My standing desk

I’ve taken the plunge and am on the standing desk kick.  I have been asked about it no less than 30 times, so I’m putting it in writing.

For my health.  I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes over the last year.  I’ve lost fifty pounds so far.  This is just another small step to make me a better me.  There seems to be a lot of research around this, and there are many benefits to standing.  When I’m in the office, I would normally sit for about 6 hours each day.  A Men’s Health article cited a study that people that sit for 6 hours a day are 68% more likely to be overweight.  Furthermore, the article indicated standing will burn an additional 60 calories per hour.  While that may not seem like a lot, every little bit will help me.

It’s better for my back.  I don’t have the back problems that some people have.  I do have lower back issues, though.  If this will help in any way, then count me in.

It’s better for my posture.  I’ve not been slumping as much.  It’s even easier to maintain a good posture.  While I can sit in a good posture, I find myself slumping very quickly.

There seems to be a lot of research in support of it, though I think some of it leaves room for interpretation.  For example, the American Cancer Society website article cites more time spent sitting linked to higher risk of death.  While many of the standing desk advocates read this as ‘stand at your desk’, I read it to mean that a sedentary life is bad and movement is good.

I do get more movement while standing as I’m shifting, pacing, doing toe-ups, and generally getting some movement and exercise instead of slouching in my chair.

It’s only Day 3 – what have I noticed so far?

First, the positives.  I seem to be able to type faster.  I don’t know if it’s actual or imagined, but it seems to be so.  I haven’t been getting my late afternoon tiredness.  I seem to be more awake the entire day.

Downsides?  My legs are a little achy.  I’m committed to trying it for 3 weeks, so I’ll see if this helps.  My normal dress shoes weren’t going to cut it, so I’m sporting my Asics today.

Who else uses a Standing Desk?

A lot of people.  There are apparently schools in Minnesota or Texas have tried them.  Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani and Lifehacker editor Jason Fitzpatrick; former Twitter developer and founder of BankSimple Alex Payne; TreeHugger leader Graham Hill; creator of Instapaper Marco Arment; novelist Philip Roth; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

What are your thoughts?  Should I get the treadmill going and walk all day?

You immediately feel wonderful just by being congratulated.  Your mind is tricked when you get that feeling of accomplishment – yet you haven’t done any of the work associated with accomplishing the goal.  This feeling significantly increases the likelihood that you will not achieve your goal.  You’ve already had the great feeling of accomplish – why on earth would you want to do the hard work now?

I am living this advice today.  I have a few ‘bad goals’ that I’ve talked about for months that I’ve taken no action on.  I have a couple of ‘great goals’ that I’ve kept to myself that I’m wildly successful at (one goal in particular).

I think I’m going to try this more often…

Interesting 4 minute video from Derek Sivers.

Section508.gov does not like being crawled by Bing.  Google seems fine.  Guess the feds really do have it in for Microsoft…

There was another OFNG sighting at the gym this morning.  That brings me to today’s topic.  There are some things that cannot be ‘unseen’.

Most men in the locker room are modest.  A typical dude at the gym will exercise, hit the locker room, shower, change, and then head out.  While in the locker room, there are clearly moments of being naked – in the shower, drying off, changing clothes, etc.  It happens.  It’s natural.  It’s fine.  Most men are modest.  They are naked, and then they are covered.

On one end of the spectrum, a few men are extremely shy.  These men change clothes under the cover of a towel and never expose any skin.  Some of the very shy ones carry their clothes into the shower with them and come out fully clothed.  I’m not even sure how they do that.  Our showers have no shelves or benches, yet somehow they manage.

At the other end of the spectrum is something much darker – the other extreme.  Some men love being naked in front of other men.  This is something that the rest of us don’t need to see.  Some things can never be unseen.

My gym has hair dryers that are for shared use.  I’ve always thought that these were to dry the hair on top of your head after a shower.  My mistake.  Apparently these hair dryers are for OFNGs to dry their entire body.  There is one OFNG at my gym that is a hair dryer maniac!  He doesn’t just do a once over.  This particular hair drying OFNG spends a significant amount of time blocking the common walkway to the shower and thoroughly dries every nook and cranny on his entire body with the hair dryer.  He kicks his leg up on the bench, does toe touches, and uses the hair dryer everywhere for a solid 5 minutes.   Horrifying. I will never touch one of those hair dryers.  Some things cannot be unseen.

