Tag Archives: Health

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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Development Personal Productivity

Work 2.0 – the interruptible programmer

September 4, 2010 – 12:25 pm

I’m 37, and I’ve been a (professional) developer for 16 years. You would have thought that in that time, I’d have figured out an effective work style which delivered the desired outcomes (code cut, products shipped etc) without causing detrimental knock-on effects – but, sadly, you’d be wrong. I think the style in which I practiced my craft for the first 15 years of my career was much the same as every other enthusiastic developer: you put a ton of hours in. 12-16+ hour days, evening and weekend coding marathons, pizza in the keyboard, crunch times, 3am debugging sessions where you just can’t go to bed because you can feel the source of that bug just beyond your fingertips, dammit, desperate last-minute sprints to deadlines where you manage to slot that last piece in, Jack Bauer-like, just before the world goes to hell. If you’re in the demographic I’m talking about, you’re nodding sagely, and probably grinning a little too, reminiscing on past trials and glories. This sort of crazy dedication is respected in our circles, and is pretty much expected of any developer who has claimed to earn their stripes.

But, it turns out this kind of thing is not good for your health – who knew? Those of you who know me or keep up with my blog know that I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming away from my old ways, because of back issues that I initially ignored, then tried to cope with using token accommodations, and finally succumbed to in a big way. Being self-employed, this was a major problem. Crawling out of the pit I dug for myself took a long time and a lot of frustration – I read quite a few productivity books on the subject to try to find answers on how to keep working, and in the end found that the answers you mould for yourself tend to be the best ones. I’d like to share one of the things I learned along the way.

But I’m ‘In The Zone’!!

So, I want to talk about the biggest problem I encountered: concentration periods. I can’t sit at a desk for longer than about an hour at a time now; if I don’t get up and walk around, do some gentle stretching etc, at least this often, I’ll pay for it badly once I do move, and probably over the next few days too. I also can’t realistically work more than a standard 8 hour day without pain any more. The problem with this was that, as a programmer, the style which I developed over 15+ years involved getting gradually ‘Into The Zone’ and coding for very long periods at a time, uninterrupted. This is a common theme among coders, who like to shut themselves away for hours at a time, wear headphones to avoid distractions, have ‘quiet times’ and so on – and it’s also why we tend to react really badly when interrupted. Programming requires concentration, and concentration seems to run on a valve system – it takes time to warm up, and once it’s going, you don’t want to turn it off because starting it up again is a major hassle.

I thought there was no way around this, and had begun to resign myself to just being less productive because of it. However, over the last 6  months in particular, I’ve discovered that, far from being an intractable problem, this ‘slow warm up, long uninterrupted focus time’ approach is to a large degree a learned behaviour, and it’s possible to re-train yourself to cope with things differently. It’s a little like when people learn to adopt polyphasic sleep patterns – it’s not that you can’t do it, it’s just that when you’ve become accustomed to doing things a certain way, changing that is initially very, very hard. But it’s not impossible, given the right amount of motivation and time to adjust.

So, my goal was to acclimatise myself to many shorter work chunks during the day instead of a few very large ones, while still maintaining productivity. The key to this was to learn how to get back ‘In The Zone’ in the shortest time possible – much like the way polyphasic sleepers train themselves to achieve REM sleep more quickly. I’m mostly there now, or at least way better at it than I was, so, what techniques did I use to make this transition?

  1. Embrace interruptions
    This is less of a technique and more of a deliberate psychological adjustment which cuts across all the practical approaches I’ll cover next. Instead of being the typical coder who avoids interruptions at all costs, you need to accept them, and learn to manage them better. It’s hard – you have to try to set aside years of resisting interruptions and initially, until you adjust, you’ll feel like you can’t get enough done. Many people will probably want to give up, unless there’s something specific motivating them to push through it – for me, daily pain was a great motivator. My main message here is that the transition is just a phase, and that it is possible to be an interruptable programmer who still gets things done. But you have to learn not to fight against it, hence why this is the first point.
  2. Maintain context outside of your head at all times
    Much of the problem with interruptions is that of losing context. When you’re in that Zone, you’re juggling a whole bunch of context in your head, adjusting it on the fly, and maintaining and tweaking connections between issues constantly. Interruptions make you drop all that, and it takes time to pick it all up again. My answer to this was to externalise as much as possible, on as many levels as possible:

