The iPad Experience Part 3 - Watch Your Posture, Kid!

Don't you get that a lot, especially during the early life of schooling where the teacher would comment things like "sit straight!", "don't slouch!", et cetera, et cetera? Parents would not hesitate to give us a lesson about postures if we were found lazing around being a couch potato!

Fast forward a few decades and here I am NOT sitting very properly typing this blogpost on an iPad using the Blogger app (that's really made for the iPhone actually). Only a month or so ago when I first got the iPad, my attention was so fully into the device that I did not realise I was actually reading and playing games for hours off it with my head down until I had to put it down and go grab a bite. My upper back (or whatever you call the area around the shoulder blades) hurt so much that the pain lasted for a few days!

On another incident (which I still frequently go), I was lazily slouching on the chair with my legs up on ANOTHER chair that when I finally got up, my legs and back were numb, feeling like I'm a thousand years old! The problem wasn't so bad during the days of the desktop because I had to sit upright to be able to look at the monitor. Things started to go downhill when desktop became laptop where the head had to be tilted downwards to look at the screen. There was still salvation then because I could still occasionally attach the laptop to the external monitor.

So, folks, be careful how you sit or lie down when using the iPad or ANY tablet... Especially if you are way passed your teens! The tablet is here to finish what the TV started!

#

A close friend recently asked me what is the name for #. My immediate answer was "hash". Apparently, the most common name these days is its social media one called the "hashtag". Besides that, I remembered a teacher once told me this symbol on the phone is called the "pound" sign which leads to its origin. According to this article in Dictionary.com's iOS app (which I am going to further dilute here), its real name was invented by Bell Laboratories scientists whom placed this symbol into the telephone to send instructions through. The name is... "Octothorpe".

How they came up with the name is unclear but "octo" came up because of its eight sides. Now that we know its real name, we can confidently call it the Octothorpe and repeat it really quickly 10 times with our noses pointing high up into the air. Heck, I'm tempted to call me self the blogger known as Octothorpe.