There are a few OFNGs in this gym.  Some of them sit in the sauna naked.  No towel needed!  Some of them sit on the bench naked.  No towel needed!  I guess nothing feels as good as a shared bench against your hot sweaty skin with no barrier between you and the bench, especially while you are performing some yoga position toe nail cleansing!  One of the OFNGs at the gym spends a lot of time massaging his entire body with lotion.  He then follows it up with entire regimen of home brewed medicated balms.  How do I know these are home brewed medicated creams?  Most OFNGs love to talk.  Some things cannot be unseen.

Several of my coworkers go to the same gym as I do.  Usually we run into each other, say hello, chat for a few minutes, and then go about our individual workouts.  One of my coworkers will actually work out next to me on the bike or elliptical when he actually makes it to the gym. (You know who you are, Patrick!)  Another one of my coworkers and I will see each other frequently and compare work out notes and then go on our own merry ways.  Completely unbeknown to me, yet another one of my coworkers was one of the wild OFNGs.  I didn’t even know that this particular coworker was even a member of the same gym.  I didn’t know it at the time, but there is actually such a thing as an Old Fat Naked Guy ambush.

I had gone into the gym later than normal one day and was in a rush to get through my workout.  I had finished on the bike, already showered, and was standing at the community sink shaving – wearing a towel.  I was startled by a hand on my shoulder.  “Hey, John!  I didn’t know you came to this gym.  Great to see you!”

My focus shifted in the mirror to see that standing behind me was a COWORKER OFNG!  No towel, no clothing, no modesty.  Coworder OFNG was basking in his own glory.  I swear that he wasn’t even looking at me but admiring himself in the mirror.  Even more disturbing was that the COWORKER OFNG was touching my shoulder.  This crossed all lines.  Worlds were colliding.  You are not supposed to touch anyone in the men’s locker room.  Ever!  If you were going to shake hands, high-five, or make any contact at all, the unwritten law indicates that you should both be fully clothed – and it should actually be out in the gym.  The locker room is a touch free zone.

After the initial shock subsided, I nodded my head, said hello and went back to shaving with more focus and an intense concentration that I didn’t even know was possible.  The coworker OFNG didn’t go away.  In fact, the coworker OFNG sidled up beside me and leaned against the sink to talk.  He went on and on about things that I am still trying to block from memory.

I saw the coworker OFNG at work a few hours later in the office.  It was haunting.  It still is.  Some things cannot be unseen.

I secretly told a few of the other folks I work with, and everyone got a huge laugh out of it.  I got a little ribbing over the next few days.  I thought that was the worst possible experience you could have at the gym.  I was wrong.

Roughly three weeks later I had an even more awkward experience.  For lack of a better term, recently-fired-coworker-OFNG walked up to talk to me.  This was the same guy from a few weeks prior.  He had been fired.  I hadn’t yet heard.  He worked in a different department.  Apparently after giving him multiple chances to turn things around, his supervisor had to let him go.  I had not yet heard about his departure when the following morning he walked up to me at the gym.

“Hey, John.  Did you hear I was fired?”  Previous Coworker OFNG had become recently-fired-coworker-OFNG.  The events that followed are burned into my retina-memory for life.  Running into a coworker old fat naked guy is an extremely uncomfortable situation.  Being cornered by recently-fired-previous-coworker old fat naked guy is even worse.  Having him ask you for a recommendation and really looking at you like he wants to hug it out still haunts my dreams to this day.

Some things cannot be unseen.

I know that I live in a bubble.  I have a great job, and I have worked with computers and worked online in one fashion or another for my entire life (starting with a 300 baud modem).  I literally have trouble comprehending a life without connectivity, though I know that most of the world is still without Internet access.  According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, nearly 3 out of 4 people on the planet do NOT have Internet access.   In the bubble I live in, everyone has Internet access.  Between my desktop, laptops, iPhone, and iPad, I am always connected.

I know quite a bit about the Internet, but this scenario got me thinking: how do you teach someone the Internet?  Where do you start?  Do you just point someone to Bing and walk away?  What is the ‘learn the Internet’ syllabus?  In typical ‘seven steps’ fashion, below is my basic list of acclimation to the insanity that is the web of 2010…

1. Get an email account.  Go to http://www.gmail.com or http://www.hotmail.com.  Click the link that says, “Create an account”.  You cannot exist online without an email address.  Sure you can lurk, but you can’t contribute.  You can’t join a site, place an order, or create an account for any site that I can think of.  I even considered just creating an email account for him but decided that it would be best to go through every miniscule step to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible.

2. Send me an email.  I provided my email address.  Having an email address without an understanding of the process of sending and receiving an email is like having a Ferrari without knowing how to start a car, or maybe not even understanding what a car is.  Once he understands how to send an email and check his email and read my response, he at least has remote tech support.

