There's occasionally a "what should I do with my life?" advice thread, so I'm guessing this is okay here. My girlfriend of 18-months is returning to Osaka this week, and it's kind of hit home that I need to try doing something positive.

I have a computer science degree, but I've suffered (badly) with RSI for years. Since this means I basically can't write/type, I've never actually had a programming job, or any job with any kind of prospects.

I did CELTA this year hoping to teach English, but I started worrying about things like marking work and writing on the board. From what I read, it also seems like a dead-end job, which is far from motivating. I was also pondering translation in the future, but that doesn't seem like such a promising idea either.

I started private physiotherapy last month (the delay is mainly thanks to misplaced faith in the NHS), and I use Dragon productively to type English. It occurred to me that maybe I could do something in software development (perhaps after an MSc) away from the code, but apparently that's not at all likely. I really can't imagine anything I could do using Dragon as a crutch, but at the same time it seems like there must be something.

So, I was wondering if anyone here has any ideas or information. Do you know anyone who suffered and maybe even recovered from RSI? Anyone who works with voice recognition? Other places to find advice about this sort of thing? What would you do in my situation? Anything you can think of is welcome.

Sorry for the wall of text (I trimmed it as much as much as I could ).

Check Workrave. It's a program that forces you to stop at intervals you can adjust and guides you into doing some exercises to protect you from RSI.

In the Wikipedia article about RSI there are lots of info an links, probably you can find something there.

BTW, from what it says in Wikipedia, I understand that RSI is a reversible condition, are there cases where it can't be reversed. In other words, can you get permanent RSI if you don't take care of yourself?

I think the answer to that is "it depends". There are a number of different underlying medical conditions that get labelled "RSI", not all of them very well understood. But I think that mostly things are triggered by particular actions so to the extent that you can stop doing those things you can avoid the problem.

Personally I have ended up putting up with a certain amount of pain and trying to manage things to avoid it being too bad. (for instance laptop keyboards are very bad for me, I have a kinesis keyboard which I think helps a bit) I did use dragon for a while but found it incredibly frustrating.

Are you any good at writing documentation? Good technical authors are hard to find because ideally they need both the language skills and the technical background to actually understand what they're documenting rather than mangling it. I'd guess that that would be a bit more amenable to using dragon for most of your input.

You might want to try the usual career guidance stuff (what colour is my parachute etc) to see if there's anything non computer related you would enjoy doing.

Oh, at one point there was a project called VoiceCode aimed at letting you dictate (python) code via Dragon (demo youtube movie), but it looks like it's died and the project website has gone. Code still available from sourceforge, though I never really got it working cleanly. (I think it suffered from the problem that the only people interesting in working on it would be those unable to do much coding...)

Javizy Wrote:I have a computer science degree, but I've suffered (badly) with RSI for years. Since this means I basically can't write/type, I've never actually had a programming job, or any job with any kind of prospects.

I feel for you man. I was in the exact same situation as you six years ago. I just graduated with a computer science degree and within six months both of my hands were seriously messed. And unfortunately the doctor's advice made it worse...

anyways, what I did was look back on my life and saw what I enjoyed. I was a math tutor back in college, so I decided I would go back to school to become a math teacher. It was a good decision although a challenging one....

basically my problem was RSI in both of my wrists. During my first full-time contract as a teacher I further developed tendinitis in both elbows (still a major problem three years later). Point being, push for your rights and make sure you get for ergonomic accomodations.

From that I learned that full-time work as a teacher with all the marking and stuff like that is beyond me.

I do very well having a regular teaching job on one day and then substitute teaching on every second day. My body seems to hold up well to that.

I am definitely enjoying my new career but at the same time I do really miss coding while listening to trance music. I will always have nostalga for that


If you're wondering specifically about the demands of teaching, I'll list them below. Most of it just has to do with minimizing hand use:

1) writing on the board or overhead is not too bad, but I always do my notes for the kids with handouts. So for example things like word problems and whatnot, that's already typed out for the kids, so they only have to fill in the work for the problem.
2) marking is a serious pain in the but. I need to be very economical with it. My left hand is in better shape than my right (I am right-handed) so usually marked with my left hand. My checkmarks are just single lines (no hooks) in order to use my hands less. I also will not put checkmarks and X's on the same page. I just choose the one that needs less hand use.

That's all I can think of specifically at the moment, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask Javizy