2076-05-15 Cyrano

I built Cyrano in an attempt to create a prosthetic aid for some of my autistic deficits.

Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of.—Benjamin Franklin

This morning I took care of my correspondence while I was exercising, a habit I developed in Africa. It took almost the entire hour, a heavier than average day.

This makes me sound like a character from a preindustrial novel of manners. Now that I think about it, there are a few parallels. I have a secretary, I am in control of quite large holdings, and I feel a responsibility to my peers and colleagues to keep up with events in their lives.

Of course I could not and would not do this on my own. It bears directly on my weakest abilities and would aggravate my most disabling sensitivities. I delegate the work to my secretary, Cyrano.

One aspect of being autistic is that I can lose track of people. I can go a year or more without thinking about someone, even though they are actually quite important to me. This apparent contradiction was brought home to me a couple of years after I’d formed my own business. Without the daily contact of even a virtual workplace, I had initiated no personal communication for over a year. Incoming communications had fallen off as well. It was all business, all the time. In hindsight, that was a perfectly natural outcome.

I built Cyrano in an attempt to create a prosthetic aid for some of my autistic deficits. As the name indicates, the goal was a system that could tell me what to say, prompt me as to when to say it, and read and translate for me any nonverbal and unwritten cues.