocal link. Please follow the instructions given here

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the RIAA or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many indie (unsigned) musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans - here's mine and my friends The Divine Maggees.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs from indie bands, and seeing their shows, instead of enriching the major labels every time you buy a Britney or New Kids CD. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads are not copyright violations because the artists give you permission to download them.

Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com . See especially their genre index . Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.

Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet ?

The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.

There are better sites for hosting MP3s than MP3.com. Some of them allow you to buy the band's CD from the same page as the MP3 download. Among them are The Internet Underground Music Archives, CDBaby, Epitonic.com, Lulu, SoundClick, Matador Records and insound .

Monotonik provides BitTorrents with zip files containing 60 to 100 MP3s apiece available here.

If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here . Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.

There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b] .

Unfortunately, musicians are often not very good website designers, so poor usability is a significant obstacle to getting music directly from artists' websites. If you're a musician, and you'd like to know how you can improve your website so more people will download your music, please read my article If Indie Musicians Wanted Their Music Heard....

Finally, there is the problem of finding the music that's actually worth listening to. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE, which you'll find at

Why violate copyright? Many musicians offer legal downloads of their music from their websites or from music hosting services. While you won't find many big-name bands offerring free downloads, you can get a wide variety of enjoyable music.

I'm one of those indie musicians that offers free downloads of my music so more people can get to know it. Please download and enjoy:

• Geometric Visions

It's a recording of me playing my piano compositions.

I'm one of those indie musicians who gives away free MP3s so people can get to know my music.

I have four MP3s of me playing my piano compositions:

• Geometric Visions

(I'm afraid there are some artifacts in Recursion - I'm going to have to re-digitize it from the analog master tape I have.)

I will have Ogg Vorbis as soon as I find the time to encode the files.

Enjoy!

I am one of those indie musicians who wants everyone to download their MP3s so their music can become known.

Please feel free to download and share the MP3s for my album:

• Geometric Visions

The album consists of me playing my compositions for the piano.

You can feel free to share these with your friends, but I would prefer that rather than sharing them with strangers over the Internet, that you link my page from your own homepage or weblog. That will help others to find out more about me when they download my music.

For a while I was into taking panoramic photos, where I set my camera on a tripod and take pictures at angular increments around the vertical (or sometimes horizontal) axis of the camera. I'd stitch them together with Live Picture's PhotoVista.

PhotoVista was meant for making QuickTime VR-like images, where you can scroll the panorama around in a web page using a viewer plugin or Java applet. But I always thought it was cooler to have just a photographic banner.

I have a panorama I took at burning man on this page. The panorama in that page is quite small so that it will fit on your screen - click it and you'll get a greatly enlarged view where you can see some detail (including the PhotoVista Demo Version watermark!).

I have promised the organizers of Burning Man that I'd give them a hi-res panorama on CD that they can print and hang in their office, but I've never gotten it together to make it for them. I'll try to do that sometime soon.

You can find a few other examples of my photography, art and music here. I have a lot of stuff on PhotoCD that I mean to put on the site, but again I've been too busy to deal with it. There are several MP3's of my piano compositions though.

I'm not sure if PhotoVista is still published. Live Picture was bought out by MGI Software, who were then themselves purchased by Roxio (the Easy CD Creator people). Roxio has an inexpensive graphics bundle package, but I don't know whether PhotoVista is included. Besides stitching the images, it would handle such things as lens distortion quite nicely.

I have a couple panoramas I took up on the Eiffel Tower that are still waiting to be scanned.

For a while I was into taking panoramic photos, where I set my camera on a tripod and take pictures at angular increments around the vertical (or sometimes horizontal) axis of the camera. I'd stitch them together with Live Picture's PhotoVista.

PhotoVista was meant for making QuickTime VR-like images, where you can scroll the panorama around in a web page using a viewer plugin or Java applet. But I always thought it was cooler to have just a photographic banner.

I have a panorama I took at burning man on this page. The panorama in that page is quite small so that it will fit on your screen - click it and you'll get a greatly enlarged view where you can see some detail (including the PhotoVista Demo Version watermark!).

I have promised the organizers of Burning Man that I'd give them a hi-res panorama on CD that they can print and hang in their office, but I've never gotten it together to make it for them. I'll try to do that sometime soon.

You can find a few other examples of my photography, art and music here. I have a lot of stuff on PhotoCD that I mean to put on the site, but again I've been too busy to deal with it. There are several MP3's of my piano compositions though.

I'm not sure if PhotoVista is still published. Live Picture was bought out by MGI Software, who were then themselves purchased by Roxio (the Easy CD Creator people). Roxio has an inexpensive graphics bundle package, but I don't know whether PhotoVista is included. Besides stitching the images, it would handle such things as lens distortion quite nicely.

I have a couple panoramas I took up on the Eiffel Tower that are still waiting to be scanned.

This is a very simple one that really impressed me when I saw it as a freshman at CalTech.

It helps to have a tall ceiling, or some high-up place you can tie a rope. At the other end of the rope you hang a heavy weight. At caltech they used a steel ball that must have weighed 100 pounds. Possibly you could use a bowling ball enclosed in a net bag.

What you do is pull the heavy weight some distance to one side. You will need to have the length of the rope and the distance of swing so that it just touches the tip of your nose when you pull it to the side.

Then let go, while facing the direction of swing. The heavy weight will swing across, then back and up - and come to a stop just as it touches the tip of your nose.

You have to stand there calmly and let it. Your amazed audience will think you're just about to get your face smashed in, but that doesn't happen. I think it was Prof. Ed Stone who did this.

As the weight swings, the potential energy from being raised in a gravitational potential will be converted into kinetic energy that reaches a maximum at the bottom of the swing. But when it comes back all that kinetic energy will get converted back to potential energy, and the kinetic energy will drop to zero just as it reaches the starting point.

If there is any friction from the air or flexing the rope it won't come all the way back to your nose.

You could also contact a local astronomy club and get them to show your kids a homemade telescope. I make them. Visit my page for some links, likely there is a club in your area.

Telescope makers and opticians use pitch for polishing glass.

I have a page about telescope making that should give you some jumping off points, but I haven't yet got to the polishing stage of the mirror I'm working on.

One reason for using pitch is that you can press a mirror into it and get a very close fit. Another is that if the mirror is not perfectly spherical, the pitch will flex as the mirror moves across it. And finally, the polishing abrasive (ferrous oxide or cerium oxide) will set in the pitch and have a planing action rather than rolling around and chipping little flakes off as in ordinary grinding.

Pitch is nasty stuff to work with. It takes a lot of practice before a novice telescope maker can make a pitch lap they're happy with.

I'm building my own telescope, an 8 inch (wide) reflector. You can build a telescope too, very inexpensively and with modest materials.

It's very interesting and enjoyable. Try it! Maybe you'll discover a comet too someday.

True, to purchase an 8 inch reflector isn't that bad anymore, but with the skill you gain from building a small telescope you would become able to build a much larger telescope affordably; to buy one, say a 20 inch, would be beyond the financial reach of most working people, but you could reasonably build one. Many people do.

The amateur telescope making mailing list will be glad to help you out. Mel Bartels has a lot of telescope making links.

While the telescopes described here are beyond the reach of the amateur, it is possible for you to make your own high-quality telescope to enjoy and photograph astronomical sights. I am an amateur telescope maker and I am making an eight-inch Ritchey Chretien reflector.

You can get books telling how to make telescopes from Willman-Bell and ask for help on the Amateur Telescope Maker's mailing list. Dan Cassaro can sell you a reasonably priced mirror grinding kit.

You can find many products for amateur astronomers at the Astronomy Mall.

Clear Skies!

While the telescopes described here are beyond the reach of the amateur, it is possible for you to make your own high-quality telescope to enjoy and photograph astronomical sights. I am an amateur telescope maker and I am making an eight-inch Ritchey Chretien reflector.

You can get books telling how to make telescopes from Willman-Bell and ask for help on the Amateur Telescope Maker's mailing list. Dan Cassaro can sell you a reasonably priced mirror grinding kit.

You can find many products for amateur astronomers at the Astronomy Mall.

