Get Up And Code 054: Austin Dimmer On Ergonomics

John:               Hey everyone, welcome back to Get Up and CODE.  I’m John Sonmez and in this episode I’m actually going to throw it back to an older interview that I did with Iris in Austin Dimmer.  So back in you remember the North Pole Expedition Episode we had interviewed Austin Dimmer and he had a lot of information about his North Pole Expedition but he also happens to be an ergonomics expert.  We had a discussion about ergonomics here in this interview and we had saved this for a later time just because we didn’t want to release 2 Austin Dimmer episodes at once.  We wanted to break this up.

This is a throwback episode of that time.  You’ll hear Iris back on the show for this episode since we had recorded this before she left the show.  It’s a real good episode, a real good interview, a lot of good information.  I hope you enjoy it and here it is.

Iris:                  Hi and welcome to Get Up and CODE Podcast.  This is Iris Classon and I’m here with my co-host John Sonmez and back in the studio we have with us again Austin Dimmer.  Of course we had to have him back on the show.  I have to say after we recorded with him last time we ended up talking political issues and motivation for over an hour.  This is such a good conversation so I’m really happy we get an opportunity to continue the conversation.  This time we will be talking about his expertise in ergonomics.  I know I need some help there.

Hi and welcome back Austin.

Austin:            Hi, thank you for having me on the show again.

Iris:                  Thank you for still wanting to talk to us.

Austin:            No, no, it’s a great show.  I admire what you do so it’s a pleasure.

John:               So now fix us.  What’s wrong with us?  How can we—tell us about ergonomics.

Austin:            Ergonomics, let’s start with the definition of ergonomics.  Ergo means work and nomos means natural law.  So the combination of ergo and nomos is the natural law of work.  Throughout history and the industrial revolutions and so forth humans have worked in conditions which have had fairly adverse effects on their health and their wellbeing, psychological and physical wellbeing.

Ergonomics is a fairly young science and it’s quite a broad science.  It’s a very interdisciplinary science.  It’s not reductionist science.  Physics is a great science but physics is very reductionist in its approach and it’s trying to find the fundamental particles and reduce things to very specific traits in the universe.  Ultimately if you find the ______ 00:03:13 of everything in physics then okay everything is solved.  They can predict every single situation, possibility and outcome.  At the moment we don’t have that perfect unified theory and we do have pretty complex socio-technical systems that we live and work within.  Often they can have negative impacts on our health and wellbeing.

I think that if companies can get the ergonomics of their organizations right they can become more profitable and better working environments.  They can attract better quality employees.  You can see that technology companies like Google have obviously spent a lot of effort analyzing how to track good quality employees and create great working environment and great conditions and providing sushi for their employees.  They’re steps forward.  I think the quality of life that we have now I say we’re hacking the coalface of information.  We’re not hacking at the literal coalfaces that they were before which was very, very unhealthy situations.

I think that information workers do have certain health hazards that they can face.  Ergonomics is trying to help address some of those issues.  In my definition of ergonomics I would like to expand it a little bit more.  It’s a framework that I work in my head.  It’s called seeing double.  See and see, S-E-E S-E-E and they stand for Social Environmental and Economic and then satisfaction, Efficiency and Effectiveness.

Social, Environmental and Economic are at the macro scale.  They’re at the social societal level.  The Satisfaction, Efficiency and Effectiveness they’re at the individual level.  Ergonomics could get quite complex because you could start to analyze the social environmental and economic impacts of a system.  You could also go down to the micro level and analyze the individual and their working environment.

There’s a lot of tips I think that I can give more probably on the individual level and very practical for someone who’s working with a computer all the time.  I’ve got a few tips that I’ll just go through.  I know normally you do the tip of the week on the show but I think we’ll call it the Tips of the Week if that’s okay.

Iris:                  Yeah, we haven’t done so many Tip of the Week on the last few podcasts.  We were saving it up for you so go ahead, fix us.

Austin:            Tips of the Week certainly and I think you’ve talked about this on other shows.  I’ve heard you talking about it and using the Sit-Stand Workstation.  That’s definitely a very healthy and positive thing to do.

