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Ergonomic Changes

Recently, because of my carpal tunnel, my hand therapist had me take pictures of my posture so that she could evaluate my ergonomic situation. Here are some of the pictures I took to her.

She didn't think there were too many problems with this picture.

Not so much with this one.

So what did I change? Well. I've bought a keyboard tray, a laptop stand, a trackball, a vertical mouse, and another keyboard.

The keyboard tray hasn't been installed yet. The laptop stand is awesome and is at work, as is the trackball. The keyboard and vertical mouse are at home. Instead of a laptop stand at home, I'm propping up my laptop on several copies of Harry Potter.

Part of the idea was to decide whether I liked the vertical mouse or the trackball better. The trackball definitely wins (for me) I've been using it with my left hand and I love it. The keyboard is also something I'm enjoying. There's a way to prop it up so that it has a negative slope, which is better for my wrists. I've never had a split keyboard either but I enjoy this one.

Eventually I should also have a new desk chair at work as well, but that's something to tackle another day.

4 year olds + cameras = crazy

In 2005, I spent time at my grandparents cottage with my family, cousins, and grandparents. I loaned my digital camera to my then-four-year-old cousin and the following pictures are but a small sample of the pictures that resulted.

An interesting representation of me.

My grandmother would be mortified by this. Don't anyone show her!

My cousin's face and someone's arm.

My legs.

We could figure out where my cousin had been by what pictures were on the camera. Here's the porch door. Pretty good framing.

Back stairwell.

And the camera cord...

England Food (Part 2)

I'm on a roll thinking about English food, so here's part 2.

Here's the table in our dorm kitchen. On the table are all the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies and brownies.

which were cooked in this oven. Yes. This is an oven. And a stove top. Note the size of this, it's about the size of a microwave. In addition to the tiny, tiny size, if the oven was on, both burners didn't work. Only one burner worked. Dinner parties...not an option.

Now on to eating instead of cooking:

Fish and chips in a hotel room in Scotland. I bought a bottle of ketchup at the store on my way home from the chippy. Now I want some healthy fried fish :)

I love British yogurt. This is "Luxury Yogurt." The flavor is "Spanish Oranges." Why don't we have more orange yogurt?

Water, grapes, and chicken & bacon salad. A Boots lunch special. Sandwich, drink, and a side for £3 or so. Sweet deal.

OMG. Chocolate pudding. YUM! "Layers of chocolate chip muffin, chocolate sauce, chocolate custard and chocolate mousse decorated with milk chocolate curls."

Jacket potato with sour cream and bacon (and a side of salad).

Flapjack. If you've never had one, you should make some. They are pretty awesome. Here's a fantastic recipe. (Here's the associated article about the flapjacks.)

Full crazy tea. Egg and cress sandwiches, hot cross buns, scones, clotted cream, jam, grapes, milk, juice, and cocoa. Oh. And a millionaire's bar for good measure.

A crazy, crazy burger. This is the Kiwiburger from Gourmet Burger Kitchen. "Beetroot, egg, pineapple, cheese, salad, mayo and relish. We will make a voluntary donation on your behalf of 25p which will go to help save the Kiwi in Whakatane**"

Pineapple and yogurt. Yogurt that has peaches on the side. I love this yogurt. It tastes like England. It's one of the first things I buy when I get into London. Probably another flapjack in that paper bag.

Also, diets are sad.

English Travels & Food (seriously abridged)

Ah! England & food. A perpetual joke to many. While many have negative things to say about English food, I didn't find it bad. I like a culture that embraces nutella and clotted cream. Seriously, how can you not love that! And they sure know how to make a roast, still...

even Vikings need a coke

and fries every now and again. Thank goodness for Mickey D's!

