Everything In Between

Aww. Mozilla’s Firefox has been updated to its first Preview Release and along with it came some improvements. Unfortunately, few extensions now actually work which is a bummer. Most important of these are LiveHTTPHeaders, wmlBrowser, and ImageZoom, three of my most often-used extensions.

Most notably was the advanced options and preferences pane. I loved the old cookies segment text which read “Cookies are delicious delicacies.” Now, sadly, it reads a far more bland “Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data.” Also potentially frightening to an inexperienced computer user, however. Login information? Like my password?!

Anyway, I suppose that’s more appropriate than the cookie joke for a preview release anyhow. Was also glad to see the Certificates and Validation advanced options section being implemented. Nice new visual signal for an HTTPS transfer, too: a yellow address bar.

So I’ve been teaching myself to use Vim. So far, so good. Far better than any other editor I’ve seen, and it has syntax highlighting support for damn near every file type imaginable. Plus, it’s available (just about) everywhere I go.

I still need to read Bram Moolenaar’s Seven Habits of Effective Text editing though. Will somehow find time for that between finishing up reading the GnuPG Privacy Handbook, the old (circa 2002) copy of Mac OS X the Missing Manual, and The Snailbook. Oh yeah, and the two new JavaScript books I got.

As an afterthought, setting up encrypted email communications with my family and friends is so utterly simple that I feel as if I should slap myself silly for not doing it earlier. I oughta write up what I’ve done so far to let others know. Ah yes, and I also want to check out IBM’s new approach to teaching Web Accessibility, though a rather intimidating registration form greets me when I try to download it. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to get it after all, but it sounds intriguing.

Hurricane Ivan hit New York today. At 8 in the morning Danica and I were awoken by the sounds of lightning and thunder which seemed to be coming from right outside our ground-level apartment’s window.

It’s nighttime now but the whole day has been this dark. I’ve wanted to do laundry or write more or fiddle with my computer in some productive capacity but haven’t been able to do any of that. Instead, I’ve been in bed catching up on news feeds and wathching reruns of Law and Order and the Indiana Jones movies. Now it’s nearly 10 and I have a headache.

Oh well. I guess it’s not all that bad. I did a lot of reading and that was educational. Perhaps Ivan put a damper on my mood.

In an effort to enact something concrete (as opposed to something theoretical like all the day’s reading and movie watching) I’m putting together a publishing schedule which I hope to stick to concretely. This is obviously a good idea for any publication, formal or not, but it’s an especially good idea for me. That is to say, being bipolar, this sort of published schedule will help me actually stick to writing here, and writing here will motivate me to better the site, etc.

For the time being, here is the current working draft of my publishing schedule:

• Monday: main postings and writings directly related to Bipolar Disorder.
• Saturdays and/or Sundays – Geeky things and other hugely off-topic musings.
• Special Considerations given to postings regarding Site Updates.

In addition to the expected posts above, I’m also considering writing up a little about external resoures and other sites both personal and professional related to Bipolar Disorder. This should help keep me up to date with what’s going with BPD these days and over time would create a pretty good compilation of resources about Bipolar Disorder.

And in an effort to end on a positive note, the Kellog’s Frosted Mini-Wheats tagline made me laugh: “mmmmmm, fiber.” ;)

Character references? Entity references? Am I referencing some obscure geek joke? No, I’m actually talking about a often overlooked aspect of the push towards a more semantic Web.

What are Character and Entity References?

First, let me explain what character and entity references are actually referencing.

Written languages the world over employ various symbols to denote different effects of verbal communication. In addition to these punctuation marks, various symbols are used to describe relationships between parts of a written phrase. One very common example of this is the dash to denote a range of numbers. For example, the dash between the years in the sentence “George Orwell (1903–1950) was a British author,” denotes a range of years in which George Orwell lived.

Many times, this is written with a simple dash. A dash looks like this, - and its purpose is to break apart long words at the end of a line in print or to connect two words to form a single one. The dash used in the above lifespan example is not a regular dash. It is called an n-dash, named for its length, about equal to the width of the lowercase letter N.

The other common dash seen in prose is the dash used to break the flow of a sentence. This is called an m-dash, which looks like this —, and is named for its width (approximately as wide as the lowercase letter M). I’ve often seen this written online as two dashes like this: --. You probably have, too.

