Looking forward to a nice long weekend up in Scotland, weather is good apparently so will be going for some trips with the off-road chair. Getting excited about the festival season and some nice warm weather.

Summer festivals for us include wilderness, Paleo aand Southwest four Weekender offering a wide variety of music between them.

We will be hopefully travelling to Italy, Switzerland and possibly Ibiza before the end of the year.

I will be giving talks at the backup trust charity city dinner As well as the Guttman Conference on spinal injury at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

Concerned about the progress of the welfare reform and the more stringent controls being put in place with regard to community Healthcare services as well as the introduction of personal independence payments(replacing disabled living allowance) and its seemingly stricter qualification requirements. There seem to be a significant section of the disabled population who will really suffer from these changes, notably those with conditions of temporal severity. I was also told that there has been research to prove that there is no health benefit of performing passive stretches and that the recommended procedure for preventing muscle contractures is postural adjustment! This was quite a surprise and I can’t imagine being able to do sufficient postural adjustment to avoid contractures whilst having a busy lifestyle. I plan to investigate this research further.

happy Easter

Paleo2014 Day 6

Paleo2014 Day 5
Paleo2014 Day 4
Paleo2014 Day 3
Paleo2014 Day 2
Paleo2014 Day 1

Paléo Festival Nyon | Day by day.

Looking forward immensely to this years Paleo Festival, highlights include but not limited to:

James bugg, MIA, the Black Keys, Jack Johnson, fat Freddy’s drop, seasick Steve, mimetic, Elton John, ground corps Malade, the Prodigy, skip the use, Vanessa Paradis, James Blunt, Mr oizo, placebo, the national, Detroit, youssou ndour

so what and audio extravaganza!

post coming up on improvements to my voice controlled iPhone interface…

The Turner Twins Question Greenland.

I thought you might be interested to know that on BBC1 tonight at 7pm, The One Show will be featuring the Turner Twins who are raising money for Spinal Research through their epic Greenland Trek in May.

help them out if you can

Backup Team | Join our Back Up Team today!.

I’m honoured to be asked to speak at the city dinner, a charity dinner for the backup trust who do lots of work to help motivate people adjusting to life after a spinal cord injury “http://www.backupteam.org.uk/city-dinner”. 15th May. promises to be a cracking evening.

Having moments of contemplation today, one of those “what’s it all mean” days. Had a very stimulating weekend talking to our friend Stephen and his partner about his experience of Japan(having lived there for forty one years) and differences in culture and etiquette. Covering topics such as linguistics, body language and other forms of communication as well as cooking and the art of tea making/tea ceremonies (a critical component of Japanese hospitality taken very seriously).
Some work pressure to finish off a project this week before departing for Switzerland beginning of the next week to see dad who is now back in Switzerland after his operation in New York.

We hosted Stephen’s birthday which included wonderful spring themed music from Kismet, the Japanese harp (Koto), enthusiastic karaoke and lots of dancing.

then on Sunday we went for a lovely jaunt around the fishing lakes yesterday in the wonderful spring sunshine. Photos to Flickr imminently

This is an email to a researcher in the domain of eye-control for computers, indicating my interest in the work…

here is a link to a recent seminar abstract: http://bid.berkeley.edu/announcements/#483

I’m a software engineer with mobility issues due to tetraplegia from a snowboarding accident, I’ve been interested in wearable computing for awhile but it’s not my software domain. I work mainly with real-time information processing developed using C, bash & python.

I have tried various different accessible technologies as control inputs including most recently the PCEye Go from “Tobii”. But have found that due to my familiarity with voice recognition and scripting, there is an inherent inertia that seems to prevent me from integrating it into my day-to-day use. The abstract on your talk states “… our eyes are our primary sensor to understand the world around us and are not naturally used as means of control. Eye-based interfaces can thus feel frustrating, uncomfortable, or counter-intuitive. Which information can we harvest from the eyes without disrupting the sensory process? …”. this sentiment reflects very closely my experiences with eye-based control.

I have tried and I’m interested in the dual use of voice recognition and eye-control and would be interested in your opinion on this modality.

as well as asking for practical advice would also like to follow some of your research and offer to help in any way I can. I couldn’t find your talk on YouTube, has it been uploaded yet?
please send me links for any easily absorbable research summaries you have on this topic

thanks to Cedric Honnet, a fellow student at Brunel University, for signposting me to this

off to Switzerland end of March to see some of David Josephine Lucas and Gillian after dad ‘s operation. May venture up to Flaine to see some friends while we are there.

working on some interesting information processing challenges at work

Dad has undergone major back surgery in New York, fixing his lower back(T11-S2). Not a very nice ordeal for him but he seems to be recovering fast. I’m planning to go to Switzerland to visit soon to try to entertain him.

I’m working hard on information processing software looking at dealing with large numbers of Internet packets.

Looking forward to break over Easter

Tickets – South West Four.

I just got tickets!

Thoughts going out to those in the UK suffering from the flooding, we have been lucky!

great weekend with Gary (inspirationalgeek.WordPress.com) and Kayleigh, very excited about seeing PRINCE tonight, then less than Jake & Reel Big Fish & FOALS next week & dirty dancing on the weekend!
what a busy time…

Eats Everything + Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs + Gerd-What’s On-XOYO.

Going to see Orlando play at XOYO,  any of the other Oxford lot going?

GOLD TEETH – by dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip and Flux Pavilion – YouTube.

Just went to see these guys And they were fantastico.

Hopefully see them again soon