[Gllug] RSI: Was VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[Stuart Children]

Jumping in a bit late to this thread as I've been on holiday (which by i
definition does not involve email)...

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 03:55:47PM +0000, Nix wrote:
> > To anyone reading this who doesn't take the whole typing style/posture
> > thing too seriously, please, have a think about what you're doing.
> 
> When the pain starts, they'll learn. I used to scoff, once: it would 
> never happen to me! Then it did.

Funny you should say that... :( I've been pretty fine for years [1], but last
couple of weeks things have got bad. My right thumb in particular - pain over
the top of the first knuckle, swollen, stiff (doesn't want to flex very far -
though it can). Been to the doctor who's ordered an x-ray and we'll see what
he says after that, but "RSI" is screaming in my head. I wouldn't have
expected it to come on so suddenly though.

[1] Nothing I would call RSI. Though my hands have got cold easily for a long
time, which you mentioned being a symptom in another message. I've just put
that down to naturally poor circulation (I'm very tall, which probably doesn't 
help). Which it may well still be of course.

I do use a tackball at home, and I asked our desktop people for one at work
today. I've had brief plays with a MS split keyboard before but it never sold
me. I'd be intrigued to try a Kinesis/similar, especially now I have pains I
can measure improvement against!

This has made be think of other ways to reduce key strokes and use the mouse
less. I do use shortcuts for heavy-use applications (editors/IDEs), but
there's room to improve. Remapping non-alphabetic keys is tempting - making
brackets, @, ", etc single hits. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is 
"sticky" modifier keys, ie: so you press Ctrl then X, rather than
having to hold Ctrl. I've not tried it so I don't know if there are
downfalls! Alternatively, forcing yourself to use both hands (one on each
key) - rather than stretching across the keyboard with one hand.

-- 
Stuart
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