Don’t Break my Back!!

As a researcher in computer science (who thinks a CS researcher day without any line of code is a wasted day ) I end up spending quite a bit of time sitting in front of my computer.

So far so good, till today I was young and innocent and could spend 14 hours in a raw debugging an obscure prototype in C. HOWEVER, since a while now I end up having such bad back pain that I decided to act!

What’s my point? Well I was trying to find a tool that would force me to take (short) breaks on a regular basis (let’s say every 60 minutes).
I actually found a tool that does much better, it’s a timer but also a personal trainer: StrechClock!

Every 60 minutes (you can customize that) it pops up a browser window which contains a youtube video of a one to two minutes stretching exercise demonstrated by a guy in suite (that guy is just hilarious at first!).

That great tool comes as a Vista sidebar Gadget (which I’m using) and as a igoogle gadget. It’s free but there is a cool business model behind it, the site that pops up also offers some related adds and a shopping corner, nothing intrusive and rather contextual.

Yes, it’s cool but moreover it also seems to… work! I actually started using it a week ago and I already fell the difference (nope, I don’t have any shares in that company, at least not at the time of writing).

From a technical point of view I also quite like the app since it is a nice example of a web/desktop “mashup”. The tool installed on your desktop is directly connected to a website which in turns uses youtube to display contextual content (videos). Isn’t that a nice example of the cloud?

Last note: you might end up looking really foolish doing these exercise in front of your colleagues. BUT three replies to that: 1) who will look foolish in 10 years time when they can’t bend anymore? Um? 2) let’s all use it! 3) who cares, looking foolish is cool!

Get it now: http://www.stretchclock.com/download/default.htm