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Roughly 6 months ago, I started experiencing sharp pain in my left hip shortly after sitting in the chair at work for the first few months of my employment. This pain started with sitting from work, then got worse when sitting at home, on the bus, on the motorcycle, etc. Since I spent well over 8 hours a day at a computer most days, I decided standing as much as possible was worth the effort.

To combat the soreness while sitting in certain chairs, I decided to look into buying a standing desk. Geek Desk is a great looking desk, nice flat surface, raises and lowers – it’s great. Unfortunately, the price tag of the geek desk is very high. At over $700, not counting shipping, I wanted to find a better solution. That better solution took the form of building my own desk. I do not feel I’m much of a builder, and barely know how to use a hammer. The task of building the desk only took about a week, and really came out well.

To build a desk, that’s not adjustable, the height is incredibly important to get right the first time. Too high or too low will cause discomfort either way. Fortunately, figuring out the height is very easy. The way I did it was taking my existing desk, stacking boxes and containers on top of the surface, until the height including the keyboard was set correctly. Then, simply taking a tape measure and measuring the height is all you need to do. You can use 2x4s to build the legs of the desk, and the top of your current desk. I won’t include too many details, but will provide some links to pictures of the desk later on. A simple google will give many plans on building such a desk.

For the first few weeks, standing all the time was difficult. Since I started with a desk at home, I was able to regulate the amount of time I was standing every day. This helped quite a bit, but it only took a few weeks to be able to stand for 3-4 hours at a time without issues. It does take time to get used to, so it’s not something to be rushed.

The benefits I found from a standing desk were enormous, and probably very similar to anything others will write about. Increased productivity was the first thing I noticed. I found I didn’t get fatigued nearly as much as I did prior to sitting. Especially the times between 2-4, when I was usually very tired were gone. I also found I move around a lot more. This was both in place (different standing positions) as well as taking a break to walk a little. The largest benefit that was apparent after awhile was my hip pain was drastically reduced. I stopped limping all the time, and only did after sitting. I also found my leg strength, in general, increased as well. In other words, I felt increased muscle tone.

There were a few disadvantages to this though. The first was, and still is, that extended periods of sitting (6-7+ hours) is still somewhat difficult to do. Also, since I have just a standing desk now at home, as well as at work. Meaning, if I want to sit and work, it’s more difficult to do that. But…overall, these are minor disadvantages to the number of advantages the standing desk has given me.

Some pictures:

Creation of the standing desk

While I was at Ryumonji this last weekend, I had attached to me near all my technological gadgets. Almost as if this was a safety net, my gadgets are almost always by my side. Thinking back the past month, I can’t really identify a time when I’m not within arms reach of my cell phone. I take my laptop computer, iPad, my phone, and even sometimes my ebook reader to work with me. So much technological garbage leads me to check facebook, twitter, email, and so on – even when at a monastery where I’m supposed to practice. How did we get here and how do we indend to get through it?

Technology Addiction

The term technology addition, I feel, is the near-blind (or at least short sighted) collection of gadgets such as video game systems, computers, and other electronics. I personally feel I have a technology addition because of shere number of gadgets I own. From multiple routers and external hard drives to multiple computers and multiple video game systems. The justification for such purchases are easy at the time of purchase. I tend to dream about the future, both during the purchase and shortly after. This dream consists of how much I’ll use gadget X, how my current gadgets don’t directly solve the problem that gadget X will suddenly solve. I dream of lots of use, and even the option of selling old gadgets that this will replace. I think simplicity! I think efficiency!

Yeah, right…

The truth of the matter is that few of the gadgets purchase ever end up like dreams would portray. I doubt I’m the only one with this kind of probelm. So why do we purchase so much in this manner? From my own behavior, I can point this to a discontented feeling of the current moment. Purchasing items is a way to solve a perceived problem, which may or may not really be there. Our minds control a lot, and depending on one’s personality the root reason for purchasing may be hidden but the effect is the same. Consuming more tech gadgets costs quite a bit of money, increases clutter, and divides our attention into more the maintenance and integration between the gadgets rather than using them to their potential.

