Oi. I never actually told you folks what happened for the end of my "yay! be a nerd!" experiment. Suffice to say,

  • I read a freakin' lot of books over the 10 days, including textbooks. I have a new appreciation for people who write textbooks. It's like running a mental marathon (I'll find out soon, though - AHS capstone is coming up).
  • I really need to spend some serious time setting up a good coding environment for myself. Most of the time I balked at writing productive code because I didn't like the tools I'd have to use to do it.
  • Boy am I bad at talking to random people.

Sean's post came as a kick in the pants to do something I've wanted to for a while. I've finally accumulated the hardware I've wanted for years - that is to say, I have a lovely desktop (thank you, Mike Wu!) for development work and now I need to set it up to do such instead of using it as my "hm, what Linux distributions can I learn to install?" playground and then not doing anything with said installations. So tumtum-tree (from the poem "Jabberwock" - my Dell laptop is "jubjub-bird") is getting a remake this weekend. Actually, it's getting plugged in; it's been sitting in a forlorn pile of wires in the corner since I moved back to the dorms.

Hopefully having a nice dev desktop won't mean I'll spend too much time in my room. I appreciate the mobility of laptops and the social interactions that enables, as much as I hate the ergonomics it provides. If you're reading this on a laptop, I can bet that your lumbar curve is slumped the wrong way on a chair or something, and your neck is hanging down and forward off your shoulders, and your wrists are probably crooked in sidways and down onto the palmrest instead of being aligned with the rest of your arm. Ouch.

Anyone interested in tackling the design problem of ergonomic mobile computing? It'd be a fun thing to mock quick versions of and walk around with for a week or so - both computer interface folks (ECEs!) and physical prototype folks (MechEs!) and... well, a lot of things would be relevant to such a design sprint. Let me know if you're either interested in making prototypes (a few days, maybe a weekend, of making quickie things - think blue foams and paper prototypes) or testing them (walking around with said fake gadgets for anywhere from a few hours to a few days).