Not being able to work at a desk, and: Intel Macs + Parallels = perfect for development

I made this happy discovery of using Parallels after being forced for health reasons to switch to only using laptops for my work: I tend to get very caught up in my work and not move for long periods of time while working - this lead to sudden onset deep vein thrombosis and two (nearly fatal) pulmonary embolisms. I am getting better, but my surgeon and doctor strongly suggested that I permanently simply stop working at a desk. It turns out that not using a desk is working well for me: I still use my desk occasionally, but do most of my work using a laptop with a laptop desk stand. An orthopedic chair with ottoman, reclining deck chairs in my yard, couch in our living room, etc. all work well for me, and it is good to move around for variety.

Anyway, now I can still be "in the flow" for long periods of time while working, and I am fine as long as my legs are elevated. I am also careful to take short 15 to 20 minute walks every couple of hours. Before this problem occurred last December, I often hiked in the wilderness behind my house for 8 to 10 hours a week, so I was surprised by the deep vein thrombosis. If you spend a lot of time in a desk chair, please be careful to exercise periodically during the day and not get most of your exercise just one or two days a week - I am writing this hoping to help other people not have the problem that I did.

Parallels: this is a brilliant product for Intel Macs. My wife talked me into buying a nicely loaded MacBook a few weeks ago. I had been happily using a Linux/Windows laptop but now use the MacBook for everything. Windows 2000 and Ubuntu Linux were easy installs on my MacBook, and both "guest" operating systems boot very quickly so if I need to perform a Windows or Linux build, or do some testing, I have fast access to any environment that I need for my work. It is also great being able to share file systems and the system copy/paste buffer. That said, I spend almost all of my time just working in OS X and tend to do quick 10 or 20 minute tasks under Windows or Linux, finish up, and shutdown the guest operating system.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more