Clear Skies!

There are a few different things going on.

The reason they are called the Leonids is that the main orbital path the meteroids are on before they strike the earth is such that it points back in the general direction of the constellation Leo at the point where the earth crosses the comet's orbit each year (meteor showers come from debris broken off a comet).

If you make a black-on-white copy of a starchart, and draw a line on it for each meteor you see when it happens, with an arrowhead in the direction of travel, at the end of the night you will see the most of the paths generally radiating away from Leo, like spokes radiating from the hub of a bicycle wheel. This is like what you'd see if you stood in the middle of a multilane highway as cars sped past you, facing where they come from - you'd see the cars angling to the right and left, but "radiating" from one spot in the distance.

If a meteor's path is very short, it is headed in your general direction. If it just a bright spot, then it is headed straight for you, so you know when to duck. If it is very long, it is headed away from you.

I don't know if it is still practiced, but there used to be organized efforts among amateur astronomers to map meteor paths during showers so their orbits could be calculated. Now I guess it would be more practical and accurate to do it with radar. To do make such a calculation, the observers also need to write down the time they saw each meteor.

Even so, the meteors won't all be radiating from a single point. There will be a lot of randomness. Part of this will be because the meteoroids are spread out in space, to either side of the comets orbit, each on its own slightly different orbit.

Also, as it approaches the earth, the earth's gravity will disturb the orbit of the meteoroid. If the meteoroid is heading straight to the center of the earth just before it hits, then it will just go faster. If it's heading a ways to one side of the earth, then its path will be deflected in towards the earth, and when it hits it will be at a highly deflected path. If it's even farther to the side, it won't hit the earth but it's orbit will be disturbed, and many orbits of a planet through a comet's path will introduce a lot of scatter in future showers.

Now let me shill for amateur astronomy. I'm grinding my own telescope mirror. You can join the Amateur Telescope Maker's mailing list and they'll tell you how - read the FAQ. Dan Cassaro can sell you a mirror grinding kit. You can get books with instructions (you need a whole book, it's pretty involved) from Willman-Bell. You can find lots of tips on the Telescope Making WebRing.

Or you can buy telescopes from Meade and Celestron or shop at the shop at the astronomy mall. Finally, there's a new ATM portal at www.telescopemaking.com.

Let me use this opportunity to plug a fascinating and intriguing hobby, Amateur Astronomy and Telescope Making.

I made several telescopes when I was a teenager, and have recently taken up grinding glass again after a long hiatus. I was also pleased to find the Central Maine Astronomical Society is in my area and joined last night while visiting their new observatory.

Telescope mirrors can be made by hand with suprisingly simple equipment. An eight-inch diameter telescope will run you about $250, maybe less if you're creative, for the mirror kit, eyepiece, aluminizing, and mounting.

There may be a telescope making or astronomy club in your area. A good way to find out is to subscribe to the ATM mailing list. Another way is to follow some of these links:

• Chabot Telescope Maker's Workshop (Oakland, California)
• Sidewalk Astronomers (Los Angeles and San Francisco)
• Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston
• Stellafane - Springfield Vermont, where the hobby was started in the USA

Although it's helpful, you don't need to work with a club to make a telescope. I didn't for my first two. What you will need is some books, which you can buy from Willman Bell or Newport Glass. You will also need a kit that contains your mirror blank, abrasive, polishing pitch, and polishing abrasive. You can get those from Newport Glass or from Dan Cassaro. There are other suppliers of kits as well, or if you join a club you could buy the materials from another member.

If you don't want to build a telescope, you can buy one. The telescopes made by Meade and Celestron are well known. You can find ads for dealers in the pages of Sky and Telescope Magazine, which you'll find in many bookstores.

A large number of astronomy products may be found through the Astronomy Mall.

Although the price differential for small telescopes like 6 or 8 inches is not that great between making it oneself and purchasing, the cost of purchasing really large instruments is really prohibitive, while large ones are actually affordable to make, comparable to purchasing a computer. If you start off making an 8 inch mirror, your next mirror can be much larger, say 16 inches, and amateurs commonly make mirrors from 20 to 30 inches, and I think there is a 72 inch mirror nearly complete made by some amateurs. My goal is to have a 40 inch observatory in my backyard.

Although I've listed U.S. organizations and companies, telescope making is practiced world-wide. A while back someone from Iraq subscribed to the ATM list and asked for help obtaining a kit. There are lots of subscribers from Europe and a number from Asia and Africa. Follow the links, and maybe you'll find a club in your home town, or at least within a reasonable distance!

I cannot describe the awe that comes from beholding the wonders of the heavens through a telescope made with one's own hands.

Sometimes it helps to talk about it with someone you can trust.

Have you any friends you can call on the phone?

I've been through some pretty tough times myself. Here's a website I wrote about my experiences.

Don't give up hope.

When I was in junior high and high school I ground, polished and figured several telescope mirrors. I did a 6 inch, then a 10 inch, and finally an 8 inch.

The 6 inch had a decent figure but I didn't know I could send it away to be vacuum aluminized, so I chemically deposited silver on it using chemicals I bought at the University of Idaho chemistry stockroom. Take my advice, it's much better to get a mirror aluminized.

I hurried a bit too much on fine grinding the 10 inch and wasn't happy with it, so I tried again with my 8 inch and was much more patient, and got excellent results from it (1/10 wave according to Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop's Paul Zurakowski).

Grinding telescopes and being a sciency kind of guy led me to study astronomy at CalTech where I assisted CalTech astronomer Jeremy Mould in observing the the Palomar 60 inch and 200 inch telescopes - the experience of a lifetime for an amateur astronomer.

It's been about 18 years since I last worked any glass but I just bought an 8 inch plate glass kit from Dan Cassaro. You can buy Pyrex kits and optical glass (suitable for lenses) from Newport Glass.

I'm starting to write about the telescope I'm about to work on here.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area check out the Eastbay Astronomical Society's Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop (there's an observatory there too, it's in Oakland), Fremont Peak Observatory, which has a 30 inch reflector that's open to the public, with regular gatherings of amateurs who bring their telescopes up there, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers - the Sidewalk Astronomers set up telescopes on city sidewalks and introduce people to astronomy by inviting them to look through their scopes.

You can get books on astronomy, and importantly, the specifics of how to actually grind and polish a telescope from Willman-Bell and Newport Glass.

Check out this guy who made a ribbed mirror blank by cutting out a pattern from one disk of glass with a water jet and fusing it to a solid sheet in a furnace.

Visit Google's index of Amateur Telescope Making, particularly http://www.atmpage.com.

If you want to get into amateur telescope making, take advantage of an immensely valuable resource that wasn't available to me when I was a kid - subscribe to the ATM List - here's the FAQ.

Mike

Can anyone tell me where I can get a rack mount, not the cases for the PC's, but the actual rack that you'd mount a bunch of them in, in New England?

Mail ordering one of these babies from far away would be expensive, and I suspect the UPS man would stop talking to me.

I live in mid-coast Maine. Portland, Maine is about an hour and a half drive away, Boston a little less than three. There's a lot of industry and some high-tech in South Portland, so maybe I can rent a truck or a van and get a rack there.

Advice on rackmount uninterruptible power supplies would be helpful too.

I do cross-platform development and I'd like to set up a build and test farm of lots of twisty little 1U machines all running different Linux and *BSD distros, QNX, Solaris x86, UltraSparc Solaris at some point, BeOS and of course Mr. Bill's operating systems. I do Mac OS too but probably won't rackmount those, as it would mess up the nice Flower Power look.

BTW, I'm finally about to break down and by a Belkin Omniview 4-port KVM Switch with a Mac video/ADB keyboard adapter. Maybe if I save up I can get the 8 port with On-Screen Display.

While the Belkin may be expensive, the switching is electronic. I've worn out a Manhattan mechanical VGA switch in about four months sharing a monitor between a Mac and a PC - I have to fiddle with the knob each time I switch it to get the connection right or the colors are all wonky. Also I'm sure to start shooting from the rooftops the next time I type into the wrong keyboard!

Mike

Eh?