Ordinarily, word processors like Microsoft Word take care of the formatting. If you type -- and then hit the space-bar in word, the program automatically converts your dashes into an m-dash. But if you were to copy and paste the Word-formatted m-dash into an HTML document, browsers would have difficulty reading the character and would be unable to display it appropriately. This is where character references come into play.

Okay, so how do I use them?

Character references are specially-encoded characters referenced by number. For example, the character reference for writing an m-dash is —, that is, an ampersand, the octothorpe (frequently misinterpreted as the number sign) symbol, the numeric characters 8, 2, 1, and 2, followed by a semicolon to mark the end of the reference. All character and entity references begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;).

Entity references are almost identical to character references, except they refer to specific characters by name rather than by number. For example, the entity reference to write an m-dash is —. Entity references were created to make character references easier to remember.

Word of Warning! Many HTML entity references are not compatible with some other language formats (most notably SVG). Always use the numeric character references in favor of entity references for maximum document portability. That said, I often use entity references simply because they’re easier to remember. If I want to port my document to some other format, though, I’ll need to replace the entity references with proper entity values. This XML.com article is great if you’re looking for more information on typography in general or how it pertains to SVG specifically.

Why should I go through all this trouble?

1. Professionalism. If you have a business Web site, then you should do it for no other reason than because it’s only professional to do so.
2. Semantic accuracy. There is a big difference between three periods in a row and an ellipses. The former is simply bad English. (An ellipses, by the way, is …, or ….)
3. For looks. Which line do you think looks better:
   1. "They used dumb quotes all over their site!"
   2. “I was impressed; they used smart quotes on their site!”

   Smart quotes, by the way, can be written with “ for opening quotes, and ” for closing quotes. This name is an abbreviation of “left/right double quote”. The character references are “ and ”, respectively.

Great! I love my newfound semantic correctness. Now can I have some fun?

You bet! A friend of mine blogged the other day and had just the need for such entity references. In this case, she wanted to make a check mark appear. Here’s a table showing some fun symbols you can use to spice up the text on your page! Just be aware that some older browsers won’t render these properly, because they don’t understand them, and some symbols won’t work with certain encodings. For best results, encode your page as UTF-8.

Hope you have fun with these. ‘Til next time, ☮-out!

In the spirit of The Tao of Mac, here are some links that have caught my attention recently. None of them, thankfully, have anything to do with politics.

• PHP5 introduces interfaces, iterators, and does something incestuous with its object and array syntax. I’m excited about this. Nevertheless, I get the feeling that this will significantly increase the learning curve for PHP significantly. I can’t say I like that prospect, as one aspect of what made the language so attractive was its utter ease to just pick up and use. While it’s still under debate whether or not this makes the language easier or harder for beginners, it seems that perhaps this evolution is just the nature of the beast.
• Sjoerd Visscher has some intriguing thoughts for the future of the Web. Removing semantics from markup in the same way as removing presentation from it using CSS is interesting, but frightful. Am I going to have to learn another language just to define the semantic meaning of the content I write? I’m not so sure we need this sort of abstraction. Then again, the possible convergence of different markup formats making use of XML and its ability to be extended (which is the whole point of XML anyway) does deserve some thought. I’m glad this is still just a thought though, and that says something about my unwillingness to compartmentalize my data too much.
• Doug Bowman of StopDesign has implemented multiple stylesheets for his site. He beat me to it but I still applaud his work. His is truly world-class design. (Although I’m not quite sure why he doesn’t use cruft-free URLs when they’re so easy to get in MovableType. Of course, they’re even easier with WordPress.)
• Ian Hickson teaches us important life lessons. I love Isaac Asimov, too.
• In a related story, there are more widespread problems with Microsoft Windows XP SP 2. As it turns out, my troubles with the install were negligible compared to some. I officially count my blessings.
• And finally, this Yahoo! News story about making better laptop batteries made me smile. Always a good note to end on.

Earlier today, (well technically it was yesterday) I installed the Acronym Replacer WordPress plugin and had my whole site crash with a PHP parse error. I immediately deactivated the plugin, and everything was fine. I spent the next half hour reviewing the code, and upon finding no apparent problems that would have caused such an obvious error, I spent the following half hour searching the Internet for possible causes. As it turns out, it was really quite simple. Thanks to Dave over at ForbiddenByte I was able to solve the problem in minutes!

