Category Archives: Health

Development Health Personal Tech

104 keys: who needs them anyway?

July 22, 2012 – 4:42 pm

I fired up my desktop Windows PC for the first time in a while recently, and the first thing I realised is that I absolutely hated the keyboard. This was nothing to do with the slight differences between the PC and Mac keyboard layouts, the latter of which I’ve become more accustomed over the last couple of years, nor was it about whether the keys were mechanical or scissor switched, or any such nuance.

No, it was solely this: the damn thing sticks out way too far on the right hand side if you’re a right-handed mouse user.

Like most heavy computer users, I’ve had various bouts of RSI over the years. The most basic case was resolved by learning to touch-type rather than the spider-typing that actually most programming languages encourage you to self-teach if you don’t know any better, given that all the useful symbols are around the edge of the keyboard. Later on, I found that low-profile keyboards with low travel distances & pressure resistance reduced general fatigue-related issues I started to get with age. But there was one issue which never went away – aches caused by mouse use. The main issue for me was not the mouse itself, but that because of the asymmetrical nature of the standard PC keyboard, with the cursor / navigation block and numpad sticking out to the right, your mouse has to be placed quite far out to the right, meaning that when using the mouse your body is skewed out of symmetry, meaning you’re straining one side of your body more than the other. This gives me shoulder & back ache, and also the angle means the unnatural wrist rotation of most mice is even more exaggerated, causing issues there too. I try to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, but you can’t avoid reaching for the mouse sometimes.

Now, I’ve been using a MacBook Pro pretty much exclusively for the past 2 and a bit years, and all those aches have gone away, because the trackpad is right there in the centre and everything remains aligned. I love the Mac laptop trackpads – they’re large, expressive, multi-touch, ergonomic and just a joy to use, to the extent that I can’t use any other trackpad without being struck by how awful they feel. I’ve tried a few on Windows laptops over the last few years and my response is always really negative. And this is a desktop in any case, they’re quite hard to find outside laptops even if I wanted one. So in practice, a PC-based trackpad wasn’t going to cut it, the mouse really had to stay.

Secondly, since I’ve been using a laptop keyboard for so long, I don’t feel I even need all those separate blocks of keys any more. Sure, I used to use them all the time;  I’d used 102/104 keyboards since 1991 and my muscle memory had got me used to jumping over to the cursor keys, Home/End, and occasionally the number pad. But in the last 2 years, that tendency has been completely eradicated from me – I now reach for the arrow keys in the bottom-right of the keyboard, and use combos like Fn-Left-Arrow rather than needing a dedicated Home key without even thinking about it.

So here I was, with a keyboard that was throwing off my ergonomic balance due to a couple of blocks of keys I didn’t need anymore anyway. I could have just sawn the keyboard in half I suppose, but I looked online and ended up grabbing a surprisingly cheap ‘compact’ keyboard that just gets rid of all that. You can see the difference in the image below:

To me, this feels a lot more natural; the angle of my right arm is far less acute, and that puts less pressure on my shoulder and wrist as well as not requiring me to reach as far when I move back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse.

The keyboard in question is not great quality, (I would have bought this one instead if it wasn’t for the fact that it only came in American layout with the horrible single-row Return key) so I’m going to have to see how that pans out. The range of choices for keyboards like this seems very limited, with a few options like this one at the budget end (probably designed for server rooms methinks), and a few crazy expensive options at the ‘specialist ergonomic’ end, which I wasn’t ready to pay for (I don’t expect to be using this machine all the time). If you know of any others for future reference, please let me know in the comments.

A final thought: over the years I’ve become more aware of how we seem ready to accept working in configurations that are actually quite bad for us physically, due to convention and familiarity. Almost 10 years ago a colleague of mine bought a Fingerworks TouchStream LP, a weird multi-touch surface that acted as both a keyboard and a mouse at once, with gesture support, and which at the time I thought was total insanity (and I found it impossible to use his PC!). In hindsight, I recognise the genius in that product, and can see why Apple bought the company – who of course ended up being at least partly responsible for how good Apple’s touch-based tech feels today.

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Health Personal

My take on stand-up desks

May 10, 2011 – 9:44 am

I think most people are now aware of how much damage sitting down for long periods does to the human body – aware doesn’t necessarily mean that they change their behaviour of course, until something starts going badly wrong (as it did for me a few years back).

