All posts by arjen

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Black Dog Ride Australia 2012

Commencing on August 18, riders from all around Australia are heading to the Red Centre to raise community awareness of depression and suicide prevention.

Black Dog Ride began as one man’s personal quest to complete a solo motorbike trip around Australia to raise community awareness of depression. In Australia, each year around 1,000,000 adults and 100,000 young people live with depression. More than 50% will not seek treatment. Join Steve as he continues his mission.

As I understand from motorbike riders who are going to do this trip (I don’t ride), there’s a fairly large overlap between riders and people working in IT, so they figured it’d be a good idea to give the Black Dog Ride a mention via BlueHackers. Hereby!

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BlueHackers donations – update

Some of you may have noticed that the donate page currently doesn’t actually work, the PayPal gateway refuses to accept. This is because PayPal has (again) limited our access, pending their verification process.

It all started a few years back when we created the PayPal account and showed it as a non-profit organisation. We know there’s no profit objective, but there wasn’t an option for it not being an organisation. When PayPal asked for clarification, we sorted it out by being adopted by the Open Source Developers Club, Inc (“owner” of the Open Source Developers’ Conference, OSDC) which is a registered not-for-profit organisation itself.

That made things ok for a while, but since PayPal is increasingly subject to legislation for financial institutions (mind you, I reckon that’s a good thing! operating like a bank while pretending that you’re not has issues) they now have more stringent identity verification processes, just like other banks. The difference is that while regular banks use a piece of paper and a human you can talk with, the PayPal process is automated. Unfortunately, their processes don’t take all permutations of Australian business and organisation types into account, and thus I have to navigate through the options as best I can, while being fully aware that it’s not absolutely right no matter what option I select. Of course, a human will look at the info provided, so I’m hopeful it’ll be sorted soon.

BlueHackers doesn’t do much with money… mainly we fund the production of the little stickers, and people make donations covering those costs. There are a few other ideas (serving the purpose of BlueHackers, not specifically aimed at raising funds) that we’ll be able to look at again once the PayPal verification process has been completed.

Finally, you may ask why we use PayPal at all. While not perfect in many ways, they do offer a service that we haven’t as yet been able to find elsewhere. Accepting credit cards through other means incurs significant setup and running costs, whereas the PayPal fees only affect payments and are very small (2.4%) considering the very low volume. A bank would typically charge 4% in such a scenario, with fixed monthly costs added also. That would eat up all our funds in overhead and thus make the whole exercise pointless.

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Brand Substitutes

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Pharmacists tend to ask if a substitute or generic brand is ok for a prescription. While I’m generally for that as it tends to save money, I’d recommend against saying yes when it comes to depression-related medication. As you know, getting the dosage right is tricky enough. From my past personal experience, substitutes didn’t work or at least worked differently, thus messing with my head – so basically, once you get to something that works for you (whichever brand that might be), don’t risk messing with it for the sake of saving a few dollars. You can also ask your doctor to put a tick in the “no substitutes” box on the prescription, then the pharmacist won’t even go there.

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Second Guessers Question Their Way to Depression – Sara Novak

http://blogs.discovery.com/dfh-sara-novak/2011/12/second-guesses-question-their-way-to-depression.html

You surely know someone like this or maybe that someone is you. Second guessers research and research decisions before hesitantly stepping forward only to wonder whether they made the right decision in the in.

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Navigating Love and Autism

Navigating Love and Autism (NY Times)

Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students living in Greenfield, Mass., discuss how aspergers/autism affects their lives and relationship.

Being the Supporter, Written Reflections

Seasonal Consideration

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The time of Christmas and New Year can be troublesome. I’ll provide a couple of examples, and offer some ideas on what you can do to make this a good time for people around you!

Certainly, some people don’t care for it at all and are fine doing stuff on their own. If they get time off work during the period, those people will be the ones going on a nice cycling or hiking holiday. Awesome. But that’s not everybody.

Consider this

  • There are lots of social activities. Some people don’t want to partake in big events, but would be fine with something small.
    Invite a friend (yes, an individual one) over for dinner or another explicitly small activity. This means you’re specifically making time for them: it shows real care.
  • Many social events have costs (gifts, food at a restaurant, drinks in a cafe) and it all adds up – for many this is a significant burden, and it becomes a toss up between feeling left out, or potentially overextending financially. You can imagine how the choice alone makes for stress and anxiety.
    If you do a potluck style event, people can bring something small or home made, or do something else to contribute. When going out, there are also ways to be inclusive without creating awkwardness.
  • Around Christmas, “everybody” tends to be busy with their family. But what if you don’t have nearby family? You can be on-your-own throughout the year, but that’s not the same as being-alone while you know “everybody else” is having fun. It’s fairly crap. This is of course relevant whether or not you care about Christmas as an institution.
    Of course it’s not always suitable to have a “stranger” partake in say a family dinner, but hey with some families that works perfectly – please do it then!
    Perhaps you can do a more general event on another day, and invite a few extra friends.
  • A single parent can find it difficult to participate in adult-only events (who will be available to mind the smurfs?), and some activities you’d normally undertake with other parents tend to not happen at this time because they’re busy or away. If you’re one of those other parents, perhaps you can find time to do those things together anyway, and suggest some playdates and sleepovers! It’s fun for you and the kids, but it’s so easy to forget with lots of things going on.

