New Hobbies 3

Over the past few years I have made many attempts to start doing this blog again. Throughout my time at college and then throughout University I regularly kept my blog up-to-date and active. At one point I was featured quite often on the BBC disability website. Eventually I got really busy with my dissertation and lost the motivation to keep up the blog. Every New Year and birthday ever since I would always swear that now I will finally start doing it again. However, every time I did this after a few posts I would lose motivation and just forget about it. This time I really feel it will be different. This year I actually have quite a bit going for me. I have made a bunch of new friends, joined a few clubs are generally kick-started my life. If all this snow would stop then I would be sorted. I will talk about all this new stuff later. One of the things I like to do in this blog is have a good whinge. I enjoyed talking about some of the more unfortunate things in my life and have a good laugh about them in the process. I would like to point out that most of the stuff by I go on about has actually happened and in order to make it more humorous I have heavily exaggerated most of what's going on. It is not my intention to get anyone in trouble so I will not use any names or any other language that would allow anyone to recognise who I am talking about. Also most of the stuff here will be about my thoughts and embarrassing things that I have done. Everyone has these in their lives but I am not sure that many people enjoyed writing about it.

Anyway, enough of that. What I am here to talk about now is my third point mentioned previously. That is the fact that I was going to do an online computer programming course to try and improve my skills and give me something to do. Quite a few years ago now I went to university to learn how to program computer games. This was one for a while; I managed to learn how to program in C++ and a few games techniques. I enjoyed this while my arms could still work and I was able to use the keyboard to type the code. Once that time to happen I lost my mojo. Speech recognition and the on-screen keyboard would just not cut it for this kind of work. You can just about get away with it to work with HTML and to a certain extent small JavaScript. I could work with that so I switch courses to the more catchall computer studies where you could select modules from pretty much any discipline of computing. I chose to go more web development which it turns out I was really the best at. Due to going from relatively able-bodied to almost paralysed from the neck down I did not do as well as I could have done. I did manage to get a 2 in the end which given the circumstances I believe to be pretty good. Well, it has been ages since I got my degree but that is when I saw a free online computer programming course (www.codecadamey.com). I decided to register and try refreshing my skills. The course that they offered was been JavaScript which is not far removed from C but with most of the really dangerous taken out. I had gotten quite far along with this but it was extremely time consuming with the on-screen keyboard. Now that I am 100% on-screen keyboard only it was much more difficult than I remembered it. Apart from downloading a free C++ editor and an online programming for dummies book I have pretty much given up on computer programming. It is like riding a bike and although you will get a bit rusty it still says there. Maybe in the future there will be a better way for me to input the computer or even a cure for the condition I have. Until then I don't think I will stress myself out with it. I am just glad that I did not enrol for the Open University. I could be a computer programmer but at the moment no!

Later, Bert.

Note: it has been a good while since I had a serious attempt at doing this blog. Whilst I feel I have quite an amusing and unique writing style I feel that at times it might seem like a jumbled mess. That is because it is. I am using Dragon Dictate and no matter what they say for someone with a Duchenne like me it will does not work out of the box. Even if it did I am still not used to all its various quirks and other things. Once I really get into the swing of it all these weird errors will disappear. The main problem I am having it whilst none of the words are spelt wrong they had the wrong words for instance cause/course. Once I resolve all these issues then my blog will be fun a seamless work of literary genius. Sorry for inconvenience.