Data Addiction

The term data addiction is very similar to technology addiction, but specifically with forms of data. The sneaky part about data addiction is that it applies to both online services as well as data we accumulate. I’ve only recently became aware of this situation, which is hard to see due to the invisible nature of data. A simple way to see this is to check how much storage space you have available between all your machines, and how much used space there is. I’m sitting, personally, probably near 5 Tb or so of data (not counting backups), with around 3.5-3Tb of that being used for some reason or another. While a lot of this data is probably redundant information between machines, the point remains that much of that data I probably don’t “need”.

Access to online services also apply to a degree to this. Services such as Pandora and Netflix give us many, many terrabytes of data that is at our fingertips. If we spend much of our time online watching these services or through general browsing, this is in a way still a form of data addiction. So Facebook, twitter – constantly having this data accessible to us wherever and whenever is coined data addiction.

Unlike technology addiction, we don’t have much clutter – heck, it may not cost much if anything so why not? Drive space is cheap, so there’s no reason to fill it up. The reason why we should still be concerned about data addiction is of the constant consumption issue. Shoken put it well, where we can sometimes act as a pacman of sorts, constantly gobbling up and consuming things around us. It’s a less-mindful way of living our life. By keeping data we need, we are practicing mindfulness. This is like minimalism, only with data rather than clutter.

How to solve it?

We collect possessions in general to either solve a problem we’re having (or perceived problem), add a safety net to our lives – and in general to just make us happy. We dream about the uses of such a device, how many problems it’d solve, and us using said gadget. We, as a result, feel happy in our happy place and promptly purchase the wanted item. Many times, at least for me, it’s fear of the future for why I’ll purchase something and hold onto it for so long.

With that said, what’s the solution? I’m not so sure there really is a good solution outside being mindful. I’ve gone through times of getting rid of possessions, sometimes too quickly, and bounced right back and either purchased the same item or the newer version of the item. This is much like a diet, if you know you’re dieting, you get hungrier. Remember Pacmman from earlier? So with that said, some of the most successful diets are ones where a person is going very slow at the diet, that is, a few pounds a month vs a few pounds a week. This approach was taken by the declutter folks in a common strategy in that camp. If you haven’t used something in 6-12 months, be that data, technology, or even normal clutter – you get rid of it. While this can’t apply to everything – such as old taxes, important documents, and so on; stuff like music, video, documents it could easily apply to.

Getting LeafNode to work on OSX is a bit of a pain, messing with that today I found that little exists in terms of documentation on how to make this happen. The real problem isn’t specifically with the base install of LeafNode, but getting it configured is where the problem is at:

Installing Leafnode:
port install leafnode

Once leafnode is installed, you have a few commands that you can use at this point:
fetchnews – This will be used to get the listing of groups, which once read, will start pulling the actual documents themselves
leafnode – This can be run a few different ways, but with the macports option it’s really not a bad idea to run this through launchctl (assuming you’re on a later version of OSX).

Once it’s installed, your configuration file that you’ll need to edit is in /opt/local/etc/leafnode/config. Most of the stuff in the config.example will help in configuring leafnode. The important elements that should be edited are:
server – The server name itself
username – Obvious
password – Again, obvious
expire – I personally wanted everything that a newsgroup had, and to continue to fetch as much as possible since I want to be able to search off archived messages. I set this really high, I’d recommend the same.
hostname – This can be configured from your newsreader, but I added this as something if I forgot to configure it correctly.
maxfetch – Similar to expire, just sets the max number of initial articles to fetch. I set this insanely high as well.

The plists for launchctl are located in /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.leafnode
One way to load this right away is:
sudo launchctl load /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.leafnode/org.macports.leafnode.plist

I’ve also created a symlink from the above location to /Library/LaunchDaemons
cd /Library/LaunchDaemons
ln -s /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.leafnode/org.macports.leafnode.plist .

