i mesed up my back

over the weekend i spent a couple of days on the floor. This was because i messed up my back. This is mostly becuase I have really poor posture. I have had really poor posture for a good 35 years now. It is likley that the poor posture is finally catching up to me. So what do we do when bad things like this happen? We make a whole bunch of changes to things and then revert a number of those changes but hopefully one or two of those changes will stick. Along with a number of stretches and exercises that I have started doing, I have also configured my keyboard into a vertical alignment. Well it is nearly a vertical alignment. The conversion was pretty easy using a couple of printed parts and some tripod things that I had laying around. It was also shockinly easy for me to type on because I have been using a split keyboard for the last 5 years. A result of the split keyboard conversion all those years ago, was that I became a really good touch typist. I had all these bad habits on a regular keyboard that all went away when I switched to the split. Then when I switched to the vertical split all the same muscle memory was already there and pretty much nothing changed. My typing speed and error rate got back to normal after about 30 minutes and it has felt great.

why a vertical keyboard

Now why switch to a vertical keyboard? Part of my posture issues are the “forward neck posture” whhich is essentially “smart phone neck” it is also a result of sitting at a keyboard all day with my palms facing down. This angles the shoulder blades out and pushes the neck forward. You can get around this by angling the hands up with the thumbs up, this drives the shoulder blades down and helps pull the neck back. I like it and I think that I am going to continue this for a bit and see if I can make my posture more better. I will prolly write up a longer blog post about all of this with the split boards then the vertical boards and links to everything, but I figured that I could at least get some of this word vomit out now.