Robby on Rails

It’s been quiet here the past several weeks and that’s because for the first time since I started Planet Argon, I was able to take an extended vacation.

My partner and I headed to France (Paris, Nice, Lascaux II, and Bordeaux) for a few weeks. It was a first time for both of us. I’ve posted some photos on my flickr (vacation set).

I’d like to thank my amazing team for helping make it easy for me to take off for that much time. :-)

In any event, I wanted to post a few non-technical links…

• Veggie Tastespotting (tastespotting without the meat)
• Robby’s Muxtape
• Robby’s Grabb.it
• Robby on twitter
• Robby’s feedflix (netflix queue/stats)

Link yours up!

In the coming weeks… I’ll be posting some more thoughts on Project Management, time management, and anything else that seems to come up. If there is anything you’d like me to write about, feel free to drop me a line with a request.

It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote about my wrist pains that would often occur at work, which was being caused by something I bet many of us deal with from time to time… Repetitive Strain Injury. So, I’ve been wearing these gloves when I’m at work on my normal Apple keyboard. I knew that they helped to some degree because on the days that I forgot them, my wrists would begin to hurt after a hour or two of coding/writing emails. Not much fun.

A few months ago, I attempted to start typing with Dvorak, which started off with requiring myself to do it for about three hours each morning to start the day and then switching back. After about a week and a half, I forgot to continue doing it. The Dvorak keyboard sits next to my desk… whispering to me, “play with me”... but I haven’t had time to get back into it.

So, the strain continues from time to time. Over the course of a few months, I began to notice that most of the strain seemed to be in my right wrist and I started to wonder if the mouse movements were a bigger culprit than the keyboard itself. So, I spoke to a guy at Macforce (a cool and local Apple dealer) about the mouse pad that he was using. He said that it really helped him out and so I bought myself one.

It’s a Belkin WaveRest™ Gel Mouse Pad and cost me less than $30 USD. It’s been a few weeks and I’ve noticed that I can go almost the entire day without the gloves that I wore before. So, I think that there is still some strain occurring, but a lot less than before. So, I’m hoping to give Dvorak another shot and hope that combo helps alleviate a lot of pain that I’ve been experiencing at work.

If you’re experiencing wrist pains and it’s focused on the hand that you use your mouse with, you might consider something like this to help out.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has/is experienced motion strain at the computer.. so, what has been your experience and have you had any success making improvements to your work space to help?

I saw this photo of the Microsoft team from 1978 on Anselm’s flickr and thought, “Hmm, that looks like Chad Fowler!”

Could this be Chad Fowler’s dirty little secret?..

Happy Saturday!

While everyone else is trading their pownce and skitch invites, I wanted to let everyone know that I still have 89 gmail invites available.

Post a comment on my blog and I’ll hook you up!

Happy Friday! ;-)

update: only 12 left!

I’m digging the new friends feature on tumblr. If you’re tumblin’... consider adding me as a friend.

• my tumblr: Robby See, Robby Share

Also, you should check out the #caboose tumblr, which court3nay setup the other day with a friendly IRC bot.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like it when a site takes some initiative and let’s me know as soon as they can if my username is already taken in their system… but I didn’t think that PublicSquare’s approach to letting me know that my username was available… was the sort of feedback that I was looking for.

There is a slight difference between being an available username and being a terrific choice.

Perhaps they are trying to make me feel good about myself? Shrug… I’ll take the compliment (this time).

Okay, now they’re just trying to kiss my…