I loved this photo so much I had to post it.

With gratitude to Ashley...

Oh noes! You may remember a while back, I wrote a post about the perils of bad computing posture. Many of you probably read it, shuddered, and carried on merrily with your poor postural habits... yes? (Trust me, I am not nearly as much of a model for proper ergonomics as I wish I was. I count myself among those of you who did not rush out to change your entire set-up.)

Well, today, via my friend the Instapundit (who has kindly linked to me on a number of occasions), I came across this quite distressing article. 

Read 'em and weep:

• Back specialists say as many as four in five patients have chronic nerve damage caused by working on portable PCs.
• One expert said he had seen dozens of Xrays showing signs of degeneration in the joints of regular laptop users.
• He is also quoted as saying: "I also see many people in their twenties and thirties with a dowager's hump - a rounding at the base of the neck - after only a few years of looking down at a small screen while sitting slumped on a chair for long periods."

Watch out, my friends. You only get one body in this lifetime. 

So what can you do?

• Take regular body breaks. Stand up, move around. Do some stretches right in front of your desk. (Look for the YFG podcast coming soon, I promise.)
• Get a raised laptop stand and external keyboard for the bulk of your computing. Try not to spend hours in compromising positions (like slumped in a chair with your laptop on your knees).
• Get a good chair. I didn't really understand the power of a good chair until I started borrowing one belonging to a friend where I work... and completely fell in love. I have never felt anything like this chair (it's a Keilhauer and sadly retails for $1200) and I swear I could sit for hours in it without getting most of the weird pains that other chairs cause. I actually spoke to an industrial design / human factors / ergonomics guy recently who told me that you really do have to spend at least $500 to get a quality desk chair. Start saving. It is worth it. If you spend as much time in your chair as you spend in your bed, shouldn't you make sure it's supporting you?
• Take stock of where you could be more effective with your time. If you find yourself wasting time online a lot, you might as well be going for a walk, or doing anything else that gets you out of your chair. Laundry! Play with your kids! Take a yoga class! Your body will thank you. 

I really can't stress enough how important it is to take responsibility for your body before things get bad. Sometimes we avoid making changes because the scope of the issue feels too big (ie, you don't know where to start). So take a deep breath, accept the way things are right now, and start to make small changes. You deserve to be comfortable in your one blessed body.

As an update to my recent post, I wanted to report that I did go out and get an external keyboard and a mouse to add to my working set-up. (It was hard deciding which to go with – way too many choices in this world.)

Now I know that some people think I'm ridiculous to worry about radiation from my laptop CPU, but all I know is what I feel, and I can assure you that the physical experience of working for hours on an external keyboard is *very* different from the experience of working directly on my laptop. My laptop gets pretty warm after a couple of hours of use, but with the keyboard it's all cool all the time. No more hot buzzy feeling either – which is a relief, because the buzzy feeling was starting to make my wrists ache.

As for the purchases I made...
I'm happy with the keyboard, though for my purposes I'd much prefer that they scrapped the whole number pad at the right hand side. I'll never use it, and shaving off that extra 10cm would make the whole thing much more portable.

I don't love the mouse I got - a Macally iLaser. It performed terribly yesterday at Workspace on the unfinished wood table surface. It also doesn't have the ability to scroll side to side, which I value. I think I'm going to take it back and get something different... probably a Logitech with a Tiltwheel in it.

Therein ends today's discussion of workplace health and geekery. ;)

Oh dear. Yet another thing to be wary of when it comes to laptop addiction.

For all that i love the portability that my 12 inch laptop affords me, I'm coming to accept that working at it full-time is *not* good for me. The postural problems that result from hunching forward over a laptop, and constantly looking down at a screen that's below eye level, are bad enough. But I've also started noticing something more insidious. 

I been noticing that when I work at my laptop for a while, my wrists and hands get hot from the heat coming off of it. The keyboard is directly over the CPU, after all. Worse than the heat, though, is the feeling of "vibration" that I've been feeling. It doesn't just feel like my hands are getting warm – it feels like they're being pumped full of some kind of energy. As I've become more attuned to it, it's become more and more uncomfortable to me.

Last week, I had an appointment with a craniosacral therapist named Mark Levine, in Richmond Hill. While we were chatting after my (great) session, the topic of working at a laptop came up. He pulled up a little device he has that measures electromagnetic radiation. When he holds it over things, it registers the radiation coming off of them. As he held it over his MacBook keyboard, the little indicator shot off the chart. As he held it over his external keyboard, it barely registered anything at all. 

He showed me that you really don't have to get too far back from the CPU for the EMFs to drop significantly – but when you type at a laptop, you really are working direclty in an intense field of radiation. Which explains what I've been feeling... and makes me rather nervous.

I've been meaning to invest in an iCurve and an external keyboard for a while now. No more excuses... I'm going to do it asap. It'll be much better for my back, and will hopefully also elimiate this creepy hot buzzy feeling in my hands that I've got as I type this!