Category Posts

Entries 447 Total Description

This is the Posts category!

Standing up while I work

Jan 21, ’11 11:46 PM

standup.JPG

We all sit too much. I’m certainly guilty of it.

According to JustStand.org, full-time employees spend 2/3rds of their day sitting, on average. And an American Cancer Society study, published in the July 2010 American Journal of Epidemiology, of 120,000 adults suggests that the more people sit, the shorter their average life span.

Combine those stats with the fact that my back and legs have been hurting lately, no doubt in part due to the fact that I sit far too much, and I finally took a stand. Yesterday, I converted my workspace into a stand up desk. Check out the picture to see me at my new command center.

After a few days of standing up and working, I’m loving it. Sure, my feet and lower back hurt a bit from the adjustment but I know that will get better over time. I hear it takes a few days to a week or so to get over the hump.

At home, I’m still sitting on an Evolution Chair, which is probably the second best thing to standing that you can do for yourself if you are at a desk all day long. I think the combo will be great. I’m considering standing up at my home desk as well though. We shall see.

Comments Off

Geckoboard is my new dashboard

Jan 20, ’11 7:50 PM

My Geckoboard invite code arrived today. I’ve been longing for this invite and will write up another, in-depth post once I’ve had time to put Geckoboard through its paces.

I was able to configure a dashboard today at work with some basic info and I have to say, I’ve got very high hopes for this awesome service.

Here’s my dashboard after a bit of tweaking. It’s sure to change. What will you do with your Geckoboard?

mygeckoboard.png

Comments Off

Sleep Cycle wakes you during your light sleep phase

Jan 20, ’11 5:53 PM

sleepcycle.jpg

For the past few weeks I’ve been getting up earlier than my normal routine. At first I started getting up at 6am and then at 5am. I love the extra time in the morning but I definitely felt as though I was being awoken by my alarm clock during the heavy phase of my sleep cycle.

Enter Sleep Cycle, an alarm clock for iOS devices like the iPhone and my iPod Touch.

Sleep Cycle analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase. It works as advertised and wakes you up with some really nice sounding alarms. Nothing like the traditional BEEP BEEP type of alarm that nobody in their right mind should ever awaken to.

I have my wake phase set for 30 minutes. That means that Sleep Cycle might wake me up anywhere between 4:30am and 5am. Today it woke me up at 4:45am. I awoke refreshed and ready to tackle the day.

Really, there were only two things that I had to get used to. The first is trust. After having been burned by other alarm clock type apps that didn’t go off when I needed them to, I was a bit hesitant to trust this app to wake me up. I’m happy to say, it hasn’t failed me yet.

The second thing is having your mobile device plugged in and resting on the corner of your bed. Takes a bit of getting used to but you’ll forget about it soon enough.

Sleep Cycle displays some handy statistics that show your sleep patterns on a graph. It’s pretty interesting to analyze. You can also send your sleepy graphs to Facebook if you’re into that kind of thing. I’m not.

Check it out in the iTunes store. It’s only a buck or so and well worth the benefit of waking up when your body is most ready to wake up.

Comments Off

Let Your Computer Do the Proofreading

Jan 19, ’11 2:48 PM

Excellent tip for quick and easy proofreading from Ljuba Miljkovic at Adaptive Path. I think I’ll use this tip for the report I’m writing this week.

If you write on a Mac, there’s a robust way of proofreading using the system’s built-in text-to-speech feature. Intended for the visually impaired, this feature will read any text back to you in a relatively pleasant voice, immune to human visual biases.

Speech-Pref-Pane.png

Comments Off

Pinboard is del.icio.us

Jan 19, ’11 2:18 PM

Pinboard.jpg

Yahoo! fired the Delicious team and is moving away from the bookmarking service. Though I haven’t added any links to my Delicious account in a year or so, at first I wasn’t concerned. But then I started thinking about my archive of bookmarks and thought I’d like to preserve them.

Word on the interwebs fingered Pinboard as a worthy replacement. Upon first glance, the minimal design struck a chord in me. I liked it but there was a cost involved. Something on the order of $6 for an account. I decided to wait and see. Then, I visited the site once more and discovered the cost had risen to around $9. WTF? It turns out, the longer you wait to join, the more money it costs. Brilliant!

So, I poked around a bit more and met with my financial consultant, Professor PayPal, who said that I had a whopping $12.52 balance, so I committed. First thing I did was import my Delicious bookmarks. The second thing I did was wire up my Instapaper account. Now, I’m bookmarking again.

I approach my bookmarking mainly in two ways.

  1. The ‘save to pinboard’ bookmarklet lives in my browser toolbar for quick and dirty bookmarking.
  2. I’ve configured my Instapaper settings such that whenever I ‘star’ an item in Instapaper, it gets added to my Pinboard.

I still haven’t really referred to my Pinboard bookmarks much but when I need to, it’s nice to know they are there.

Cool Pinboard icon: Tom Bryan

Comments Off