Tell that to the psychiatrists and psychologists who treated me in the psychiatric hospital where I spent the summer of 1985, when I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

Or to my insurance company at the time, who sprung for the $10,000 treatment.

I know it may be fashionable to claim one is manic depressive, but I can assure you it's unmistakeable in me, and it's not something I would choose. There's no Hell so deep as what I experienced in my college days.

If you don't believe me, maybe you'll at least believe I do some good in my writings. I regularly receive emails in response to my website on Manic Depression from people who've experienced it - either they have it or their loved ones do - and they don't know what to do about it.

There is a lot of information available about the illness but because of the stigma which is perpetuated by ignorant people such as yourself, not a lot of folks have the confidence in themselves to speak out about their experience publicly as I do, occasionally here on Slashdot and permanently on that website.

I speak out in part because of my confidence in my position in my career and also my belief that speaking out on what is right is one of the most important things you can do, even when it comes at great personal cost.

The people who write to me tell me the fact that I speak out personally as I do makes a tremendous difference in their lives. It has happened many, many times that someone has written to me to tell me that I'm the first person they've shared the fact that they think they're mentally ill, or contemplating suicide.

You should know that that page receives about 3,000 hits a month, and I recieve several emails a day from people looking for advice, about half of them people who have the illness and the others from people who are closely involved with a sufferer and don't know how to deal with them.

By the way, I'm happily married. I first met my wife three years ago, and we were married in St. John's Newfoundland on July 22, 2000. We just bought our first house together, in Midcoast Maine, and moved into it last weekend.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I was in and out of my University physics studies a number of times, and having a generally bad time, because of a serious illness, and at some point decided I should get out and get a programming job because I figured I'd be better at that than school.

I didn't really know how to program, I knew a little FORTRAN, C and Basic from doing data analysis during summer jobs, and I didn't really like it all that much. I used to really have to struggle to spend several weeks writing a 500 line program, and I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to look at the source code to those programs today.

I figured I'd program for a while because it paid the rent (I was making $20k a year doing Sun administration and writing image processing software), but when I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living I'd quit programming and get a real job.

That was in 1988. Then some consultant visited and installed GNU Emacs on our machines (two Sun 3/160's, one diskless, both with terminals and no workstation monitor, but with frame grabber cards and NTSC color monitors). He explained about the GNU manifesto.

I thought it was pretty cool but didn't see it affecting me personally in a big way. I was mostly annoyed that I had to wait up while the consultant installed the software on what was supposed to be my day off while a ladyfriend was visiting from away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who went to MIT for a while and vaguely knew Richard Stallman, spent an evening with me singing the praises of Emacs. What I really wanted was VI with macros you could program to include conditional branches, and he said it had all though and much much more.

So I learned to actually use Emacs, and soon learned that it was quite extensible, but it wasn't made too clear how to extend it. The online manual was useful mainly to people who already knew what they were doing.

So I read the source code. One thing I was interested in doing was writing C functions that were callable from Emacs lisp as lisp functions. There are many such functions built into Emacs (usually for performance) and you can add your own. There's this big DEFUN macro that even makes the C API look like Lisp.

I learned that and a lot more. I learned what an eloquent statement of software architecture Emacs is.

I learned that there really was something worth my while doing in the way of software.

I wanted to write a program like that someday. Not another big editor, but a program that would someday strike other young programmers the way Emacs struck me.

During the course of reading the source code, one day I stayed at my terminal 24 hours straight, arising only to get coffee and use the restroom, not even eating. I only realized how much time had passed when I started to fall asleep.

That was when I started to take programming seriously. I began to put serious effort into studying programming, and studying it deeply.

For example I would read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the bus on the way to work and I would stay up all night after work learning to program better on my Macintosh at home.

For many years I selected all of my jobs based mainly on what I could learn from them.

I've become a very skilled programmer. You can see this from my consulting business website, my resume (on my resume the place where I first encountered Emacs is the Programmer job at Verde Technologies) and my programming tips pages.

So in a very direct and profound way I owe it all to Richard Stallman and Emacs.

I still haven't written my great program yet. I don't even know what it will be. One project I've worked on peripherally is the ZooLib cross-platform application framework and a project I've just started up but not gotten too far with yet is the Linux Quality Database.

I did finally get my B.A. in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz, but only after being out of school working at a programmer for a number of years.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I mentioned this earlier in my recommendation of Seagull Networks (note - SSH, SCP and CGI's you can write and install yourself, even in C or C++) - but I'll say it again.

If you want reliable email, it is important that you own your own domain name. If you want email to get to you easily and reliably, then it's important that the domain name be easy for people to remember and to spell, even when you've just spoken it to them over the phone. (Note that while my business name is GoingWare, Inc. I've also registered goingwhere.com and had Seagull alias it to make sure people can find me.)

You think your Yahoo or Hotmail account is reliable? Guess again. How many big companies have tanked in the last few decades? What if yahoo decides it's not worth their while anymore to provide email service, even if you want to pay for continuing to have the privilege of having the same email address for the rest of your life.

I was proud to be one of the first customers for Scruz-Net - until they went down for a week just after I started my consulting business!

And they've been bought out more times than I can count. I keep my old ISP account there mainly because I haven't moved all my web pages yet, but periodically I download all my email from there and pick the real mail out from the spam and send them a message asking them to use my new permanent emails, either crawford@goingware.com or michael@geometricvisions.com.

I've also got a few pages on scruznet that I feel are important for people to be able to find in the distant future, so I'm slowly going through my old site there, moving the pages to one of my own domains, and putting a page in the original's place with a META REFRESH tag and a note. But the problem is that some sites have permanent links to my scruznet pages embedded in their databases that I've been unable to get them to correct.

In the long run, I'll close my account at Scruznet and they say they will redirect accesses to my old site to a single, fixed URL but people may not be able to find what they're looking for.

As I emphasize in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants, it's important to own your own domain name not just to maintain a professional appearance and so your customers can find you, but everyone should own their own domain name so they can have a permanent address.

If you own your own domain name and your service should go bad, you can relocate it to another provider and be up in a few days. Mainly you just have to wait for the new DNS to take effect.

(For other helpful programmer's tips (mostly technical) see GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.)

An added benefit of owning your own domain name is that you often get what are incorrectly termed "postmaster" email addresses. With these, any mail sent to anyuser@yourdomain.com will be delivered to your mailbox. You can combine this with filtering email clients to suppress spam. You still have to download the stuff but what you do is sort all of your legitimate mailing list mail into separate mailboxes, and mail addressed to your real name into the main mailbox you read, and leave everything else in your inbox.

Then if you need to give a website a valid email address, say to allow them to send you a password, you give them the email theirdomain@yourdomain.com.

If they sell your name to a mailing list at least you know who's done it. For example, this is the way that I know that Citibank is using the email I used to log into my cardholder webpage to access my account - I've only used that particular email for that one page. But Citibank is now sending spam to this address asking me to sign up for their card! How dumb can they get!

If you really don't care whether an email address should last, as when signing up for a web page, this is when you really do want to get yourself a Yahoo or Hotmail account. That way their servers can handle all the spam and not yours.

I strongly recommend Seagull Networks at http://www.seagull.net/

Whenever anyone asks me for a hosting recommendation, I always recommend Seagull.

No, Seagull is not an ISP. While it would be nice to have a secure ISP, you're better off using any random joker for your ISP, owning your own domain name so you can relocate it in the event your service tanks (I discuss this in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants) and accessing the hosting service via SSH and SCP (secure copy). Note that it does no good to only use SSH - you have to use SCP as well.

Here's a sample SCP command line, in case you can't figure it out, it's very simple but I had a hard time from the man page:

scp foo.bar crawford@www.goingware.com:.

The above places file foo.bar in the home directory of user crawford on www.goingware.com.

scp crawford@www.goingware.com:web/index.html stash

This copies index.html from directory "web" on www.goingware.com and places it in directory "stash" on the local machine.

Please read my web page on Why You Should Use Encryption

Besides being a good service, it's a small enough company to offer personal service. I've sent support email to the webmaster at 2am his time and had the problem fixed and the mail answered within the hour.

