I had carpal tunnel from all the gaming I was doing (specifically Desert Combat.... it was like Desert Combat Syndrom). My wrist and hand were going numb and tingling after a while! Rather than go get surgery or take drugs to kill the pain (which is what most normal doctors would suggest) I went and had this deep muscle massage done called Active Release Therapy. It's very intensive and hurts like a mother fucker BUT after one 30 minute treatment... I was totally pain free. From what my practioner told me, it's just a matter of flattening out all the muscle knots that occur from the wear and tear. So now between coding and gaming, I do some simple hand/wrist stretching excerises and there hasn't been a problem since!
The doctor who initially demonstrated these excercises has since retired but I found a snapshop on the internet archives:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000304050523/http://w ww.orthohelp.com/exercts.htm
Game/Code ON my brothers and sisters!
There are lots of good alternatives to the iPod. I picked up an iPaq 1945 and it does everything I would want a PC in my pocket to do!
* mp3 player using an open source player. I've mapped it's startup to a hardware key that also allows me to turn off the screen and lock the buttons while it's playing. This particular player also allows me to change the skin so I even installed an iPOD skin just so I could mock the sheep who all bought one. And it supports shoutcast streams as well.
* A decent video player. I can shrink DVD movies down so that 2 fit on a 256 MB SD - CARD. DiVX support isn't there yet but that's just a matter of time. I can play WMV, RealPlayer, AVI, MPEG 1 and 2 which covers the better part of my collection.
* internet connectivity - all I need is a WiFi connection or with bluetooth I can use a GPRS phone and connect via dialup to the net. From there I can read email, surf and even listen to shoutcast streams.
* above all that I also have some cool RTS and arcade shooters, word and excel, GPS if I wanted it, camera if I wanted it and my appointment and contact book.
All that for $200 CDN! Not to shabby! And best yet, if I want to write an app for it, the tools to write stuff for it are FREE!
I had carpal tunnel from all the gaming I was doing (specifically Desert Combat.... it was like Desert Combat Syndrom). My wrist and hand were going numb and tingling after a while! Rather than go get surgery or take drugs to kill the pain (which is what most normal doctors would suggest) I went and had this deep muscle massage done called Active Release Therapy. It's very intensive and hurts like a mother fucker BUT after one 30 minute treatment... I was totally pain free. From what my practioner told me, it's just a matter of flattening out all the muscle knots that occur from the wear and tear. So now between coding and gaming, I do some simple hand/wrist stretching excerises and there hasn't been a problem since! The doctor who initially demonstrated these excercises has since retired but I found a snapshop on the internet archives: http://web.archive.org/web/20000304050523/http://w ww.orthohelp.com/exercts.htm
Game/Code ON my brothers and sisters!
Dude we Canadians would never feed any refugee bad beer..... we only use American beer to water our dandelions.
There are lots of good alternatives to the iPod. I picked up an iPaq 1945 and it does everything I would want a PC in my pocket to do!
;)
* mp3 player using an open source player. I've mapped it's startup to a hardware key that also allows me to turn off the screen and lock the buttons while it's playing. This particular player also allows me to change the skin so I even installed an iPOD skin just so I could mock the sheep who all bought one. And it supports shoutcast streams as well.
* A decent video player. I can shrink DVD movies down so that 2 fit on a 256 MB SD - CARD. DiVX support isn't there yet but that's just a matter of time. I can play WMV, RealPlayer, AVI, MPEG 1 and 2 which covers the better part of my collection.
* internet connectivity - all I need is a WiFi connection or with bluetooth I can use a GPRS phone and connect via dialup to the net. From there I can read email, surf and even listen to shoutcast streams.
* above all that I also have some cool RTS and arcade shooters, word and excel, GPS if I wanted it, camera if I wanted it and my appointment and contact book.
All that for $200 CDN! Not to shabby! And best yet, if I want to write an app for it, the tools to write stuff for it are FREE!
And you can even install Linux on it...