Imagine my surprise when a nice gentleman from India phoned me today to tell me that my Windows computer has a corrupt Windows Messenger that is affecting my command system!

Small problem. I have an iMac…

Lets see what my new friend thinks about that.

Click for the audio of the phone call.

Last night, Channel 4 aired Ricky Gervais’ pilot “Derek“. The comedy/drama features Gervais as Derek; a man with learning difficulties who works in an elderly people’s home.

There is much discussion over whether it is right for Gervais to play a character with learning difficulties. Is it moral? Is he poking fun at those with such challenges? Of course much of this discussion was before most had seen a single second of the show.

For what it’s worth, I think Gervais is being far from mean-spirited. Indeed, Gervais imbues Derek with a sweet innocence; a kind of naive kindness that only children foster for others. But this is the problem for me. The first half was genuinely uncomfortable because I wasn’t sure how Gervais was playing the character. Gervais is David Brent. He’s Andy Millman. His persona is acerbic, vaguely obnoxious and superior. Watching Derek shuffle about with his lower jaw pushed out and his hair slicked forward was like watching David Brent aping around The Office or Andy Millman hamming it up for Maggie’s yucks.

Would Derek be better if Gervais had cast an unknown in the titular role? Definitely. But that’s not because Gervais is a bad actor; there were several scenes where he summoned up real emotion from his audience: the death of an old lady and being protected from mean jibes in a pub where stand-outs.

Karl Pilkington essentially plays himself which is no bad thing. His world weary view is perfect for Dougie the caretaker. The chemistry he has with Gervais made their friendship instantly believable. The scene on the bus where Dougie is driving the bus and Derek is winding him up with stupid questions could have been an outtake such is their real life relationship.

The acid test for a pilot is whether we want to see more and I definitely do. I hope to get past the discomfort of Gervais playing a character with so many quirks and ticks.
Derek’s friend Hannah is interesting. She left school at 16 and has been working at the care home for 15 years. She’s still waiting for her life to start but sticks close to Derek so she doesn’t have to. It’s an interesting dynamic and I would love to see how that develops especially as a potential love interest was introduced in the pilot.

What did you think? Do you think it should be given a chance to flourish or are you sick of Gervais already?

(Yeah, yeah, yeah)

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

A few weeks back, I blogged about switching to a standing desk and I wanted to throw a little update together to share my progress.

When researching standing desks, a recurrent theme was to expect discomfort. Some bloggers recommended standing for 15 minutes to start with and extending the standing time slowly. Other bloggers found it painful and uncomfortable around 3pm and went off to sit down with a laptop. I was expecting a similar experience and prepared myself for short standing sessions between perching on my stool.

Happily, I’ve found it very easy to adjust. I’m certainly aware of mild discomfort towards the end of the day, but it’s not enough for me to sit down. I do finish the work day feeling like I’ve done a days work which is refreshing as I used to uncurl myself from my chair and hobble downstairs feeling somewhat restless.

Not including exercise, I average about 5 hours of standing a day. I tend to start work sitting on my stool around 8am. I generally exercise (weights or running) around 9:30 for around an hour and sit to rest and eat a post work out meal afterwards. I generally start standing around midday or a touch earlier and continue standing until I finish work around 5pm.

As other bloggers have noted, I do feel more alert and ‘present’ while standing. I find I’m more efficient, productive and less likely to procrastinate. In fact, when I do sit down, I feel my brain and body slowly shutting down until I’m leaning over my desk mindlessly clicking forum topics or refreshing Facebook. The mental change between sitting and standing is astounding. Likewise, when I’m on my feet I feel energised and focused. I like that I can just take a few steps back to focus on a problem.

I don’t feel that I’m in any significant discomfort or pain. I’m currently working through a barbell strength program and hit a PR of 5 sets of 5 x 100kg (220lb) last week. I’m happy that this proves there is no long term fatigue from standing most of the working day.

If I may share some tips for those thinking about making the switch: Make sure the desk is high enough. I fiddled with the height adjustment for a few days until I found a comfortable position. It’s important that your elbows are around 90 degrees to the floor when resting on the desk. Hop and shuffle around as you work. It helps if you have upbeat music to listen to. I find myself half dancing which is a terrible mental image but really quite enjoyable. I find myself resting a foot on my stool quite often to shift the weight into a different position.

It’s been a very positive experience for me and I don’t think I could return to a sitting desk. Why not give it a go? Pile up some boxes on your desk and raise your laptop up and try standing for half an hour or so?

