personal

Sitting and Standing at Work

Sitting and Standing at Work:

Ergonomic experts at Cornell don’t recommend standing desks, instead:

Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward
titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20
minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t
critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and
move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient.

[A big problem at work, we talk and work on these skills quite a bit. We’ve sat on exercise balls, we’ve changed positions, we stand. We’ll keep trying to make this healthier for ourselves.]
Source: Daring Fireball

A Pattern Language

"When I was a child, I thought
God was disappointed
whenever some distraction interrupted...
Now I know that God expects such interruptions,
for He knows our frailty.
It is completion that surprises Him."

--From the God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Noah loves playing with patterns. Colors, shapes, letters, lego pieces, alternation, similarity… the whole gamut.

But he also gets upset when for one reason or another he can’t complete a pattern the way he’d like. Lack of resources, lack of concentration. What have you. He likes a nice tidy world from that perspective (although not from many others…)

There’s much yet to teach.

On Pacifism (Part of what I wrote on 9/14/2001)

A moment form my personal Wayback Machine: On Pacifism: “I hate war. I hate destruction. I cry my way through the reports of those who cannot yet release the hope that their loved ones will return despite what they have seen. You can feel the disturbance in the City. Not just in the quiet, or the change in rhythm, but in the disruption of lives. Those “lost” are present, infused with the anguish of those they left behind.”

There’s some more with emergency information and quotes and pictures lost in the transition from one bit of software to another. The release of anxiety I felt when all the first responder folks I know had checked in with their families. But I can still feel the changes from back then if I care to.

We avoided the coverage this weekend as the 10th anniversary passed. I didn’t want to relive those moments. But I did the love the story of Camp America, which now closed it doors, its goal accomplished, and of the flag that has been mended and patched by folks all over… and then part of me wondered what I wrote…

Anyway…

I pray for peace.

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles: I danced professionally for a few years, and then taught for almost ten. For a lot of that time I had a company and was making work. I went to art school (university of the arts in Philadelphia). I thought I was going to study industrial design. I was pretty disenchanted when I realized that the industrial designers weren’t that involved in the engineering side of making stuff (or really the MAKING side of making stuff). Mostly just how it looked. How it felt. So there was a lot of CAD work, and some molding of models out of plastic. Someone dared me to take a dance class one night. I did. It seemed like much more fun than the visual arts core classes I was taking, so I switched majors the next day (“you want to switch majors!?” “Yes, if that’s possible.” “have you ever danced before!!?” “Yeah… I took a class last night.”). I stopped to catch my breath almost 15 years later and realized that I sort of hated dance. When I finally ran away screaming, building bikes seemed like a safe harbor. Can’t remember how I connected THOSE dots. [Go read the whole thing. Ezra Caldwell takes great photos, builds beautiful bikes, and continues to beat cancer. In a world where “awesome” is overused…]
Source: Cycle EXIF Update

A Supercomputer in Every Backpack

A Supercomputer in Every Backpack: People visit my school all the time. They shake my hand as they leave and tell me how inspiring it all is and often they sign off with “truly, the iPad is the future of education”. I bite my tongue every time because unlike Richard Stallman I’m not an anti-social jackass, but I want to correct them.

I want to tell them that the iPad is not the future of education, it’s the present of education. If we consign the iPad to the realms of the future, then we are implicitly saying that it’s not for right here, right now, today. We’re saying that we can postpone the task of seriously engaging with the educational and social impact of ubiquity of Internet-connected computing.

I ask you to consider other industries that put off dealing with such challenges. How is that approach working out for record companies? For newspapers? For booksellers?

The hour is already late. We have allowed a 16-year gap to develop between society and schools in terms of our children’s access to computers. Can we properly prepare Beth and her cohort for the year 2029 with the same level of access to computers that I had 35 years before?

How long can we let this gap continue to grow? Another five years? Another ten? In another 14 years, if GSMA are right, society as a whole will have 7 connected devices each – will we be delivering relevant education in that world if each pupil only has a third of a computer to themselves?

Cedars is not a school of the future. I think we’re a decade late. [Everything that Fraser has been working cuts close to my heart as I concern myself Noah’s education. What parts are his school getting right? What parts are they getting wrong? Where is it so bad that I need to shore it up, where can ignore it as it as irrelevant? Clearly his school has the computer and technology stuff wrong. But I don’t think it matters because that is something that I can (fortunately) fix. Not everyone can, but I (we) can. The stuff I can’t fix? What they feed him. The crappy behaviors he learns from the kids on the bus. Yeah, I know all survivable stuff, but considering the importance of these years… anyway, consider how your child’s education doesn’t match the needs of the marketplace. What are you going to do about it? Where do you think it’s lacking?]
Source: Fraser Speirs

Glassboard is for sharing privately with groups

I’ve just started using Glassboard. Glassboard is for sharing privately with groups on your iOS, Android or WP7 devices. But while I’ve barely sent a message as yet it fits so well where tools like Twitter were failing. And yes, that means that it only runs on mobile devices at least for now. Could easily work, but for me, having the ability to see activity on my boards from bots, or notify my desktop could be helpful. Maybe. I have to think about that some more. But it certainly seems that way for the use cases I have in mind for myself.

There are other tools that I’ve been using that do similar things (so far) like Groupme which has advantages (at least for now). For example, not everyone I work with or everyone in my family has a smart phone. But every one (at least as of recently) can receive and send text messages. But they also fail in various ways.

I’m looking forward to see how Brent and crew move this forward.