Donnie Narco

Ten million dollars was waiting for me on the other side of the world. All I had to do was get on a plane. I couldn't go. Not "didn't want to." Couldn't. The company I'd started in my den — nights and weekends at first, mailing diskettes from the kitchen table — had grown into a real business with real offices and more than two million customers. A publicly traded California company wanted to buy it, and after months of due diligence, audits, and lawyers, the deal was nearly done. One task remained: fly to Jaipur, India, and personally introduce our American buyer to our overseas software partner, a company run by my good friend Shrishail, who had built some of our most popular products. A handshake trip. A victory lap. The kind of moment founders dream about. I had never flown overseas, and even a domestic flight takes a toll that I try not to let anyone see. This trip meant days in an unfamiliar country with none of my routines, capped by a midnight bus trek through the countryside on a road the locals cheerfully called the "Road of Death." From the moment it was proposed, something deep and inaccessible in me began to panic. And here is the part I couldn't explain to anyone, then or for years afterward: I wasn't afraid of the airplane, and I wasn't afraid of the road. I was afraid of myself. I knew — with the certainty of an engineer reading a gauge — that somewhere between the airport and the negotiating table I would come apart, the kind of collapse my wife and I privately called an "episode," in front of the exact people who were deciding whether to write the check. I honestly didn't think I was well enough to go. I could not have told you what "well" meant, or what, precisely, I had instead. Understand: I am not a timid man. I had dropped out of high school and clawed my way from a 7-Eleven in Saskatchewan to Microsoft. I routinely risked a million dollars a month on advertising and slept just fine. I'd been sued by the state attorney general and lived to tell the tale. Whatever this was, it wasn't cowardice and it wasn't nerves. It was some kind of hard limit — a ceiling I could feel but couldn't see. And skipping the trip might look strange enough to spook the buyer and sink the whole acquisition: life-changing money if it closed, a devastating loss if it didn't, like misplacing a winning lottery ticket. That's when a trusted friend saved the day. Allen, a former U.S. Marine who ran our marketing division (I'd recruited him from Microsoft years before) already handled our Indian partners, and he offered to make the trip in my place. It made sense in every way but the one that mattered: I am nearly incapable of delegating anything important, and this was the most important trip of my life. I was now gambling my future, my retirement, and my family's security on another man's performance, all to avoid getting on an airplane. When you catch yourself doing the math on that trade — and taking it anyway — some part of you begins to suspect that what you have is not just a quirk. Allen made the trip and performed brilliantly. The deal closed a few weeks later. I accelerated the vesting of the employees' stock options so the team — Allen in particular — could share in the sale alongside me, say my goodbyes, and take one last long look around the offices. I handed in my keys and went home with a check that meant I'd never have to work again. By most measures by which a life can be scored, I had just won. And nobody — least of all me — thought to ask the obvious question: what kind of man stakes his entire fortune on a proxy rather than take a trip? What was that ceiling I'd been living under, and how long had it been there? It took another decade before I asked, and the answer turned out to have a name. I have autism. I found out long after the career, long after the company, long after the check had cleared. What follows is, in part, the story of how I finally got there — and everything I've learned since about the invisible thing that had been quietly running my life all along. [This is the new intro to my Second Edition of “Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire”, everything I now know about living a successful life with autism that I wish I had known long ago.] Check it out here: amzn.to/3UhNrFs Love to get your feedback on this new introduction!]

I wrote a new Task Manager that runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can get it now at tmog.org ... but why? Well, it started as an argument over whether you could vibe code Microsoft Word today. I didn't think so. But I figured... maybe something simpler like Task Manager. But you can't just tell Claude, "Hey, write a task manager!" Well, you can, but it'll be hot garbage. Then my kid blew out his appendix and needed surgery, so I had a couple of days in waiting rooms to tinker with the idea. I broke out my new M5 MacBook Air, and I put together a 107-page spec, like I was some caffeine-addled PM from the 90s. Everything you could ever want to know about a task manager, how it works, what it should do, and what it should look like. By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now - but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed. But why write a Task Manager? Because when I wrote the original in '95, it was on a P90 or something equally weak. Updating, scrolling, and painting without using more than a percent or two of the CPU was the modest goal. Now that we have 5 GHz CPUs and GPUs to help, why not push the limits? Animate everything at 60Hz, instead of once a second. History mouse tracking, a summary page, and all the features I would have added then if the hardware had allowed it. My autism leads me to embrace neon and high contrast in a way that's not to everyone's taste, so there's a saturation slider to control the color. But this one goes to 11. You can also select from a bunch of DEC VT220-inspired themes like Green Phosphor, Amber, or White. And I added Blue to match my VSCode theme! The code is fully native: Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, UIKit on Mac, and Qt on Linux. The UI communicates with a shared CPP core, which branches out to platform-specific helpers. There's NO electron, HTML, JSON, etc. Thanks to David and Rutger for their help along the way, I couldn't have done it this quickly on three platforms without them! If you've got some cycles to spare, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues! tmog.org