    1. Maintain a running commentary on your current task
      I am my very own chronicler.       I write notes on what I’m doing all the time, whether it’s adding a comment line to a ticket, committing frequently and writing detailed commit notes (you do use a DVCS to make light commits more practical, right? ;) ) scribbling a drawing on (ordered) pieces of paper. This really isn’t that onerous, and in fact externalising your thoughts can often help you clarify them. Basically the guide is that roughly every 30 minutes, I should have generated some new piece of context which is stored somewhere other than my head. If I haven’t, then that’s context I’d have more trouble re-building mentally if I’m interrupted. It doesn’t take much time to do, and it has other benefits too such as recording your thought & decision process.
    2. Ruthlessly ignore tangental issues
      You might have noticed that in the last bullet, I used the words ‘current task’, singular. Not ‘tasks’. There is no such thing as having more than one ‘current task’ – there is only the one task you’re actually working on, and distractions.
      We probably all use bug trackers / ticket systems to track bugs and feature requests, but when you’re working on a ticket, it’s very common to spot a new bug, or identify an opportunity for improvement, or think of a cool new feature. How many of us go ahead and deal with that right away, because it’s in the area we’re already in, or it’s ‘trivial’, or it’s a cool idea that you want to try right now?  I know I did – but I don’t any more; any tangental issues not related to what I’m currently doing get dumped into the ticket system and immediately forgotten until I’m done with the current task, regardless of their size, relevance or priority. It sounds simple and obvious, and this might even be official procedure in your organisation, but I challenge most coders to say that they actually do this all the time. The benefit is that even the tiniest of distractions add an extra level of context that you have to maintain, which is then harder to pick up again after an interruption.
      For this to work, you need a ticket system which is fast, lightweight, and doesn’t require you to be anal about how much detail you put in initially. You need to be in & out of there in 30 seconds so you can offload that thought without getting distracted – you can flesh it out later.
    3. Always know what you’re doing next
      This is one from GTD (‘Next actions’), but it’s a good one. When you come back from a break or interruption, you should spend no time at all figuring out what you need to be doing next. Your ticket system will help you here, and so will the running commentary that hopefully you’ve been keeping on your active task. If you’ve been forced to switch gears or projects, so long as you’ve maintained this external context universally, you should have no issue knowing what the next actions on each item are. The important thing is to have one next action on each project. If you have several, you’ll have to spend time choosing between them, and that’s wasted time (see the next section on prioritisation). At any one time, you should not only have just one current task, but one unambiguous next action on that task. Half the problem of working effectively is knowing what you’re doing next.
  3. Prioritise Negatively
    I mentioned next actions in the previous section, but how do you decide what comes next? A lot of time can be frittered away agonising over priorities, and I used to struggle with it; I would plan on the assumption that I wanted to do everything on the list, and I just needed to figure out which I needed to do first. I discovered that I could cut the amount of time I spent on planning, and also get better, less ambiguous priorities by inverting the decision making process – to assume a baseline that I wouldn’t do any of the tasks, and assessing the negative outcomes of not doing each one. So instead of ‘which of feature A or B is more important to have?’, it became ‘Let’s assume we ship without feature A and B. What are the issues caused by omitting them in each case?’. It might appear to be a subtle difference, but having to justify inclusion entirely, rather than trying to establish a relative ordering assuming they all get done eventually, tends to tease out more frank evaluations in my experience.
  4. Recognise the benefits of breaks
    Much of the above is about limiting the negative aspects of taking breaks, but the fact is, that they have many work-related benefits too. I’m willing to bet that all coders have stayed late at work, or late into the night, trying to fix a problem, only to find that they fix it within 15 minutes the next day, or think of the answer in some unlikely place like the shower. The reason for this is very simple – extended periods of concentration seem productive, and can be on operational / sequential thinking, but for anything else such as creative thinking or problem solving, it’s very often exactly the opposite. Not only do tired minds think less clearly, but often the answer to a problem lies not in more extensive thinking down the current path which you’ve been exploring in vain for the last few hours, but in looking at the problem from a completely different perspective. Long periods of concentration tend to ‘lock in’ current trains of thought, making inspiration and strokes of genius all too rare. Creativity always happens when you’re not trying, and it’s an often under-appreciated but vital element of the programming toolbox. Interrupting that train of thought can actually be a very good thing indeed.

There’s more I could talk about, but that’s quite enough for now I think. I hope someone finds this interesting or useful :)

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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

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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Health Personal Tech

Laptop ergonomics really do suck

April 6, 2009 – 1:41 pm

Laptops are great, of course, whether you’re travelling or just enjoying the flexibility of having a PC wherever you want in the house at any one time, instead of closeted in a fixed location. But if there’s one dimension in which they suck (barring upgradability – but then modern laptops are pretty nippy these days), it’s ergonomics. Laptops are excluded from the design standards that regular PCs have to adhere to, simply because it’s hard for them to comply within the form factor we expect.

I’m a little sensitive to ergonomics, having had bouts of RSI over the years, and of course my back problems.  However, I still love my laptops – particularly since right now the only Mac I have is a laptop, so that’s where all my testing for OS X has to happen. The reason I’m raising this today is that, despite having limited my laptop time in recent months because of my back, I decided it was feeling good enough in recent weeks to try to finish the OS X support for CMake this weekend. It took quite a lot of time over 2 days to get everything sorted out, but I did manage it, and was pretty happy about it. My back though – not so much; today it’s more painful than it’s been in a while.