Are you sitting comfortably?

Any office worker chained to their computer for the best part of the day will undoubtably complain of RSI, lower back pain or mysterious cramps and aches that come and go. I am the same. I’ve been working at a desk for nearly 15 years now and I’m convinced that it’s responsible for a weak lower back, tight shoulders and pins and needles that start at my elbow and travel to my fingers occasionally.

There is growing evidence that sitting down for long periods of time can increase your risk of death by as much as 40%. Mark’s Daily Apple wrote about this in 2009, the NY times in 2010, Men’s Health in 2010 and fascist Nazi mouthpiece the Daily Mail a few days ago.

I know. You’re rolling your eyes and you’re about to hit close before I start waxing lyrical about soaking beans, weaving hemp and hugging trees. Stick with me for a second, though.

I generally take my news with a healthy dose of skepticism too. Scientific research is notorious for mistaking causation as evidence. My first reaction was a sarcastic eye roll. “They” are always coming up with new ways to ruin our fun. Smoking, drinking, saturated fat, sugar, artificial sweeteners, plastic, frying pans, bacon, salt, and now the most innocent of all activities: sitting.

After revisiting these articles for a thorough read my resolve started to weaken. The evidence was quite compelling once you get past the headlines.

So what’s so bad about sitting? Well, sitting for long periods of time switches off the electrical activity in your legs, it drops your metabolism down to burning a single calorie a minute, the enzymes that break down fat drops 90%, ‘good’ cholesterol drops 20% and insulin effectiveness drops 24%. It will also shorten hip flexors and weaken your glutes and hamstrings affecting your posture even when standing. (Source)

Men’s Health offer that you can mitigate some of this damage by ensuring you stretch or move for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. But lets be honest. Who is going to remember to do that? I can lose track of entire hours when I’m “plugged into” code. I once made a vow to rest my eyes every 30 minutes while working. That lasted about 2 hours.

We’re generally led to believe that if we eat right, and exercise regularly with intensity then we’re generally ‘undoing’ these bad things. I often comforted myself that even though I was generally sedentary during the work day, I lifted weights three times a week and ran a few times a week so I was A-OK.

However, researchers found that exercising regularly regardless of intensity cannot undo the damage your chair causes you. In short, you can’t out-exercise your chair habit.

I tend to work from about 8:00am until 5:00pm and most of that time I’m sat in my chair. During term time, I’ll take the short walk with Luke to his pre-school twice a day and I workout daily Monday to Friday for about an hour but other than that, I’m sitting. After I finish work, I’m generally sitting until I go to bed. A quick calculation proved that I spend an alarming amount of time sat on my well padded behind. Even if you don’t buy into the science you can’t help but recognise that can’t be good for you.

Like many of you, my line of work requires me to be at my desk all day so, as the proverb says “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain”

Switch to a stand up desk
Standing / stand up desks have been lurking in my periphery for a while. There’s several good blogs from those who’ve switched already. (Here, here and here to link just a few). Those that have switched generally rave about the increased energy and focus standing while working provides. This is especially attractive to me as I find it harder and harder to concentrate daily. I blame my advancing years and saturation in social media. Perhaps slumping over my desk, mouth slightly agape as my neurones struggle to fire by 3pm is partially attributed to that ‘switching off’ that results from sitting in a chair.

I did a little research on height adjustable desks. There are some excellent desks available such as the GeekDesk which offers powered height adjustment. However, I didn’t want to lay out £700+ on a new desk. I found an excellent manually cranked desk for less than £400 at Posturite. The manual adjustment didn’t bother me as I don’t intend to drop it down for seating.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money on fancy desks, though. Many people have used boxes, books and crates to raise their desk up or to raise their keyboard and monitor up. I’ve even seen an ironing board used as a standing desk. I went with an adjustable desk solely because I have two monitors and assorted peripherals that shouldn’t be precariously balanced on boxes. If you generally work from a laptop then you have much more freedom.

That said, there is no ‘silver’ bullet. Just as humans aren’t designed to sit all day, they’re not designed to stand still all day either. This is the mistake that many often make when they switch to standing desks. Varicose veins, plantar fasciitis and a whole host of other conditions are caused or made worse by long periods of static standing. For this reason, I did purchase a draftsman’s stool for occasional sitting breaks and an inexpensive anti-fatigue mat for my feet; much like the kind you’d use for bar or cashier work.