Now, if we analyze posture and human body, essentially the best posture is the next posture.  The human body hates enforced static environments.  It hates being stuck in a single position.  People I think would have the concept of an ergonomic office chair being this chair that sits you in one ideal posture and you never move.  You’re just so comfortable and it’s like that’s the perfect ideal but it’s not.  It doesn’t exist.  The ideal is to continuously move, change and vary your posture.

I mean the physiological benefits of pumping the blood through your muscles and getting rid of the waste products that have accumulated in the muscles and the spinal disks themselves don’t actually have any veins that penetrate the spinal disks.  They get their nutrients just through pressure differentials that are created through movement and that brings fluid in and out of the spinal disks and help the spinal disks rehydrate and so forth.

Movement is your friend.  If you’re standing and just standing statically it’s just as bad as if you were sitting statically all the time.  The ideal ergonomic workstation in my opinion is a workstation that is designed explicitly to encourage movement and variation as much as possible through the day.  I would go as far to recommend that if you’re a standing workstation you get a wobble board.  A wobble board it’s almost like you’re surfing on a surfboard and it really improves your balance and coordination.

You can actually work on a computer even if you’re on a wobble board.  If you’ve got the good skills your skills will improve through time.  That constant variation in your posture engages your core stability muscles and so forth.  It’s a very healthy way to work.  It would be a little unusual in a conventional workspace.  We’d maybe laugh at the guy with the wobble board or whatever but those guys are wrong.  We don’t want to work like those guys, yeah?

Iris:                  Yeah.

John:               It will help build character too if they laugh at you.

Austin:            Yeah, but I would also argue that if you’re standing or if you’re going to the extreme and using a wobble board sometimes you’ll be too tired and you do need to sit.  I do think that you need to vary your posture and be able to sit and have a good quality ergonomic chair.  That chair should also encourage you to change posture, move posture and sit forwards and maybe recline and rest your spine.  Get a good balance between active engagement and passive resting.

Through the day I mean if you’re on a 14-hour coding marathon or something you need to keep your body in tiptop condition because if you go and hit the gym after that and your shoulders are tense it’s not the ideal set of circumstances to hit the gym with I would think.  If you can design out all the stresses that you don’t need in your daily working environment then your body should theoretically be more—it should have more reserves to face other stresses.

I think that’s what a lot of ergonomics is about is trying to design out unnecessary stress that you’re exposed to daily and continuously.

Iris:                  I used to have a standing desk.  Now I’ve moved apartment and my new apartment is really small and I can’t have a standing desk.  I had a standing desk because I would listen to music and I naturally just start dancing.  Yeah, it sounds weird but yeah I dance and code and my coworkers make fun of me for that but that’s what I do.

In my new apartment I’ve set up several different stations, one standing and one sitting and I’ll move around.  I’ll switch between sitting in my living room working at the table there to my actual desk to a standing version.  I make sure I move around between the stations and I have a white board so I’ll be standing and sketching out ideas and UML diagrams and so on.  I was told that an alternative is if you can’t really get specialized equipment is to just make sure that you have different stations that you move between and that you also keep yourself moving between the stations throughout.

Austin:            That’s absolutely logical and good way to work because the continuous variation of your posture.  If you work in a company and if you do not work in the home or something and you’ve got different criteria, like I used to work in investment banking in London in the city.  I was right in the heart of the financial jungle there.  You’ve got very constrained ideas about work.  It’s maybe a little bit trickier in those environments but a lot of people nowadays especially developers have the ability to be able to work from home.  I think that if they learn how to look after themselves because a lot of this as well as employers are not really going to look after you, you need to learn to look after yourself and do that well.  I think Iris you do that very well.  John does as well.

Iris:                  I do have to go in to work.  I try to work from home when I’m able to, but when I go to work we have a standing desk the ones that you can put up and have as a sitting desk as well.  The problem is we don’t have our own offices.  It’s like an open office and you don’t sit in one place.  You can’t get somebody, a specialist in there and customize things for you because it’s not your desk.  You’re going to be moving around.

