Drinkable Chicken

Baby Amari, yo.

Actually, it's not really news anymore, as she was born on Sep 30... but I had not gotten around to blogging about it yet. :-)

Bonus points if you can figure out what her relation is to me. :D

It's almost April... So far it has been one hell of a year. My wife was diagnosed with cancer. Then her brother died last month. My 16-year-old (step)daughter has been a total prick, doing and saying hurtful things over and over again. (I know that is what 16-year-olds are supposed to act like, but she has been taking it a bit far.) Meanwhile, my 20-year-old (step)daughter is pregnant. Huge (medical) bills keep coming in. On top (and probably because) of all these things, I've been suffering from crushing depression, which in turn is making it rather hard to do my job right.

Hopefully the turmoil will settle down once two abusive household members will leave (they are expected to do this soon, in April). If not, I am not looking forward to the rest of the year.

This post is not meant to inspire pity or concern in readers, but rather to provide an explanation for if and when I don't write so much. Real life tends to interfere a lot these days. :-(

Four years ago, I did the Clean Sweep Assessment. Back then I scored a "meager 51" (out of 100). Today, my score is 41. Hmm, I don't think it's supposed to work like that. :-(

Even though I make more money these days, everything else has been crumbling down. Although there are signs that positive changes are coming up soon. Getting rid of some abusive household members should be a great improvement.

It appears my Windows box has given up the ghost. Now all I have to work with is three Mac machines:

• key lime iBook clamshell, G3, 366 MHz, 576 Mb memory (~2001)
• indigo iMac desktop, G3, 400 (?) MHz, 384 Mb memory (~2001)
• MacBook, Intel Dual Core 2.0 GHz, 2 Gb memory (2007)

Funny, how things change.

(Well. I also have a small park of older computers, like my SGI O2, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, etc... but those don't count. (Although the idea of running Spiffy on the C64 and then talking to it using Firefox on the O2 sounds... wicked. :-)))

Richard Öberg on psychopaths:

When a psychopath feels that his manipulations are not working, he will always always always as a last resort use the pity play. He will be very sad, disappointed in you, and claim to be unfairly treated. It is very predictable and yet I still find myself amazed when I see it pretty much every single time. If you push a psychopath who has done something incredibly wrong, and try go get him to admit to what he's done, or just agree on what has happened at all, at some point the pity thing will come up. The psychopath uses his knowledge about what we have but he has not: a conscience. And this is used ruthlessly through the pity-play.

We probably all apply to someone's sympathy at times, but I know a few people who do this kind of stuff, like, *all the time*. The "pity play" is just one part of their arsenal. They will lie, make up stories, cry, throw fits, appeal to your sense of fairness ("but you did this for X, why not for me?"), pit people against each other, etc. It's not nice to be on the receiving end of it. It's also my experience that even if you recognize the ploy, it's still incredibly hard not to give in, because you don't want to feel like a heartless jerk. :-/

My eyes were opened when I accidentally stumbled upon this Wikipedia article on psychopathy, especially the checklist. Somebody I know matches most of the points on this list, which was a shocking revelation to say the least. (In fact, I know at least two people who it would apply to...) My "theory" about said person is not easily shared with others, as they tend to think of psychopaths as violent killers or something, which this person is not.

This also sounds very familiar:

Another general point is that to a psychopath there is no such thing as objective reality. Reality is what you manage to convince other people that it is. Therefore, to a psychopath there is no such thing as “facts”. “Facts” are to a psychopath only what he feels is convenient for his current purposes or desires. Since there are no facts every discussion becomes a manipulative struggle. For example, if you point out a fact such as “your code doesn't work” to a psychopath, this will be perceived as an “ad hominem” attack on the psychopath (because if there are no facts, EVERYTHING is an “ad hominem” attack!), and the psychopath will then accuse you for this and respond, using this twisted logic, with “Fuck you too!”. In a fact-less world that makes total sense.

("My" psychopaths are not involved in software development, by the way. :-)

I already broke my resolution to post every day... but I have a very good reason. My wife is in the hospital with lung cancer. ;_;

So I'm at Shands right now and probably will be for the next few days, while we wait for her to get her biopsy and hear what her prognosis is. (Fortunately I can spend the night here and go online... a big difference from Dutch hospitals.) In spite of everything, I still plan to keep hacking (and writing about it). It's my system of survival. :-/