But even though it's a small service, it's not a low-quality service. They have high-performance machines, they are in a good colo facility with a high-speed connection to the backbone, they upgrade their service regularly and the webmaster, Paul Celestin, is just a damn nice guy.

I'm not sure if he still publishes it but Celestin used to produce a CDROM full of useful free source code for the Macintosh. Some of my own Mac open-source programs were on it.

These are the sites I personally have located there:

• http://www.goingware.com/ - My consulting company, GoingWare Inc. My livelihood depends on the reliability of this site.
• http://www.wordservices.org/ - Seagull hosts this public-service site for free in exchange for me placing a small banner ad on some of the pages
• http://www.geometricvisions.com/

In addition, my wife has a couple sites on Seagull through my account, and my friend Andy Hasse used to host http://www.williebrown.com there (yes, if you live in San Francisco you might remember that Hasse was a consultant to mayoral candidate Clint Reilly when the Brown campaign discovered Andy owned the williebrown domain.)

I have a couple tips for you on checking email. I use PGP when I'm trying to be secure, but it's really not that much that I really care for complete security. But I just don't like people snooping on me, mostly I think it's none of their damn business what's in my mailbox even if it's spam.

So mostly I read my email at seagull using elm while logged in via SSH, and when my mailbox gets big, I move it to my home directory and copy it to my home machine via SCP:

goingware$ cp /usr/spool/mail/crawford ~

goingware$ echo "" /usr/spool/mail/crawford

back on my home machine:

C> pscp crawford@www.goingware.com:crawford .

It is also possible to download your email via POP with SSH via port forwarding. I describe this on the BeOS Tip Server. It doesn't seem to be responding right now but if you go to its search and enter "ssh" you'll find the tip I submitted called something like "Secure email download via ssh". The instructions have some BeOS specific items but most of what's there will work on any systems.

Don't have SSH? Try one of these:

• Nifty Telnet/SSH for Macintosh - includes a graphical SCP client!
• putty for Windows (also supports NT/Alpha) and pscp for secure copy
• CygWin - a GNU environment for Win32 - use bash, compile with GCC, a lot of linux code builds right out of the box in Cygwin
• The Secure Shell Community Site
• SSH Communications Security (commercial)

That's because I have something to say that is of value to the world, and I already know that saying it can touch the lives of others in a deeply meaningful way. Just to give one example.

How many high-school kids don't do much more than hang around at the mall, drive their cars up and down main street or do bong hits when they're not watching the tube?

Learn from other platforms.

And I mean this not just in regard to installers and packages, but everything.

And no, I'm not proposing that what we need to do is make Linux look more like Windows or the MacOS.

But there are problems that others have solved and we can draw on their solutions, even if we can't use their source code.

(Even when I was working at Apple I would tell people about stuff from SunOS or Linux that I thought would go good in the Mac - they wouldn't hear of it).

I think an indicator of the problem we face in trying to bring Linux to the desktop was when I was corresponding with RMS about things I thought would be helpful to the users and I suggested an installer. He replied "What's an installer?"

The best installer I've ever come across on any platform, both to create packages with and for the user to install products with is Mindvision Vise.

It would be worthwhile to find a friend with a Mac and download it, and make a little toy installer that installs SimpleText and a readme file to try it out (you can download it for free - the installers created with it complain that you've lifted it until you get a valid serial number. It is possible to get a serial for free for installers for freeware).

It beats the living hell out of anything I've seen for Linux.

BTW - if you want to see an installer that really blows, check out PackageBuilder/Software Valet for the BeOS. The thing drove me to distraction. It wasn't just the way it would corrupt the data in my archives or crash while users were installing my software with it.

What really drove me nuts is that it had no concept of updating an installer when I had built new software to go in it.

With vise you just drop your new files in the folder next to your installer project and tell it to update. It gives you a list of files that have changed and you can approve or disapprove of updating them (or deleting the ones that are now missing).

PackageBuilder requires you to delete the old file from the installer project, which loses its settings, then you have to go and add your file back in and reset your settings. This is probably the number one reason for every time I've been reluctant to release a new version of my software on the BeOS - I enjoy programming it but I hate the damn installer.

I first found I was color-blind when my mom brought home some color blindness tests from the library.

There are circles filled with lots of colored dots and you're supposed to be able to see figures in the dots.

I didn't know I had a problem before then, but since it was pointed out to me I notice it sometimes. Broad fields of color are easily distinguishable, but if you make small dots of red and green next to each other with felt tip pens on a sheet of paper, I will have trouble telling them apart.

I can easily tell that they are of different colors and one is red and one is green - but which is which is hard for me, and as I stare at them they switch color.

Resistor color codes - you know Victory Garden Walls - are just unfathomable to me.

On the other hand, I am an artist when I'm not programming (not much there at the site yet) and I particularly like oil painting; if I paint a lot for some period of time my color perception gets much sharper. If I spend all my time just programming it gets dulled.

I've done the same thing that RMS did, when he was asked for change for food - I bought food for the hungry person.

I haven't done it a whole lot, and I have to admit that sometimes the approaches I get frighten me or I am too busy with my own thing to deal with them. But whenever I have done so it has been extremely rewarding.

I also know from my own experiences with mental illness that one of the most miserable things about it is the reaction that strangers on the street have to you. Being disturbed makes you look and act different sometimes, and often people will avoid your glance, cross the street upon your approach, or lock their car doors when they see you standing at the street corner. You'd better believe that the affected person notices that even if they don't visibly react to it.

The first time I did this a man in Pasadena asked me for money for food. I bought him lunch, spent an hour with him and ended up giving him ten dollars. He was a very nice man and said he was a hardworking construction laborer but couldn't get work.

The second time I met a couple homeless people, a vietnam vet and a teenage girl on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz California. The girl was coming down from an acid trip and having a very bad time. We talked for quite a long time - the vet recounted the horrors he still sufferred from having killed a soldier with a bayonet in Laos. I bought the girl a slice of thick-crust pizza at Pizza My Heart. It comforted her greatly.

On another occassion I had noticed a schizophrenic woman around town, who hung out downtown a lot but never seemed to talk to anyone. I just walked up to her, asked her name, and we got to talking.

Allison was a very nice woman and interesting to talk to - but was having such a hard time with her hallucinations that she had to keep brushing them out of her face with her hands so she could see me. I bought her a coffee at the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. We just sat and talked. I imagine she was on government assistance and was neither homeless nor hungry, but probably (like I back in the dark days) welcomed someone to talk to who didn't react with revulsion.

That was years ago, and better medicines for treating schizoid symptoms have been developed (clozaphine, and the risperdal I take). I ran into Allison again not too long ago and she seemed like a pretty ordinary woman, and spoke of her husband and children. She didn't remember me from before.

My wife tells me about how a lot of people say panhandlers are just trying to rip you off, and I imagine some of them are - there are dishonest programmers too, aren't there, but we still associate with each other? She's very generous in giving money to those who ask for it because she knows that by doing so her conscience is clear. Maybe a few people will come by the money dishonesty, but far more people will be helped a little bit out of their misery.

Even if you feel you can't or won't give spare change to someone who asks, stop and chat with them. They may not admit to it but it's far more likely that they are hungering for genuine human contact more than food or money. I know I was.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

For some weird reason, web browsing doesn't work anymore when I boot Windows NT on my laptop.

I think there's a hack or a virus or maybe just some corruption.

That's OK for me, I just run Netscape under Gnome from my Linux partition. Get real good network performace.

But when my poor fiance has to use my machine for web browsing, it nearly drives her to hysterics. She's learned how to use Windows and anything different really disturbs her.

Now, you could say "just get used to it and she'll be happy" but I think there are some real serious UI errors in Gnome that will affect its acceptance among people who are not expert users.

Chief among these is the way it switches desktops when you move the mouse off the screen. That really threw her and cause me trouble still. I don't think it should be possible to switch desktops by moving the mouse. I like the way it is done in the BeOS, where you hit a key combo (like switching virtual consoles when you're not running X) or clicking on a window that gives a menu of desktops.