I however, didn't eat at McDonalds. I don't think I even ate there once. I remember eating at Burger King, Pizza Hut, and KFC (total let down as they don't have biscuits :( ) but not McDonalds. I mostly fed myself while I was studying at York and even when I travel I occasionally buy food and fix it myself (more pictures to come if requested). But this is the fridge in my dorm. I think that it was supposed to hold the food of about 6-8 people. The giant jar of red sauce is mine (spaghetti sauce which I would have added ground beef, onions, and garlic paste to) as is the small thing of milk on the door. The Utterly Butterly is not mine, sadly. Oh! And there is also yogurt (above the utterly butterly) on the door that is mine, most likely. I ate a lot of spaghetti as well as egg salad sandwiches that year. And a surprising amount of honey mustard chicken. My breakfast every morning was 3 slices of white bread (untoasted as we didn't have a toaster) with nutella on them, a banana, a yogurt, and a glass of juice or milk. (Ha! I say juice, but that meant dishes. I was not above drinking form the container.) And yet, despite this, I do miss it occasionally. But on the other hand, I'm totally psyched about the braised short ribs and the best mashed potatoes in the world that I'm making tomorrow night. That would not have been possible in this kitchen...or fridge.

Old Family Photos

In chronological order:

This is a relative, we think. We don't know who she is, but she appeared in a photo album from the early 1900s of a trip of a relative to visit other relatives in Alberta. She is, as far as we know, the only person on my mom's side of the family who looks like me. Freakishly like me.

I believe that these are my paternal grandparents. (Unlabeled pictures! Grr!) I never knew my grandfather well, but I knew my grandmother. I don't remember her as being this elegant though, which is what is throwing me off. In my life I knew them as Noni and Nono. (Yeah, Italian scholars, I know it should be Nona and Nono, but my fam lives on the wild side...)

My maternal grandparents with my mom, aunt, and uncle. This would have been their first Christmas together.

Aw! Look. It's my mom and her sister grown up a little. Yes they're twins. However did you guess? Apparently this was taken in Newfoundland where they lived for their first 3-4 years.

My dad looking all young and wearing his crazy hat, showing off my little brother. He looks awkward. It cracks me up.

Thanksgivings

This was last year's Thanksgiving. On the top of a "mountain" in Kentucky with my family and Ben (minus Anthony), peeling off layers because it was warm. (But not warm enough to take off my hat, apparently.)

This is Thanksgiving in Minnesota in 2006. All my cousins (and their kids) were there and it was warm enough for a short-sleeved backyard soccer game.

This year, I'm in Iowa (sorry no pictures yet) and it's cold. We outran (kindof) the freezing rain/snow/sleet mess leaving the Twin Cities yesterday and got here to a layer of water covering everything and 34 degree temps. Today the high was maybe 20 with some seriously cool windchills. I was glad I had flannel lined jeans, a warm coat, and a giant scarf. Luckily it's supposed to warm up tomorrow and I think we vetoed the 3am waiting-in-line-for-stores-to-open move. I sure hope we did. I have some turkey to sleep off.

Happy Thanksgiving to you Americans and I hope the rest of you had a good Thursday (it's almost the weekend.)

Cinnamon Rolls

Someday I want a GIANT John Deere mixer. And somewhere to put it. In the meantime, I will have to go get my fix at Isles Bun and Coffee. They have all you can eat frosting. I try not to eat as much as I can. I find that my stomach is not a fan of that hard core approach...

Choir Collaboration

I haven't written recently about my choir, but I figure the time was right because my choir was just featured in the Star Tribune.

This fall we collaborated with Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and did one service at their church and one at ours. (Sadly I missed the service at our church last Sunday because I was at home with a migraine...hence why I am in none of the pictures.) We sang three pieces together (one chosen by each director and the third jointly chosen?) Amusingly Philip chose a very gospel-ish piece, "What a Mighty God" arr. Abels featuring a FMBC soloist while Sanford chose a Rossini piece featuring one of our soloists. The third piece was a gospel-y arrangement of "Come Thou Fount."

We met for the first time the Sunday that we sang at FMBC. I was interested that not that many of our choir members had ever seen an alter call and that some of them thought that perhaps the service we'd just been in was a praise service.

