An E-Mail To The University of Ulster
I wrote this e-msil to the team developing the computer games at the University of Ulster.
You could argue, that I’m in a sorry state, being a 62-year-old widower of three years, who has just lost his youngest son at just 37 to pancreatic cancer. To cap it all I have just had a series of strokes,which have left me with a gammy left hand amongst other smaller issues.
As someone who has spent nearly 50 years programming, writing reports and lately blogging on the Internet, the standard PC keyboard totally frustrates me. You want to hit shift to get a capital and you hit caps lock or control, which means the precise document you are creating gets into a mess, because you have capitalisation all over the place or say you hit something like control-W which opens a new window in Internet Explorer.
I have found a partial solution in the Microsoft Comfort Keyboard, but sadly it doesn’t quite go far enough.
One of the features of this keyboard is the ability to disable individual keys, so they don’t work.For example, I have disabled the Caps Lock key and this now means that I don’t have to rewrite large portions of documents, when I accidentally toggle the key. Having no Caps Lock is no problem to me, as I have never ever used the key in my work.
I also want to disable other keys :-
- One and/or both of the control keys – Disabling just the left would be an interesting option, as for things like control-C and control-V, which I still use would be available using the right one. My right hand is still 100%.
- The Windows key – I’ve never used that key and used with some keys it does lot of things that you don’t want to do in a Word Document or Internet Explorer. With L it locks the computer, which is something you don’t want to do inadvertantly.
- The ALT key – Who uses that? Except in control-alt-del.
The driver of the keyboard should be able to be modified to disable any key and perhaps allow certain combinations, such as those commonly used ones with Control, but that would need co-operation from Microsoft. Microsoft’s driver and control panel is a good template and starting point.
I should say that I programmed quite complex keyboard drivers in some of my software, but that is actually a level above the actual deep-level driver. When you hit a key, you first check which of the modifier keystrokes, (control, alt etc.) are depressed and take an appropriate action, so it should be easily possible to ban single keystrokes as Microsoft do in part, but allow the combinations you want. If I could write a Windows keyboard driver, I know I could do it. I also have the money to pay someone who can to create something that would ease the lives of many stroke sufferers and disabled individuals.
I have discussed this driver with my doctor at Addenbrookes and he feels it would be worthwhile, but has never come across anything like it. If you search my blog for keyboard you will find more thoughts. As this e-mail is effectively a specification for the driver, I shall probably post it on the blog, together with a link to your work.
I see that you have developed computer games for stroke sufferers. I have never played any computer games, as I prefer games to be real. I am going to get back to playing real tennis, which is a game with a world-wide handicapping system, that can be used to measure your progress. You can also find quite a few gentle players, like the elderly or kids to play with, so that you can build up your skill and power levels gradually.
Keep up the good work.
But as my Irish racehorse trainer, Tadey Regan says, “The Struggle Continues”
Some might say that publishing here is just giving away an idea, thst might be stolen by someone else.
As Rhett Butler said in Gone With The Wind, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”. If I get my driver I’ll be pleased.
Computer Games For Stroke Rehabilitation
Researchers at the University of Ulster have been carrying out trials of specially designed computer games to help rehabilitate stroke sufferers.
Ulster’s School of Computing and Information Engineering in Coleraine has collaborated on the project with fellow researchers at the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the Jordanstown campus.
The Games for Rehabilitation project, which has been funded by the Department of Employment and Learning over three years, focuses on rehabilitation of the upper limbs and involves the player using their hands and arms to touch targets which move around the screen.
Read the full article here.
I can see the point, but I’ve never been someone for computer games. On the other hand, I’ve had some good physiotherapy in both Hong Kong and Addenbrookes. The stuff that I liked had an element of play in it. Especially, when you were playing with an attractive twenty-year-old or so ypung Chinese woman. Addenbrookes were also using a Nintendo Wii.
What a Waste of Money!
The Saville enquiry cost £200,000,000 and didn’t find anything that most right-thinking people didn’t really know. Read the statements of sensible politicians like say John Major, and they would probably have predicted the findings about ten years ago.
The population of Northern Ireland is just under 2,000,000 according to this report on the BBC. So that means the report cost about £100 for everybody there. Wouldn’t it have been better to have given the money directly to the people, especially as about 11% are pensioners?
We must move on and even some of the most controversial characters from the depth of the troubles have done so.
Take Glenn Barr He is still a controversial character to both the British and the Nationalists because of his involvement with the Ulster Defence Association and politics. Now though he has retired from active and conventional politics and devotes himself to community projects in Derry, often concerned with high unemployment.
This is also in his Wkipedia entry.
He has also worked closely with Paddy Harte, a former Irish Government minister, on promoting awareness of Irish Catholic participation in both World Wars.
I first saw Glenn Barr on a BBC Panorama program in the 1970s. Asked by the interviewer, what would happen if the British pulled out, he said that the Protestants and Catholics would probably fight for a couple of days and then realise they were all Irish and had a lot more in common. He was also asked if he had any regrets. He said that he couldn’t watch Derry City, as he wouldn’t be safe. I hope he can now!
