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Living with Screens During Lockdown

In the covid-19 pandemic, everyone has entered my world of working from home, online meetings, and spending most of both night and day in in front of a screen. In my career as a software architect, I worked regularly with online teams spread over every continent but Antarctica. The last decade of my career, I worked from our old farmhouse on Waschke Road most of the time. Since I’ve retired, I spend as much time writing in my home office as I did when I was gainfully employed.

I have some advice on how to be comfortable and even enjoy the online screen life. Mind you I am not a physician, ophthalmologist, or physical therapist, only an opinionated coder, but you might find some of my suggestions useful.

First, let me say that everyone is different. The saying is that “your mileage may vary” and I have found that my mileage usually varies widely. For me, when it comes to wellbeing, it works better to experiment than to find an expert’s rule and stick with it. So, this is my first suggestion: try different strategies; pay close attention to how you feel, both physically and mentally. Go with whatever makes you feel the best, but try reasonable strategies as they occur to you. Also be aware that change is constant. What worked well yesterday may not be optimal today. A tiny pain can turn into a screaming wildcat in a short time.

The most important consideration for me is my eyes. I think there is a good reason for this. We live in a three-dimensional world and our eyes are designed (or evolved, if you will) to move constantly, continually refocusing on objects at different distances, and adjusting to different colors and intensities of light. Screens are flat and most of the time they are at a fixed distance from our eyes. The intensity and color of the screen stays the roughly the same. Our bodies are simply not made for this fixed environment. We have to compensate.

I have found that if I take care of my eyes when I am online, the rest of my body tends to take care of itself. That doesn’t mean that I intentionally ignore the recommendations of the ergonomic experts, but I find that when I take care of my eyes properly, the rest of the ergonomic rules fall in place and I can quickly adapt to changing circumstances, like a new piece of furniture or moving to a different room without looking at charts and getting out a tape measure.

Now for some bullet points:

  • Frequently look away from the screen and into the distance. It helps to be near a window with some action outside. There are apps available that remind you to look away every few minutes, but I personally can’t abide those bonking timers. The antics of the crows, seagulls, and assorted avians outside my window works much better for me. I also like a room with some visual interest—like shelves of familiar books and other memorabilia (clutter).
  • I avoid using a laptop for any length of time. Put your laptop on a stand (or a stack of books) and get an external keyboard.
  • Position your screen so that you are looking at the upper third of the display with your neck in an unstrained position and at a proper distance. That’s about two feet for most people. I have three pairs of glasses. One pair for screen distance, one pair for reading, which is closer for me than screen distance, and a pair of lineless bifocals. For me, the bifocals are a disaster for serious reading or screen work. The area of lens that is the right focus is too small and forces me into contortions. But they are great for normal life.
  • Invest in the highest resolution monitor you can afford. I find hi-res much more important than size. I like using a twenty-two-inch display and I’ve thought about getting an even larger one, but forced to choose between resolution and size, I feel better after a long day with a hi-res screen.
  • Position lighting carefully. I find having my desk perpendicular to a north facing window with the window on the left to be perfect. If I were left-handed, I’d want it to the right, so my dominant hand does not cast shadows when I am writing by hand. I seldom print anything, but I like to draft and plan on paper. Facing a window is not bad, but it places the screen in a shadow, which is not ideal. A window behind me is a disaster because glare on the screen is straining and forces body contortions.
  • Avoid too much blue in your screens. On Windows 10, you can change the color balance in the “night light” settings and turn on the night light all the time. But remember to turn it off when you are shopping online, or you’ll be surprised at colors when they arrive.
  • Give yourself opportunities to move. I use three different computers and switch between them. One on a normal desk, another set up for standing, and a third on a lap board in an easy chair. In the course of the day, I use all three. I use Dropbox to keep my working files in sync so I can switch from one computer to another without messing around with copying files or thumb drives.
  • An adjustable office chair with good lumbar support helps. You can spend thousands of dollars on a luxurious ergo chair, but I like one I bought at Ikea. I prefer chairs without arms.
  • As far as I am concerned, the best keyboards were made by IBM in the 1980s. My favorite keyboard is over thirty years old and still the best.

This covers the most important stuff. I still put in long days in my home office, but I have fewer aches and pains today than I had ten years ago.

However, I repeat: your mileage will vary.

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Chicago Conversations

This morning, I spoke with four alumni from the University of Chicago, the institution where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees close to fifty years ago. The experience was instructive and pleasant.

Fifty alumni signed on to a Zoom meeting. The meeting leaders then randomly paired the participants into two-person breakout rooms to talk privately for ten minutes. When the time was up, the moderators returned us to the full meeting, then paired us up randomly again. Rinse and repeat four times.

