Some of you may have seen a photo or know that I have been trying out standing at my desk recently. Here are some of my thoughts after a week.

Findings:

• Love how it has improved my posture. Feels great for my back and my shoulders.
• I don’t slouch like I did in a chair. No more resting my elbow on the chair or my desk.
• Can’t get as sleepy as I could sitting in a chair.
• Feels like I have better blood flow and generally feel more active.
• Legs and feet get sore after a while.
• Would be really great to have a tall stool to rest my legs and feet throughout the day.
• I’ve heard that a padded mat will help some with the feet hurting.
• I find myself wanting to continue to stand at my desk even when my feet and legs are tired.
• Many people within WCG and outside WCG on my social networks have either asked questions or shared their love for standing at their desk.

Insights:

• Based on reactions and questions, I think there is a lot of interest both internally to WCG and outside of WCG for working at a desk while standing.
• I believe that standing at my desk has made me somewhat more productive in my work day because I don’t get as sleepy and I feel more active throughout the day.
• I also believe that I continue to want to stand at my desk because of how good my posture feels standing at my desk versus sitting.
• Working at a desk may not be feasible for everyone since it does put a fair amount of stress on the feet and legs. Some may be able to stand for longer periods at a time than others. I think the key for some will be to have a tall stool so they can gradually work up to standing and working for long periods of time.

The next step for me is to get a tall stool to be able to rest my feet and legs throughout the day as they get tired. I may also want to look into a standing pad to reduce the stress on my feet. Standing has been worth the effort and I recommend it to anyone looking to improve their posture and their general health while at work.

Found a great motivational post, “Fail Upwards“, that I wanted to put on my motivation board on Pinterest. Clicked my “Pin it” bookmarklet to pin the post but was greeted with this sad message:

If you want your content to be sharable on the booming social sharing site, Pinterest, then include a related and cool looking image to go with it! … or just include a cool photo ; )

This blog post isn’t so much about programming or the technical stuff I deal with day to day but I feel that it is important enough to share it here. If these two videos are not viewable on your device I apologize.

The next video is on the New York Times Opinions Page. I don’t agree with A.C. Graylings statement that there is not God but I like the rest of what he says. You can read about it and watch it at http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/10/31/opinion/100000001141283/ac-grayling.html

Recently used PHP’s simpleXML to parse through a blogs RSS feed. The parsing worked great and it was simple and clean. Only problem was that the XML nodes that contained colons in the name were being discarded by simpleXML. Example:

<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>

Not sure if this is a bug, error, or what but it was causing me grief. I haven’t been able to find others on the web complaining of this but my own solution was to remove the colons and traverse accordingly. I wrote a function that takes the feed as a string and returns the string with all colons inside tag names removed.

function removeColonsFromRSS($feed) {
    // pull out colons from start tags
    // (<\w+):(\w+>)
    $pattern = '/(<\w+):(\w+>)/i';
    $replacement = '$1$2';
    $feed = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $feed);
    // pull out colons from end tags
    // (<\/\w+):(\w+>)
    $pattern = '/(<\/\w+):(\w+>)/i';
    $replacement = '$1$2';
    $feed = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $feed);
    return $feed;
}