Enjoying being busy at work learning valuable programming lessons. Attended a C++ course this last week and stayed down in Southampton because of serious car trouble. Spent a disproportionate amount of time battling with insurance agencies and car hire companies. Unfortunately things aren’t simple with regard to specialist transport and insurance companies aren’t particularly understanding of these complex issues.
Car adaptions for a “mobile office” still ongoing and not completely resolved unfortunately. I need to seek further advice.
Wedding planning another item on the list struggling to get attention. Must prioritise.
Good news, I’m becoming a ‘mentor’ for the backup trust to help discuss issues with people who have experienced a spinal cord injury. I may also help with Matt Hamsden’s new charity.
Unfortunately I have to go into hospital (locally) to have large kidney stones removed. We are going for a non-invasive but not always hundred percent successful approach to attempt to mitigate the risk of a long stay in hospital.
The new off-road wheelchair is looking promising, still some design issues to be resolved as is not a simple control solution.
head control was not the one I expected, the one from permobil has reverse which is very important (front left side sensor). Obviously not much we can do about that now apart from ask dynamics to add a pushbutton (accessible from shoulder movement) to act as a reverse switch. The other modification I would need for the headrest is to enable a greater sensing area for the back of the head (e.g. two proximity sensors or more side-by-side), this is to enable me to make contact with one of the side sensors and the back sensor simultaneously to turn and drive (obviously a critical functionality). This is partly due to the fact that the turning sensors are further forward (away from the back plate of the head control) than on my current head control.

letter to try to obtain funding for car modifications to enable efficient working environment “on the move”.

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I commute three hours per day (round-trip to work from Oxford to Romsey), this is an enforced commute as relocating is not an option due to the complexities of personal care, healthcare, local reliable support worker, building adaptions etc.

I utilise these hours in the car to work in order to maintain competitive productivity in the workplace (I rely entirely on voice recognition which, in some cases, is inefficient and requires extra out of contract time contribution to catch up with the productivity level of other engineers). Due to the age of my previous laptop I required a replacement to meet the performance requirements of the voice recognition (and other work tools) software. This new laptop is significantly larger than the old one and I cannot use it on the dashboard as I did with the previous one. As a result of this I now need another solution which I have identified as installing a small, relatively inexpensive LCD screen in the roof (near to the sun visor) and a docking station in the passenger side front foot-well which will house my laptop safely. There will also be (in addition to a display cable) a USB extension cable run up the side of the car to accommodate my headset for the voice recognition and integration of my phone into the computer and car stereo.

My employers have kindly purchased the required over spec laptop with solid-state hard drive and 3G modem to accommodate my mobilised working needs. This means that with the adaptions I will be sufficiently productive during the commute and customer visits or conferences.

The supplier I have sourced is extremely good value and the parts are common and relatively inexpensive compared to the majority of audiovisual car components.

Hopefully you can accommodate my needs and enable me to be necessarily competitively productive in my workplace. If you think this is a worthwhile endeavour I will engage the supplier for a quote.”

Inundated with fantastic live music. DJ Shadow, Coldplay & Tini Tempa this weekend, looking forward to Metromny, two door Cinema club, leftfield, Booka Shade, Laurent Garnier and Michael McIntyre in the New Year.

dealing with ups and downs in the winter months. Being cooped up away from the cold create some hazards such as cabin Fever related anxieties and associated mood swings.

Looking forward to the eventual arrival of the off-road wheelchair thanks to help from generous people. Should be here sometime in the New Year.

Wish I could have a break from constant care and health concerns but there we go, very fortunate all things considered. My heart goes out to those without a roof over their heads in this cold weather.

Work very interesting, increasing the level of parallelism within network traffic processing code. On a self driven project which has a trade-off of benefits and risk. Time management time management time management…

Looking forward to a lovely Christmas, cosy and familial.

Love and greetings to all

Debian anonymous FTP tips:
use a vsftpd.conf similar to that at the following site:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-91887.html
anon_chroot parameter is important, must point to a NON-WRITABLE root for anonymous

users.

It seems that there are various possibilities for anonymous login credentials

including client specific settings (e.g. anonymous checkbox, I don’t know what this

actually sends to the server), the user “anonymous” or “”. Passwords can include “”,

any arbitrary string e.g. e-mail address or “guest”.

A specific criteria for anonymous users is that the anon_chroot directory that is the

root for the anonymous user is non-writable. I.e. owned by different user to that of

the anonymous FTP (ftp user for vsftpd). This does mean that the anonymous users

cannot create directories or write files to the root anonymous directory. They can

however to a subdirectory of this root directory (/var/ftp/pub in my case).