But throwing the whole screen display sideways just because the mouse drifted a little is unforgiveable.

The other problem is that a default installation of Gnome with enlightment clutters up the screen with zillions of little icons. I mostly ignore these except when I have to fish under them to press on a taskbar button in Gnome 1.2. My fiance wanted to know how to get rid of them and I couldn't tell her - she wanted to view a web page full screen so there'd be a maximum view and you couldn't accidentally bring the focus to the wrong window.

While I think Gnome has the stated purpose of making Linux easier to use, I think it is having the opposite effect. I think it is worthwhile to have advanced features that are not installed by default but the default behaviour should be something that a novice can use.

You don't have to make it look like windows - get someone who's never used windows or macos before (hard to find these days, but there are some), sit them down in front of your linux box and videotape them working with the system.

Do these for your individual applications too.

I haven't tried them for colocation services (although I've discussed it with the webmaster) but I heavily recommend Seagull Networks. I use them for hosting several domains I own and always recommend them to people who ask me.

Here's why:

• They allow shell access via telnet and secure shell
• Supporting ssh allows me to use secure copy (scp) to upload content
• I can read my email via a shell login with Pine or Elm without downloading all my mail (important when one uses several operating systems)
• I can write my own CGI's in any programming language I want and install them myself. They provide the gnu development tools.
• They have excellent customer service. I've sent in questions in the middle of the night and got back authoritative answers within the hour.
• Their prices are quite reasonable - $25 a month for basic virtual domain hosting, which might seem high but you get the shell access and secure shell

Write to seagull@seagull.net if you want to ask the webmaster about colocation. That's not really their specialty but hosting is.

I host these domains with them:

• www.goingware.com
• www.wordservices.org
• www.geometricvisions.com

In addition my fiance has two domains there and a friend has two domains there under my account (there's a discount for reselling the service - your first account is free but more under the same billing are cheaper).

I feel that the digital revolution has lived up to its expectations in my case because I have chosen to take control of my life.

There's a discussion of what happened to the four day work week below with the consensus that it never came about because of corporatism.

As long as people just stay in their jobs and do what the boss expects of you, the boss can keep turning up the speed on the machine and you have to keep up.

Not all of you are in the position to do what I do, but you could do something appropriate to yourself.

I became a consultant

It is still the case that I work long hours, but usually this is because I choose to. When I take time off is almost always under my control. I work at home, and I could work in the nude if I wanted to (I find office dress in the home office makes me more productive though).

Note that this is different from telecommuting. I used to telecommute too, but it really didn't serve my needs. It invited the corporate master into my home.

It is also different from being a contract programmer for a body shop. Read about my decision not to work with recruiters or agencies and why they are bad for both employers and employees.

There are a few aspects of the digital revolution that made this all possible:

• I find customers almost entirely through the web. I explain how in Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

• Laptops are suffiently powerful that I can use a laptop as my primary development machine for commercial programming on a variety of operating systems. Read about my laptop here. This allows me to travel or live anywhere and have my development system at-hand.

• With good phone service and a high-speed internet connection and online shopping I can operate my business from St. John's Newfoundland and live in a much nicer place than Silicon Valley.

The most important factor in all of this is to make the conscious choice to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by high-tech yourself. If you don't make the choice I'm sure Time-Warner or Microsoft will be happy to make your decisions for you.

Many geeks are shy people who are easily taken advantage of by those with more social skills - such as managers at high-tech companies, salemen and the like. The first step in taking control of your life will come when you can say "no" to your boss.

I learned to say no to a difficult boss and my life at the company got better. I stopped working all nighters. And not too long after that I learned to stop feeling loyalty to a company that didn't care about me and went looking for a new job. Between one friday and the following monday my pay doubled.

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on how the Internet is restoring personal power to the individual and taking it away from the corporation.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I keep posting this around Slashdot.

If you're a computer user, you need to read The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computer and Related Systems, available on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ on on the Usenet news as comp.risks

The Risks forum is part of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy.

You should make a special effort to read Risks if you:

• Program computers
• Make policy decisions involving computers (managers, government etc.)
• Depend on computers for your life or safety (do you fly on airplanes?)
• Operate computers in situations where they affect life or safety

You will see computers in a different light after reading Risks for a while, and maybe it will affect the decisions you make regarding them and the way you write and test your code. Consider this article I posted:

USS Yorktown dead in water after divide by zero

The Navy got rid of its more robust warship operating systems and replaced them with Windows NT. As a result of this, when a sailor typed a "0" in a data entry field, the whole shipboard network went down and the proud Yorktown had to be towed back into port.

Security concerns, viruses and the like are discussed extensively in Risks.

Do you use Microsoft Word on Mac or Windows? Do you use it to type confidential documents? Consider this post from a fellow who received a contract from an attorney in Word format:

The scary MSWord residue feature

I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written.

We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience. It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.

This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.

Do you have any loved ones in the hospital with a life-threatening medical condition?

New HDTV signal shuts down Baylor heart monitors

On 26 Feb 1998, WFAA TV (Channel 8) in Dallas turned on their new digital HDTV signal. As a result, 12 heart monitors stopped working in a Baylor University Medical Center heart surgery recovery unit; they happened to be on the same frequency. The monitors were made in the mid-1980s, and were slated for replacement. [But the patients weren't?] In the interim, WFAA has stopped transmitting -- because there are no commercial receivers yet anyway. [Source: * Dallas Morning News*, 5 Mar 1998. PGN Abstracting]

Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the Risks forum, wrote a book called Computer Related Risks which draws on the material in the forum and discusses it in more depth.

It has ISBN 020155805X and you can purchase it online from:

• http://www.fatbrain.com
• http://www.barnesandnoble.com
• http://www.amazon.com
• http://www.chapters.ca - in Canada

If you teach a course in programming in any school (even high school), I suggest you put the book on the recommended reading list. If you teach a course on embedded or fault-tolerant computing, I urge you to include it in the required reading.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

There was another Michael D Crawford in my junior high and high schools.

I was in the "Mentally Gifted Minors" program while this other fellow was in a remedial program.

But our grades came out with our classes intermixed. He got half my classes on his report card, I got half of his.

The only thing that enabled me to ever straighten this out is that I memorized my student ID number. He never bothered.

It happens that our school district computer (A DEC-System 20 - I graduated in 1982) provided only one character for the middle name, so even though his middle name was Dwayne and mine is David, the computer was unable to reliably distinguish us.

Starting around our sophomore year, he started skipping class regularly, and the school tried to get aggressive about his truancy by sending threatening computer-generated form letters to my parents.

My father had to take an hour off work about once a week for an entire school year to drop into the principals office and straighten it out. After a few weeks of this the office staff recognized him as a regular and would fix it right away, but with no way to distinguish us in the school records there was no way to stop those letters from coming to us.

I guess I just happened to fall first in the database.

On another note, I was working at a company where there was another Michael Crawford with a different middle initial who was an MIS programmer.

I got a call one day from a manager at another company who said he was very sorry, but I didn't get the Lotus Notes job - but I hadn't applied! I explained the mixup, but of course he'd let it leak that this long-time employee was out hunting for other work.

And finally I have the same name as a famous british actor, the Michael Crawford who starred in Phantom of the Opera. I regularly get adoring fan mail from both pubescent and middle-aged women. One woman asked me to sing at her daughter's wedding, and when I explained the mixup, she asked me to sing anyway.

I send them to check out my own music at http://www.geometricvisions.com

Note that I was born Michael David Crawford - the actor changed his name for the stage.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

If you're a computer user, and most especially if you're a computer programmer, then you have good reason to read The Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems, available as comp.risks on the Usenet News, and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

Cell phone interference to airliners has been discussed there extensively.

For those of you who work where they're considering replacing a real OS installation with Windows NT, consider this post I contributed:

USS Yorktown dead in water after divide by zero

The Yorktown has to be towed back into port after a sailor entered "0" into a data entry field and it crashed the ship's entire NT network.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

You can read about installing BeOS, Windows NT and Slackware Linux on my Compaq Presario 1800T at:

http://www.goingware.com/laptop

Note that the machine came with Windows 98 installed and doesn't support NT; NT was the most difficult installation and still doesn't work very well.