So how’s it going?
Well,  it’s only a few days in but I’m really enjoying it. I do seem to have better focus. Perhaps it’s the placebo effect or perhaps it’s the greater sense of urgency one has when you’re acutely aware of minor discomfort. I feel more compelled to get on with my work than procrastinate or trawl through Facebook.
The sense of freedom shouldn’t be discounted either. A chair does trap you under the desk. I generally found I had to scoot under the desk and fidget until the castors were in the right place on the carpet and my body wedged against the wood of the desk. When I hit a problem that I had to think about, I’d generally stare at the monitor or browse another website until a solution prevented itself. While standing, I can literally take a step back and move about a bit to try and get through the block which seems much more effective.

Indeed, yesterday I stood from about 12:30-5:00pm without a break and this was my most productive portion of the day and I managed to fix a slew of bugs reported in IP.Board including several issues that I hadn’t managed to fully grasp in months.

I won’t lie, it can be uncomfortable. But I expected that to begin with. I have less than fond memories of working in a corner shop which required standing for the entire eight hour shift. The stool allows me to take a 10-15 minute break without adjusting the desk. I sit for a short while after exercise. I don’t fancy standing immediately after finishing a set of heavy barbell squats. When not in use, I tuck it under the desk and use the foot ring as a rest for one of my feet to take the weight off. I generally find I shift and fidget about when I’m working rather than stand completely still. After a while, I’m not really aware that I’m standing as I immerse myself in my work.

The geek in me loves tracking stats, so I was thrilled to discover the ‘Standing Clock‘ which I’ll be using for a few weeks perhaps with a follow up blog.

If you’ve been thinking about switching to a standing desk, why not get a taster by finding activities you can do on a laptop or iPad such as reading email, researching articles or general leisure time surfing. Find a high counter like a kitchen worktop and give it a go. It might feel a bit odd for a few days but it quickly becomes second nature.

If you like modern classic music and/or Sigur Ros, then you’ll probably like these guys too.

Check out the YouTube video of one of my favourite songs from the album.

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.

Absolutely beautiful.

Last night’s episode of The Secret Millionaire focused its cameras squarely on my home town of Peterborough.

Peterborough rapidly expanded in the 70s and 80s by adding ‘townships’. Some of these townships have fallen into disrepair and there are some very unsavoury parts of our city. However, on balance, I’d say that generally Peterborough is a prosperous place to live with many green areas and good local amenities. There has been a rejuvenation of the city centre areas and there’s been quite a substantial investment in developing industrial areas. Indeed, in this past few years Peterborough has attracted flagship gardening centre Van Hage (and in the same shopping complex an Edinburgh Woollen Mill and a Le Creuset), several chain restaurants such as Nandos and Chiquitos. Not to mention a Dobbies gardening centre and an ambitious extension to Queensgate, our shopping centre.

I moved here several years ago and I’ve always been impressed with how Peterborough manages to balance green space with good road systems and the availability of restaurants and shops.

The Secret Millionaire’s agenda is to make sure the setting looks suitably deprived and ‘urban’ as possible to underline the drama. This was achieved by cutting from different shots taken from around the city: overgrown garden; rusty fence with broken sign; rough looking pub; a bus; a walk through Bretton ‘spine’. These vignettes formed an impressive montage of misery. Anyone that lives here though knows these shots were collected from several locations within a 12 mile radius of the city.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The best the team could do to highlight the youth crisis was to briefly interview four work shy lay abouts knocking around a kid’s park on a summer’s day. These late-teens wearing their designer t-shirts and expensive hair cuts sported the iconic iPod headphones and declared everything as “shit”. One bespectacled youth sensibly attired looked about as street as a luxury Range Rover.

Some of these so-called destitute areas are a stone’s throw from where I live. Indeed, one lingering shot of a rough pub set the scene nicely. Though if the camera did a 360 pan it would have taken in Sainsbury’s, Next, Boots and a Laura Ashley.

Of course, I’m not denying that Peterborough has some troubled areas. Government funding cuts have left several charities facing closure and the millionaire Mike Greene – originally from Peterborough – embraced his experience and did some real good with his cheques.

Shame then that most will write Peterborough off as a hell-hole when it has so much more going for it. I really hope that outside investors looking to move into the city won’t be put off by such inspired editing.

Look what I found, a photo by mattmecham on Flickr.

The device that started it all. Amazing how clunky it feels now.

Mobile phones in the 80s, a photo by mattmecham on Flickr.

As modelled by Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. I remember them being like this too. Love the battery pack.