Quite a few people recommend stand-up desks as a solution to this problem. I tried it myself in fact, firstly with a jury-rigged version, then after it seemed to help some I spent a bunch of money on both a desk and chair with a very high range of movement to accommodate both standing and sitting. It’s been just over a couple of years since my back problems started in earnest and I’ve actually concluded that (for me at least) stand-up desks don’t really help directly – the benefits are actually circumstantial, and unfortunately relatively short-lived.

Here’s why – when I first started using a stand-up desk, it was really uncomfortable. That required that I regularly took breaks to sit down (my feet hurt), or walk around and change position – this helped my back. But over time, here’s what happened – I got used to standing up for long periods, and as such I got ‘better’ at staying at the standing desk anyway. And all that happened is that I got yet more back problems, this time resulting from my back muscles locking up in a standing position rather than a sitting position. Not really progress.

The real key to avoiding back pain in my experience is not to stay in one position for too long. A standing desk may force that behaviour on you for a while, but the chances are that you’ll overcome it with time and just get locked in a different position (or maybe 2 positions if you alternate between standing and sitting). Sure, you could go for one of those treadmill desks, but IMO they’re a bit stupid. The thing is, the principle behind all these things is that our our bodies did not evolve to spend long periods sitting down – but they also didn’t evolve to spend long periods standing in one place, or walking on the spot, or alternating between 2 limited positions, either. In practice there was some walking, some crouching, some standing – all sorts. Variety of movement is what we were designed for, and while standing up may alleviate the problem for a while because the discomfort makes you move, it’s not a long-term solution IMO.

So really, keeping your back healthier is simple – keep moving around, take regular breaks, and try to avoid stress (this bunches up muscles, encourages unusual posture and suppresses the immune and natural recovery systems). Switching sitting for standing isn’t enough IMO, and can be quite misleading, implying you can still stay at your desk for the same number of hours and avoid back problems (win-win right?). I think most people would be better off saving their money and just learning to change their behaviour, building regular breaks / stretching / walking around into their day instead.

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Health OGRE Personal

Health update: December 2010

December 1, 2010 – 10:47 am

I’m still getting the odd comment on my post in April about my back & why I was retiring from Ogre – thanks again to everyone for the best wishes. I haven’t posted any updates since then, both because I don’t want to ‘count my chickens’ too early, because I’ve been busy, and because I don’t want to be too self-indulgent; but it’s been 6 months now, and I figure some people might like to know my status, because it really has changed a lot.

I’m glad to say it’s good news. :) In the 6 months since I announced my retirement, my back has improved a huge amount. Withdrawing from my multitude of (over)commitments was hard, and I felt guilty for quite a while (as well as reducing my income since I switched to less stressful projects of my own), but it was absolutely the right decision. Literally every month that passed has made a small difference, and it has thankfully accumulated – right now it’s better than it’s ever been. I’m not in pain on a daily basis any more (only occasionally if I overdo something), and I feel a lot more confident that I’m not going to injure myself doing normal everyday things. You’ve no idea how much it means to me to be able to go to bed at night without dreading how much it’s going to hurt to get out of bed the next day – such a simple thing, but it’s a huge deal to me after 2 years of pain.

My physio’s theory (after being very puzzled because the problems I had were symptomatic of a major trauma, of which there was no evidence) was that the problem was a vicious circle of stress and excessive time being desk-bound that had caused a long-term shortening of the tendons / muscles in my back, coupled with a general age-related degradation of discs, which then (because of the pain) caused me injure the nerves far too easily, causing more stress and making exercise to alleviate the problem long-term very difficult to do. In hindsight, while I was skeptical for a long time it appears he was right – it’s just that to break that cycle required a massive change in lifestyle over a sustained period of time, and being consistent with that change even when it didn’t seem to be working early on.