3. Google.  Enough said.  http://www.google.com.  Most of us take Google and Bing for granted, but it truly is a magical assistant.  Searching for content is a millennia-old task that individuals have dedicated their entire lives around.  Do you even remember having to learn the Dewey Decimal System?  Google has spoiled me.  I expect to type a single word or phrase into a text box and get back EXACTLY what I am looking for.  No Boolean operators.  No complex searches.  No.  Find what I am thinking about by looking at a single set of words.

4. Facebook.  Create a Facebook profile and reconnect with a variety of TRUSTED individuals.  Do not connect with the people that you don’t want to.  Be VERY selective of who you connect with.  Facebook has gone through a series of peaks and valleys of acceptance from most of the people that I know.  Initially, everyone was very skeptical and only accepted friend requests from people that they knew very well.  After this initial skepticism there was a period where everyone was trying to make anyone and everyone they have ever met in a grocery store checkout line a friend.  Based on the fact that everyone was everyone’s friend, most people were extremely modest in what they shared on FB.  That may be a good thing, that may be a bad thing.  Now Facebook has kind of stabilized.  I think that most people are more selective in choosing who they invite and accept as friends.  This allows a little more transparency and honesty in what is shared…  Facebook is one of the game changers on the web and has transformed how we connect.  It’s a must.

5. YouTube.  This one I was skeptical of…  Based upon the fact that 24 full hours of video are uploaded every 60 seconds, you can literally waste your entire life watching what is uploaded and NEVER catch up.  However, is there really a faster way to truly experience the full human condition of 2010 than to spend 1 hour clicking through today’s most popular vids on YouTube?

6. Amazon.  Product consumption has changed.  I don’t have to go to Kmart, Hills Department Store, Wal-mart, Sears, or even the grocery store.  I can order groceries, shoes (since they acquired Zappos), clothing, electronics, and books.  Books.  Funny that Books is the last thing I think of when I think of Amazon.  Books were the backbone of Amazon.  I’m a Kindle fanatic, yet Amazon to me means commerce and, oh yeah, books.  That said, I would recommend the Kindle Application on the laptop so that you have a reader and access to hundreds of FREE books.  Sure, purchase any books you want, but look through the free books before you start spending money on new books.

7.  Netflix.  For less than $10 a month, I can watch as many movies as I want.  YouTube is entertaining, but produced movies can be life changing and even inspiring.  Keep in mind, my relative has not seen any form of modern media for years.  Netflix doesn’t even require a laptop.  I can wait for the latest, greatest DVDs to cycle through the mail (which I do), but I can also watch hundreds of movies right now – directly on my laptop.  Even better, I can watch them on my iPad, but more about that later…

Of course, the millions of sites out there could be prioritized in any order, but other ones that I would at least highlight would be (in random order):

• Pandora
• MSN
• Wikipedia
• ebay
• Craigslist
• Twitter
• CNN

I’m curious to hear your thoughts and feedback.  What would you recommend?  What steps are missing?

Hills Department Store, Morgantown, WV.
Photo from http://www.hillsstores.com/hills_images.htm

From rob at The Aquaman Shrine – http://www.aquamanshrine.com/2010/05/sg.html

I ran out and purchased the iPad based upon the AT&T Wireless plan changes that were eliminating the unlimited data plan.  The only thing that makes the iPad a Kindle killer is the unlimited data plan.  If I need to use wifi, then a combination of my laptop, my netbook, my phone, and my Kindle are sufficient.

For a strict text reading device, the Kindle is better.  It’s lighter.  It’s easier to hold.  It’s easier on the eyes for extended reading.  It will handle open book formats, Amazon proprietary books, and PDF files natively.  Deep concentration reading is really about turning the page.  Read.  Turn the page.  Read.  Turn the page.  The Kindle does that extremely well.  I read a lot, and for text only books, docs, and papers – my Kindle is my go to device – or at least it was.

The iPad surpasses the Kindle for reading books with images.  I’m a photographer.  I’m a reader.  I read a lot about photography.  All photography books include images, and every one of these books are better on the iPad.  I can see the images in color and not grayscale pixel art.  I can read all of the same books, PDF files, docs, and papers that I could before on the Kindle.  I can also read my email, my RSS feeds, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the 20,000 other scattered information sources that I consume on a daily basis.  Very convenient.

Possibly most convenient?  This blog post was written and posted using the WordPress iPad app.  Very convenient indeed.  I’ve not had the iPad very long so far, but I’m logging about 2 hours per day on it right now.  Two very convenient and easy hours…