The trouble is that I can either use the laptop on the dining room table, which places the keyboard and screen at about chest height – which strains my mid-back because I have to sit up pretty straight to use it (ie exactly what my physio says I shouldn’t do), or, I can use it at my stand-up desk or on my lap, which then hurts my upper back because you have to hunch your neck over quite far instead. For me, mid-to-upper back strain is the main problem, not lower back as is more common (trust me to be different), so this is straining the exact area I don’t want to.

Of course the usual way to resolve it is to use a laptop stand and connect a separate keyboard and mouse, but that pretty much defeats the object of having a laptop in the first place if you have to cart those things around & have cables trailing about. There are other more modest stands just for the laptop itself but I’m not entirely convinced about their effectiveness given how little they can change the configuration (if you’ve used one, please shout :) )

It would be nice if laptops could start trying to address this. Maybe incorporating some kind of telescopic housing for the LCD, so you can put the keyboard and screen at the right height simultaneously. The main challenges with that are strength, space requirements and the centre of gravity I guess, but it would be nice. Or, maybe a simpler approach of just a detachable screen with fold-out legs or something. Am I nuts?

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Health Personal Travel

No, I’m not going to GDC this year

March 18, 2009 – 7:25 pm

Since I keep getting asked this question by friends, existing business partners and prospects, I figured I’d just confirm it here – I won’t be attending GDC this year. It’s a shame, because I’d love to meet up with all the people I know who are going, but the primary reason is the 5,000 miles between here and there. Given the issues I’ve had with my back over the last few months (the worst episode of which emerged just after I made it back from California last time), I decided to have a break from long-haul travel to allow it time to recover. It would be different if I could afford to travel anything other than economy class, where I have to spend 10 hours wedged in a space PETA would find objectionable, but that’s not really an option. So for the moment, I’m limiting myself to 2 hours flights or less, which lets me get to most places in Europe (in May I’ll be at FMX in Stuttgart doing a talk), but rules out the US of A except in the unlikely event that Concorde makes a return and is curiously both faster and cheaper.

On the back issue, I can tentatively report that things are improving. It’s slow, but the number of ‘incidents’ where I do something that takes me out for a few days with major pain are decreasing; it’s been a couple of weeks now since the last one (touch wood), and before that I had a fairly good couple of weeks. It’s still sore a lot of the time, but sore is a big improvement :) Having been back to the doctor & physio again, they both appear to be convinced now that my spine is ok structurally (which is very good news), the problem is in the soft tissues – specifically that the muscles in my mid-back have become way too dominant, caused by years of spending too much time sitting relatively motionless and a bit too upright (aka my usual typing position). The result is that the multitude of muscles and ligaments down my mid-back are a bit too short, a bit too tense all the time, and poorly balanced by all the other muscles that would have been doing more if I wasn’t sitting at the desk so much. That means that they have a tendency to over-tense and jam the ‘fins’ at the back of my  spine in awkward ways, which means inflammation and aggravation on the clusters of nerves running between them.

The symptoms I’ve had can be caused by much more serious problems, but the fact that mine recovers in between the ‘incidents’, and doesn’t seem to react to prodding once the inflammation has gone down, means that it’s not serious, apparently. I have to say, it’s easily the most painful and prolonged non-serious condition I’ve had in my 35 years!

This week I’m adding the gym to my schedule of activities, for the first time in a lot of years. I’ve got a list from the physio of the things I should and shouldn’t do, but it’s time to take my recovery to the next stage (that is, Stage 1-2: Moderate Discomfort Overworld), and to redevelop the bits of me not related to adopting the keyboard position. Here goes…

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Health Personal

HAG Capisco, 2 weeks on

February 27, 2009 – 12:46 pm

hag-capisco-8106I’ve had the HAG Capisco for a little over two weeks now, which is not really long enough to give a definitive verdict, but it is just about long enough to give some initial impressions of it.

Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat – this is not an instantly comfortable chair. It’s most definitely not the kind of chair you can buy, plonk yourself into and be immediately at ease – far from it. It might seem crazy to spend this amount of money on a chair that initially makes you rather saddle-sore, but if you’ve ever had recurring back problems, you’ll know that the word ‘comfort’ is relatively alien to you anyway, and having sore thighs for a while really isn’t a big deal in comparison to something sawing away at your spinal column day-in day-out.