I’ve always believed that success is just a factor of effort and consistency, and that there’s no such thing as a ‘quick fix’ for anything important. I think if there’s any experience in my life that has reinforced this philosophy (and also tested my ability to follow it), it’s this. Plenty of people (particularly in the USA) told me I should be looking for a surgical solution. I never wanted that – the spine is a ridiculously complicated structure and I had very little faith that such a fix would last (even if it worked short-term), particularly while the original cause of the problem wasn’t explained. I’m glad that the culture here is to operate only if there is no chance of natural rehabilitation, because even if there had there been a viable ‘quick fix’, without the lifestyle change I’m sure the problem would just have reappeared later anyway.

It also seems that there was a combination of physical and psychological factors contributing to this, which again undermines the surgical option. I’ve historically had quite a high tolerance for stress and work-related pressure – in fact I’ve done some of my best work in the crucible of ridiculous deadlines and seemingly intractable problems. My general attitude that I could ‘push through’ any difficulties, reinforced by the inevitable high in the aftermath, pretty much set me up for this kind of problem – because when my health started to falter, I took the same attitude. Obviously, it doesn’t work. Stress and frustration cause tense muscles, which exacerbate the problems of discs compressed by too much inactivity and make stretching them out to their proper state again even more difficult. So in addition to changing my work habits, I’ve had to learn how to relax again. It sounds ridiculous, but because of stress and a reaction to pain (which is to tense up), I had literally forgotten how to relax a certain bunch of muscles in my lower / mid back. I had to be taught how to do it again using breathing exercises and gradual, millimetre-by-millimetre changes in posture over time (too much at once would cause me lots of pain).

So, it’s been a long road and it’s not finished yet – nor will it ever really be finished, since I’ll need to continue with my new lifestyle for the foreseeable future. I have a newfound appreciation for keeping my stress levels lower and being more realistic about what I put my body through in the pursuit of work / hobbies. In many ways the old Steve is gone (the workaholic, coding at 3am Steve who created Ogre). The new Steve has a working back though, and frankly, that’s far more valuable.

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Health OGRE Open Source Personal

The spinal analysis, and what it means for OGRE

April 27, 2010 – 11:21 am

For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ‘standard non-specific back pain’ – ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.

Things have been quite good recently, up to mid-February when I had a bit of a relapse for a few weeks after doing a little too much. I raised it with my doctor again, explained that I’d been doing all the exercise and going to the gym as recommended, and yet it still flared up at what I considered to be fairly minor provocation. He scheduled me in for another set of x-rays which I expected to not come back with anything conclusive since the last set didn’t (and you can’t get into the MRI scan here unless you go through this step again first, allegedly). They took more pictures this time but I didn’t expect much given all the opinions so far.

Imagine my surprise therefore that when I got the results today, they actually had a concrete explanation for me. Apparently in my lower thoracic (ie exactly where I’d been pointing all these months) I have some disc degeneration and calcification going on, which is what is causing the stiffness and pain. This is something that happens with age anyway, but given my relative(!) youth (36) they thought it looked like it might be a result of either a trauma such as a sports injury – I can’t think of anything – or sometimes they see it in people who were child gymnasts – again not something I can attest to! Basically, something has happened to make my spine degenerate in that area faster than it should have done for my age. Too many hours spent stressed out at a desk may have been a contributing factor in that, although he thought it would have to be a lot of hours and probably combined with other factors.

So anyway, the ‘good’ news is that I actually have a reason now, an explanation for why I’m so susceptible to strains and stress on my back these days. In a way it’s nice to have something to point at. The bad news is that this isn’t fixable, it can merely be managed via careful exercise and lifestyle changes – many of which I’ve made already but I probably need to go even further. The prognosis is that I should be able to live pain-free so long as I manage it carefully over the long term to stop it degenerating further.

Following this analysis, I’ve been prompted to make a decision which I’ve been reluctantly considering for a while anyway – I’m retiring as OGRE Project Lead. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my 10 years leading OGRE from unknown personal project to where we are today, but leading an open source project requires an enormous amount of dedication, passion, and above all an awful lot of time spent at a keyboard, most often in addition to a ‘regular job’ with which to pay the bills, and I feel I just can’t give that to the level that’s required any more. It will be with no small amount of sadness that I finally take off the leader’s hat – which by now is quite battered and worn in. ;)

I still intend to be around and involved in the project – I’ll be contributing some code, giving advice when it’s wanted, and overseeing the establishment of an OGRE Foundation to handle the donations and funding side, but the days of me living and breathing OGRE, vetting every change, and being the person with whom the buck stops when there’s a bug, will be over. I’ll basically be contributing what and when I can, but shrugging off the responsibility and expectation that is inevitably associated with being the lead developer.

