It seems that every day I’m faced with the same dilemma: do I spend most of my time working on regular, paid, contracts for clients, or, do I spend (initially) unpaid hours and hours developing my ‘Big Ideas’ for hopfully profitiable sites somepoint down the road?

The obvious answer is of course both. Anyone who’s read half the posts at www.lifehacker.com or similar knows that the key is in the balance. I need a regular income to pay the bills etc., even if some of the projects I do are less interesting or exciting than my own. Yet, the fun of web-design is often in trying to forfill that child-like dream of creating the uber-amazing-money-making website you’ve always dreamed of.

So in fact, the question is not which should I do more of, but how do I do both? We all know the grove we get into when a project is going well, up all night coding and inventing. It almost seems counter productive to stop and begin a totally new taks, spending an hour getting back to grips with it and so on.

Instead therefore, I fell into the trap of doing neither, but writing about it on my new shiny blog. Now what did that achieve?

Hello. This post title probably implies yet another cliched first blog post. I guess, in a way it is: hello, welcome to my new blog.

Yet, at the same time it isn’t. You see, I recently (a few weeks ago) developed RSI (Repititive Strain Injury) from typing up my dissertation and practicing the violin too much. I typed some 25000 words in about 10 days, all whilst doing 3/4 hours of playing a day. Considering the strain I was probably putting on the fine motor control in my fingers, coupled with pretty bad typing posture, it hardly seems surprising that my hands gave up on me.

Having been to see the doctor a few times, several physiotherapists, and talking to other people who’ve had similar injuries, there’s several things I’d recommend computer ‘geeks’ like me do to avoid permenant damage:

1. Absolutely make sure you’re posture is good. Like playing the piano, make sure you sit squarely at your desk, with both hands equally elevated, and both wrists higher than your fingers. The damage happens when you raise your fingers above your wrists, pulling your hand backwards.
2. I love apple, but their old iMac keyboards suck. I just bought a new one (the really flat, low profile ones), and its already much better to type with.
3. Stretch. Essentially, whatever muscles you continually use, stretch them regularly in the inverse. For the violin that means ‘unwinding’ your left hand in the opposite contortion to how you play. The same applies for typing.

This said, it still doesn’t explain the title of this post. “Hello World” is a reference to the fact that I am actually dictating this post to my Mac, rather than typing it. The last time I used any dictation software was years ago with IMB’s ViaVoice, and whatever it may be now, then, it was awful. But, this MacDicate I’m using now is actually doing a pretty good job. It’s picking up words fine, and obviously letting me dictate straight into Firefox (and Mail, Word etc.). It doesn’t work for code, though how you’d teach a dictation program to do so I don’t know.

If there’s anyone reading this it would be great to hear from you (comments below), or anyone that’s got RSI from typing or music…