[Gllug] RSI: Was VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Sun Mar 1 16:25:25 UTC 2009


On 28 Feb 2009, Joel Bernstein said:

> 2009/2/28 Daniel P. Berrange <dan at berrange.com>:
>> On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 11:38:20AM +0000, Sarah Lemari? wrote:
>>> I recommend the kinesis keyboards, although I'm not sure there's a UK source
>>> for them. I switched to dvorak on the kinesis years ago, and still use it. I
>>> adopted both at the same time so I've come to associate the two.
>>
>> The kinesis is excellant - even though its $300 to buy, its the best

The Kinesis contouring was, I understand, pinched directly from the
Maltron many years ago. (However this is hearsay so may be inaccurate.
Certainly they look very similar, and the Maltron has certainly been
around for much longer than the Kinesis.)

If this is true the Kinesis layout should work as well as the Maltron's
:)

(However, Kinesis's sales systems are, well, sucky, or at least they
were in the early 2000s. I tried to buy a Kinesis several times --- or
rather a friend of mine did, as I didn't then have a credit card --- and
each time their online sale systems screwed it up, at one point debiting
the card and not actually providing a keyboard in exchange! Thank
goodness one can contest credit card purchases...)

>> investment I ever made for any computer hardware. I just bought mine
>> direct from their online US shop - at the time the pound/dollar
>> exchange was very favourable so even with the customs duty it was
>> not too bad.
>
> What does it do for you? How can a keyboard cost so much? Why is it a
> good investment?

I don't know why the Kinesis costs so much, but the Maltron costs insane
money simply because their production volumes are so low that they have
to hand-make them all. (My keyboard is serial number 8062, and they
started making them in the 70s!)

As for why you'd ever spend that much on a keyboard, it kills RSI stone
dead. Lots of people claim that RSI damage is permanent and that once
you've got it it will never go away. This claim is largely incorrect:
or, rather, it's correct if you keep using conventional flat keyboards
and damaging your hands as fast as they can heal.

By the time I was 28 my RSI was pretty intense: stabbing pains in the
fingertips if I touched even one key, stabbing pains in the joints if I
just positioned my hands as if to type, constant aching from both joints
and the lengths of my fingers and arms, ice-cold fingers, shooting
tendon pain: just about the only problem I didn't have was carpal tunnel
syndrome.

I bought a Maltron for use at home and the symptoms immediately stopped
getting worse. After a three-year battle with bureaucracy I got work to
buy me one, stopped using other keyboards completely, and my RSI
symptoms faded out within two months.

By now, all that's left is cold fingers due to circulatory damage which
presumably is never going to improve. All the pains are gone, and I can
type for hours (with the occasional pause) without pain.

(This is a bit impractical if you're using a lot of keyboards on
different machines throughout the day. Thankfully my job doesn't require
that. If it did I guess I'd have to switch to a job that didn't.)
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