At this point, you can use emacs to connect to your server. Much of the stuff left is to configure your emacs variables. Some example stuff I use is:

;; GNUS Setup
(setq user-mail-address “youremail@domain”)
(setq user-full-name “Your Name”)
(setq gnus-select-method ‘(nntp “localhost”
(nntp-address “127.0.0.1″)
(nntp-authinfo-file “~/.authinfo”)
(nntp-port-number 119)))

(setq gnus-summary-make-false-root ‘dummy)
(setq gnus-build-sparse-threads ‘some)
(setq gnus-fetch-old-headers ‘some)

(setq gnus-posting-styles
‘((“.“
(signature-file “~/.signature”)
(x-url “http://www.thedarktrumpet.com/”)
(organization “The Dark Trumpet”))))

The last thing that really needs to be done is setting up your crontab. I used the root crontab to do this, using “crontab -e” as root, then I have the following line:
/60 /opt/local/sbin/fetchnews -v -n

There is a lot about the Agile project methodology way that I despise, but short term focus goals isn’t one of them.

First, I should probably introduce the agile methodology. In project management, there are multiple ways of handling how a project is run. The agile methodology focuses heavily on minor but often corrections to a project to help facilitate communication, reduce churn (when something has to be recoded due to requirement changes), and come up with more accurate short-term timelines and less focus on the long term. I won’t get into much more about the agile methodology, but the above should sum it up well.

The part I want to focus on is how this develops focus. When I was talking to my father yesterday, he asked why I am getting rid of stuff and buying less. I told this it had to do with focus. In my free time I’m interested in the following activities: martial arts, art (book binding, drawing and painting), music (playing and listening), reading, programming side projects, doing some work for work, watching some tv/movies, motorcycle riding, language study (writing blogs, learning new languages), and volunteer work. This doesn’t even take in account that I’m a graduate student and work full time. The reason I mention all this is to really illustrate the worst case of someone who has no focus and does too much.

The agile way comes to the rescue. I first had to realize that I want to become a master at some stuff and let other stuff fall back a little. To accomplish this, I am starting (actually did this in the past too) to pick a few things of my interests to focus on for one week. After the week, I want to spend a bit on Sunday morning in a mini retrospective to come up with ways of improving a bit.

To further sticking to the goals, it’s helpful to stick all the times one will do stuff on a calendar. Even when willpower is low, the calendar helps to keep things on track. It also reinforces the thought that being successful each day.

To give my week plans, I decided to focus on martial arts, language studies, and work reading/coding. My short term goal is to do this M-F with a retrospective on Sunday. If all goes well, I’d like to keep this focus a month. 3 hours each night dedicated to this isn’t much to ask.

I focused much of this writing as in what my plans were instead of the more generic what could be done because I feel this type of thing isn’t a known science and is adaptable by the individual. I would be very interested in hearing your opinions and ideas to improve this. Please use the comment area below.

On minimizing….

I’ve been asked before two big questions. The first is why do I work to minimize my possessions/needs, and the second is how does one know when it’s taken too far? My goal is to try and answer these questions in a fairly concise way. The art of minimizing is a fairly recent one. Some people who are very well off decided that life is too complex when it comes to how much we own. Furthermore, movements such as 7-habits, GTD, “zen”, and so on – they all point to a general issue we have in life. That issue, simply, is that people tend to try and cram more and more things into their life, and need ideas on how to get more done, faster. I know a number of people who enjoy this thrill of having lots of friends, being more in the limelight, and so on – in short this sort of life style makes us feel important, needed and so on. I know people who want to go to meetings and find them helpful if for nothing else likely the reason of feeling important or moving up the corporate chain.