I found the problem with that is I actually drag my keyboard and my mouse to work every single day.  It’s a lot to carry and it can get damaged but for me it’s so important so I have really good equipment, but I see developers because they move around all the time, they only bring their laptop and they don’t even use external monitors.  You can imagine the posture sitting coding for 10 hours on a tiny—it’s the small laptops the Ultrabooks.

Austin:            Yeah, yeah and that’s not going to do your shoulders and back any favors or your neck.  It’s astounding that we do this because the bottom line is it’s less profitable and it costs more to have that kind of working environment.  Employers should be all geared up to maximizing profit and maximizing the quality of their output for minimum input.

John:               Yeah.

Iris:                  I think sometimes they are but the developers don’t see the benefit of it and they go like, “No, it’s fine.  No, too much hassle.  We don’t believe in it.”  You never think you’re going to be that person that gets that back injury, right?  It’s not going to happen to you, that’s your dad.

Austin:            It’s true.  In the UK I think Sweden you have much better working conditions there.  I used to sell Scandinavian office furniture in London and the competitors that we had were not selling Scandinavian furniture they were selling British furniture or whatever, the cheapest furniture they could and it was terrible.  The Scandinavian stuff was top notch.

Well, I’ve been in Sweden actually in Stockholm and have some friends that work in various technology companies there.  They took me around some of their offices.  I was like wow, these offices are so cool, everything is like designer and really nice, really cool.

John:               I have a treadmill that I put a surf shelf on and I put my laptop on and I’ll be on there walking 2.5 miles an hour at an incline for an hour a day or so.  Is that good?

Austin:            I would say it’s good because you’re probably killing 2 birds with one stone.  We’ve got limited time each day and we need to keep fit and we need to do things or learn things.  I think that if you’re doing something like that it’s certainly not a bad thing to do.  I’ve never done that myself.  I used to have an elliptical machine and I’d put that in front of a monitor and try and learn code and whatever and go on the elliptical.  I really enjoyed that when I was doing that.  I don’t have that set up right now.  It’s something in my life I probably could do a little bit more.  Definitely I would encourage creative thinking about how you can continue to work but be in motion or do something that’s going to help you just not sit and waste away because the sitting is the killer.

There’s a statistic or some sort of scientific fact that I’ve read recently, Forbes and all these sort of sensationalist media outlets say that if you’re sitting for 12 hours a day your risks of various types of cardiovascular diseases or whatever are increased.  The act of sitting continuously is just reducing your life expectancy or whatever by X amount.

Iris:                  You can’t counterweight it by exercising.

Austin:            Yeah, well that’s the pessimistic view.  Personally I’m not sure.  At least if you’re doing some exercise everyday at least you’re giving yourself the chance to get your heart to pump blood around your body and give yourselves the chance of at least having a base cardiovascular level that if manage to get really fit again you’ve got a base that’s being maintained.

In my life I’m not as fit now as I was when I was 30 years old.  I’m approaching 40 now.  I do feel that I’ve got a base of cardiovascular because I consistently walk and I keep myself at least moderately active but I do have a sedentary lifestyle.  Sitting coding for 14, 12 hours a day 7 days a week it’s not good for you.  It’s difficult.

If you can get the ideal, what I’m describing, if you have a workstation where you can have either a wobble board or I think you mentioned before you get these carpets that help you stand for long periods without getting fatigued or something, yeah?  If you can get that set up, ideally you want that wobble board workstation that can move up and down, monitors that have got arms that you can raise and lower the height and even I would suggest that if it comes to the end of the day and you still want to learn or do something that you can recline and let your spine rest and just let your body distress.  Even sitting all day, if you sit on an exercise ball it’s tiring.  You need to let your muscles relax and rest as well.

If you can get that right balance between activity and rest then you’re giving yourself the chance to be as healthy as you can possibly be.  That will help you work better and make better programming decisions and interact better with your peers and all these sorts of good things.  It’s all about balance.

