About

In January 1991, when working for Ericsson, I got my DOS-only Ericsson PC replaced with a Sun SPARCStation 1 which changed my way of working and my way of life. I found UNIX in the form of SunOS 4.1.1B.

In October 1994 I had tired of testing the AXE Telephone Exchange that I was supposed to do and changed jobs within Ericsson to become a full time SysAdmin for some 1500 users, initially still on SunOS 4, but pretty soon I had to convert from BSD to the SVR4-based Solaris 2.4.

At the end of 1995 I grew weary of the Ericsson salary-politics and left to work as a Systems Support Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Solaris went through 2.5->2.5.1->2.6->7->8->9->10 while I worked for Sun, I left at the end of 2004.

Since then I’ve worked, again as a SysAdmin (now Senior though), with HP-UX and CentOS up until November of 2016 when I took over as technical lead for all Macs at my current Company, having used a MacPro and a MacBookPro as my work computers since 2011.

As of 2019 I’m also responsible for setting up a managed Linux deskop environment, using Puppet and Fedora. Now, mid 2022, we’re contemplating (and testing) moving away from Fedora to either plain Debian or Ubuntu. I’ve “snuck” in a bit of Ansible in the setup process as well.

We currently use Jamf Pro (cloud instance) in addition to Munki to manage these Macs (160 to date).

We previously used FileWave for a couple of years for this.

More Information

Saturday August 15 2015, 5 days after my 46th birthday, I suffered a stroke while preparing for a dog show in Norrköping.

I didn’t realize what happened myself, I didn’t even realize something happened at all other than I felt drunk and a bit dizzy.

My wife however realized more or less immediately what happened and called an ambulance, which arrived within 15 minutes.

After the initial CT-scan at the local hospital i Norrköping it was confirmed that I’d suffered an Ischemic stroke and my treatment was initiated with a blood thinning medicine, thrombolysis. I was put back in the (same) ambulance and driven on to the University Hospital in Linköping where I was examined by a neurologist who confirmed a Cerebral Infarction from the CT-images and by physical examination.

I was more or less paralysed in my left side, unable to move my arm and leg, but luckily my somatic sensation was unaffected, I could feel every touch that he tried.

I spent the weekend (Saturday - Monday afternoon) at Linköping before being transported home to Södertälje hospital, again in an ambulance, where I spent 10 days doing initial tries to learn to walk again initially using a support walker while otherwise being confined to either my bed or a wheelchair. I also started to do some basic hand exercises.

After my 10 days in Södertälje I was transferred on to Danderyds Sjukhus and their specialised rehab department for patients with brain injuries, stroke, tumors, encephalitis, trauma and EP.

I was at Danderyd from Aug 28 until Oct 13, with the last weekends spent at home on leave.

During the time at Danderyd I got to meet with doctors, physiotherapists, psychologist and speech-language pathologist. Initially I was completely unable to use my left hand and had very limited use of my left leg (I could use my leg but was not allowed due to the risk of falling). On my first day at Danderyd I met with a physiotherapist for an initial evaluation. He did some balance tests and let me try walking with a sort of a cane, and he also had me try walking up and down a flat of stairs holding on to the railing. I was surprised as to how well it went. I was also evaluated of my arm/hand usage which was a lot worse than my leg. I trained a lot with my leg with the goal of being able to walk and move around with as little help of “tools” (wheelchair, walker, crutches, cane) as possible. One of my main problems with my arm/hand was that I was unable to lift my hand using the wrist, I had no strength at all. This was, almost magically, partially solved using electricity, something called NMES (NeuroMuscular Electrical Stimulation), daily for my last 3 weeks at Danderyd.

When I finally left Danderyd I walked with a crutch, but was still unable to use my left hand and arm. I had to learn a “workaround” solution to be able to lift my then 2,5 yr old daughter. I bent down and wrapped my right arm around her waist and was able to lift her with a little help from her holding me around the neck. I had pain in my left shoulder when I tried to move it. I was told that the only thing that holds the shoulder joint in place is the muscles in the shoulder, which in my case was  more or less unused for 4 months - i.e. they were very weak causing the shoulder joint to have problem to stay aligned which caused most of the pain.

I was admitted to continued rehab at Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge where I was examined by both doctors and a physiotherapist and together they decided that the PT was to tape my shoulder to keep it “in place” to help me move it with as little pain as possible and thereby starting to strengthen the muscles to eventually get rid of the pain completely.

Instead of starting full time rehab at Huddinge just before christmas I was called to a specialist PT doing something called CI-therapy, which I started mid january, working 6 hours/day for 10 days. First with main focus on arm/hand, and then another 10 days of leg/balance/walk training. Hard work, initially painful when working with arm/hand, but with unbelievably positive results, especially for my shoulder. After finishing the CI with my arm I’m now able to lift my little girl like most other parents (my hands under her arms).

My own estimation is that I went from having 30% usage of my left arm/hand to having about 80% use of it in those 10 days of intensive training. The outcome of the leg training was less. I probably finished there with about 80% usage of the leg as well but that was probably only up from 70% mainly because I had come much farther with my leg before the CI.

So beginning of february 2016 I was back to about 80% usage of both arm/hand and leg.

I started going back to the office for limited time (2 hours a day initially, and only 4 days a week) in April, increasing the hours over time and since August 1 2016 I work full time again.

To add to my current status: I’m back playing golf - albeit not as well as before, but that’s more due to lack of practice than being affected by my stroke.

Last updated: 2022-05-18