I’m going to address the first question now – why did I bother with this? The reason started some number of years ago, and I’ll keep the story short. I used to be, and still am in many ways, a pack rat. To those who are not familiar with this term, it’s coined as someone who tends to accumulate possessions and never lets things go. It’s a sense of security to have many things, to know that if anything arises, that you’d have all you needed and wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. This sense of security is why I also gained as much weight as I did in my younger years as well. About 8 or so years ago, I was introduced to Zen Buddhism, and practiced quite a bit. After awhile, I learned it’s not what you do only in meditation that matters, but also what one does outside of the meditation room. Much of this wisdom came, in part, from Shoken (An abbot from Ryumonji Monastery). From around that point, I began to heavily question why I needed to own as much as I had, and determined in some ways what I should do about it.

Over the past year and some, I’ve spent much of my time trying to give/donate and/or sell much of my possessions. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, but not really for the usual reasons. It wasn’t due to the fact I was inconvenienced from the less number of items, but more from looking at something and saying “Oh, I remember when I used to have fun with this…” sorta feeling. This happened a lot; but considering I haven’t seen that particular item in a number of years, it’s all the more reason why I don’t need it. I’m still working heavily on trying to get rid of other possessions I have. Random game consoles, computers, TV/couches/etc, DVDs and CDs – and so on, all are being analyzed and dealt with accordingly.

I’ve learned of some benefits I’ve gained from this way of doing things:
1. I have greater awareness of when I want something. This can be in the form of food, or whatever. In a lot of ways this drive died down a whole lot, but not in all ways (lifts ipad).
2. I am able to spend more concentrated time at home. I used to go elsewhere to concentrate, but find being at home works just as well now. I spend far less time cleaning, because I have less things to clean up after. This saves money from the coffee shop, and I really do have a much nicer work area at this point.
3. I less often come across stuff saying “I didn’t know I had this!” As I was cleaning up one area some months ago, this feeling happened a lot.
4. I spend more time on activities that matter. I have an issue where I like to do too much. I like to keep myself busy, and pride myself on not being bored. I jump around different activities like a jack rabbit. Since I removed a lot of areas that I used to do as random activities, and have further plans to remove even more – I’m spending far more time perfecting areas that I should have been doing for the past 10 years. Mostly this relates to martial arts, where at this point I’m spending a few hours a day working out/practicing.
5. I’ve learned to limit pleasure. Specifically this came in the form of video games, TV, and chatting on the net. I’ve worked at going an entire work week without Internet at home, and that’s been beneficial for me. I commonly will go a day or two without net with no issues as well.

I still have far to go though, but I am making good progress

To tackle the second question – how far is too far? This specifically came up with a coworker, when I was talking about building a PC (I have too many computers, but am thinking of settling on a PC tower and a MBP – long story). Anyways, looking at the data processing I do, he said that going the route of a PC is likely not a bad idea and would help me a lot. He brought up the idea that he knows I’m trying to minimize stuff, but when can it be taken too far?

I thought a lot about this question, both from that point, and afterwards. My initial answer was as follows: You can take it too far once it becomes uncomfortable. Upon further reflection, this isn’t entirely accurate of an answer. The reason being is that if one is comfortable, one really stops growing. This doesn’t mean the goal is to be constantly uncomfortable, but more to not be totally comfortable at the same time. This is a bit tricky because it really depends on the person for when something is taken too far. For myself, I really haven’t fully found the answer yet. I suppose, when I have enough to be happy but enough to not be distracted – that at that time it’s on the border of being taken too far. Does this mean I need that PC, and I should build it? Perhaps…but not yet, not until I finish getting rid of all but 1 of my remaining computers. When I can accomplish the idea of having just my MBP, maybe an ipod/ipod touch, and my ipad – I’ll reconsider the PC thing. I can find many ways of justifying the purchase, but in all actuality, I’ve gotten by this long without building it for now.

I hope this clarifies a bit about my position on trying to minimize my possessions. Much of my own story, I feel, is similar to what Siddhartha Gautama Buddha felt around my age some years ago when he left his life of luxury. Unlike the Buddha, I’m not really leaving a life of luxury – but instead trying to cherish fully the stuff I have and to be satisfied with that. Looking back at all this, I’m very happy to have gone this far and have much to learn.