People regard it as a time of caring, but restrict it to a very restricted subset. I do understand why that occurs, the time can be ridiculously demanding and overwhelming. Expectations…

Tweak “the rules”!

  • Stuff the complaining retailers, you don’t have to buy everything that’s advertised. And, home made gifts are extra awesome.
  • If you don’t like spending time with your relations, don’t!
    You pick your own friends, organise something! You can always pretend you got that special invite from one of the others, providing you with an excellent excuse to pike out of the family event “for once”.
  • Look around you, add to your own family as you see fit.

You will know people around you for whom these things can make all the difference – with a few thoughts and actions you can make extra awesomeness this year!

(comments and extra suggestions welcome, as always)

Brain Hacking

Patching your own Brain

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This video is from the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Canberra, November 2011. The term patching is used in the hacker/programmer sense: you find a bug, figure out what’s going on, and fix (aka patch) it.

Apart from my lightning talks over the last three years, this is probably the first specific “bluehackers related talk”. For this reason I was actually a bit nervous beforehand, but it worked out very well. Those present found it fun and educational, with plenty of questions and chats triggered later – which is excellent. Feel free to talk more here in the comment thread!

Refs:

  • Prof Martin Seligman, numerous books and papers in the space of cognitive psychology (and connections to depression) incl. “Learned Optimism” and “The Optimistic Child”.
  • The OpenOffice ODS and Excel XLS files referenced in the talk will remain online. Note that the talleys have to be adjusted from the explanations in the Learned Optimism book, in part because I use used fewer questions (42 rather than 48) and also most questions were mine rather than the originals. Still, they provide a rough indication, which was the intent.

Note: Yes, the video does show a prototype game board at the end. It was an unexpected spin-off during the talk preparation months ago, and I’ll post on that separately!

Sleep

Sleep Cycles

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Jenson Taylor made an insightful post on Google+, I’m reproducing it here as its topic -sleep- is important and has already come up several times. From my own experience, the observations hold quite true.

 

Sleep Cycles by Jenson TaylorStudies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to be refreshed upon waking. The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy. Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brain- wave patterns.

For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes: 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep; 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream); and a final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. The REM sleep phases are shorter during earlier cycles (less than 20 minutes) and longer during later ones (more than 20 minutes).

If we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes–for example, after 4 1/2 hours, 6 hours, 7 1/2 hours, or 9 hours, but not after 7 or 8 hours, which are not multiples of 90 minutes.

In the period between cycles we are not actually sleeping: it is a sort of twilight zone from which, if we are not disturbed (by light, cold, a full bladder, noise), we move into another 90-minute cycle.

A person who sleeps only four cycles (6 hours) will feel more rested than someone who has slept for 8 to 10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed.

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There’s Never a Justification for Bullying

I posted a reference on G+ to an article about a Michigan anti-bullying law (named after a boy who committed suicide) where republicans effectively provide a loophole if the abuse happens on the basis of “genuine moral or religious conviction”. The text is:

“This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.”

One comment approached the issue by questioning the definition of bullying and tying their position to their religious beliefs, and that’s prompted me to post this blog entry. I reckon the definition of bullying is fairly clear and simple. I phrase it something like this:

Bullying is ongoing psychological, verbal and physical abuse against a person and their environment and property.

I didn’t look that up anywhere, it’s just loosely based on my own experience. I think this sums it up concisely, but feel free to comment with improvements!

Even if you don’t agree with people being gay, or atheist, or you reckon reds look funny, or whatever, I’d urge anyone to think long and hard before being in favour of laws like the Michigan one – you’re as different as the next person, and one day you’ll become the victim yourself.

Unlikely? Let’s look forward a bit: considering the current Christian fundamentalist extremism in the US, I consider it quite likely that at some point there’ll be a backlash and Christians will find themselves persecuted – let’s please have laws in place that protect them then as well as other people now. So even on a purely selfish level, you don’t want to gamble on this.

Someone’s right to expression and beliefs have nothing to do with it. We simply don’t want people (kids or adults!) persecuted in their school, work, sport, home or social environment whether they’re black, gay, use a wheelchair, wear glasses, have red hair, are socially awkward, believe in a god or faeries, or in fact happen to not believe in something someone else does believe in.

What’s the point of being different if we can’t live together?

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R U OK day

http://www.ruokday.com.au/

Today is “Are You OK” day in Australia. A day when specifically you ask those around you. Of course you should always do that, but just as a reminder.

And remember that if you just ask “how’ya doing”, the answer tends to be “fine” regardless, it’s empty interaction. “Are you ok” or “tell me how you are doing” is significant and let’s the other person know you’re interested in hearing the real “status”.