Reducing Eyestrain: A primer for programmers and superusers

It’s so frustrating to have  something so important to you be taken way by a health issue.

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.

Picking a name for your startup

Recently I’ve had misgivings about my chosen name for the  Meal Planning website I’ve been working on with a friend, MealsZen.

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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