13 Apr 2007
erognomics
My standard machine is now a laptop, and at home I’m fine. I’ve bought a laptop shelf for my desk and the laptop sits at the correct height and it’s all very ergonomic and I am not having any back problems. (Two years I had a trapped nerve in my back, and it hurt. Physiotherapy and attention to posture and working environment helped, but I’m now very careful.)
The problem comes when I’m in someone else’s office or working away from my desk. The standard laptop working position leaves you hunched over the keyboard like a vulture crouched over road kill, and peering down at the screen. I like the screen at eye level. I need the screen at eye level.
So I need a laptop stand. Piles of books are at best a temporary measure.
Criteria:
- The stand has to get the laptop screen up to the height of an LCP monitor. I’m not interested in anything which raises the laptop a miserly three inches off the table, or any product which describes itself as ‘laptop feet’
- It has to be adjustable.
I’m in charge and I want to be able to control position, and height.
- My laptop is portable. My laptop stand must also be portable.
And when I say portable, I mean it must fit in the rucksack with the laptop and all the cables, add-ons, and dinky gadgets. So I’m not interested in the stylish brushed aluminium design which will “enhance your working environment”
Last week I bought a folding laptop stand. It works. It does what I want. I’m a happy customer.
Hints for the home worker:
Over Christmas I spent some time on the sofa with the cat on my lap and the laptop balanced on the arm of the sofa. Bad idea. My neck hurt for the next two days. If you’re going to stroke a cat and browse the internet, put the cat on the desk with the laptop.
Amendment July 2007
Janet has recommended Bakkerel Huizen
22 Mar 2007
design
Sometimes you read something and just go “Yes!” to it. The following articulated perfectly my grudge against Lorem Ipsum filler text – basically no one wants to read this garbage so it ends up at 8px white text on a black background.
By not having the imagination to imagine what the content “might” be, a design consideration is lost. Meaning becomes obfuscated because “it’s just text”, understandability gets compromised because nobody realized that this text stuff was actually meant to be read. Opportunities get lost because the lorem ipsum garbage that you used instead of real content didn’t suggest opportunities. The text then gets made really small, because, it’s not meant to be used, we might as well create loads of that lovely white space.
From I hate Lorem Ipsum and Lorem Ipsum Users by Tom Smith
And I found Tom Smith’s blog entry via Getting Real by 37Signals; a collection of essays where I find myself saying “Yes!” a lot!
1 Mar 2007
working
I’ve finally gotten round to updating my website, and adding a few of the projects I’ve been working on in the past year.
When I started this business a year ago I put up a thumbnail and a one-line summary for a few sample projects – which I picked primarily on the basis that they had interesting homepages and would make pretty thumbnails. And since then I’ve done very little. The blog gets updated intermittently, the website and list of projects not at all. Well, I’ve been busy, and I get people by referral or word of mouth rather than via the website, so updating content somehow never quite made it to the top of the To-Do list.
But today I’ve made myself a deadline. I’ve written a proposal which our potential client will receive tomorrow. In it there is a line saying “see website for details of previous projects”. So by tomorrow there must be details of some previous projects up on this website. That’s a deadline.
But I’m finding it tough going.
Each page must have a screenshot or two to make it look pretty, and because one picture is worth one thousand words and I really don’t want to write a thousand words, and if I did no one would read them.
Selecting, taking and editing the screenshots takes time. I’ve spent even more time setting up a nice little slide show so people could cycle through’ the multiple screenshots but decided that this didn’t work unless all the images were high-quality and precisely aligned. Nice for photos, slightly less impressive for pictures of blurry text.
The text must be clear and meaningful, and avoid the temptations of evil management speak (e.g. “holistic interactive enterprise internet communication solution”)
It has to summarise the project. Sometimes easy to do (website to advertise business), sometimes rather more difficult (we want a nuggetorium)
It has to explain what I did in a way which is both impressive and convincing (and also true).
And I’m really not enjoying myself
17 Jan 2007
design
It’s scary how accurate this is. For me, I’d want to drop the slice “Time spent actually designing anything” and replace it with “Time spent explaining the realities of html and css to distressed designer”