Darth Who

Yep, that's the name Annie gave to her new PC... I like it!

After all, it seems that the switch back to PC went smoothly, considering the pain in the butt Windows can be. It's odd with all these people we hear about switching from PC to Mac... It probably is good for many people, but the fact is that it was not for us. We saw a big downside of owning a Mac, and I'm not talking about the Mac Pro (since this one would probably have done the trick), I'm talking about the "more affordable" ones: the iMac (if you call that affordable - but it really is not that bad considering all that comes with it).

The problem: Annie is a power user. Not power in the sense of gaming power, but more like having a dozen apps running at the same time, one of which is Photoshop with 50+ high-res photos. The iMac just could not handle it smoothly. It did not crash mind you, but you could tell it was hurting... a lot. And it was not the RAM, because it had 2Gb already. The solution should have been relatively easy: time for an upgrade - more powerful CPU, better video capacity, faster RAM, bla bla bla. I usually expect an upgrade of around $500. Well, you just cannot do that with an iMac.

An iMac is basically built like a laptop: you can change very few things in there. I probably could have done this in a Mac Pro, but damn, the cheapest Mac Pro is $2800CAD, and that's the box alone (no monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers) - it's simply not affordable for us. So, what could we do, buy a new iMac? Damn, we spent over $2000 about a year and a half ago only (that was the price of the 20" iMacs back then), and now we should spend another $1700 plus taxes? And then 2 years down the road it's gonna be another $1700 when this one doesn't cut it anymore? The way we saw it is that if we buy a PC now, we would not have to spit that much money each 2 years. Only the necessary components can be upgraded. The rest is still all good. Why would I need to change the monitor, if all that is needed is more CPU power?

The other plus of going back to PC, is that I can pretty much troubleshoot any problem on them, and usually fix it. And if I don't find it by myself, there are TONS of people who can help on the Internet. With a Mac, the resources are very few, and even if I find what the problem is, I very probably would not be able to fix it. And we are not the type of buying the extended warranties everywhere on everything (it's more like close to never), but when buying a computer from Apple, you almost HAVE to, so might as well just add it to the price (so add another $400!!!). Otherwise, having it repaired is uberly expensive, so might as well just buy a new one... Sounds like you lose anyway you look at it :-/

Anyway, I think we made the right choice. I know Annie's going to miss OS X a bit. But Windows is just a getting used to... then it's fine.

A bit about my son Sébastien.

My son is autistic. Mildly mind you, but still... He's often in his own mind, makes little (sometimes louder) noises and sounds when he is happy. Although he has made huge progress with his speech, which we are very proud of him for, at 11 years old he still shows signs of difficulty with his phrase structure. He would rather play alone than with another child. He is autistic. But worry not, he is a generally happy little person, and gets lots of love from his parents and sister, which is probably the main reason why he is doing well and show constant signs of progress.


One other common characteristic among autistic children is either hyper-sensitivity, or hypo-sensitivity. Mine is hyper-sensitive. Today, he seems to have certain control over most of them, most of the time (but not always), except for the sens of taste. For example, yesterday at school, they had a gym class outside in the snow. They made them do all sorts of exercises I guess, one of which was made them crawl in the snow. Afterwards, he was all wet because of the snow, and he could not stand it. He was frustrated about it. They did not tell us if he cried, but I would not be surprised if he did.


But autistic children also have strengths, most often shown by signs of high intelligence in certain domains. For instance, some are very good in mathematics, some have very good memories (remember the movie "Rainman"?), some have strong spacial perception, and others might be very good at puzzle solving (remember the movie "Mercury Rising"?). Often they will have a combination of many of these abilities. Seb is very good in drawing. Not that he draws realistically, but he's good at reproducing the "emotions" in his drawings. You know what a character is feeling by looking at the drawing, and he does that very easily. He also has a strong spacial perception, and that shows in his art too. He's been drawing in 3D since he was 2 years old!!! He understood that principle long ago. He also has a very "musical" ear. He can easily repeat by singing the notes, a song or a melody he heard. Sometimes he only heard it once. And some of those melodies are very complex (I know that because I am very much into music myself), but that seem to be no problem for him. They have strenghts, but commonly have the same weaknesses also, like difficulty with the language, and with social skills for instance, which my son has.


So that's our Sébastien (on the right in the picture obviously, my daughter Ophélie on the left, who is autistic also, and my wife Annie in the middle). I will not lie to you and say that everything is easy. Because it is not, even if they are "just" mildly autistic. And the "not so easy" part is not just about them, it's about the system. Actually, I'd say it's MORE about the system. The things we constantly have to fight for, even if it's for services they are allowed to get. The things we always have to explain to people at school who don't always "get it". Members of the extended family who had or still has trouble accepting them, and still doesn't give a care about them (or don't show it anyway). Etc etc... Fortunately me and my wife still love each other very much, thus we are still together (parents in similar situations are often torn apart by all the difficulties). It makes things better, easier for the kids. I've always thought that these two little souls were given to us for that reason.

Seb, Ophie, Annie... I love you! (OK, everyone say: "awwwww")... ;-)

Incom tax return - 2006 edition

Wow! The provincial and federal government are very generous for me this year. Of course, there are a number of factors that happened this year, which makes the total go up. It has actually never been this high before for those reasons.