Iris:                  I have to ask, a few months ago I went ahead and purchased my first really expensive keyboard and my first mechanical keyboard had one with blue switches but due to complains from my colleagues I bought a second keyboard with brown switches which doesn’t make as much sound.  I bought a really expensive, really good mouse that I really like.  How important is it to have good keyboard and a good mouse as a developer?  Does it matter?

Austin:            I’d say it’s very important.  Golfers use the best golf clubs they can get their hands on.  It helps their golf game.  The keyboard and your mouse and your interaction devices are absolutely critical to enable you to work effectively.

Iris:                  How do you pick?  How do you choose?

Austin:            I think it’s very personal.  There’s so much variation across the population that you just need to keep experimenting and find the right devices that suit you.  I don’t think it’s something that can be forced.  The technology environment is also changing.  You guys have done a PluralSight course on what’s that sensor, the Leap Motion?  Yeah.  We’ve got Kinect sensors and voice control systems and various interaction technologies that are evolving.

I think the keyboard and mouse they’re the core, they’re the precision and the control.  I think that if you find the right tool, because you can get injured from using a keyboard and a mouse.  People can get serious injuries from using them.

When I was working in London there were no stickers on the keyboard to say prolonged usage of these keyboards can cause you injury.  There were no stickers but then they started putting stickers on keyboards that keyboards can actually injure you.

Now if you’re a programmer and your career is dependent on your hands and you’d be able to bang out the code then you’ve got to look after your hands.  Finding a descent keyboard is a good worthwhile investment because if you can’t type you can’t code and if you can’t code you’re not going to be working for a long time.  Definitely I would encourage people to find the right device that suits them.

Iris:                  Yeah, and monitors are important.  I know when we emailed a little bit—you sent us a picture and you had a thousand monitors.  How do you place a monitor?

Austin:            Because I did an MSC in ergonomics so I don’t believe in just studying the theory.  I like to apply and practice and experiment and find an optimum.  For me it’s a continuous process of creative ideas about how to solve the problems maybe that I’m currently facing.  I’ve tried various keyboard systems because I had hand injuries that made it very difficult for me to operate computers.  I worked in an investment baking in London and quantitative analysis.  We were working with pretty deep—I mean they call it big data nowadays, but the big data then was the financial markets and all the data streams that were coming from the stock markets and evaluations of companies and so forth.

If you’re working in an intense computing environment like that for me it was very easy to get injured especially if you’ve got—I'm pretty, well, I describe myself as a perfectionist.  I can’t leave an Excel Spreadsheet when it’s all messy.  I have to make it absolutely right.  You’ve got lots of little details that you’re trying to do.

Iris:                  Did you get specialized equipment?

Austin:            I tried everything that I could at that time.  The DataHand keyboard was certainly an interesting device that I used.

Iris:                  Can you explain what the DataHand keyboard is?

Austin:            The DataHand is designed to minimize the force and the distance that your fingers move to get to the keys.  It’s designed like a glove.  It looks more like a glove than a keyboard.  It was a very comfortable device.  I was pretty fast in using the DataHand.  It was great.  I wrote my MSC thesis on the DataHand.

Iris:                  It was on the DataHand, wasn’t it?

Austin:            Yeah.  I don’t know if they’re selling them nowadays.  I’m not sure if the company went bankrupt but after the DataHand I started using another interesting device which was the FingerWorks keyboard.  Actually I would say the FingerWorks is more interesting than the TouchStream.  FingerWorks was designed by a guy called Wayne Westerman and he had designed the keyboard because he had repetitive stress injury and he had sore hands from using computers too much.  He designed that device and from about ‘98, ‘99 to about 2005 or so they had a little company that were selling these little flat surface keyboards, multi-touch.  They were incredible.  I’ve still got one.  I’ll show you.  I’ve got it here.

The listeners won’t be able to see that but that’s how it works.

Iris:                  Does this give enough tactile feedback?  I struggle not using anything that is—anything that is non-mechanical for me in terms of keyboard I struggle without tactile feedback because I don’t know how hard I should press with my fingers.  I don’t get the feedback.

Austin:            That one for me works absolutely fine, no problem.  These surface keyboards are interesting now because they’ve got the touch cover or whatever.  I’ve not used one intensely but I’d be –

Iris:                  I hate the touch cover.