It turns out that Safari has a nasty little bug that causes text that you copy to contain invisible characters, referred to as “gremlins,” which are copied right along with the text. This means that when you select and copy code fragments, then paste them right into a source file such as PHP script in my case those gremlins come right along with the code and confuse the hell out of the computer.

The solution then is not to use Safari for copying code. I fired up Firefox, copied the source code for the plugin, pasted it right into my site and bam! No problems.

I’m hoping this entry might save someone the aggravation that I could have gone through, if it weren’t for Dave. That’s the beauty of community, really. The wonder of the Web.

Networking, as in social and business networking, relies on persistence. Interestingly, the concept can be extended to apply to computer networking as well. One of the underlying communications protocols of the Internet, ICMP (a part of the TCP/IP protocol suite) plays a very important role in creating connections between computers, and ensuring that these connections stay connected.

Likewise, in social networks, it’s important to have some kind of contact information that is easy to disseminate so that you can be easily reached when opportunity knocks. Enter the business card. And, finally, I’ve got mine! Here it is:

Actually, it’s already a little out of date, but it certainly serves its function.

The other day I went to my first New York City Entrepeneur Meetup Group meeting, and this very subject of business cards came up. It’s entirely true; I actually remember the folks who gave me a card far more than I can remember the folks who didn’t. Now, of course, I just need to get Maymay Media’s web site up and running….

Symptoms, in itself, is an interesting word. Depending upon how one thinks of a “symptom” many different things can be included in the definition. For the purposes of this exploration, I’ll define symptom as any effect which is believed to be caused by having bipolar disorder. This is an important distinction to make because it excludes things that are altered due to being bipolar but that are not directly caused by it. For instance, under this definition, an angry mood swing can be considered a symptom because it may be caused by the disorder but subsequent yelling or fighting is not and is therefore excluded as a possible symptom.

Here’s a list of some direct symptoms I experience nearly every day.

1. Potentially extreme mood swings caused by innocuous triggers, such as the weather, frustrating news from a client, or a compliment on my attire for the day.
2. Insomnia due to manic energies.
3. Increased rate of speech. I have had to explicitly practice speaking slower so that people can understand what I say.
4. Extremely distractable. Focusing on anything, be it a work project, a TV show, someone else, takes almost noticeable effort. I have gotten better at this with practice too.
5. Reduced apetite, either due to depression or to excitement about other things. I literally don’t remember to eat very frequently.

In addition, there are some symptoms which are less frequent. Such symptoms include physical pain due to extreme depression (usually in the pain of my hand, arm, or chest), difficulty moving (again, depression can literally be paralyzing), and loss of specific blocks of memory.

Some of these seem more extreme than others. More interesting than the fact that these are actually symptoms of “just” a mood disorder, I think, is the observation that emotions can powerfully affect so many different parts of life. There is a lot to be said for knowing thyself, isn’t there?

So What Is A Symptom?

Some symptoms of Bipolar Disorder are very general. For example, the American National Mental Health Association’s List of Symptoms for Bipolar Disorder state “Easily irritated or distracted, provocative, intrusive or aggressive behavior, fatigue or loss of energy and irritability or restlessness” among others as possible symptoms. Each of these symptoms can have many causes. Here is a list of a few possibilities right off the top of my head.

• Lack of sleep.
• Long day at work.
• Just found out a friend is in the hospital.
• Relationship problems.

There is no reason why someone who is not Bipolar would not display the same symptoms as someone who is. A cursory glance at these lists is all that’s needed to label everyone on Earth as bipolar. Furthermore, there is currently no test available with which to determine whether someone has Bipolar Disorder or not with absolute accuracy.

That’s a very hard question. It is a fact that psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and other mental-health professionals very often mistake bipolar disorder as some other disorder such as ADD or social anxiety disorder. Sometimes, they don’t even catch it at all.

One reason why the question is hard for me is because I’m not “normal.” I’ve never been normal! How would I know the difference between what is caused by bipolar disorder and what isn’t without a frame of reference? The answer is quite simply that I’ve had to guess. I’ve observed other people, and then noted both differences and similarities between how they act in certain circumstances and how I act. For example, this came up in a conversation with a friend recently.

For a long time, I was always so self-conscious whenever I needed to cough or sneeze on the subway. It’s not that I’m afraid of coughing or sneezing in public, but it’s just that no one else is making any noise, so if I sneezed it’d be very noticeable. Then I realized that other people coughed and sneezed all the time (which is why I try to remember to wash my hands when I come home) and it never seemed to affect them. So, I figured it’s probably not something important enough to worry about.

