Technology Futures

Many of us spend too much time sitting in front of a computer, often while seated in a poorly designed chair and/or a poorly designed desk space. Here are some tips for avoiding repetitive strain injury (RSI) and/or surgery.

• Put the mouse as the same level as the keyboard. I still see many many people with the mouse on the desk. This will kill your shoulder and elbow because of the repetitive strain of moving your arm up and down. Unless you like rotator cuff surgery, put the mouse next to the keyboard, even if you have to hack some sort of tray extension.
• And while it should not need to be mentioned, you need to get the keyboard off the desk and onto an adjustable keyboard trayideally with four axis adjustment: in/out, up/down, left/right, and tilt angle. Tilt angle is very important for RSI and wrist problems; you should have a small negative tilt (downward slope) on the keyboard.
• You need a palm rest, either integrated into the keyboard, or a foam extension that you place at the base of the keyboard. Your palms/wrists should not rest on any kind of edge. I see many keyboard trays with a thin metal lip placed on the edge to keep the keyboard in place, but these often stick up just enough to dig into your wrist. Over time, this continually pinching of nerves in your wrist will lead to pain and RSI.
• Get a good chair. If you are experiencing back pain, while it could be related to keyboard problems, it is more likely related to posture (which is severely aggravated if your keyboard is on the table). Any chair that costs less than $500 is usually inadequate. I have NEVER seen a properly designed chair in places like OfficeMax or Staples, at any price. Many of you will be disappointed to hear that, but it is true. Good chairs have carefully engineered support, and more levers rarely translates into a better chair. Good chairs tend to run $650-$800, and I would recommend the Freedom chair. It has very few adjustments but is extremely well designed. If you think an $800 chair is an extravagance, consider that it will last ten years or more, and if your livelihood is sitting in front of a computer or at a desk all day, it is a lot cheaper than surgery on your wrists or back.
• If you have back pain, you need a different chair. Note that the Aeron chair is highly overrated. While it broke new ground, it has two major problems: 1) the breathable fabric is like sandpaper and will ruin your clothes, especially if you keep anything in your back pockets (like a wallet), 2) the front edge of the chair, although designed with an appropriate downward slope, has a rigid edge that digs into your thighs and cuts blood flow to your legsthis is inexcusable.
• Keyboardsa split, contoured keyboard is a must. It only feels odd for 2-3 days, and then you don't notice it anymore. There are many good one, but my favorite is the Datadesk Smartboard. It is one of only a very few keyboards that actually make the keys farther from the centerline bigger, so it is easier to hit them. In other words, the "O" and "P" keys are wider than the "G" and "H" keys.
• Most mice are poorly designed. They require a fairly tight grip to be usable, and this is often where RSI sets in. Most people don't realize how muscle stress and strain, continued over days and weeks, even the small amount of force required to grip a mouse, can damage muscles. A good mouse will require NO gripping pressure to use it. This is very hard to understand until you use a mouse that does not require gripping pressure. I've used a Contour Design Perfit mouse for nearly a decade. It's big, but a pleasure to use. The Perfit mouse is one of a very few mice that can be ordered in different sizes for different size hands--important for women and for larger men.
• Finally, few doctors know a darn thing about any of this stuff, and are often too eager to recommend surgery. The stats on RSI surgery are very grim--surgery often makes the problem MUCH WORSE. There is a huge bundle of nerves passing through the muscle sheath on your wrist, and going in there and hacking away is extremely risky. Surgery should be a last resort only after spending as much as needed on better furniture and giving your body time to repair itself.

Good furniture and the right tools is usually cheaper than surgery, too.

Here is a very short article about the falling price of DSL service in the U.S. Usually, when prices fall, it is a possible indicator that people are not buying enough of whatever is for sale, or that they supplier has "too much" of something. In the case of DSL, both is probably true. The phone companies have been investing heavily in upgrading their local phone systems to handle DSL, but with limited success, apparently, or they would not be cutting prices.

Part of the problem is that the cable companies beat them to the punch several years ago. The cable companies got an early start not because they really believed the Internet thing was going to catch on, but because digital cable systems let them sell a lot more TV. It really did not cost much (relatively) to build systems that could also deliver Internet service. So a majority of broadband users in the U.S. have cable modem service rather than DSL. And it is often difficult to get your computer working with a new ISP, so most people tend to want to avoid switching unless there is a really compelling reason. And a $4.27 price differential is not enough, it seems, to get people to switch from cable to DSL.

Anedotally, almost everywhere I visit in the U.S., people tell me that cable modem service is faster, more reliable, and tends to have better service than DSL provided by the phone companies.

But the sad news is in the last paragraph of the article. While many communities are happy just to any broadband Internet service delivered over slow, last century copper systems, broadband prices in Japan also continue to drop. Service providers there are offering 100 megabit fiber service for $25.90 a month--less than we are paying for copper broadband 100-200 times slower.

Ireland's research and higher education network, HEAnet, is getting configurable lightpaths. What are configurable lightpaths? It means that ordinary network users can configure a single wavelength of light on a fiber network from their computer or server to another computer or server on the same network (the computers could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart). A single lightpath can provide many gigabits of bandwidth with very little network delay, because the photons have a single path (lightpath) through the network. Much of the pioneering work was done in Canada and in Chicago, and a similar project has been underway in North America, called Starlight. Starlight already has fiber across the Atlantic and Pacific, and more schools, universities, and research labs are joining the effort.

This new kind of network system (it is entirely compatible with the Internet) is starting the same way the original Internet started, with schools and universities. It is already moving out into industry, with companies like Cisco developing off the shelf equipment to implement lightpath networks.

Lightpaths are one more reason for communities to start investing in fiber, now. Old-fashioned copper cable modem, telephone, and DSL networks don't support lightpaths and never will. Do you want your schools and businesses to be left behind?

This importance of this article really has little to do with the NSA. It is an excellent reminder, however, that reliable and resilient electric power drives IT--literally. Substitute 'our local IT firm' for 'NSA' and read the article a second time. The NSA is facing expansion difficulties because it cannot get the power it needs to run its IT infrastructure.

How about your community? Can you deliver reliable electric power--as much as needed--to any business? We can argue about what is causing global warming, but I do see a consensus that we are moving into a period of more unsettled weather--more heat, more cold, more storms--no one seems to disagree about that, although there are many opinions on the causes. All these weather extremes tend to put more stress on electrical distribution systems, and communities that have some of their own electrical generating capacity may have a unique and distinct advantage in the Knowledge Economy. In particular, communities with public power (municipal) electric are well positioned to be attractive to IT companies with power hungry computers and servers. Diversified local electrical generating capacity (e.g. hydro, gas turbines, coal, diesel, wind, solar, cogeneration) are even better positioned to leverage that infrastructure as an economic development advantage.

Are your economic developers including reliable power as part of the strategic roadmap? If not, why not?