Austin:            You hate, it yeah?

John:               I hate the type cover as well, sorry.

Iris:                  The type cover is okay.  It’s okay.

John:               I hate the track pad on the type cover, let me be specific.

Iris:                  Oh, yeah, I don’t use it.

Austin:            Well, I’ve used this TouchStream stealth keyboard for literally years now and it’s mind blowing what you can do with it.  You’ve got arrow keys you just go like—with 2 fingers you’ve got arrows up, down, left, right.  You’ve got page down, page up.  You’ve got scroll down, scroll up.  You’ve got select text.  You’ve got move to the end of the lane to the beginning of the lane.  You can use gestures on the surface that are amazing.  The thing was that their company, FingerWorks, got bought by Apple.  Apple integrated the multi-touch technology into the iPhone and so forth.  I feel to a degree they’ve sort of dumbed the technology down and limited the capabilities of multi-touch and gestural interactions because the marketing department says, “No, you need to present the most simple possible thing because that’s what will sell.”

It does obviously sell but –

Iris:                  They’ve removed ergonomics part of it as well because looking at the FingerWorks keyboard it’s almost like 2 separate plates that are angled so it looks a little bit like a tipi almost.  It’s a better angle.

Austin:            Yeah, well the thing is that your hand, if you pronate your hand like this you’re creating a bit of stress in the pronators, the muscles that rotate your wrist.

Iris:                  Pronate is facing palm down.

Austin:            Yeah, so when you stand the neutral posture that’s an important thing.  Ergonomics is trying to maintain the body in neutral postures, postures that are the least stressful in the muscles and tendons as possible because you can maintain those postures for longer time periods than other postures.  A conventional keyboard that’s flat is forcing you to rotate your hands inwards and increases the tension in your forearms and probably right up into your back and spine and neck.  If you’re doing that 12 hours a day it’s not beneficial for your physiology.

Having the angle is definitely a good thing.  Most people and most programmers seem to be able to get away with it and code away.  It’s not too much of an issue but I do think that they could be even better if they really thought about how they were working.  If people do want to do the best job they can these are not expensive adjustments.  They’re pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Iris:                  I guess if we were ergonomic we wouldn’t use the keyboard layout that we have today, would we?

Austin:            Well, that’s a good point.  The Dvorak you know they’ve analyzed the frequency of letters in the English language and so forth and designed it to minimize the amount of finger movements as well.  The keyboard design that we have, the QWERTY is actually, I believe if I’m not mistaken, it’s a relic from the industrial revolution where they had to –

Iris:                  From the typewriter.

Austin:            Yeah, they had to design it to slow down the finger speed because the arms would get jammed in the typewriter.  They would have to release the arms.  It was expressly designed to slow down productivity.  This is an example of what’s called technological lock in where you’ve got an inferior standard and lock in across literally billions of users.  With the economic crisis and so forth that we’re all facing it’s not ideal.  It’s one worry that I have with certain technologies that we have nowadays is that again we create a lock in to a substandard system and that itself creates risks moving forward.

It’s difficult.  I mean it’s not something you can easily solve.  I do worry about that to a degree because I –

Iris:                  I have actually a second question for you because we talked about keyboard and you mentioned a track pad.  Now this my current—I used to have the Logitech performance mouse and I wanted to try this one.  I love this one more.  I’m holding out my rat mouse here.

John:               For the listeners Iris is holding up a bright red mouse that looks like it came off of a cyborg ship.

Austin:            Yeah, do you have the special mat?

Iris:                  I have a gamers mat.  I have a soft one and a hard one.  This one is the one I travel with and then I have a soft one.  Now, I got this one because I like to have buttons so I can program and it has a horizontal scrolls and so on.  Me, personally I’ve tried using track pads and I just hate them.  My hand gets so tired but I want to ask you because you know this stuff.  What is best a mouse or a track pad which is gesture based?  I’ve tried the gesture mouses.  They’re not there yet.  They’re just really unintuitive at the moment.