On the other hand I've been testing the 2.4.0-test1-ac* kernels every few days and generally they work pretty well. The only serious problem I had was that my Adaptec 1480 SlimSCSI card didn't work; that wasn't a problem with the laptop itself but some problem in the Linux PCI drivers as well as a temporary bug in the SCSI driver. Recent 2.4.0 kernel patches work great and I can burn CD's off my laptop through SCSI.

If you're considering buying a laptop, I encourage you to read my page on my laptop, as I think the information I give could improve the wisdom of your choice.

Generally I've been happy with how it works, but I'm afraid I'm not so happy with the mechanical design of the thing; there's a ribbon cable in the DVD drive that gets tangled when I close it if it's been opened too far, and the most serious problem right now is that the power adapter doesn't always make good contact so the battery drains even when it's plugged in. Sometimes if I leave the house with Linux running it will power down while I'm away. Note that I've only had the unit for 7 months; if they could have the same electrical design but built for more rugged use I think I'd be happy.

I should point out, in response to some who have written me, is that I'm not trying to use my Linux box as a mail server. It's a laptop that's not always connected to the net. I just want to use my hosting services like any Mac or Windows user would.

I tried XFMail and Post Office today and couldn't get either of them to build.

I spent about an hour with each of them. Post Office required a bunch of undocumented environment variables to be set in order to get it to build.

I think it's critically important that no software require an environment variable to get it to basically function. If it does, you can be sure the user will select a product from Microsoft or Apple instead.

This is with a Slackware 7 system.

XFMail hasn't been maintained in a year, and although it's taken new life as Archimedes it hasn't been released yet.

It is possible to retrieve it from CVS and build it that way. I'll give it a try

If you're manic depressive and would like to aid in the understanding of the illness, and something that would massively aid in the rational design of drugs for it, please consider participating in the Genomic Study of Bipolar Disorder. They are specifically seeking volunteers where two or more siblings in the same family have the illness.

They'll interview and ask for a sample of your blood. If you can't go to their site, they can interview you over the phone and have a local physician or blood lab take the sample and mail it in.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

That class was 15 years ago. The study you describe may have been done a long time ago - a great deal of more recent research refutes your argument.

It may well be true that we tolerate eccentricity greater in the more intelligent people, but the book Touched with Fire quotes a number of substantive studies that I believe effectively prove the link between mental illness and creativity.

If you think there isn't such a link, I suggest you read the book, then read the studies quoted, and then maybe use the science citation index to look for followup studies and discussion in the psychiatric technical literature.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

(There seems to be a massive bug in the HTML processor on slashdot now). The preview is all screwed up, the "Allowed HTML" note below is empty.

It depends greatly on where you are. In the US, most states have public mental health services which are free or low-cost with a sliding scale. The service isn't all that great but you can see a psychiatrist and get medication and such things as lithium level blood tests for free.

I did this for years through the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Department, but there were two big problems - only one 20-minute session a month with a doctor (so if I was having trouble there wasn't a lot I could do), and the antidepressant they wanted me to take caused a immediate and severe anxiety attack (I was warned this might happen). The one I ended up taking as an alternative, ludiomil, worked great for me but the state wouldn't pay for it because the cheaper one that caused the bad anxiety was available.

(I understand the Alliance for the Mentally Ill had to sue the state of New York to cover the $9000/year it costs to treat a schizophrenic with clozapine - many cheaper drugs are available but clozapine works for many people where no other drug will and has had miraculous effects on about 30% of those who take it. But it's an expensive drug and even more expensive because it has a rare but fatal side effect and weekly blood tests are required by the FDA for everyone who takes it).

If you are a college student, you may be able to see a doctor for free through your campus. I did at UC Santa Cruz and CalTech. There may be a limit on the number of sessions and the medication won't be covered.

If you live in an enlightened country like Canada, psychiatric sessions are completely free, although finding a doctor and getting an appointment may be hard. (Only M.D.'s are paid for, not psychologist or non-M.D. "talk therapists"). Also medication is not covered. Lithium's pretty cheap and so are most antidepressants but some things are real expensive, my risperdal runs me well over $100 a month and I only take a tiny dose.

If you live in a place with publicly funded medicine where there is no prescription drug coverage, you would do well to apply immediately for supplemental insurance that does. A friend in Canada gets blue cross for CDN $30 per month - and besides covering her psychiatric medicine at a couple hundred per month it also paid for a $700 two-week ulcer antibiotic treatment (to kill H. Pylori bacteria).

I'm afraid in the vast majority of the world there is little public support for psychiatry, if you can find a doctor at all. But in many of those countries, you can buy medication without a prescription - pretty dangerous yes and I wouldn't suggest it without actually seeing a doctor but at least you wouldn't have to keep seeing one to get refills.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

I used to correspond with a very nice woman who was married to a Greek diplomatic corps member who worked in western europe at some European Community official post.

When her bipolar husband got sick and couldn't work anymore, he wanted to move back to Greece. There is psychiatric treatment available there but what he got was clearly not competent.

I was able to help them out somewhat on suggesting medications to his doctor, and for a little while things got better.

The fellow got physically ill, I think it was heart trouble or something, and he went into the hospital. But at the same time he was sufferring from life-threatening heart problems he was manic.

They figured he was just crazy and didn't take his physical ailment particularly seriously so they just sent him home after a day or so.

He had a heart attack and died three days later.

This man was a diplomat for Christ's sake. He used to hold a position of significant importance to his nation's and Europe's well being.

But because he was manic the folks in Greece just let him die.

Think about that the next time you shy away from a homelessly mentally ill person. For the homeless mentally ill, generally they don't want your spare change - they want maybe just a flash of eye contact, a nod of the head. They want validation of their own existence as a member of human society - and I know very well from quite painful personal experience that that is the hardest barrier to overcome.

I've taken the homeless out to lunch in restaurants a few times. Had coffee with a schizophrenic woman who had trouble seeing me because the hallucinations got in her way and she had to keep brushing them aside with her hands. She could hardly express a complete sentence (she spoke in "word salad") but honestly she was and still is a very kind and decent human being.

There's been a lot of advances in medicine for schizophrenics since we had coffee that time - the "atypical antipsychotics" such as the risperdal I take and the clozapine that enabled Lori Schiller to come out of her darkness.

They don't help everyone and yes they can screw you up (clozapine can kill you from agranulocytosis and requires frequent blood tests to prevent sudden death) but the next time I ran into this lady on the street in Santa Cruz a few years later we walked together for a few blocks and had a nice chat. She was on her way to meet her husband and had kids. Seemed like a very good wife and mother. She was studying the arts at Cabrillo College.

Something I really try to emphasize, my shrink took years emphasizing this to me against incredible resistance on my part, is that each of us who suffer has to take individual responsibility for our own lives.

Psychiatrists who recognize and teach that and put the power in the patient's hands do their job well.

But yes there are plenty of psychiatrists who don't and do their patients a disservice. How many programmer's do you know who write bad code? And how many of them are convinced that their bad code really is just fine? Same with shrinks. Gotta be choosy. Insist on quality service.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Michael D. Crawford

Here's something I've learned and used in my life that is a fundamental fact of existence. Please try to understand and take this with you if you take nothing else from this discussion.

This applies to everyone, not just the mentally ill or computer geeks, but all humans, even people from other cultures, and animals too. Even if you choose not to apply this to your own life, knowing this and understanding it will help you to deal with other people, especially difficult people who don't make sense or who don't understand you.

Most people feel that reality is something that just sort of happens to them. In fact the vast majority of people believe this so deeply that they don't even know that they believe it or ever consider the question of whether it could be otherwise. Things that are, just are because they happen that way.

But that's simply not true. There is an objective, absolute physical reality, but it is too vast, too complex for any living being to comprehend. This objective reality is also devoid of any significance and meaning.

The reality we experience is something we make. We do not have complete control over it, but everyone has influence over its general course, and it can be changed with time. Further, in conducting our construction of reality, we are constantly making choices, usually unconscious, and there is constant opportunity to choose, far more than most people would believe without really spending some time contemplating it.

