The obfuscated workplace
As time goes on, I grow ever more idiosyncratic in my choice of computer interface, to the point where my habitual working environment is verging on the deliberately perverse.
Many years ago, when I was having some trouble with my wrists, I switched over to the Dvorak keyboard layout, a completely different layout from the QWERTY layout that most people are familiar with. It requires much less hand and wrist movement while typing, and my keyboards develop a characteristic polish on the eight "home keys" where the fingers relax while at rest.
A while ago, figuring that I spend well over a thousand hours a year hammering at my keyboard at work, I decided to get myself a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, a weird-looking beast that places all the keys within very easy reach of the fingers, reducing hand movement to almost zero. After a conventional keyboard it's first disorienting, then
I use it with the Dvorak mapping, of course; and in a fit of perversity, I sanded all the key legends off, leaving a blank black keyboard. In our team, when anyone leaves their workstation unlocked, everyone receives invitations to beer at their expense. Nowadays I'm exempt from this prank.
Don't use wrist pads: they put the pressure exactly where you positively, absolutely don't want it. Instead, I swear by an inch-thick, thirty-by-ten-inch wooden board, with its edges rounded off, laid in front of the keyboard. It elevates the forearms to the same height as the keys, keeping the wrists straight to minimse stress on their tendons.
Trackballs are better than mice (unless you're a gamer). But big trackballs, the ones with a fat ball that you roll with the fingers. At all costs avoid the thumb-operated ones; they're ghastly.
On the software side, I've just discovered the xmonad window manager, a system that pretty much entirely does away with the age-old desktop idea of overlapping windows that you can toss freely around with mouse and pointer. xmonad is very different: it tiles all your windows on the desktop at once, and you change their layout with keypresses. It takes time to get used to, but so far I'm finding the experience to be a minor revelation. No more moving windows around. Like, almost ever. It's an extraordinary idea. I've been using it for an hour and I think I'm sold on it already.
The trouble with most of these measures is that they take time to learn; in some cases a lot of time. (And xmonad carries the extra disadvantage that you'll have to abandon your Windows box and move to Unix or OS X.) But personally I've found them all worth it.
And I get the wicked satisfaction of knowing that nobody else will want to even touch my workstation; but that's a project that can wait until tomorrow.
Many years ago, when I was having some trouble with my wrists, I switched over to the Dvorak keyboard layout, a completely different layout from the QWERTY layout that most people are familiar with. It requires much less hand and wrist movement while typing, and my keyboards develop a characteristic polish on the eight "home keys" where the fingers relax while at rest.
A while ago, figuring that I spend well over a thousand hours a year hammering at my keyboard at work, I decided to get myself a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, a weird-looking beast that places all the keys within very easy reach of the fingers, reducing hand movement to almost zero. After a conventional keyboard it's first disorienting, then
I use it with the Dvorak mapping, of course; and in a fit of perversity, I sanded all the key legends off, leaving a blank black keyboard. In our team, when anyone leaves their workstation unlocked, everyone receives invitations to beer at their expense. Nowadays I'm exempt from this prank.
Don't use wrist pads: they put the pressure exactly where you positively, absolutely don't want it. Instead, I swear by an inch-thick, thirty-by-ten-inch wooden board, with its edges rounded off, laid in front of the keyboard. It elevates the forearms to the same height as the keys, keeping the wrists straight to minimse stress on their tendons.
Trackballs are better than mice (unless you're a gamer). But big trackballs, the ones with a fat ball that you roll with the fingers. At all costs avoid the thumb-operated ones; they're ghastly.
On the software side, I've just discovered the xmonad window manager, a system that pretty much entirely does away with the age-old desktop idea of overlapping windows that you can toss freely around with mouse and pointer. xmonad is very different: it tiles all your windows on the desktop at once, and you change their layout with keypresses. It takes time to get used to, but so far I'm finding the experience to be a minor revelation. No more moving windows around. Like, almost ever. It's an extraordinary idea. I've been using it for an hour and I think I'm sold on it already.
The trouble with most of these measures is that they take time to learn; in some cases a lot of time. (And xmonad carries the extra disadvantage that you'll have to abandon your Windows box and move to Unix or OS X.) But personally I've found them all worth it.
And I get the wicked satisfaction of knowing that nobody else will want to even touch my workstation; but that's a project that can wait until tomorrow.