Austin:            The best device I’ve ever used is this FingerWorks Stealth but they don’t sell them anymore.  The gestures and track pad capabilities in this thing are just phenomenal.  I mean Apple have –

Iris:                  Don’t you get tired?

Austin:            Sometimes but I use trackball mice in addition to the track pad.  It depends.  I think I’m now naturally gravitating towards what’s most efficient or comfortable.  I’ve got a Wacom pen as well as Cintiq.

Iris:                  Yeah, I’ve got a pen for playing.

Austin:            But I think that your mouse is quite a good one.  It’s well made.  I saw them in the computer store.  I’ve never bought one and used it myself.  When I saw them I was really interested and the little friction mat that they had.  It was a special friction free sort of surface and I remember using that mouse across and I was like, “Wow, this is really smooth and fast.”

Iris:                  Yeah, I don’t understand people who buy an expensive mouse and they don’t have a good mouse mat.  I don’t get it.  Get a good mouse mat and just bring it with you.  It’s really slim.  It’s not heavy to carry and it makes such a difference.

Austin:            Yeah.

John:               I need to do that.  I’ve just got my mouse thing on my desk.  I can see where it’s like worn off the veneer from my desk.

Austin:            I’ll bring up a point at the moment.  One thing that I would recommend in terms of monitors, this is in relation to eye strain.  Obviously, your eyes are crucial to keep healthy as well because staring at text and small little comas in details you want to keep your eyes as sharp as possible.  Having monitors a different focal length from your eyes, the focal length is the distance from your eye to where the surface of the screen is.  If you have different depths of view for your eyes to adjust so that your eye muscles are just changing and they’re not always looking at the one monitor at a specific distance.  They are changing multiple times through the day.  Touch, I mean I'm 40 so maybe by the time I'm 50, my eyes will have gone.

We talked about the North Pole expedition the last time I was on the show and my nickname was Eagle Eyes because I could spot polar bears from 10 kilometers and whatever.  I had good eyes and I think that changing the focal length is important.  I totally recommend that if someone can get two monitors or three monitors and just change the distance of each of the monitors, adjust the text size or whatever so that you’re not straining your eyes.  I think that is definitely something that programmers should do.

Iris:                  That is a really good, yeah.  I have to try that.  I’ve tried to do the exercise once and then training your eyes to look at different distances but honestly, I forget all those exercises.  I’ll do it for a week and the next week I’ve forgotten about them.

Austin:            Absolutely.  If you have your monitors set up so that they’re at different focal lengths you’ll do it anyway.  It’s not ideal.  There are theories about the hunter-gatherer focal length, the optimal focal length because if you’re going along the woods and you’re looking as if you’re walking where you’d be watching to where you’re going to step.  That’s maybe where the evolutionary optimal point has evolved too for our eyes.  I think that, well, computer programming you’re not looking at the forest floor just a few meters in front of me.  It’s inevitable.  You’re going to get probably some effects in our visual systems.

Iris:                  I guess the question is whether we’re adapting as well whether there are changes.  Can we still go off the same?  Can we still use the same theories 50 years from now?

Austin:            I'm sure that you mean physiologies adapting and we’re going to become cyborgs or something in the near future.  There’s a distinct possibility.  The technology in nanotechnology and biotech, it’s ones and zeros.  There are all ACTs and Gs.  You’ve got these various programming models that are coming up with biological systems.  It’s probably scary at some point because we’ve basically got the DNA building blocks of life, and we can mix them all up and produce these new life forms.

Maybe the human is not going to be optimally evolved to compete and not ecosystem.  Maybe.  You don’t know, but it’s definitely a double-edged sword, and I think that programmers, I think, now will be probably be propelled into that world faster than we expect because it’s … I think the pace of technological innovation is going faster and going faster.  There doesn’t seem to be any breaks on any of the—I think in America, there are big hackathons and things like this.  I'm not sure.  I’ve never seen them.  I’ve just heard stories and whatever, and maybe you know John.

Iris:                  I think South Korea is ahead of us by like 20 years, anyway.  I'm just guessing.

John:               At least with gaming mice.  I know for sure with gaming mice they are.

