Standing Desk

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. A lot of time — there are days when I go from bed directly to my laptop; spend my morning commute, my entire workday, and my evening ride home staring at the same screen; then spend the rest of my evening in front of the machine, with only brief breaks for eating, showers and bathroom.

This is not exactly good for my body, needless to say. Hunching over a laptop hurts my eyes, hurts my back and neck, and ultimately hurts my ability to focus. I often take quick breaks where I walk down the hall and back again to think, have a drink water water and just get out of my chair for a bit. That helps, but it is not quite enough.

This July my back was hurting more than usual so I decided I'd try standing up rather than sitting down. I'd tried to stand and work a few times before but never managed to get comfortable. This time I've figured out how to make it work. Here is my setup:

Improvised standing desk. Note my cool "Cup Noodle" coffee mug. I'm very proud of it.

I found a couple of cinder blocks in a storage room and added a thrown-away cardboard box on top (I don't have a Sony laptop myself). I now also have a cardboard wedge of sorts under the back of the laptop to tilt the keyboard forward. The mouse pad support is just a collection of suitably thick books from my bookshelf. A bit impractical when I want to look something up in one of them but otherwise nice and stable.

Both the laptop and the mouse are higher up than I first thought they should be. With my previous attempts I had the desktop at waist level, with my arms at a 90 degree angle when typing, but that quickly gave me worse back pain than sitting down. This desktop is much higher, about level with the bottom of my ribcage, and my arms angle upwards to reach the laptop. The mouse is midway between hip and chest.

It makes sense. When your lower arms stick straight out at 90 degrees it puts maximum load on the upper arm and shoulder muscles. Our muscles are much worse at keeping our joints in a midway position than close to either end. Imagine a heavy jar full of water in your hand. imagine holding it in your hand with the upper arm straight down and the lower arm sticking right out in front of you. Now imagine the same thing, but with the lower arm angling upwards, toward your chest. Which one would be easier to hold over time?

With a higher surface your wrists also find support on the front edge of the desk and mouse pad, while they're dangling unsupported in the air with a 90 degree angle. Also, the screen comes up to a comfortable viewing angle. It is important to get the height just right though; I really notice when I need a book in the mouse pad pile and replace it with another of a different thickness.


At first, I could perhaps stand one hour at a time. I'd stand up and work until my legs and knees started complaining, then sit down until my back started hurting again. But within a few days my body was adapting and after a week I was standing up most of the day. I do need to move about a bit as I stand, and I continue to take quick walks every now and again. And I do sit down when I read stuff, or write by hand.

Now, two months on, I probably stand about 80% of the time at work. My shoulders are still stiff but my back no longer hurts. My headaches have become much less frequent too; I think that may be because I keep varying the viewing distance to the screen as I move about, rather than due to standing itself.

On my wishlist is some kind of less improvised setup. Ideally some kind of small add-on desk I can put on a normal desk like this. It'd have fully adjustable height, a laptop surface with adjustable angle, a separate mouse pad shelf and a small surface to the left for a book or things like that. And it'd have to be decently inexpensive; my employer is not likely to pick up the bill for anything like this. I may have a go at building something myself at some point, for home use if nothing else.

That Was Fast

Remember that I'd reached 77kg about a month ago? I've lost another kilo since then, without even trying. There's nothing like pervasive stress and lack of sleep to make you lose weight, I guess. Not that I lack appetite, mind you - I'm plenty hungry at dinner time - but I feel full as soon as I start eating.

Anyway, this is just a temporary problem. Tomorrow is my second vacation day of the year. Ritsuko is going to Tokyo even as I write, and after work tonight I will take the train and join her for a long weekend in the capital. We'll go see a big outdoor temple market in Asakusa, spend an afternoon in Jimbocho (home to hundreds of specialist used book sellers), have Smörgåsbord at a Swedish restaurant and probably spend Sunday in nearby Yokohama and its large, lively Chinatown.

I strongly suspect I'll gain back the weight I've lost, and then some, by the time we come back.

The Amazing X-Ray Ride

It's health check time here at NAIST and everybody from the first year graduate students onwards are getting poked, probed and perforated. Height, weight, waist ("Do you Metabo?" You bet I do.), blood pressure, eyesight, hearing, EKG, blood sample, urine sample, chest X-ray and stomach X-ray. A health company has set up shop here at the university assembly hall for a few days, with buses parked outside containing the X-ray equipment. I have to say that people take health check-ups a lot more seriously here than I'm used to from Sweden. I've had more check-ups here the past five years than I had my entire previous life.

