Title: From the Coal Face

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 03 January 2015 21:23:57 +00:00 or Sat, 03 January 2015 21:23:57 +00:00

Summary: Ian Bruntlett shares his experiences: not salaried because of mental ill-health, but still working and learning.

Body: 

In 2001 I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I spent a fair amount of time between 2001 and 2004 in St George’s (Psychiatric) Hospital. Whilst on East Loan (the hospital’s rehab unit) I started a blog [1]. To cut a long story short, I found it hard to keep a job down because of both the effects of schizophrenia and the side-effects of my medication. In particular, I experienced Cognitive Impairment. So I set about fixing my brain using my brain and the help of NHS staff. I got to grips with Cognitive Impairment and went on to run a 45 minute talk about it at ACCU 2014 (I also wrote up my experiences [2]).

Working is a goldilocks problem for people with schizophrenia. Salaried work is nice but in my case the stress involved triggered ill-health – psychotic episodes. Sitting around in a hospital lounge drinking tea and chatting was nice but not productive. So I discovered that voluntary work at Contact 3 was the best compromise.

Volunteering

I am a Polymorphic Volunteer for Contact – I do I.T. support and pretty much anything else (running a Hearing Voices Group, answering phones, fielding queries, taking messages, making cups of tea). Because that does not take up too much of my time in Contact, I teach myself things whilst there. Thanks to Chrissie O’Dell, I have a laptop which I keep in Contact. I read Linux books and try things out on the laptop. I am currently working my way through Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and HTML5 (3e) 4. When I’ve done that I will submit a book review to Astrid Byro.

We had a wiki with a Software Toolkit page, full of links to useful pieces of free software. Because wikispaces.com has gone commercial, we have lost access to those pages. So I’m waiting for Contact’s website to be handed over to Contact and I’ll rebuild my Software Toolkit page.

I.T. is a bit like a Traveller (tabletop) RPG. You are faced with problem(s) and a less than perfect skill-set to fix the problems.

A recent problem happened with Contact’s networked laser printer/ photocopier. It stopped talking to the office’s PCs. So I did some research. We had hundreds of pages of documentation on the printer and router as PDFs. Some of the printer’s manuals had been printed. So I started reading and googling and taking notes for two days. Last time I was a netorking expert was for the Sinclair QL and things have changed since then. I discovered that the printer’s I.P. address was now 0.0.0.0 which even I knew was a problem. There were two things that had to be done to fix the problem.

1. Configure the router to allocate a static I.P. address to a particular MAC/physical address.
2. Configure the printer to have the static I.P. address mentioned in step 1.

And, once things were working, I wrote up the notes. The printer has a drawer for manuals so I put it there.

I am also a volunteer for Ubuntu and lubuntu Quality Assurance. I have access to some old Dell computers and I install Ubuntu/lubuntu onto them and report successes and failures to particular e-mail mailing lists 5. I also help out friends with Ubuntu/lubuntu PCs. Because I use Ubuntu/lubuntu Linux so much, every so often I buy stuff from the Ubuntu shop 6.This time round I bought a variety of things including a 14.10 t-shirt – Utopic Unicorn and an Ubuntu badge.

Platforms

I’ve changed software platforms a number of times – HP calculator, ZX Spectrum, Sinclair QL, PC with DOS, PC with Windows. And now I’m using Linux exclusively for personal use and for learning new things. I decided that, taking my experience into account, when I read the Linux Pocket Guide 7 from cover to cover, understanding and knowing all of it, I would be a Linux person. That stage has been passed.So I am a Linux person these days.

Direction

I’ve discovered that as long as I pace myself, I can stay well and stay focussed. I don’t know what kind of voluntary stuff I will do in the future. I do have a few ideas, though :)

References

[1] http://schizopanic.blogspot.co.uk/

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/ianbruntlett/home/health

[3] http://contactmorpeth.org.uk/

[4] Nixon, Robin (2014) Learning PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS & HTML5 (3rd Edition), O’Reilly Media, ISBN 978-1-49194-946-7

[5] http://community.ubuntu.com/

[6] http://shop.ubuntu.com/

[7] Barrett, Daniel J. (2012) Linux Pocket Guide, O’Reilley Media, ISBN 978-1449316693

Notes: 

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