Many people are satisfied with their lives, but many aren't, but believe they have no choice to have it any other way. Some people struggle constantly to improve their lot but consistently fail and live miserable lives - it's not for lack of trying, it's because they live in a reality that is not effective for them and they do not see the way to change it or even know that's what they should do.

I didn't invent this concept - I learned about it in an anthropology course at UC Santa Cruz. It has been "discovered" repeatedly over the ages and written about by many people, and the concept is expressed and taught in many different ways, and understood differently by many people. But however it is expressed the fundamental idea is common and widespread and very old.

I'll describe it the way it was taught by Prof. Stuart Schlegel in Anthropology of Religion, where we concentrated on studying the world views of some other cultures - and the social and mental processes by which they constructed them.

The objective physical reality I mentioned was termed Nouminal Reality by Emmanuel Kant. Nouminal reality is the physical universe in its entirety and complexity. There is no conscious perception of nouminal reality because it is both too detailed, too complex and our senses are physically incapable of perceiving it - most light is to long or short in wavelength to see or feel, much sound too quiet or lost in noice, most objects to small to see or too large to comprehend.

Nouminal reality is all there is, and it is completely true and absolute, but it is also meaningless.

For example, in nouminal reality there is no boundary between physical objects. Where one thing stops and something else starts is an artificial concept; in physical reality the quantum wavefunctions of almost all particles in the universe decay exponentially into infinity but never fully reach zero, although the wavefunction may have zero points it will almost always (except in a black hole) come to a non-zero value on the other side.

In the nouminal world there are events (too numerous to imagine) but they have no significance. The Kennedy assassination and the atomic bombings of Japan occurred but were no more important then events in some nearly-evacuated patch of empty space out between the galaxies somewhere. At best they could be described as complex particle interactions, and the events did have consequences but the consequences were only more particle interactions.

Nouminal reality is the raw, unfiltered and unformatted data that we use as a raw material to sample, filter, interpret and distort the information that we actually experience.

Subjective Reality is what we actually experience happening to us. A lot goes on in the process of transforming nouminal reality info subjective reality.

Reality construction is a layered protocol, like a TCP/IP stack. You might get a sense of nouminal reality by wiring an audio speaker into an Internet backbone cable; subjective reality is the formatted web page with styled text and nice JPEGs and maybe some streaming audio. It looks pretty automatic to the naive user but we all know the decades of process and engineer-millenia that went into making a web page happen.

And protocols can change. And you can choose what web pages you're going to look at. Some parts of it are easy, but significant change is a difficult process in life, as in standards development and implementation.

The first layer in subjective reality construction is physical selection. We can only experience the things our senses are sensitive to - we see a limited range of light wavelengths and hear in a narrow spectrum of audio frequencies. We can only see things that occupy a solid angle in our visual field wide enough to resolve in our physical eyes.

There are evolutionary and biological selections and interpretations applied. Part of the processing of visual signals in the nerve from the eye to the brain transform visual pixels into edge information and movement - our vision is much more sensitive to distinct edges and motion than to broad, stationary featureless fields.

I'm sure a lot of this filtering results from evolutionary processes not just to make us see well but to allow us to survive to reproduce. Loud or high-pitched noise, bright lights and flashes get our attention quickly because through most of history they've signaled danger or injury.

Once we've constructed a vision of an object we have to choose which objects to pay attention too and what to consider significant. Look at the room around you. See the objects in it. Now try to see all the objects all at once in their entirety. Pretty difficult, isn't it - a mental strain at best and not something you can do for any length of time.

The choice of what to see, and what significance these things have start with our culture. Us geeks will walk into an office and see computers.

A Tiruray on Mindanao in the Philippines will walk into the forest and see homes for spirits, and take care not to walk to close to any tree lest they disturb the spirit. This isn't just their belief - this is their reality, their universe. They'd see one of our offices and probably be thrown right into a panic or severe depression.

We have significance applied by our upbringing and by our personal preferences. You're friends and loved ones capture your attention much more reaidily than random strangers on the street - and we see humans in general much more readily than animals or plants because we attach such importance to other humans.

A whole lot of selection, filtering, whittling down and built-up significance is applied before a sensory perception is spit into our conscious mind for us to think about consciously. The part we normally get to consider consciously is only a small part of the object and most of what we experience is created by our own minds.

The most important thing to understand is that during the vast majority of those filtering processes, choices are being made - choices as to what to point your eyes towards, what sounds to focus on, and most importantly what significance to apply to the things we perceive.

This process exists for purely internal experience too, and this is particularly important for people who are unhappy with their lives. If you can come to understand the processes by which experience is created, both external experience and in your own mind, you can alter it in a way that will tend to be more positive and effective.

It's also important to understand that biology has a vast influence over what you construct. You can choose consciously to absorb a new trait into your personality, but there are things about being human that are too deeply wired into our brains to be able to alter through conscious will.

That is why I, as a manic depressive, choose to medicate myself with psychotropic drugs. Manic depression's sympoms have too profound an effect on me to be able to control them through better living, but I can choose to affect the biological component with medication.

The choices made in subjective reality construction are mostly automatic and unconscious - but they are still choices. They have to be automatic because there are too many choices to make for your conscious mind to be able to keep up with them all. But you can decide to alter the process and make a conscious decision to change your experience and then there are processes by which this decision can be implemented in the subconscious over some time, sort of like pushing a new STREAMS object down on the stack, or removing one.

I'm not going to go into how this is done. I can recommend some reading later. But this is basically the process taught to psychiatric patients in mental hospitals. It's not usually couched in these terms but I've found that the shrinks are quite comfortable discussing it this way with me when I bring it up.

The problem for mental patients is that they are in a very difficult and desperate position when they are asked to effect this change. They don't have the tools any more - it's like working with a stone chisel that's been smashed to bits. But there really is no choice and it is a long and difficult process to create the mental and emotional tools needed to do this and to heal.

If you're having an argument with someone who just doesn't seem to grasp your point, consider that they may have more than a different opinion, they may live in a different world. Jack Valenti doesn't just think DVD hackers are vandals - they are sapping the very foundations of his world. That may help you to understand the desperation of some people who work to oppose you.

And understanding these processes, and the process by which changes to reality construction are effected, may allow you to live a more satisfied life and to be more effective in gaining the support of people who might otherwise oppose you.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Michael D. Crawford

I wore the wrong shirt for my photo in the Metro article.

I wore my BeOS Master's Award polo shirt that I won (honorable mention) for porting Spellswell from MacOS to the BeOS

(It uses a protocol called Word Services that links word processors and email clients to spellers and other text services (including text encryption); the award was as much for bringing Word Services to the BeOS as for Spellswell itself. I plan to do the same for Linux soon, possibly through the CORBA techniques they use in Gnome - http://www.gnome.org seems to be down or I'd link to the relevant page there.)

I'm pretty active in the Be developer community.

I'm also pretty critical of Be because of their complete lack of any sense as far as managing the business and handling developer relations and I have no qualms about making my views known to them and other developers, both in public and in private discussions.

I've always been a shy and quiet person but there's something about living through experiences such as I've had that makes such things as speaking up in public about mere work matters pretty easy in comparison.

Remember my sig: Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. Words I live by.

I thought it would provoke quite a lively response to post the link to the Metro article to BeUserTalk and BeDevTalk. I got a couple private responses and one public one. I was very glad to get the responses I did get though.

On the other hand, I submitted this article to Slashdot but figured it wouldn't get posted, considering the dozens of articles I've submitted that I think were more directly relevant to open source programming, privacy, free speech, encryption and so on, but this is the one that gets on.

And my manic depression page, which grew to get 3000 hits last month (it's linked from some bipolar sites and the bipolar category on Yahoo), has gotten 4800 hits in ten hours.

No, I should have worn my Release Your Inner Nerd t-shirt that I bought from the Slashdot booth at the Linuxworld Expo in San Jose a while back.

(Wore it shopping for wedding supplies with my fiance the other day :-) ).