X-ray Bus

New to me this time was the stomach X-ray. The throat, stomach and intestines don't show up well on X-ray, so you drink something that does. The "something" is barium sulfate. Barium is a heavy metal, so it shows up great on X-rays. Heavy metals are normally a bad idea to ingest, but barium sulfate is not taken up by the body so there's no problem; it'll go right through you. To make sure your stomach is easy to see you're supposed to not eat or drink anything the night before or the morning of the examination - no breakfast, no water and not even coffee; if you think I'm normally cranky...

Anyway, the stomach is empty and shrunken (and complaining bitterly I might add), so to make it unfold you swallow a powder - baking soda, pretty much - that, together with a shot of citric acid produces carbon dioxide, the fizz in fizzy drinks. The gas blows up your stomach and makes it easy to see. Yes, you will want to burp a lot, and no, you're not allowed to; that would deflate your stomach. The barium itself is a cup of sweetened and flavoured muddy white sludge, rather like chalk dissolved in Calpis.

You lie down on a rotating table with handles for you to hold on to, then they tip the table around every which way and ask you to rotate on the table ("Now please lay on your left. Your left. Your other left.") so that the barium sludge spreads and covers your entire stomach lining. Occasionally they'll ask you to hold still and hold your breath to take an image. It's over in about five minutes, at which point the novelty has well and truly worn off and your stomach - hungry, gas-filled and dizzy from the constant rotation - is most definitely getting unhappy about the state of things. Afterwards you're asked to take a mild laxative and drink plenty of water to avoid constipation from the barium sulfite.

 
So, you drink too much sweet, heavily carbonated slurry, then go on a machine that flings you around until you feel disoriented and faintly sick. Once you've left you crave some real food and stomach medicine. If they'd add some greasy popcorn and loud music it'd be hard to tell apart from an amusement park ride.

Health Examination

Japanese health care is generally quite good (Jun Okumura has a good post on it), and my own experiences match that. If you're gainfully employed in Japan for instance, you will have a yearly health check. This may be different from Sweden I believe as I've never had such a check while living there - but then, I've never been a company employee there either so I'm not sure what the case is for normal people. The health check is mandated for every employee, but of course, exactly how that health check is being offer in practice can differ quite a bit depending on the employer. Most examinations I've heard about are fairly slow affairs taking half a day or so.

The health check this year was different - good, but different. I am currently employed through a staffing agency, and they of course have hundreds (or more) people spread out all over the Kansai area that all need this examination. So I get an envelope with directions to a clinic in central Osaka, a health form and a small sealable vial, both to be filled-in beforehand. I expect there to be quite a lot of people so I bring a couple of research papers along to have something to read.

Turns out I needn't have bothered. The place is indeed full of people, but the clinic staffs speed and efficiency would make an F1 pit crew dizzy. We all bring our filled-in form, with a number sequence already printed at the bottom, to the desk with the first number. The polite but oh-so-efficient nurse takes the urine sample ("Mr. Moren, the sample please"), and speeds us to the next desk, the path marked by a tape line. The next one, for weight and height is the same ("Mr. Moren, stand here. Thank you.") - blink - Eyes ("Look in here and read the last line") - blink - blood pressure ("Relax please. Quickly now.") -blink - heart, lungs and waistline ("breathe deeply .. and the tape measure - ahh, you've got metabo!") - blink - EKG ("lie here, lift your shirt") blink - hearing ("press the button when it beeps") - blink - X-ray ("Stand here, breathe in deeply, it's only radiation") - blink - blood test ("just one more vial Mr. Moren, no need to faint yet.") - blink - and... done.

All in all, the whole thing, from entrance to exit (head still spinning), took about 25 minutes. That's less time than I would normally expect to wait before even starting a normal examination. And yet, there was never a hint of sloppiness nor any feeling of it being rushed. Everybody even managed to be bright and pleasant throughout the whole thing (I was there early morning; no idea how that holds up over the day of course). Fun for all. And I certainly prefer spending my time in the lab over a hospital waiting room so I'm certainly not complaining. Kind of makes you wonder why ordinary visits take such amazing amounts of time though.