We have a great team and community around OGRE and I’m sure the project will be fine with me taking a more back-seat role – time for younger and less physically challenged developers to step into the limelight :)

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Business Health OGRE Personal

Refocussing

January 20, 2010 – 12:19 pm

lensSo, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier ;)

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys ;) From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it :)

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

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Health Personal

A year on, practicing philosophy-fu

November 9, 2009 – 6:02 pm

chimp_thinkThe last 12 months have been a big adjustment for me. Just over a year ago, I almost lived at the keyboard of my PC – work, hobbies (mostly Ogre & general coding, but some PC gaming too). It was not unusual for me to spend 12 hours in a day sitting in front of a computer, coding away. I had a bit of RSI (addressed with low-profile keyboards and less mouse use), and some back pain on occasion, but I carried on because I loved what I did, and with always a huge list of things to do (and that I wanted to do!) I felt productive and content. I was the can-do guy. I felt I could take on anything if I wanted to, just by concentrating enough and putting the hours in. That enthusiasm and ability to focus was a blessing, and a curse.

It all came to a crashing end in one week in October 2008, when I spent several nights in a row not being able to sleep because of acute backache, pacing around the house at 4am in a lot of pain, culminating in not being able to get out of bed one morning, and being carried off in an ambulance pumped full of morphine. I hadn’t properly addressed several years of grumbling back problems in favour of getting on with what I loved doing to the exclusion of most other things, and eventually there was a breaking point. I’ve spent the last 12 months recovering from that sudden cliff-dive, and I can truly say it was a life-changing event; not at the level some people have to deal with of course, but still it’s one of those events that, in hindsight, everything can  be described in terms of “before” or “after”.

I’ve scaled back my PC time extensively. I try to work smarter to compensate for it; that means more ruthless prioritisation of things that I want to do, and being far more hard-headed about getting sucked into other people’s priorities (and not putting up with as much bullsh*t as I used to). I think I try to juggle less balls now, and am less worried about letting the occasional one drop. Before, I would have worked my ass off to try to handle all incoming projects and keep all the balls in the air, now, my ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ metric has been completely reset and I’m far more likely to walk away from projects if they’re more hassle than they’re worth, or if I feel my time is being wasted. It also means that with Ogre I appreciate my community even more than before, and am more willing to delegate than I used to be. I don’t feel under the same pressure (which was largely self-inflicted) to be everywhere at once and spearheading everything myself; I’m happier to let others take the lead on many aspects and offer advice instead, on design, API structure and so on. I suspect that I’m probably developing into a better leader for that experience, learning how to loosen my grip a little and do more guiding instead; and I’m really lucky that our team and community seem to grow stronger every year.

I’ve also completely changed my exercise regime, which is to say I have one now :) I hit the gym a couple of times a week and have a daily routine of home exercises (about an hour a day) which keep me flexible and compensate for the time I do spend at the PC, which is now mostly just office hours and maybe a few extra hours at the weekend and the odd evening. I spend a few hours a week gaming, play my guitar(s), read and socialise.

Strangely, I actually think my back problems have done me good overall, although I can only look at it with that perspective now that I have the situation largely under control. I think my previous level of intense focus, while very productive and hugely satisfying, and ultimately responsible for lots of great things like my career and Ogre, was very unhealthy. It’s hard to step away from when you’re on a roll, but having been forced to do so, I feel much better for it – less stressed, more centered generally. There’s more to life than work, than computers, and yes, even than open source ;) That’s not to say you can’t do those things, I certainly intend to continue to do so, but balance is so important, and yet so easy to lose track of. Society these days is hugely pressurised – you have to compete hard for everything, to earn money, to be more successful, to do things better than the other guy, and so on. Many of us just push ourselves as a matter of course, because we have high or maybe even unrealistic expectations for ourselves, or maybe just out of habit, and we end up sacrificing too much on the altar of progress – for some it’s marriages or relationships, for some it’s moral integrity, for some (including me) it’s health. Sometimes getting sideswiped by events and being shoved off that perpetual better-faster-stronger-harder treadmill can be a good thing long-term, because you get to stop concentrating on just keeping up for a while and take stock of what’s important. I’m certainly going to try to keep that in mind from now on.