For example, last year I changed work to a completely different department. Still in government, but different department. They call that a lateral move. This has different side effects, although they claim there shouldn't be any, like some deductions you start paying from scratch again once you transfer over. You end up paying too much of these deductions, so that's not good during the year, but it come back to you at tax time, which is good at that time (of course, the government make interest on that money in the meantime, but that's a whole different subject). Also, I'm pretty sure I payed too much income taxes during the year, because when I transferred, my salary went down a bit because they had not signed a new contract yet, so of course my federal and provincial taxes should have went down. But instead, they went up o.O!! Whatever... And last but not least, and this applies for multiple previous years, since I have two handicapped children (they are autistic), that gives me a tax credit on the federal side (on the provincial side, it's a monthly allowance instead, so there's no effect on the tax return itself - and fortunately, that allowance in non-taxable). Nice, yes, although I see this as a compensation for all the times we had to fight to get the services our children are allowed to get, or all the time spent to go to appointments to school or doctors, or any type of extra effort or care that is required for our children. Actually, I would say it's a small compensation for all of this, but still much better than nothing.

So I'm going to file this tonight, and, thanks to the Internet revolution, I should be getting my reimboursement within a week or so. With this money, I will be paying for some (not all) debts, and also to give us some breathing space...

Maybe I will then, buy tickets to go see Mr Waters.... ;-P

I'm now good at building PC's

Two days ago, I bought the necessary components to build my wife a PC (yes Ben, you read right: she's going back to PC!!!). And I did not realize how good I have become at it. It's no exploit, that's for sure. Many people can actually do this. But why I say I have become good at it? I hook up all the components together, plugged all the wires, powered it up, and it was ready to go! It's not rocket science, but if you try it yourself, most possibly you will find that you hooked something up wrong, mostly if you did not do this very often...

Well, now she has a brand new PC running WindowsXP. It's snappy and solid! The specs:

• Antec NSK4400 case (with 380W Power Supply)
• ASUS M2N motherboard
• AMD X2 3800+ CPU
• ASUS Extreme X1300PRO 256Mb video card
• 2Gb of Patriot PC6400 RAM
• WD 320Gb KS Hard Drive
• LG SuperMulti DVD drive
• Samsung 225BW 22" WS LCD (WOW!!!)

Gynecologist follow-up

Well, in the end, I think it went well. I mean, a hysterectomy is the most radical solution (although there are three types or hysterectomy a woman can get), so the doctor was not too keen to go towards this solution, but he did understand Annie's arguments, our point of view. He did seem to sort-of think it's the best solution. One thing we did appreciate is that he explained a lot of things about how the uterus works, how it reacts, what are the different solutions and whether they were good or not in Annie's case (of course they were almost all not suitable, except for the hysterectomy).

So there you go, her name is on the waiting list. It's gonna take 3 to 4 months they said, which is much sooner than we anticipated. So it good, because the sooner it's done, the sooner it's fixed, but it's also more stressful knowing it's soon. It falls smag dab in the middle of summer too, but there's not much we can do about that.

A stressful appointment (probably)

Well, a bit later on, me and my wife Annie (or MommyBabou for the intimate) will be going to see the gynecologist. Without going into details, the way we see it, her only option is a hysterectomy. Like she says, her life is "ruled by [her] periods". And this has been going on for years. She tried many things that do not work or turns out being dangerous for her, but recently we've found out that her uterus is Retroflexed. Again, to quote her from her LJ: "Retroflexed uterus means either your uterus is tilted backwards or that it is bent on itself somewhat or a literally folded in half. Or you can get ambitious and have a uterus that is folded in half and very titled backward!". That last part, that's how hers is.

So anyway, hopefully the appointment will go smoothly. The stressful thing about it is that no matter what the doctor says, the end-result is not pleasing. He will either agree that Annie needs a hysterectomy to fix her, which is not very pleasant and will have side effects of their own, or the doctor will disagree, in which case we will have a fight in out hands. Yay!... :-/

I'll keep you posted on the results...

It's not easy being middle-class...

Not that I'm complaining, because I do consider myself pretty lucky in a financial point of view. But sometimes, I which I had more spending money... The reason right now? Well, one of my favorite artists is coming to town on June 4th: Roger Waters. He came to Montreal no long ago, and I really wanted to see him, but with the ticket price at $150 each, plus the travel expenses, that was way too expensive for me. Now he's coming to Ottawa, and I don't know if I'll be able to afford it still. My wife would like to go see him also, and I would really like to go with her too, so that's twice the ticket price. And I might even be able to get early tickets because I'm registered at the sponsoring radio station's web site. Everything is right... except for the ticket price. The prices have not been announced yet, but I don't expect it to be below $100 each, possibly up to $200 for the good ones.

Oh well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Maybe my income tax return will be generous this year, and I could get the tickets for us as a gift. I mean, we don't go out very often, so that would be nice...

Official first post... WOOOHOOOO!!!!

Well, not that I'm overly excited about this, but I'm going to try and use this Blog. I have a LiveJournal, but for some reason, I'm uncomfortable knowing that when you post something, it automatically goes on the page of all the "friends" on your list. I prefer people coming to read my stuff here directly, knowing very well that this will make very fewer people coming here. That way I know that when there is actually someone reading one of my blogs, it's because he or she wants to and has an interest in what I have to say.

Anyway, I'm at work right now, so I should not be spending too much time here, although it's really not busy here recently. I have stuff to do, but there is no rush to do it.

Good day!