******* mouse! My arm >.<
29 Dec
House Mouse, Mus musculus. lol ^-^
Kitty Kittiwat, a newfound idol of mine, having a masters degree in biochemistry and running an oriental spa (which I find very impressive) taught me some very wise things about the body: Take care of it now, you’ll never get it back.
Suddenly I felt both worried and perplexed, because I realized I have been taking my body for granted.
Lately, I’ve been having an unhealthy relationship with my laptop, which has resulted in my right arm getting totally out of function. Just being able to press one key at a time with my left hand sucks and makes me so mad I don’t know what to do. This is what we Swedes call the dreaded MUSARM!
Hurts like hell. Please, do consider taking care of your bodies.
Btw, when my pain is gone I will write some mindblowing posts. Stay tuned and take care.
cute mouse, lol!
Poor you!
I hope you’ll get well soon, looking forward to more of your funny blog posts to come!
Happy New Year sweetie!
After this fifth semester which only had a lot of writing document courses my right arm has failed. It hurts like hell, maybe I’ll skip the last semester and open my own spa instead.
While I am unsure as to what caused your musarm, if it was due to using the mouse too much I would like to share some insights:
If you are one a GNU operating system, consider switching your window manager to a non-mouse-dependent dito, such as wmii, ratpoison or xmonad.
Even if you are on a GNU system and change to a mouse-less environment, there will always be times when you need a mouse, and then: http://www.inet.se/artikel/6101335/logitech-trackman-wheel Learn to love it!
As writing in T5 was suggested to be one of the major culprits, I’d recommend using LaTeX for document generation.
This might seem counter-intuitive at first, seeing as you would need to type even more stuff (the markup), BUT, it has some advantages.
Composing your texts in a markup language opens up for the possibility of using whatever plain-text editor is out there, including the two great ones, emacs and vim. And when you begin to get proficient with either, you WILL notice an increase in efficiency, using less typing.
The other awesome part about using LaTeX (which has nothing to do with combating musarm) is that all plaintext sources lend themselves VERY well to being stored in version control
It is of course (and sadly) a rather large undertaking, learning a new window manager, and a new text editor, alongside a new markup language, so it is probably not feasible to do any of these things, but hey, anyone up for a challenge, try it
It is remarkable how much you can do at a software level to solve some of the ergonomic problems. In an attempt some classmates and I tried to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout, and admittedly, you move your fingers less. As long as you only use English that is.
Nevertheless, emacs (with its shortcuts) keeps me at least from using the mouse when programming and writing reports (as most of them are written in LaTeX).
I do miss some flexibility in OS X though. Would be nice if you could let the window manager make some more decisions for you (according to my settings obviously) as I could do while I was using GNU/Linux and Xmonad. Somebody else got hints?
Some of my classmates tried out Dvorak (or Svorak, can’t remember) and I think at least one of them stuck with it, but my muscle-memory regarding vim keys had already set so I didn’t stick with it. One day perhaps…
And perhaps new ideas (such as http://vimeo.com/6712657) can further alleviate musarm and similar ergonomy (or lack thereof) related injuries.