We were geographically dispersed. I’m in the northwest corner of the country next to the Salish Sea and close to the Canadian border. I first spoke with a fellow in New York whose partner is a nurse at one of the Columbia hospitals; then a Chicago architectural history graduate student locked in her parent’s apartment in a northern Chicago suburb; next a recent business and econ graduate only 160 miles south of me in the Washington State capital, Olympia; and finally, a sociology graduate student on a fellowship at Oxford in Britain.

Our experiences were widely disparate. The young woman in the Chicago suburb had not been outside in two weeks. I made her jealous by telling her about the goose sitting on her clutch of eggs on the island in the middle of the pond that Albert The Imperious Border Collie walks me around each morning and evening. The guy in New York discussed toilet paper shortages and supply-chain interruptions with me.

In breakout with the sociology grad at Oxford, we discussed the implications of the pandemic for broadband connections for the disadvantaged. I am optimistic— the network infrastructure has already been significantly strengthened in the past two months of increased network traffic. Comcast has offered two months of free broadband here. These signs generate optimism in me that we will soon see a TVA-like initiative for broadband connections. She was less enthusiastic, perhaps from her more global perspective.

For the architectural history student, I acted professorial and turned to my shelf to pull out a copy of the bible of software design patterns, which was inspired by the building architect, Christopher Alexander, who happens to be from the era she is studying. She, in turn, gave me a reference to blob architecture, which is an architectural term derived from the software term, Binary Large Object, the subject of Big Data analysis. A cross-disciplinary moment.

The business and econ major in Olympia and I discussed lobbying the Washington State legislature in Olympia for continued support for public libraries.

The pandemic bringing a diverse group closer together.

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Optimistic Pessimism

Today, I expect the worst from the covid-19 pandemic and look for the best. Nearly a million and a half confirmed cases and ninety thousand dead, fourteen thousand dead in the United States, twenty dead in our own rural county. And more to come.

For whatever reason, our wealthy and sophisticated country is not responding well. We don’t seem to be able to organize ourselves. Shortages and gaps in medical supplies are appearing in the country that invented supply-chain management. Testing is faltering at the source of testing technology.

As a world leader, we are stumbling. What else can be said? The number of cases in the U. S. is more than double that of the country with the second highest count.

The only way we have to stop the deaths is to shut the country down, and we struggle to do it. Americans cherish their freedom and do not take kindly to interference. Some insist on their right to assembly when not assembling is to avoid the death for themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, their countrymen. In the country that is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people cannot save themselves.

What do I see that is good in this? Yes, healthcare staff, nurses, and doctors are valiantly giving their lives to save the victims of the virus, but sacrifice is not bright hope. Volunteers distribute food to the distressed and help in many ways, and philanthropists donate billions, but this is only more sacrifice. The necessity of sacrifice drives me to despair, not hope.

Then what good do I see? Change. Change for the better paid for with staggering suffering and cost. Hundreds of thousands of good people forced to die alone with a tube jammed down their throat. Myriads of others who will survive with lame spirits and weakened bodies.

You may lament the shattering of the economy, but I see an economy that was already broken with unseen cracks. We were living in a condition that we now know humans cannot survive. The death toll from the virus testifies to this. If we lived differently, flew around in airplanes less, did not live in cities stacked in layers, looked out for our neighbors instead of competed with them, used computer networks, the mark of the new century, to protect ourselves from pestilence and bring us together instead letting them divide us, the emergence of the virus would have been a minor event. A temporary statistical variation that only epidemiologists and public health specialists would notice.

But the pandemic isn’t minor. It is a catastrophe because we have been doing it all wrong.

Now we know.

Will we have a better world when this is over? I think so. World War II was a horrible event, more destructive than the pandemic. After the war, many people were dead like today, but cities were also flattened, industrial facilities devastated, and resources destroyed.

Yet, the world that emerged from the war was more prosperous, more pleasant, more humane than ever existed before on the planet.

After the pandemic, we will have the dead to bury and grieve, but our resources and infrastructure will be intact, and we will have learned much about the weaknesses in our old ways. We will know new ways to work, to live, to cooperate.

Already, the network has been strengthened in just two months to support the new loads and will continue to get stronger. We’ve learned to get together electronically in ways that the virus can’t disrupt. And we will learn more. New ways to work and distribute goods. Our communities will be stronger and more resistant to stress.

Rebuilding will be rapid because we will have so much to rebuild with, and like the aftermath of the war, the world will improve in ways we do not yet comprehend.