Hello and Welcome

I'm Lindsay Weekes.

Perhaps you remember The Autism Picture Page which I had online for eleven years. When I first wrote it, there were hardly any sites where people could see autistic children being themselves. That's all changed. Today, there are thousands.

This site is far more personal. It contains most of my essays from The Autism Picture Page, revised where necessary. It also contains essays not related to autism at all: as well as an essay about returning to the place where I grew up and whatever else I have a whim to put here.

During the last few years I've been travelling, speaking to many parents' groups and working with difficult autistic children in Europe in addition to Australia. What can be very difficult is to change entrenched attitudes. Consider this: throughout most of the world, autism is considered to be a catastrophic illness from which society needs to be protected at all costs. Therefore, autistic people are shut away out of sight, often in appalling conditions, and forgotten. But I've gone to some out of the way places and tried, often with positive results. Once autism moves out of the category of "mad" to which it's been assigned, once it becomes known and demystified, the attitudes of many people do change. That encourages me to keep trying. What I'd like is to encourage other autistics to try.

What is autism anyway but another state of being? Another take on life? Many autistic people in the western world would resent any suggestion that autism is a catastrophe. The trick is to mix with the right people and never to accept the judgements of those who have no knowledge and consequently proclaim nonsense.

On another subject: here in Australia, the federal government has been talking about censoring the internet. This was to be done by making every ISP install software that would filter HTTP traffic in accordance with a blacklist supplied by the government's communications authority. There are probably a billion or so websites online. How could they all be scrutinised for objectionable content? Nobody in the government seemed to be asking that question which is a pity because someone might have realised that there's no answer. Even China and Iran can't do it. Whether it will now eventuate will depend on the outcome of the next election. If the current Christian radical is not re-elected, then the need to appease him will be gone.

Many autistic people jealously guard their privacy and we have good reasons for it. If you've been called all the names or had people ask you hundreds of times: "Why are you doing that?" as though it's the weirdest thing they've ever seen, you learn not to advertise what you're doing, you learn to put things (including your feelings) away where others can't find them; you learn to be like icebergs: mostly invisible. That part which is visible is the public facade.

The internet is very public. In some countries, your ISP is legally obliged to keep a record of every site you visit. Email addresses and content are easily snooped. In addition, you might have sensitive data on your hard drive. I know I have. For example, I have emails from autistics detailing their most private issues; I don't want malware or unauthorised people snooping it. What to do?

The first thing is to protect your data by encrypting your hard drive. You can't stop your laptop being stolen but you can absolutely protect the data on its hard drive. PGP encryption is good but I prefer BestCrypt Volume Encryption from the Finnish company Jetico. Next is to encrypt all data entering/leaving your computer using a program that incorporates OpenVPN. Last is to be always on the lookout for malware. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a tutorial at https://ssd.eff.org and also a Firefox extension, HTTPS-Everywhere, at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere. This extension forces Firefox to use a connection to a secure server in every case where one is available.

Those of you who read this are probably using some other file manager than Windows Explorer, and rightly so. If you use Windows at all, you probably use one of the freeware offerings such as 7zip, or maybe you've paid for Total Commander, which has been the best of breed for many years. For quite a while, I've been tinkering with an Australian program, Directory Opus. It's gone through several releases but wasn't really ready for prime time until it reached version 9. It's much more than just a file manager (the manual runs to 237 pages) and it's anything but free, but you can download and evaluate it for sixty days at http://www.gpsoft.com.au so why not give it a try?

I've written this site to please myself. Take what you want or take nothing, it's up to you. The navigation frame is on the left. Email me if you want but please don't ask me anything that you could discover for yourself with a small amount of research.

Click Here To Write To Me

I've received quite a number of emails asking me whether or not I have plans to ever restore the Picture Page. My answer must unfortunately be "no". I do agree that it was the largest collection of autism pictures ever but as such it took a great deal of time to maintain. Time which I no longer have. However, as both a remembrance and a "thank you", I've assembled some of the most popular pictures into four gallery pages which you can access by clicking the Gallery link in the frame on the left. Wherever possible, I've shown them full-size for the first time. Additionally, I have several albums online at Fotki. The link on the left will take you there.