By observing the surrounding environment I believe I can get a pretty good sense of what normal is even without being “a normal person.” If you want to get slightly philosophical, remember that no individual is the same as another individual, so even within the “normal” range there can be great variances. How do normal people know they are normal? They actually don’t, but they use the same technique of observation I described above without realizing it, and then end up with a conclusion that they can believe.

In any comparison, it helps to first establish the things being compared individually. In this case, that means to first define what is considered normal, and then define what isn’t.

Defining Normal

The Princeton online dictionary (accessed via a Google search for the word normal) states eloquently that normal is “being approximately average or within certain limits.”

In the case of relevance to bipolar disorder, this means that the range of emotions felt by a normal person is contained within certain limits and do not reach extreme levels. This is either the result of being less sensitive to the normal ups and downs of life or because these emotions simply get capped at some point. To put it biological terms, the chemistry in their brains does not change as rapidly or as much as someone with bipolar disorder. The symptoms listed earlier are thus less likely to occur in a normal person, though this does not necessarily mean that they will not.

Defining What Isn’t Normal

Now that we have defined normal, it is very easy to define what isn’t. Obviously, what isn’t normal is anything that does not adhere to the above restrictions. Bipolar people are not normal precisely because they behave differently than most other people when in the same situations. Usually, our behavior is more acute. When we are sad, we easily slip into severe clinical depression. When we are happy, we easily lose touch with the practical reality in favor of the happiness.

That simply does not happen to most people, and it’s a fascinating difference to contemplate. It’s also true that people who are bipolar are affected by the same things as people who are normal, and they are also likely affected in the same way.

Bipolar Disorder is Usually Responsible for Effects, Not Causes

So how can I, really, tell the difference? I can’t, but then, I don’t need to. Observation has taught me that I am very normal in regards to what triggers different moods in me and how I am affected by those moods.

One of the most important things I’ve learned about triggers and symptoms of bipolar disorder is that there has never been a mood swing, outburst, or mania without a real event as a cause, as a trigger. That’s something my father first noticed and told me back when I was a teenager, and it’s something that has helped keep me confident in my sanity for a long time.

Sometimes it’s very hard to spot what originally triggered a mood, but if I re-trace my steps backward through time and focus on what my emotions were saying at each moment, I can always find what triggered my mood. That’s when it becomes crystal clear that bipolar disorer affected my response, my reaction to the trigger, far more than it caused my initial mood swing. It was, in fact, my interpretation of the event, my response to the reality I perceived, that caused my mood.

Distinguishing the symptoms have become less important to me than distinguishing my reactions. I don’t hope to cure my bipolar disorder, but I do hope to live happily with it.

How hard do you think it should be to find some information on the Internet? Not very. Google makes it easy to find information, but they don’t host any of it. That means that when Google tells me that it found something I might be interested in, I have to go the source to find it.

While Google does its job very well, the source of the information doesn’t always give it up so easily. For instance, earlier today I wanted to find a brief summary statement of Vincent van Gough’s life. Just a little blurb, nothing fancy like images or some kind of wow-me-silly presentation. Just a line that looked something like “Vincent van Gough was born in … he painted this many paintings in this style. Etc, etc….”

Naturally, I googled the term. Among others, that brought me to the ArtCyclopedia page on Vincent van Gough. But wait, don’t click on that link! Why? Because it’s a redirect page!

After searching for nearly 20 minutes, getting a redirect page was more than just frustrating, it was painful. First of all, there’s no reason at all why a redirect page can’t be automatic. Even a simple http-equiv="refresh" would have been better than making me click the link. I actually spent some time looking for link to the page I was supposed to go to because their link wasn’t clear enough.

Which leads me to point number one about redirects:

Always put the link at the top of the page, and make it as prominent as possible!

To get more technical, there’s actually no reason why a redirect page should be necessary at all! Using sever-side scripting one could easily output a Location HTTP header and be done with it. Alternatively, you could simply put a Redirect permanent line in a .htaccess file. And if you needed anything fancier, Apache’s mod_rewrite can turn any URI into any filename request imagineable!

So in the end, this redirect page wasn’t even necessary!

The real blow hit me when I actually got the right page. The problem here is two-fold.