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Health Political

Lies, damn lies, and lobbyists

August 14, 2009 – 10:52 am

I’ve watched with some entertainment the latest round of scraps across the pond about health care, which has now turned into a Brit-bashing exercise. Apparantly the NHS is ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Evil’ (allegedly that particular accusation was from the eminent scholar and international expert Sarah Palin) according to the American right-wing – which, when perceived from this side of the Atlantic constitutes most of the political spectrum compared to what is considered centrist here – all of which is news to most people in Britain, barring the usual suspects on the fringes of the Conservative party that their own leader would like to disown, but who always turn up on American TV because no-one listens to them over here.

I live in a Crown Dependency which unfortunately doesn’t benefit from the NHS, and frankly I’d love to have it over here, instead of paid-for primary care and state-run specialist care as we have (I’ve spent an awful lot of money on physios and doctors over the years). My parents moved back to the mainland a few years back and have had nothing but positive experiences with the NHS since; when we were visiting, my Mum was taken ill late at night and an NHS doctor was on the scene at her home within 45 minutes, all for no charge – something you would pay through the nose for here. It’s not perfect, but frankly IMO anyone who considers it optimal to have profit interests involved in the process of saving lives is either smoking something, or has a vested interest.

But, regardless of your point of view, it’s the blatant lies which are most amusing. My favourite is this quote from the editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, a national American financial newspaper:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,”

For goodness sakes, who writes this nonsense? Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life, and has hit back himself at this article explaining that he’s around today precisely because of the NHS, not despite it. Clearly facts are irrelevant when it comes to reinforcing your personal point of view. They’ve tried to take it back, but it just makes them look a little more stupid, especially casually tossing the word ‘Colony’ in there to somehow bolster the emotive side of the argument (taking speech tips from Mugabe now? not smart). Stephen Hawking was ‘a bad example’? In other words, they’re just making it up.

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Health

The great swine flu overreation?

July 17, 2009 – 11:18 am

I’ve had some kind of flu for the last couple of days -  I don’t know if it’s regular flu or swine flu, but what I do know is that it’s been pretty weak and at no point has going to the doctor remotely entered my mind (although, I’m the kind of person who has to feel really sick for a number of days before considering going to the doctor, unlike some people who seem to go whenever they have a sniffle). I’ve had all the normal symptoms – fever, persistent headache, dizzyness, nausea, sore throat etc – but they’ve all been fairly mild; unpleasant but no big deal really. I’ve been working throughout, just taking paracetamol, and apart from feeling a bit crap for a few days and having to have a couple of early nights because I’ve been extra tired, it’s been pretty much business as usual, just a little annoying. I’m already feeling better, if not 100% yet – in all I’d rate it at about 1/5 of the potency of the last bout of winter flu I had, or less.

Lots of people seem to be panicking about swine flu though, which is somewhat puzzling to me – the media probably has a lot to answer for. Ever since the 2009 pandemic began, the media has been scaremongering about swine flu, concentrating on individual but really very rare cases of complications, and to my mind generally blowing the whole thing out of all proportion. Sure, it’s a pandemic – but that just means lots of people get it. So far except for a tiny number of cases people just seem to get over it – ok there’s a minority of bad cases, but those happen every year in seasonal flu too (even among the young & healthy, they just don’t get reported because it’s normal and statistically miniscule).

I can understand the concern from people who have underlying medical conditions; the sorts of people who would normally need to have the seasonal flu vaccine. But everyone else just needs to calm down. The hysteria going around at the moment seems rather irrational, and very much fueled by the media concentrating on headline-grabbing minority cases rather than the general picture. It’s almost as if the media wants it to be as serious as the Spanish Flu, because that’s better news than the reality.

Current estimates are that, of those people that get swine flu badly enough to seek medical assistance (and presumably that’s genuinely need to seek it, rather than wasting the GP’s time because they panic), approximately 0.5% of those people (1 in 200) may die from it – and note that that excludes the vast majority who will just breeze through it like a regular virus. That’s pretty much the same as seasonal flu. It seems the vast, vast majority of people will just get regular flu symptoms, feel a bit lousy for a few days, and recover. Based on current reports, most people’s symptoms will be milder than seasonal flu anyway.

