Back when I was working for Ohio Electric in 1994/1995 I got terrible carpal tunnel, complete with shooting pains along the insides of my fingers because the ergonomics sucked so bad there. I bought a pair of wrist braces with a steel insert in the bottom, and that helped a lot, although the pain and weakness never really went away. I used to get flare-ups where I’d have to dig out the braces and wear them for a few weeks every year or two. I haven’t had a flare-up since I started using the SafeType keyboard.

Sometimes I’ll be typing away and even though I’ve typed it dozens of times in the last couple of minutes, suddenly I can’t remember where one of the symbol keys like the close square bracket key or semicolon key is. Usually this happens when I’ve just typed one and I have to backspace to correct something, and need to re-close the bracket. In a case like that, either you end up having to crane your head around to look, or you force yourself to stop thinking about it and go back to just typing automatically.

I have to say, though, that while I have one for home as well, I don’t use it because it’s PS2 and the USB adaptor tends to drop a character a few times a minute. Also, I had it on the KVM in my office but Vicki complained that she couldn’t use it when she needed to use the old Power Mac, so I put a Mac keyboard on the KVM.

K.

I’ve also had to do VNC viewer running on a Windows box accessed via RDC tunnelled over SSH. Usable, just, for small jobs.

I’d like to replace my Powerbook with a MacBook Pro so that I can run Lotus Notes in Parallels Desktop, and just use X11 for stuff like the clearviewupdate.