1. No information about Vincent van Gough is directly on the page. You need to click on hyperlinks to find anything out.
2. The page is divided into two sections; a navbar sits on the left side of the site. But that navbar is frozen on the screen somehow and doesn’t scroll with the rest of the site! This wouldn’t be a problem if I had a monitor the length of a city block, but as it stands it presents a major navigational problem: I can’t get to the rest of the links, presumably where my desired information is, because the links aren’t accessible!

I wish this were a rare problem, but bad web sites like these exist in abundance all over the place. In the end, I got my information from Jordan, an 8th grader with better design skills than whoever did that blasted ArtCyclopedia design. Thank you Jordan!

Some people believe that anything affecting the psychology of a person can be changed simply by having enough willpower. This line of reasoning looks something like this:

1. Bipolar disorder affects moods, a psychological (i.e. emotional) effect.
2. One can change one’s own moods.
3. Therefore, should one have enough willpower, one’s own moods can be changed.
4. With power over one’s moods, Bipolar Disorder no longer has any effect.
5. Since the disorder has no effect, it can be called cured.

This reasoning is all too common, but flawed. It is extremely simplistic, makes several assumptions that are not necessarily correct, and disregards many other aspects of what bipolar disorder does. This is an example of treating the symptom instead of the cause and that’s why it’s incorrect. Present-day medications don’t offer a cure for the same reason.

Unfortunately, the cause of bipolar disorder is still being studied, and so no one can be absolutely certain what actually causes one to have it. The dominant prevailing theory today is that it is caused by a genetic trait of some sort. In other words, if you have bipolar disorder, then you were born with it and sometime during your life you began to experience symptoms. My symptoms started at around the age of twelve.

Until such a time as the cause of bipolar disorder is known with absolute certainty and the medical technology to prevent and/or alter it exists, it is not possible to cure bipolar disorder in the clinical sense of the word. But that’s an awfully limiting definition for “cure,” don’t you think?

Life is about more than just physiology. Bipolar disorder is unique in that it crosses the boundary between physiology and psychology. If you get bronchitis, you go to the doctor and he gives you a pill; in three weeks you’ll be cured. Bipolar disorder can be argued to be caused by physical effects (albeit on the molecular level) but its direct effects extend into the realm of the mind, into the psychological and emotional inner workings of a person. You can’t just take a pill and wait to be cured.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that people with bipolar disorder can no more control the physical, chemical effects in their brains caused by bipolar disorder than they can control the fact that they were born with two arms and two legs. It is a function of the disorder that, despite your best efforts, you can not change.

For example, imagine a man who was born blind. Try as he might, he can’t see, regardless of how strong his desire to do so may be. A bipolar person can no more wish themselves to not be bipolar as the blind man in my example can wish himself to see. However, like the blind man, bipolar people can learn to live with and even capitalize on their condition. Many famous people throughout history were all purportedly bipolar. Even today, there are countless celebrities who have bipolar disorder. Yet in different ways and in different fields each of them achieved great success.

In my opinion, too much emphasis is always placed on treating the disorder. The far more salient issue, however, is what I can do to help myself live with it. One can even take this a step further and ask, “How can I use it to my advantage?” This question addresses the one thing that treatment regiments and the search for cures will never address: that being bipolar (or having any other type of mood disorder) can actually be quite a powerful gift.

For me, it is difficult to imagine curing the disorder because in effect that would mean changing who I am in a very fundamental way. It is almost like saying to the blind man in my earlier example, “When you take this pill, you will be able to see…and you will be a female Martian.” It is not a fathomable concept to not be yourself. Even the mighty human imagination falls to its inherent flaw: it was imagined by you, the very person you will no longer be.

Please don’t misunderstand me, however. I am not against treatment regiments or quests for cures. I advocate taking medicines religiously and speaking with doctors, therapists, and support groups if possible. The more help that is available, the better! But all of these are supplemental to the work which must be done at improving the emotional situation. There must be a desire to be well before one will feel better.

Sadly, that desire isn’t always there. When I’m depressed, for instance, it’s hard enough to wake myself up. But there in lies the potential for a cure, and a cure far more powerful and long-lasting than any clinical definition can provide: the full awareness of one’s self and one’s surroundins. Zen-like, maybe.

Seeking that motivation, I believe, is the real cure. No one except one’s self can provide it.