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Mouse Not Required?
Chromose asks: "Being a system administrator by day, and coder/artist/gamer by night, my hands and wrists get their fair share of exercise around the clock. I've had lumps on the back of my hands off and on for a couple years now and just recently discovered they are ganglion cysts. And although pain and stress has been minimum up to now, I worry of what continuing everyday keyboard and mouse stress will lead to. Introducing FingerWorks. I stumbled across their iGesture Pad on ThinkGeek the other day and started digging for reviews. What reviews I have found exclaim how remarkable the products work, but not many reviews could be found. It sounds like the answer to my search for relief, and it sounds too good to be true. So I'm asking, who out there has used these things and are they truly a revolution in the making?" Yes, ThinkGeek is part of the Sinister VA Software Kieretsu, but if you aren't worried about it, then neither am I.
http://www.meetthegeeks.org/ourreview/fingerworksi gesture/
From what I can tell, it seems to be testing out as alpha and might not be quite ready for prime time.
How exactly is the touchpad on thinkgeek an improvement? You're still resting your wrist on something and moving something else. Seems oddly similar to a mouse, but I can't quite figure out why...oh I do wonder.
"my hands and wrists get their fair share of exercise around the clock."
Must resist urge to make pr0n comments.....
As the page you posted says, without actually saying it, ganglion cysts are basically harmless, and unless cause you problems can be ignored, I've had them for several years and they come and go without any problems, one doctor I mentioned them to said I could get surgery, but they wouldn't be guaranteed not to come back, and the traditional method of removal used to be smashing them with the family bible.
After many years in the IT industry as an SA I began to have pain in my right hand.
I immediatly took some actions (new keyboard, comfortable mouse pads, etc).
Something else I did was to change the mouse to my left hand and declare it in my work machines as a left handed one.
At home I bought the most comfortable input device I could find (I settled for a Waccom pen tablet using the pen 99 per cent of the time) and carried on using it with the right hand.
All those changes eliminated the pain, I have been working like that for 2 years.
The workload in your hands is heavy, help them by distributing the work as much as poosible between both of them and ensuring that your hand does a little in a repetitive manner as possible (next year I may switch hands, devices or both to ensure the new changes don't become a new source of stress).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Actually vi is really cool once you get the hang of it.