In the case where my anon_root=/var/ftp and there is a subdirectory “pub” within this

directory then the following configuration applied the necessary permissions:

(As root)
chown -R ftp /var/ftp
chgrp -R ftp /var/ftp
chmod -R 755 /var/ftp
chown root /var/ftp

This should remove the “vsftpd: refusing to run with writable anonymous root” error.

Example steps:

sudo apt-get install vsftpd
this will also create ftp user and group. On my Ubuntu setup this didn’t

create home directory.

The following steps setup alternative user home directory, autostart, edit the

config, create a backup file of the config and restart the Deamon.
51  usermod -d /var/ftp ftp
52  sysv-rc-conf –list
53  sysv-rc-conf vsftpd on
55  cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf.bak
54  vim /etc/vsftpd.conf
56  service vsftpd  restart
Note: if using graphical FTP client, don’t forget to refresh, gets me every time.

After deciding I didn’t want anonymous uploading, I changed the chown parameter in the config to ftpsecure, another user with a password. I set chroot_local and disabled others users from FTP by adding them to /etc/ftpusers. I then added some symbolic links to the home directory of ftpsecure. This seemed to offer the right balance of security that I needed. I enabled chroot_local_user and disabled chroot_list_enable. Disabled anonymous_enable etc. Until deemed necessary later.
Remember to keep group and owner permissions of all contents of ftpsecure to itself otherwise may get problems trying to edit etc over FTP.

We are both little ill at the moment with winter bugs. So staying in a lot. Going to see some live music on Monday (Billy Bragg and the King blues) which I’m very excited about.I’m having my kidney Stones chopped out sometime in the future (have to be surgically removed because they are too big to be “blasted”) which is an operation I am not looking forward to. My ankle is eventually recovering I think, I’m going for another x-ray today to make sure it’s safe to weight bear. Without standing I’m a lot less comfortable sitting around all day because my body doesn’t get the same type of exercise.
The personal health budget is going really well, allowing me to have more control and visibility over my care funding. Obviously little more of an administrative burden for me but I think it’s worth it.
Work is very interesting, did my first PV (private venture) presentation to the directors of the company yesterday, this is an application for internal investment into work that will improve the technical capability of the organisation in some way. I’m going to be looking at multicore technologies and ways to utilise multiple processing entities within software. This is not something new but expertise is usually beneficial.
Off-road wheelchair is still in development, looking forward in trepidation to trying it out. Hopefully not too much longer now. The majority of fundraising is complete but still trying to raise the remainder.

Please sponsor Tim (my friend from university) to raise money for spinal research, he is running the marathon. He says: “Here be the link – http://www.justgiving.com/Tim-Bland – still got lots of money to raise before they let me run!”

We went to a good friend’s birthday recently and seeing all the lovely people from what seems like a past life was great. It was also difficult for me to see people who knew me vaguely in a previous form, it felt awkward in an open environment. This is probably because I am aware that an appreciation of the stark contrast between life now and life before my accident has been formulated. I think it feels awkward for me because of a self-consciousness brought about when the reality of my physical condition and capabilities is “brought home”. Sometimes when meeting people for the first time who have no knowledge of me before my accident, and therefore are not inadvertently comparing my present image/form to that of before, I feel more comfortable because I imagine they see a physically compromised individual with distinct cognitive ability rather than a previously blooming individual with a comparative dearth of physical ability.

Anyway, there is my introverted and egotistically indulged reflection on my emotions. I think I still enjoyed the evening.

my competition entry:

My name is Tom, four years ago I was just finishing university in London. My degree was electronics and electronic engineering and I was heading for a first and had a contract with a leading research and development UK telecommunications company. On holiday in Bulgaria visiting my girlfriend who was on an Erasmus course I had a snowboarding accident and obtained a spinal cord injury at C4 vertebrae. I became permanently paralysed from the shoulders down.
I was rehabilitated at the National spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville hospital and during my 15 months of rehabilitation I regained my efficiency with IT using various accessible technologies but in the end settled for just voice recognition using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The reason I settled with just Dragon rather than a multitude of accessible technologies was for the portability. With no other hardware than simply a microphone, Dragon was the most portable option.
During my time in rehab I kept in touch with my university and prospective employer. I was allowed to graduate with a first and university undergraduate award on the strength of my university performance throughout three years and my dissertation. The human resources Department of my prospective employer kept a keen eye on my progress and I completed various small software development projects whilst in hospital using Dragon NaturallySpeaking from my hospital bed. In particular I developed an assistive technology switch-based device to enable someone with reduced manual dexterity to use the mouse on a computer.
The capability of Dragon to control every aspect of an operating system was a life changing facility. I am able to perform all functions on the computer just as before my accident and even use voice recognition to improve the accuracy and speed of my written word. I now use a multitude of different software development tools with the assistance of Dragon and its powerful script extensions.
While still an inpatient at hospital I attended an assessment day at my prospective employer to gauge whether I would still be of use to them. They decided I would be and on discharge from hospital I started a career as a software engineer.
I am still a software engineer at a leading research and development UK telecommunications company. I have worked on various telecom projects for UK providers and other networking projects for UK and international customers.
I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 on two laptops and one desktop with two headset earpieces and scripts to isolate one listening system at a time. I interact remotely with a number of other systems via terminal applications. I have even recently bought a Mac to try Dragon dictate and I’m looking into the iPhone capability as a portable microphone.
Without Dragon NaturallySpeaking my life would not be as rich today as it was four years ago.
Tom

