I’ve met a few programmers that have had RSI issues.

• A programmer I used to work with, Ted, had some back issues, which vastly affected his ability to do what he loves.
• I listened to a touching presentation at Boston Ruby Group by Chris Maxwell about how he programs with no keyboard or mouse because he has such bad carpal tunnel syndrome.

So when I recently started getting  serious eye strain headaches, I started to get worried.  I only got headaches on days of heavy computing – 12 hours or more (which, but the way, is probably unhealthy on every level – physically, mentally, and spiritually).

Here’s a list of things you can do to start avoiding this now.

1. Get new glassess with Anti Reflective (AR) coating.  This has helped me emmensley.
2. Use anti rsi software.   Anti-rsi (mac)  workrave (windows/linux)
3. Drink lots of water.  This will hydrate your eyes and cause you to use the bathroom multiple times a day.
4. Do eye excercies.
5. Take a lunch break.  Especially if you are billing per hour sometimes you want to eat lunch at your desk. but I’ve gotten some of my worst headaches from it.
6. Upgrade your monitor to something with better resolution.
7. Don’t use dual monitors – (or at least only have one primary one) having two monitors means they have to be farther away for you to see both of them wihtout having eye strain.    Use only one.
8. Use a firefox extension – Blank your monitor  + easy reading or the “Readable” bookmarklet.
9. Increase the text size of everything in windows.
10. Put your monitor on the lowest brightness and the best contrast you can.
11. Use a dark background background in your IDE.
12. Turn on  Cleartype (it’s on by default in mac).  This allows you to read text better.

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) may have evolved because it increases creativity and inventiveness of the population. The condition has a genetic basis and is estimated to exist in 5% of the American population. Because this is an extremely high percentage for a “defect,” modern theories in population genetics suggest a positive factor related to ADD. This positive factor may appear unrelated to ADD, for example, immunity to a particular disease, or it may be directly related to ADD traits such as impulsivity and daydreaming.

Surprising similarities between the characteristics of those with ADHD and people who are highly creative and inventive has been demonstrated in the last few decades. Creative people are born explorers, temperamentally dissatisfied with the mundane. The traits of inattention, impulsiveness, restlessness, daydreaming, lack of social skills, enthusiasm, hyperactivity, and difficulty in finishing projects are descriptive of successful and creative people as well as “ADDers.” People diagnosed with ADHD score higher on creativity tests, and highly creative people are more hyperactive than the norm. Similar physical brain differences have even been identified for the two groups. Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla and Mozart are thought to have been Attention Deficit Disordered.

http://borntoexplore.org/evolve.htm

Let’s assume you do have ADDHD and you’re a creative mother-lover.  Well la-ti-da.  That’s a very nice.

That information is useless if it’s just up there floating around in your head.  You have to do something about it.  And if you have all kinds of ideas floating around about all different things, you need to get them out of your head and organize them.  You need to have a system for Ubiquitous Capture i.e. you need to be able to write that stuff down, ASAP.  Here’s the tools to let you do them.

What kind of ideas do you need to capture?

• To-do’s. When you are doing your laundry and you notice you’re about to run out of laundry detergent.   Are you going to just HOPE that you are going to remember to get more?  Perhaps you have a grocerylist upstairs.  That’s not Ubiquitus, HOMIE! This is 2009!
• Blog posts.
• Information. Addresses, how long your last run was, people’s names,etc.
• Ideas – gift ideas, solutions to problem, even THINGS TO GOOGLE.
• Inventions. This is the sweetest thing of all.  You could easily forget a sweet idea if you don’t write it down.
  

5. Gmail. People use gmail from everything from remembering to-dos to keeping recipes to managing their budget.  Crazy.  Personally, I find email hard enough to keep up with when I’m just using it for personal communication.  Check out inbox zero

4. Google Calendar. Often used for to-dos.  Bad.    This should only be EVENTS. That’s it.

3. Mediawiki. Picowiki has an iphone client. Mediawiki is popular.  I haven’t found a good iphone client for wiki software that doesn’t end in ‘pedia.  But I’ll keep looking.  Or I’ll make one.

2. To-Do list. I use Omnifocus for the Mac and I’ll never move off anything else.   Getting up to speed on it was just too hard.  And their iphone client is pretty sweet.  A lot of people don’t keep a to-do list.  I don’t know how they funciton at a high level.  My Dad walks around with cards in his wallet of things he used to do.  He’s such a hipster!  Remember this milk is also quite popular.

1.  Evernote. This is the big daddy. I keep blog posts in here, recipes, ideas, personal thoughts, sweet tips…pretty much anything.  I don’t go back through to look at stuff much, but it’s comforting to know its there.   You can sync with just about anything – iphone, mac, windows.

Getting Real suggests that a name should be catchy and not necessarily ultra-descriptive, and I tend to agree.

I’ve been pondering it for a few days, and funny enough I came across the video below of Tim Ferris (author of the 4 Hour Work Week) and Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) chatting about how to choose a name for your startup.

Tim and Kevin from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

In short, Tim suggested using Adwords to A/B test them.   How interesting, I thought.

Well, there you have it. But just so you get the last word….
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