I don’t know – maybe it will get worse, but it seems like people are doing more damage to themselves with all this panic than the actual virus is doing.

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Food Health Random

Caffeine vs Alzheimer’s

July 6, 2009 – 11:04 am

Good news for coffee lovers such as myself – caffeine seems to prevent and reverse Alzheimer’s.

The doses in the research were fairly high though – 500mg per day, or about 5 cups of coffee (the US standard for espresso is 64mg caffeine per fluid ounce, which equals 96mg per shot). I might have got through that in a day at one stage, but I’m not chain-chugging Red Bull and coffee like I used to a few years ago. I do tend to double-shot my home-made espresso so I’d need to drink 2-3 a day to keep up with the mice in the test – not too bad, but still more than I usually have these days (I go for quality over quantity).

Of course, they don’t say how much the mice started twitching, how many heart palpitations they had, and how they coped with the inevitable post-caffeine crashes. But overall, I think everyone would take those ahead of a degenerative mental condition. Here’s hoping this research continues to go well.

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Health OGRE Personal

Tempting fate – a (possibly final) back update

May 23, 2009 – 1:58 pm

hunchbackI’ve been pretty busy lately, so there hasn’t been much time for blogging – I’ve tagged a few subjects for future expansion in my drafts, being very much a reentrant blogger, but so far meat has only been added very sporadically to those particular bones. By the time I get around to filling in the detail, the subject matter will no doubt be considered ‘stale’, but maybe my particular brand of commentary might lend a modicum of life to them anyway.

I’ve deliberately avoided talking about my back for a while, for multiple reasons; firstly, that I suspect it gets a little dull to read, and secondly it seems that whenever I talk about it on this blog, it seems to get worse the day or two following. I’m not a superstitious man by any means, but it’s really quite uncanny; of course, it’s probably just because when it’s feeling better, I’m more likely to overdo something & injure it again.

So, with he appropriate caveats about what might happen in he next 2 days, the good news is that ever so slowly, my back is improving. After several months of following the advice of my physio to concentrate on stretching out and lengthening the muscles and tendons in my mid-upper back, to stop them clamping up and locking my back in enormously painful ways, I’m definitely seeing positive results. I now do about 1.5 hours of exercise and stretching per day, and go to the gym twice a week on top of that for something a little more strenuous. It still hurts moderately every morning and most evenings, and occasionally I get a more serious bout which requires me to take painkillers (usually the day after doing something unwise, or being too immobile such as when travelling for long periods), but overall, I can see positive results. Each month I seem to be a little bit better than the last – it’s not a fast process, but at least it is a process.

As you can imagine, it still plays havok with my daily routine, and I’m almost constantly frustrated at the amount of stuff I can get done these days. Years of sitting at the PC until 2am if that was ‘necessary’ led to a certain baseline expectation of how much I could do in a day. Now, I’m mostly a regular daytime beast, with a few extra hours at the weekend and the occasional evening here and there, so it’s quite different. But, I’m adjusting to it, such as learning to say ‘No’ to work offers that don’t feature highly on my personal priority list (which basically means that stuff that enhances Ogre gets top priority, things that use Ogre next, everything else brings up the rear, if at all), and time-boxing what I do in the community / forums – now, if I can’t do it in the time I have, it probably doesn’t get done (by me anyway), rather than the old situation of me just spending as much time as it took. I don’t like having to pass on work, or get slightly out of touch with some aspects of the community, but on balance it’s an acceptable sacrifice given the alternatives, no matter how guilty I might feel about it sometimes.

So, if I don’t talk about my back much anymore, it’s because it’s just on a very slow but seemingly steady road to recovery, which as you can tell, doesn’t make for very interesting blog posts ;) It doesn’t mean I’m ‘better’ yet, and I’ve accepted that I’ll never be able to return to my old ‘all night coding marathon’ days, (revel in those while you can guys, but definitely think about giving them up before your back ends up like mine did) – but it’s probably time to stop talking about it now. My thanks to all those who sent their good wishes, and helped me out over this rather testing time.

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