Have to do a bit of fundraising first;
the off-road wheelchair project is still going after delays due to the available funds and development processes. It is being assembled as we speak over the next few weeks as the full 50% deposit has been paid. Some of the remainder has been raised but there is still significant shortfall serve anyone else can make a contribution please e-mail me or leave a comment with contact details: whizz2000 at hotmail dot com
enjoyed the launch of the charity “vitality” founded by Lucy Robinson (I especially enjoyed Rob Rush’s DJ set), they aim to start the process of self education in rural developing communities with respect to spinal health and care for people with spinal cord injuries. Google for more info
working on my personal health budget which should enable me greater control over my personal and health care.
Remembering Michael everyday and regretting the fact that I can’t ask him about radio systems anymore.
Writing a research proposal for a continuation of work I started about three years ago on the development of “ad hoc, mesh networks”.
Planning to attend various live music events including snow patrol, Arctic monkeys, Gruf Rhys, the King blues and Billy Bragg, DJ shadow.
Slowly progressing with wedding planning, visited a promising looking venue yesterday and typically shocked by the costs.
Thinking about how to deal with a large kidney stone and willing my ankle to mend quicker (it was broken in a midnight downhill venture at a Festival).
Wishing everyone well.
Tom

We endured a marathon 17 Hour journey to Monza in the amazing VW van with myself, Gary, Raj, Yvette and Christayl. We subsequently enjoyed a fantastic weekend in Monza for the Italian F1 Grand Prix 2011. We were treated to VIP treatment by ACP and partners (the management of Monza). With an incredible level of hospitality and an unwavering willingness to solve our every problem and satisfy our every need. Specifically we enjoyed the help of Mr Marco Villa and his assistants including Sabrina and Roberto. This treatment was all facilitated by the generosity of my friend Elena del Fabbro and her mother Elisa who offered us this experience. All the stewards and police officers were very accommodating and helpful, even if a little confused by seeing such a cheeky red-faced tetraplegic Englishman in a Transformers-esque wheelchair racing about everywhere.
I struggled with the heat on the first day (qualifying) but enjoyed the pit walk where we saw the team garages and cars (and supermodels). Mr Villa facilitated us in his office to watch the qualifying on his TV when we got too hot.
The second day was race day, we were invited to another pit walk but unfortunately I was late and got separated from the others and refused entry (understandably because I was late). I did however bump into Mr Jensen Button (currently the most successful UK F1 driver who drives for Mercedes McLaren) and have a brief chat. This was the highlight of the weekend as I regard him as one of the greatest F1 drivers in the world.
We enjoyed the race and more hospitality from ACP, I then bumped into JK (a.k.a. Jamiroquai) who seemed like a very nice guy as well as incredibly talented artist.
An unforgettable event facilitated by unforgettable generosity. I still struggle to express the extent of my gratitude.

I’m completely against the dismantling of the NHS. Especially seeing as people like my grandfather fought so hard to establish it.
I think it will result in the degradation of quality of care in exchange for increases in profit margins. I think there is a real risk that specialist care will also be replaced with generic care in order to exploit economies of scale and further profit generation.

Finally photos from paleo on the Flickr account. More to follow + from Italy.

Working hard playing hard, challenging projects involving traffic manipulating at high speed.

Off to Monza, Italy this weekend to watch the Grand Prix!

Best wishes

Tom

I was asked to speak at my grandfather, Michael’s funeral.
In summary I mentioned how great it was to live with Michael for the last four years and how we both dealt with a decline in mobility together. He was a man who demanded respect by his conduct and radiated his teachings by example. He was a gentleman of core traditional values and managed the difficult balance of scientific and religious understanding like no other I have met . He developed a religious contentedness and made his peace towards the end of his life although this wavered during moments of confusion. Always the first to offer sympathy he rarely talked about personal achievements or complaints. I thought he would have really approved of the ceremony and it was great to hear such good friends talk so fondly of him. Having his very close friends (Henry, Lindsay, Tom and the rest of the Northmoor Choir) surround him to sing the last hymn was very special. He made a large impact on so many people’s lives and he taught me about the power of reflection, the virtues of patience, the importance of dignity, the pleasures of classical music and, possibly most importantly, how to really listen.
We miss you Michaeland you