Iris:                  Oh, I should go shopping there then.  I want to hack a DDR, the Dance-Dance Revolution.  I’d love to have that hooked up to my computer when I'm coding and I’ll have like a little dance every time I compile something.  That’s got to be so awesome, and you could have it with your teams and you can see the result on the screen when you’re coding.

Austin:            That would be cool, yeah.  I remember when I was into kite surfing, I was thinking how can you communicate through a power kite?  How can you control a system?  That was just a stupid idea when I really thought about it because you’re just tapped into the wind.  Then when the wind comes along, you get pulled along by it.

John:               Actually, I bought one of those wooden DDR boxes.  You know I’m talking about the wood platform like in the arcade?  I bought one.  I think it was like 3 or $400.  I use it a lot.  I used to play it so much.  Now that dance games that they have for like Xbox and for Playstation.  They’re actual real movements instead.  Now, the DDR was better because then it was like … I don’t know.

Iris:                  I like the DDR because you use feet only.  You could use your hands too, but I like the DDR better than the ones from the Xbox where you have to do like the upper body movements.

John:               It’s not astute.  It’s not accurate enough, but we’re going off topic.

Iris:                  Xbox dancing is cheesy.  DDR is actually cool.  Cool from a nerd aspect.  Guys can do waiters, no shame, but when you do the little twirling around them –

John:               Yeah, I'm not into that.

Iris:                  Yeah.  Me neither like nobody should do it.

Austin:            I was interested in the Xbox, the new one.  I’ve never had an Xbox but I thought maybe it’s a good way you to exercise, but then I saw it.  No.  It’s just probably a gimmick.

Iris:                  They did a study on that.  I'm sure they’ve done several but the one study I saw, the only one I’ve seen, it didn’t improve overall fitness level and people resumed to not exercising at all after the first initial interest the first couple of weeks.  This was done with kids though, I have to say.  Kids, I think, around ages 6, 8 and family.

Austin:            I thought it was maybe a good way to encourage me to play with my kids, and dance with them and do positive physical things because the technology is certainly evolving.  I think they’ve got big partnerships with _____ 00:39:09 and whatever to produce these games.  Surely, they must be fairly good, but I’d be interested to try it at least.

John:               What would you leave our listeners with, Austin?  What’s a good bang for their buck?  Someone sitting at their workstation right now what’s the biggest value they could do that is going to help them economically?

Austin:            I think the biggest takeaway that I can let your listeners know is the best posture is the next posture, and this idea of continuous movement and variation and if they can think creatively on how to design their working environment to encourage that change in posture and working postures.  That’s the biggest and most important thing.

I would also recommend that if they’re interested in that real idea there’s a guy called Peter Opsvik.  I believe he’s a Norwegian.  In my opinion, he’s the best chair designer in the world and he’s got a book called Rethinking Sitting.  That’s a great book and he’s got some of the best designed chairs around.  If someone who is investing in an ergonomic chair, a chair that’s designed by Peter Opsvik is going to be a good one.  That’s the takeaway I would recommend.

John:               Awesome.

Iris:                  Cool.

John:               Well, thanks.  This has been very informative.  I think I’ve learned from this.  Hey, now, get up and code guys, right?  Just like our podcast.

Austin:            It’s always been a pleasure talking to you both.  Thanks for having me on the show again.

Iris:                  Yeah.  Thank you for coming on this show.

John:               Don’t forget to check us out at getupandcode.com, and give us a review on iTunes if you get a chance.  Just search on iTunes for Get Up and Code.  Just give us an honest review.  Let us know.  Leave a comment if you wouldn’t mind.  This way you can help them find our podcast and help other programmers in shape.

In fact, if you know someone that needs to get in shape, another programmer, a nice way to do it is just say, “Hey, have you checked out this Get Up and Code Podcast?” instead of saying, “Hey, fatso.  You need to hit the treadmill.”

Iris:                  Sharing is caring.  Make sure you share our podcast with other people.

John:               All right.  Well, we will talk to you again next week.  Take care.

Iris:                  Take care, bye.