Easing Off

I’ve been having a preview of my later years, and believe me, aging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

For some $DIVNITY-forsaken reason, my upper back and shoulders started packing up during the past couple of weeks in a sneaky but progressive fashion, and pain pounced on me over the past couple of days, quickly reaching the point where my neck, shoulders, forearms and fingers hurt even when I’m not doing anything.

Which is, in a nutshell, why I’ve been keeping quiet. And reading a lot.

To make sure I don’t make things worse, I’m severely limiting my computer time and have resorted to surfing the web and keeping track of news using my Wii (fortunately, the TV has dual tuner/view capabilities and the Wii itself has decent predictive text input) and, when both my hands feel up to it, my PSP.

And I’ll be sticking to posting links because they’re, well, links. Probably with more than usual terseness, but then again most Apple news these days are either non-news or re-hashes, so it will take some real news to get me to type more than a few sentences.

Although I haven’t yet seen a doctor (national holidays and weekends conspired against that), I’m making a point of sitting up straighter than if I had swallowed a fork and seriously considering pecking at my calendar for the upcoming week and setting a bunch of alarms to make sure I start taking more frequent breaks – and, most importantly of all, leaving the office at humane hours (I’ve been leaving much later than 8PM).

After all, this can only have two causes: posture, stress or both.

Which, considering that I have had a legendary loathing for our office chairs since I ever sat on one and that I’ve only been back to work for two weeks (and already have more than my fill of, er… “interesting” projects), doesn’t bode well for this quarter.

So, Apple, what about those touch screen laptop rumors? Care to send over a prototype with decent voice recognition?

Portions of this text were input with Dasher, which is crashy and slow. If anyone knows of a keyboard-based predictive text input solution for the Mac, please drop me a line – hitting Esc in Cocoa apps (which, incidentally, doesn’t work the same way in TextMate), doesn’t quite cut it for me.