I grew up in a non-evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Palmer, Alaska. I went to the church camp up by Fairbanks. Then I wanted to go to the closer church camp that all my school friends went to (not PC USA). It was a very evangelical camp. Praise songs, alter call, tears, gasoline on giant piles of logs and then lighting them on fire (to make a point that is long forgotten), bible study via mail throughout the school year. That lasted two years. Then I couldn't do it any more. It wasn't me, I didn't really like many of the people and so it was back to Fairbanks. But I say this all to explain that I've seen both sides. Most of my friends went to a contemporary church in a school gym, when I was in middle school, so I've seen that style of worship.

Until October, I'd never been in a self-proclaimed "Black Baptist church" before on a Sunday morning. And WOW was it powerful. It reminded me of Black Music Ensemble performances in college. There's a certain spirituality that is innate in their service. You can feel the vibe and that is impressive to me. There was so much love and care in that congregation and choir. I've been singing in the choir for almost five years. I've sung in at least 8 different languages on probably 150 Sundays. I feel the love that my choir has for the music, for the history; how much we enjoy singing difficult two choir pieces by Schubert or obscure pieces by Giovanni Martini. But I have never heard (or felt) as much innate joy in singing as I did singing with the FMBC choir.

My geekiness comes out

Recently, I bought a Kensington 64325 ExpertMouse trackball. The point of it was to help my carpal tunnel and tendonitis by decreasing the stress on my wrists and the twisting required to mouse. (I also bought a vertical mouse, but that's another story.) I set up the mouse on my macbook and got it all configured the way I wanted. Most notably, I'm using it with my left hand, even though I'm right handed, so it needed to not have the default configuration. (This is due to the fact that if you have the alphabet part of your keyboard centered on your desk, you will have to reach further with your right hand than your left. I did not come up with this, I got it from one of my professors.)

The trackball has 4 buttons, a trackball, and a scrollwheel. Two buttons on top, two on the bottom. I set them up (on my mac) so the top right was the click, top left: right click, bottom right was forward (in a browser) and bottom left was back. Everything was grand and I started getting good at navigating my computer without a normal mouse or my touchpad.

Then I brought the mouse into school. To plug into my Ubuntu desktop. I knew it would work on Ubuntu because that's the system I'd tested out before I'd bought mine. But the button mappings were all wrong. Combine this with the fact that there wasn't a special program to redo mappings (aka ExpertMouse?) in Linux and the fact that I have no admin rights on my computer and I was stumped. So I hooked the trackball into my mac and connected them using Synergy. Since the mouse was primarily on my laptop, everything worked on my desktop the way I expected. Until today...when the internet was insanely slow, so I couldn't move my mouse between computers. Then I decided to fix this, once and forever.

I started searching the interwebs. (These specifics work in tsch, I haven't tried them in other shells.) I knew I was supposed to be able to fix the problem with something looking like this:

xmodmap -e 'pointer 3 2 8 1 5 4 7 6'

but I couldn't figure out what the numbers meant. I did a little more searching and came up with a slightly better mapping. I'll explain it here because I was so baffled by the online solutions, that I want to have this on hand for me and thought others might find it interesting/useful.

When the mouse is in it's default position, the numbers would read 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, I believe. A normal two-button mouse is just 1 2. A lefthanded mouse would be 2 1.

• 1 - normal click
• 2 - right click
• 3 - middle click
• 4 - scroll up?
• 5 - scroll down?
• 6 - ?
• 7 -?
• 8 - back (in browser)
• 9 - forward (in browser)

This is the solution that I came up with. The 7 was added because I needed all 9 consecutive numbers otherwise I got an error.

xmodmap -e 'pointer = 8 3 9 4 5 6 2 1 7'

This works the same as on my macbook. Top right is the click, top left: right click, bottom right is forward (in a browser) and bottom left is back. The scroll wheel hasn't changed.

Ah, adventures in making simple things more complicated!