I don't mean or intend to sound brash or arrogant, but none the less I had to ask.
My situation is as follows.
This question is rooted from my ability to perform "unnaturally" well in computers and my inability to work with a team and others.
This inability to work with others, has not stunted my knowledge in computers.
Before I continue let me dive into my computer background; since the subject itself is very diverse.
It all started as a child. I had a certain draw to electronic and software based systems, such as the everyday desktop to my n64 to small electronic devices. I had a small infatuation with dissecting, (taking apart), these devices and being more intrigued with their component parts rather than their main purpose. MY parents eventually bought me my first laptop on my 10th birthday. From there it was a rather quick and lonely childhood. I had no interest in other kids or outside activities. Only in my laptop. In the beginning stages of discovering the web and the technologies that drive it; I would go to cnet and fill my head with facts from their news articles and that slowly increased to science sites ex sciencedily, popsci and weirdscrince. I eventually began to create a small group of friends after my parents bought me an xbox and a subscription to xbox live. Me being me of course wanted to dive into the game and change it mold it to my liking and see the parts that came together to form it. This led into modding and that in itself was a phase of my life that was filled with endless nights and lack of involvement. After modding became to easy and uncomplicated, I moved to web languages and coding. I was going through cnet and irrelevant to my current reading; I asked myself, "What makes this page?". I need to know as if it was an unstoppable urgency that I do not stop until it was fully understood. I began with jumping straight to setting up a webserver. Apache was the answer to my first challenge and i quickly set it up. At the time i setup the individual packages from php to mysql to apache itself and the modules. I was not aware of xampp at the time. I progressed very quickly with HTML and CSS and then something I remember so vividly it left a everlasting mark in my memory. I was looking at a beautifully photoshoped site and interlaced with it was Jquery the early alpha stages. The page seemed to sparkle with depth in every pixel as if they each had a story to tell. This began the development of my photoshop skill which has developed tremendously. Now this spark led to wordpress which led to PHP,AJAX,Jquery,Python,Ruby,C++. I had my fair share of all. I stopped for a bit oddly enough i began to socialize more and more minor from a point but a massive change for me. I had a solid 4, (win), circle of friends. I grew up with them so naturally I had a more of an openness to them. That may seem odd but they each played a roll in getting me to interact more an more. These people allowed me to blend easier into life because I could socialize with them. Although I seemed to understand them and their actions seemed so uncomplex, in the sense that I would understand their end results but the emotion behind it was rather gone to me as if i tried to understand it or just payed no attention to that aspect of thinking. Jump forward to 8th grade summer. I applied for an all boys college prep High school entry exam. I woke up 7 in the morning to do this test. I remember opening the test and thinking about everything else but the test, yet somehow I managed to finish it. The tests came back of course horrible, but i was excepted? They positioned me in as they would call it "dodo" classes and I excelled in my normal classes better than student who were not positioned in these classes. I was offered accelerated math, (I was not permitted due to my entry exam test being to low-I do not see how this would still play a part), and was placed in independent computer science. All other subjects in school seemed to be of disinterest and un-importance and resulted in a 3.6 gpa to 3.2 to 4.3, (never seemed to be consistent).I would gain interest then loose interest. The computer field however I accelerated with no effort. Each year i have been placed in a independent course or given a TA position to help others in the class. The following summers I bought a touchscreen and later put mac osx and following ubuntu. The Ubuntu Os had no working drivers or configuration for this specific touchscreen. I later decided to tackle he issue on a Saturday and spent all day working with it. I eventually got full support for it and its future models and versions. This grabbed the attention of a rubber company that uses the same touchscreen to operate their machines (well hoped to-their touchscreen for ubuntu did not work and forced the employes to use a mouse). Their IT guy contacted me trough skype and I helped him through the process and was offered a job to go to another country and work for half a year. To bad I was 16 at the time and was overlooked. Fast forward a bit I had a few medical issues, I was diagnosed with Bi-polar disorder and prescribed abilify. This medicating was stopped shortly because it seemed to have changed my out look on things. It made me emotional where i was never and made me think a bit more like most people, and allowed me to see the emotional side of things. I cut this medication short and cold turkey I hated that feeling and it seemed to interfere with my work to much. Yes work, I was working as a freelance designer. This medication has left a permanent impact on the way i see things now and i tend to at times become over emotional while watching a movie but still have the same apathy in real life situations. The movies allow me to understand the emotion and if I were to guess maybe a good source of therapy for my lack of it in everyday life. Now fast forward to now; 17yrs old. I am currently working on a social network and just got done building a ubuntu 11.04 nginx server with xfce as the interface and ajax push modules to handle the live aspect of the app. Funny me making a "social" network. Friends have pointed that out to me. Recently I ran a few memory and time performance based benchmarks and had an infatuation with cataloging the number results than analyzing the results and picturing them as a chart in my head. Btw the improvements were massive when working with a large amount of people. I tend to make the code in my head and almost as if I see the code as faces rather than characters on the screen, this allows me to quickly tackle o called intense tasks. I am also running a web design and code freelance business and put it this way it, were not for cognitive enhancers such as aniracetam and centrophenoxzine. I would have a complete lack of the what i call business social side of me. I seem to be very well off in "this kind of social" due to the cognitive enhancers. I have been recently diagnosed with server sleep apnea, while I am only 115 pounds, this seems odd. I have been told I talk fast and i tend to st-udder a lot when I try talk about a subject that i am very interested in and I tend to not be able to stop talking when the other person wants to speak, I have been increasingly become aware of this. Now this brings me to today. My friends joke about my inability to get out of "computer" mode or Tv mode same as it was when i was a child. It is very if not impossible to get my attention when I am doing something I am focused on. They basically somehow got my attention to take a test and said to do it quickly so I did not paying attention to the test itself; i just did it. The results were..
Your score: 36
0 - 10 = low
11 - 22 = average (most women score about 15 and most men score about 17)
23 - 31 = above average
32 - 50 is very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 35)
50 is maximum
Now this brings me a couple of hours later to here. To ask if anybody can relate to me regardless of their medical stance and "Do I have autism?" question. Feel free to ask any questions I left most out.
24 May 2011, 7:24 am
