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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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Rested

8 August 2004

In order to reduce physical strain, I use a trackball on nearly every computer I operate. Not just any trackball though, always the same MarbleMouse from Logitech. I’ve been using them for a few years now, and would be extremely wary of having to use anything else for a substantial length of time. They work for me.

Well, I’ve been away on holiday for a week and during this time I’ve only had occasional access to dialup internet. The whole time I’ve been using my Powerboko’s touch-pad instead of anything else. On returning home this evening and hooking up my trackball once again, it feels oddly uncomfortable to my hand. Perhaps not uncomfortable, but unnatural certainly. The tool I use to interact with every computer I use for mostly 14 hours a day, 7 days a week feels unnatural in my hand.

And it’s by this fact that I know that I’m properly rested and fully reset, ready to start off again.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Jesse: Ha! Cool.. figured you were gone somewhere ;) Anywhere exciting? I am looking forward to 3 weeks off starting in one week.
  2. § Tristan: I know exactly how you feel. Whenever I take a long hiatus from the computer, my mind has to readjust to the mouse (I use the regular type) and even the keyboard. This is especially apparent after a long camping trip, where I haven’t so much as glanced at a CRT of any sort for weeks. When I come back, I don’t know how to control my pointer anymore—whereas usually it is as an extension of my arm, then, it is as a hand fallen asleep, just waking up again.

    I know then, when my mouse is no longer an extension of my own body, that I have got the rest I needed so badly.
  3. § Lonnie: Neat. I use that same trackball.

    Whenever I get stuck with a mouse for a while I feel a little disoriented with the trackball at first, but as time goes by my hand doesn’t get near so tired and I just fall in love again.
  4. § Ethan: Welcome back, Drew—hope the vacation treated you well.
  5. § Raven: Never used trackball… i’m loyal to my mouse friend from logitech.
    Anyway, welcome back!

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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