Photo: my home office environment in Vancouver, October 2004. I’d had my PowerBook G4 less than one month. Four-plus years later, it’s still going strong!
I’ve been doing so much computer work lately I’ve returned to my former practice of switching my mousing hand from my right to my left (I’m generally right-handed with some ambidextrous tendencies for odd things like sweeping). I had this problem some years ago, when I was also working from home in Vancouver during the time this photo was taken, this problem being shoulder and arm strain from too much mouse work. My solution was to train myself to mouse with my left hand to prevent repetitive strain injury and fire up some neural pathways for motor activity in the other side of my brain. It’s been about four years, but I need to do it again because I can feel my right arm begin to ache a bit.
I started looking into Wacom tablets today as an alternative to the mouse. I think using a pen would be moving in the right direction, motion-wise. I actually wrote a LETTER yesterday (wow, remember those?) with a pen and it felt so foreign that I knew it had been too long since the last one. Over the weekend I bought special paper on sale with a pattern of an antique map on it (a favourite thing of mine; I’d like to make it my header background) to get myself back to writing with a pen again. My penmanship has taken a dive, and I bought more postage stamps yesterday in anticipation of ramping up my letter-writing. Yes, I am one of those stationery nerds.
(ALSO — I recently retrieved my photo printer’s power cable that I left a Birds’ and Fleecie’s place in New York City last year. I told them not to mail it because I was going to pick it up, but for some reason it took a whole year to make it back to their place. Imagine, after four years of printing photo-sized postcards on my little Canon photo printer and mailing them off to people, I went for more than a whole year without printing a single one. No one wonder my letter-writing took a dive, it just wasn’t the same without being able to send a photo along, too.)
Anyway, I need to try out some Wacom tablets (Bamboo, maybe?) to see if I like it. I know it will decrease the repetitive movements I make on a daily basis, and maybe it’ll make my editing faster. I don’t like using the trackpad on my laptop because it lacks the precision I need for photo editing. If you already use a Wacom tablet and you have some advice for a first-time user, I’d love to hear from you — either by email or in the comments section.
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