The saddle seat means your weight distribution is very different to a normal chair, shifted from the back of your pelvis (which can remove the healthy ‘S’ shape of your spine and put you off your centre of gravity when you use a desk, despite lumbar supports and other ergonomics) to the  middle of your pelvis instead, largely mimicking the way weight is carried when you’re standing up but mostly taking your legs out of the equation. It takes a while to get used to that. I still can’t sit on it for long periods of time (maybe an hour) before I need to switch to standing up for a while, but that’s actually a good thing, since variety and movement is precisely what my back needs. Going back and forth means that I can do almost a regular day at the desk again, so long as I keep moving and stick to my exercise regimen.

I also like the way you can spin the chair around and use it backwards (the back is designed so you can lean against it, and put  your elbows on the arm rests which work both ways). I don’t use it like this myself, but I can see some people might like it. Lastly, the fact that the gas lift goes way high and is still super-stable is ideal for me with my stand-up desk setup.

So, what about results so far? Well, I think it’s helping. My back has been a bit variable this month; starting pretty bad – the ogre3d.org hack probably had a lot to do with this, since I was stressed out and putting loads of hours in- but improving a lot in the last 2 weeks. I’m not sure if this improvement is just down to the chair, since I made some other changes too. After the problems I had after recovering the OGRE server, I changed my routine so that it’s much more strictly focussed on health rather than work again, because that really is more important. I go for a brisk walk of a couple of miles every morning without fail (previously I’d leave it until a variable time later in the day which didn’t work very well), followed by 30-45 minutes of careful stretching and strengthening exercises.  I use the stand-up desk and chair all day, and switch between postures at least once an hour and generally try to keep active. In the evenings, I have to make sure I switch things up a lot. No sitting / standing at the PC/laptop all evening like I used to, or indeed doing any one thing for long periods – sorry to those wanting more work on OGRE, but I have to be realistic. I might catch up for an hour standing at the PC, do some guitar practice, play on the 360 a little bit (Rock Band is interesting because it’s active enough to actually help rather than hinder like most other things).  Basically, I’m forced into being a delittante in just about everything these days! I seem to have to avoid using the laptop very much, because sitting at the dining table for a long time really sucks the next day.

Still, awkward regime or no I’ve definitely noticed my back getting stronger overall. It is still susceptible to occasional upsets – I had one this week for example when I either lifted something I shouldn’t have, or spent too much time using the laptop one evening, and I’ve really paid for it these last 2 days. Not as badly as I once might have done – it doesn’t hurt most of the time, but exercising it (like I have to for the longer term!) or moving in certain ways can set off a pretty nasty bout of pain if I’m not careful.

Blips aside, I do think I’m on an overall upward trajectory, and I think the Capisco is one positive facet in that process. I’ve lost a stone in weight since mid last year and in these last 2 weeks, for the first time in around 4 months I’ve been able to get up in the morning without a good chance it’ll feel like I have a rusty, barbed chain running down my back. The trick is to maintain that improvement without accidentally overdoing it, which is a lot harder than it sounds and I don’t always get the balance quite right. Still, there are definitely positive signs here that I’m trying very much to remember whenever one of the ‘blips’ occurs. As my wife keeps reminding me, I’m light-years away from the situation 4 months ago which included being in hospital jacked up on morphine, hobbling around the house at 4am trying not to scream too loud, and laying in a crumpled heap on the floor wondering how I was ever going to get up, none of which I’ve done for ages. So, big improvements since then, and improvements even compared to a month ago. It’s hard when you’re as impatient as I am, but staying the course for the long term is clearly the way to go.

My primary goal for 2009 is to recover enough to take a holiday back to Canada this year, which is about both being able to tolerate a 10 hour flight in economy class again, and be fit enough to get around and have fun when we get there. You certainly won’t see me horse riding or white-water rafting any time soon though ;)

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Health Personal

Standing isn’t the (only) answer

February 4, 2009 – 10:42 am

Despite my initial positive reaction to working standing up, since I made that post my back has gone steadily downhill again, starting with a dodgy weekend that I hoped was a blip, but grumbled on for pretty much all last week, before taking a rapid decline this week. This morning I’ve been in the kind of pain I haven’t had since late last year. So, coupled with the ogre3d.org hack, colour me extraordinarily pissed off this week.

One aspect is that I hadn’t been out walking this week until this morning, since it’s been icy and since my back was already bad, I didn’t feel it was worth risking a slip. I’ve been out this morning but it hasn’t helped – it was even too painful to do my stretching exercises afterwards. But I know it’s not just that, because it was dodgy last week too and I was going out every day. Still, the steep decline this week clearly indicates I can’t get back to normal work yet, even when an emergency prompts me to try.

So, I dunno. I’m trying to track it, trying to observe cause and effect, but it still seems elusive. I’m just going to have to keep trying (what other option is there?). If there’s one thing I hate, it’s illogical things, and this is like hooking yourself up to a 20,000 volt cable with a random number generator controlling the on switch. :(

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