The Musings of Chris Samuel

Well well, less than 2 months ago I wrote:

Leon, I hope you make a speedy and thorough recovery. Get well soon.

Well, check this out, here’s Leon’s first blog post since the accident! Leon - you are amazing!

My brain is now essentially OK — modulo some bits of Short Term Memory killled by the total loser’s antics — and the body is steadily rebuilding, so I do have a viable future as this develops.

The most disturbing part of it is that the subtext of his post implies that the “accident” was anything but - he writes:

I truly have ZERO appreciation for a selfish waste of space and oxygen who hurts people for the hell of it, including that it had already hurt several others before applying it’s stupid malice to me.

Sometimes I despair for humanity, but then people like Leon come along and give me some hope. Leon - it is so good to see you back in the virtual world again - keep fighting!

Courtesy of the PLUG mailing list here is an update on Leon Brooks current health after his bicycle accident.

Some good news!

Leon is awake, is responding to voice command (can you squeeze my hand, can you look at me), and is opening and using his right eye to locate people! He is even smiling on demand, and kissed Lucy back when she kissed him.

Another update from the PLUG list:

Leon was taken off the sedation on Saturday and has been waking up slowly since then. As you can imagine, this is a slow process because of the nature of the injuries and the level of morphine he is on. He was put in a chair/bed for a while today so he could be in a different position. He required support, but opened one eye slightly and was able to look at Lucy and move his head to see. He was responding to pain stimulus on his hands and feet yesterday, but today he has improved to respond to a more gentle touch on his feet, and squeezed people’s hands with his when requested (after a few seconds pause). He still has a tube down his throat, but the assisted breathing has been turned off - he is now breathing on his own!

Update from PLUG:

Author: Alex Polglaze
Date: 2006-02-28 13:09 +1100
Subject: [plug] LEON BROOKS UPDATE

This is an update of Leon Brooks’s current situation.

Leon is in Royal Perth Hospital in a medically induced coma. He currently has a chest infection and the doctors are fighting that. They expect that it will be another 4-5 days before they can reduce the sedation sufficiently and assess the brain and spinal damage.

He is expected to be in Intensive Care for another 4-5 weeks and therefore cannot receive any flowers during this time. Also Lucy is not at home much, so please hold the flowers.

Currently, babysitting, transport and meal preparation and supply are under control.

[...]

Lucy thanks everybody for the well wishes and support and is mentioning everybody as she talks to Leon.

So keep thinking of him and hopefully he will recover.

Alex Polglaze

Here is a probably related ABC news item from Sunday.

Hang in there Leon…

Bad news reported in a message to the PLUG list:

Date: 2006-02-27 13:54 +1100
To: plug
Subject: [plug] leon brooks

It is my sad duty to inform you all that Leon Brooks had a car accident on Saturday night and has severe head injuries and is currently in ICU.

Further details are sketchy at this stage.

Leon, I hope you make a speedy and thorough recovery. Get well soon.

Via Linux Australia

How to boil an egg in 3 minutes with 2 mobile phones.

I guess it’s obvious when you think about their power output, but it’s still a little disturbing…

Via Leon

To expand briefly on this story of Leon’s about the problems with security in Internet Explorer I will add a quote from the source article:

Actually there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs - between the 12th and the 19th of October - 7 days in total.

So for 359 of the 366 days of 2004 (it was a leap year) users of Internet Explorer were vulnerable to being hacked..
I await their figures for 2005 with interest!

Aha, so Leon thinks Canada is the 51st state, but New Model Army have been claiming that for the UK since 1986 by the look of it..

Our star-spangled Union Jack flutters so proud
Over the dancing heads of the merry patriotic crowd
Tip your hat to the Yankee conqueror
We’ve got no reds under the bed with guns under our pillows

If you’ve never heard them before then give them a listen, especially their earlier stuff. Got to be one of my favourite bands!

Leon’s got a couple of nice photos from Hawaii from the collapse of an entire active lava bench belonging to Kilauea volcano.

The USGS also has another photo (shown below) from the press release of the resulting lava hosepipe that was created when a 6 foot wide lava pipe was left spewing molten rock into the see from a height of 50 foot. Quite an amazing sight!

Credit: Photo by NPS volunteer Kelly Wooten.