Michael D. Crawford

Heh... took me all this time to find the reply button so I could actually post a new topic rather than replying to an existing one...

First, I'd like to thank all the people who have written to me at michael@geometricvisions.com regarding their experiences with manic depression. I'm afraid I'm getting a lot of mail today so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to respond to most everyone.

But if you're thinking of writing, please be assured that I take the confidentiality of people who write to me regarding this very seriously. If you like you can encrypt your mail with my PGP key

I want to respond to a number of things that have been posted here and also clarify a few things that were written in Kelly Luker's article about bipolar high-tech workers in the Metro San Jose.

A number of people have posted some very negative things about mental illness or about the mental health profession. While there are instances of bad doctors and certainly a long history of bad science and outright abuse in the history of mental health, there is no doubt that manic depression is a real illness.

This is evidenced by positron emission tomography scans of bipolar patients during various phases. PET scans measure the consumption of radioactive sugar in various parts of the brain.

Manic patients have strong positron emissions from the right hemisphere of the brain, showing that the right hemisphere is very active - suggesting a physical reason for the feeling of creativity and the overabundance of new ideas.

Depressed people have a reduced level of positron emissions relative to a normal patient.

A bipolar patient who is neither manic nor depressed will show a normal level of sugar metabolization.

The illness is thought to be genetic in origin, but the genetic nature of it is not well understood. Several times researchers thought they'd discovered the gene for manic depression but the discovery turned out to be wrong.

It happens that manic depression tends to run in families, but not always. It can appear spontaneously in a family, and after it does it will tend to be passed to successive generations and get worse with each generation.

I don't understand fully why but this is thought to suggest that the disease is caused by a certain morphology of mutation rather than a certain genetic sequence, and that this kind of mutation tends to get worse over generations. Apparently this sort of mutation is understood for other illnesses that do this so they think bipolar depression may work this way too. I'm afraid I don't have a lit reference but I expect I can get some.

Manic depression usually responds to medication. However it is very difficult to treat effectively. The illness varies quite widely in the severity and frequency of its symptoms among individuals, and each individual responds quite differently to the different medications.

It took about twelve years to find the right combinations of medications for me. I didn't work continuously to find the right combo, and in fact I went several years without medication - but it's important for any bipolar reading this to understa nd that you can go years with good health and become profoundly manic or depressed quite suddenly, as I did when I was hospitalized during graduate school during a manic episode.

Another problem is that doctors are often lazy or ill-informed about proper treatment. I was first prescribed lithium and nothing else, even though my most prevalent symptom was depression and I went years with fairly continuous suicidal feelings and no treatment at all for it.

Early on the only direct treatment for manic depression was lithium, so the mental health community seemed to have gotten this idea that lithium was therefore completely effective for everyone. The Only Choice != Effective Treatment

Another problem is that antidepressants tend to provoke manic episodes, especially if they are given without mood stabilizers like lithium, depakote or tegretol. Quite often the new patient's only complaint is depression and the doctor doesn't ask questions that would determine a history of manic behavior, so they prescribe antidepressants without anything to prevent mania, and the patient then has a psychotic episode, as happened to me when I was first given antidepressants and I spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.

The doctors then overreact and refuse to prescribe antidepressants at all, and the result is either a miserable life or maybe suicide.

Things are somewhat better now than when I was first diagnosed. Over time it was discovered that a number of epilepsy medications are effective mood stabilizers, and once the first such was found (tegretol) a large number of others followed (I take depakote, or valproic acid). This means that there is a choice for those who either cannot tolerate lithium (as I can't) or for who it is ineffective - lithium only reduces hospitalizations by about 50% overall.

The wide range of medicine and I imagine the overall advances in biology and medical research have combined to yield an understanding of how manic depression actually works in the brain. This understanding has only come about in the last five years or so, so now I understand drugs are under development that effect the processes of bipolar depression directly, by rational drug design.

Most of the existing medications were found to be effective by chance and no one ever understood how they worked.

I understand lithium was discovered because someone noticed that lithium salts made guinea pigs less active so he just fed a bunch of lithium to all the patients in a psychiatric hospital and the bipolar patients happened to get better - most likely the reaction of the guinea pigs resulted from lithium's potent toxicity; regular blood tests are required when one starts taking it because the effective dose is pretty close to the toxic dose.

But basically what got me better isn't just the medication, it was taking responsibility for and control of my treatment. Your doctor only sees you for an hour a week (or 20 minutes a month if you're in a typical state mental health program) while you get to experience your illness every waking moment (plus nightmares during sleep).

So really, if you suffer from this, what you need to do is get informed and get the right treatment. What form that may take I cannot really tell you, but for almost everyone, there is an effective treatment which is not debilitating. If your current medications don't work for you, work with your doctor to find better medications; just give time for the new ones to fully take effect before switching again.

I want to comment on the link between manic depression and creativity. Kelly Luker, the author of the Metro San Jose article, really didn't seem to get it when I explained to her that becoming manic was not a desirable thing. I really did take pains to explain it to her clearly.

Yes, the early stages of mania, or mild mania (called hypomania) do feel pleasurable so she really thought this was something to be desired and all us bipolar programmers were all fired up on our jobs while going through manic episodes.

But that's really not how it is. Mania is a profoundly psychotic state. One goes days on end without sleeping. Thoughts race and crowd the mind so fast that one is able to complete a concept in ones own mind - let alone say a complete sentence to another person. Manic people make extremely poor judgements and often act on them without any regard to the consequences - which all too often come to roost once the manic episode is over and depression sets in.

Hypomania can be a happy and productive time but only in short bursts; it can't be maintained. And for me, severe depression invariably follows any manic phase whether it is mild or severe, so I work very hard to avoid getting manic.

The important thing to understand is that while one feels creative while manic, true creativity only comes during the balanced times (I hesitate to say "normal"), and the work of the manic depressive to heal, as I have over the years in 14 years of psychotherapy, is to learn to live a balanced life without mania or depression.

The link between manic depression and creativity is extensively (and authoritatively) discussed in Kaye Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire. She gives case studies of many famous poets and writers who were thought to be manic depressive (because of suicides, or manic behaviour) or actually known to be, and also quotes such studies as one about a prestigious writer's workshop, many of the attendees of which went on to commit suicide.

Jamison is a coauthor of the standard medical text on manic depression.

Dr. Jamison kept her own illness largely a secret during her training and career as a psychologist. But she discusses her own (and her father's) manic depression in her biography An Unquiet Mind

The subject of my letter Programming and Madness wasn't about how programming drove me nuts - it was about how it made me sane.

After I cracked up and left college I had no way to support myself, I was broke, hungry, miserable, sick, clinically depressed - not just sad but yearning to kill myself almost continuously, sleeping twenty hours a day.

I needed to find a place for myself in the world where I could live contentedly as the geek I had always been. My first love was, always will be physics (I did research on the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain, and did my senior thesis work for UC Santa Cruz at the particle accellerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland). But for some reason I've never been able to survive in the world of physics.

Working with computers, on the other hand, and in the community of computer programmers, I do very well.

It's my experience that there are a lot of other people in the computer industry, and in the scientific and technical world in general, who suffer from mental illness. "Unipolar" depression is most common but manic depression is quite widespread too. I know this both because I see it in others and sometimes we come out of our closet and, at work or on the net, we share our experience with each other. It's been a really long and complicated process for me to get where I am, and a big problem I faced when I first came down with it was a lack of good information. I'm trying to do something about it.

Imagine the day when you could ask a random stranger why the sad face and he'd feel perfectly safe in telling you "I'm clinically depressed". People will tell strangers about a lot of medical conditions, but mental illness still brings up images of Bedlam in a lot of people. And I'm afraid some of the worst stigma is actually self imposed; meaningless comments on the topic of mental illness can often have a devastating effect on someone who suffers from it, causing them to retreat far from the world of light for fear of exposing themselves when often their worst fears are mostly imagined.

I've used this sig for many years, I take it very seriously. Generally only my good friends understand the painful irony in it. I started using it shortly after getting on antidepressants after my first suicide attempt:

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Michael D. Crawford