The Typing of the Dead

Surprisingly, I found myself agreeing for once with Jeff Atwood in his recent blog post regarding typing.

Its one of those things, like ergonomics that is fundamental to what us professional nerds do. Away from the glare of the monitor I also have some other hobbies inluding building and restoring old sports cars and fixing broken analogue synthesizers (wierd mix, I guess). Anyway, you wouldn't approach either of these tasks without some basic understanding of how go about them and some decent enough tools to work with.

Yet people do this every day when they sit down to work in their offices on sub-standard (or even broken) chairs, with crappy office supplied keyboards and mouses and the monitor positioned such that they have to spend the day craning their neck to read whatever it is that people in offices read all day.

So, I thought I'd compile a list of things I find essential in my office.

1. Ability to type - as Jeff points out, as a geek you'll be doing a lot of this. Play Typing of the Dead or Mavis Beacon, or whatever it takes to get you to at least 70-80 wpm _comfortably_.

2. Decent Keyboard. For Macs, I still recommend the KeyOvation Goldtouch keyboard. I've been itching to try a dvorak layout for a while, but then it'd be back to point 1 for me, will definitely be trying it at some point though.

3. Decent Chair. I have a Herman Miller Aeron chair and I love it. When you think about how much time you're going to spend sitting on your fat arse typing you may as well splash out a few quid on a decent, ergonomic chair. They're not always expensive either, I got mine from a company going bust (these may be quite easy to find these days :) ). There are other 'decent chairs' around as well, so make sure you try it out first and pick one that suits you and you think you can spend 8+ hours a day sitting in. Chosing a crappy chair (like most companies do on your behalf) is rather like being a professional driver and chosing a Daewoo Lacetti.

4. An Editor that doesn't mean you have to code with one hand on the mouse. Again, I think something Jeff blogged ago a while back, but seriously use something proper like MacVim or Aquamacs Emacs , once you get over the slight learning hump you'll find yourself being much more productive. Note: I'm not necessarily saying that you should ditch the IDE either, there are ways of using the both interoperably and for the tasks they're best at. While you're at it, it's worth spending a few minutes each day leaning the keyboard shortcuts for _everything_ on your OS of choice :)

5. Some completely awesome music to listen to. OK, not essential, but a nice to have. I'm going to go out on a limb here and recommend the new Negativland album Thigmotactic.