Greetings folks!
My name is Mike, and I'm 43 from South East England and I've had Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy since I was 15. As a progressive disease, it eventually confined me to a wheelchair, but I take quite a pragmatic/logical approach to the whole thing choosing to see how to fix issues rather than dwell on them.
I currently use two wheelchairs. An everyday Invacare Mirage electric powered indoor/outdoor (EPIOC) supplied by the local wheelchair service, and a TiLite rigid frame manual chair (purchased by myself) which I use on trips further away when friends/family drive/push. I used to drive a Motability car, but decided to give it up around 10 or so years back because of various health/money/employment changes.
I trained in computer studies (on Unix/Windows), got a job in design (Mac OS), then the Internet arrived! After that died down, I turned my attention to lower level programming (on Linux). I now have experience in PASCAL, COBOL, PHP, Javascript, HTML/CSS, C/C++, Python and am currently working from home writing projects in those last two.
I've been a huge fan of Space all of my life, so currently enjoying the SpaceX wave at the moment. One of my personal projects is prototyping automated solutions for astronomy using cheap components (Raspberry Pi / Arduino chipsets etc). I also own a Prusa i3 Mk2 3D printer which I was able to build from a kit (although it took a few weeks longer than most builds), with OctoPi spooling gcode etc.
Music has also played a massive part in my life. I'm convinced it helped me through my diagnosis early on, from metal to rave, ambient to break-beat, there are few genres I don't enjoy.
As a child of the 70's/80's, I grew up with and really enjoy computer games (BBC Micro upwards). When gaming I use a Windows box for Steam and a PS4. Unfortunately neither get the use that they really should, although having said that, I've just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, and that game is a full-on work of art 10/10.
Anyway, thanks for this site, and for reading this far
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Mike