In about 1980, I heard report on BBC Radio 4, about a guy called Paddy Docherty, who had found an abandoned coaster in Derry harbour. He was filling it with Irish cast-offs like hand sewing machines and was going to sail it to Ethiopia, where such would be appreciated. The trouble was that they couldn’t get the Deutz diesel engine repaired. So I sent him some money to help, as did aot of others. He sent me details of what he was doing and he was running the YTS in Derry. His major supporters were Robin Eames, Cardinal Daly and others I knew to be on the right side. His number two was Glenn Barr. Iremember, I phoned Paddy up and had the most enlightening hour with one of the real heroes of Northern Ireland. Years later, I met Jim Prior and he spoke appreciatively of Paddy.
Just thing what £200,000,000 would have done in the right hands in Northern Ireland, rather than in the hands of expensive lawyers.
I’d love to know what happened to the coaster.
Squeezing the Moderates
When I hear the words Northern Ireland or Ulster on television or radio, I reach for the off button. All my adult life we have had the Irish problem. I should say that all my adult life in my mind, there has been one obvious solution, give Ulster to Eire.
I don’t make this decision on political grounds, but through strict economic grounds. I have been to Ulster a few times and it is an expensive place to live and to run a business. Energy is expensive for a start. So everything needs to be subsidised. I know it is the same in other far-flung parts of the UK, like the Highlands of Scotland and Cornwall, but they don’t spit the bile about everybody who disagrees with them, that many Ulster politicians do. I don’t ever remember them trying to bomb and kill their way to get their aims.
I know that the Protestants would bleat about the reunification of Ireland, but because of population dynamics with an increasing and younger Catholic population, that they will be in the minority in a few years anyway. How will the the Catholics vote?
I have just heard Ken Maginnis on Radio 5, eloquently complaining about how New Labour has played the extreme card and cut out the moderate Unionists and the SDLP in favour of Sinn Fein and the DUP. He has a point, especially, as his party was not at the current talks.
I read once that subsidies to help Northern Ireland cost about £3-4 billion a year. (If anybody has an up-to-date figure then please let me know!) But to move control of justice and policing to the province would have cost £800 million. If it was a subsidiary of a company it would have been declared bust many years ago.
Surely, this amount of money means that on the one hand a long term solution to Ulster must be found and that on our part, we put a proper, rather than a part-time minister into the province to make a deal that is fair for all stick.
Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson!
Peter Robinson is not a person I warm to.
I should say that a lot of this is coloured by his predecessor the Reverend Ian Paisley, who was not a person I’d have allowed into my address book. As an atheist, I have a lot of respect for many religious leaders, but Paisley, his obscene views, vile rhetoric and his aggressive stance towards those who disagree with him, just mean that only a bigot can respect him.
But I did feel a bit sorry for Peter Robinson, when it became known that his wife had had an affair with a nineteen-year-old boy.
However after reading his view on homosexuality on Wikipedia.
On 30 October 2008 in his first extensive interview as First Minister interview for Hearts and Minds for BBC Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson publicly endorsed the controversial view, also shared by his wife Iris Robinson, that homosexuality was against Christian theology.
Robinson said: “It wasn’t Iris Robinson who determined that homosexuality was an abomination, it was The Almighty. This is the Scriptures. It is a strange world indeed where somebody on the one hand talks about equality, but won’t allow Christians to have the equality, the right to speak, the right to express their views.”
The comments angered LGBT Christian groups throughout the UK. Also, the Christian Bible also condemns adultery, which Mr Robinson’s 60 year old wife has recently publicly admitted to with a 19 year old Roman Catholic man – this admission only came after a BBC investigation.
The Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister is tasked with promoting “better community relations” and “a culture of equality and rights” in Northern Ireland, including for Christians and gay people.
There is a quote “As you sow, so shall you reap” from Galatians VI.
At the present, Peter Robinson is declining to resign. Here’s a quote of his on allowing the IRA to join the democratic process.
You don’t corrupt the democratic process in the hopes that terrorists might toe the line. To get into this club, you have to accept the rules of the club. You give up your weaponry, you accept democratic and peaceful means — and that entitles you to be part of the democratic process.
It is alleged that he broke the rules, by not declaring his wife’s financial interests and is now under pressure by his party to resign.
I will not be sorry to see him go.
The next installment is on Panorama tonight. Will I watch it? Probably not! The pair of them are not worth the time that could be better spent on something else.
Romanians in Belfast
Over the last few days there have been a lot of attacks on Romanians in Belfast. Racist? Of course they are.
But then Northern Ireland they know all about racism and sectarianism! It may have been pushed under the surface between Catholics and Protestants, but it does appear to have come out again, where these Romanians are concerned.
Here’s a report from the BBC explaining the backround.
I get very heated about racism and immigrants being treated very badly.
Read Robert Winder’s excellent book Bloody Foreigners and there is a piece about poor Jews and Germans coming to work in the fur trade in the East End of London.
An 1854 police report estimated that there were two thousand destitute Germans in what Alexander Herzen called ‘the miry bottom’ of London. Von Meysenburg wrote, ‘Poor German families there are by the hundreds. The work is stamping raw pelts at a German fur factory, Imagine a big barrel in a very warm room, filled to the very top with ermine and sable skins. A man climbs into the barrel stark naked and stamps and works with his hands and feet from morning until night.
That could well have been my father’s antecendents, as they are down in the census as fur skin dressers and they lived in the poorest parts of the East End.
Winder’s book also contains a whole chapter on Huguenots. My mother’s family are all descended from these religious refugees from France.
So when I hear stories like this from Belfast, I reach for my disgust hooter. And use it.
The Anonymous Widower 