I have been suffering a relatively severe pain in my right leg for the past four months or so. If I walk more than two or three hundred feet it starts in my hip and rapidly works its way down to my lower calf. Nothing worked to fix it except to get the weight off the leg for a few minutes, then the pattern would repeat.

Tiring of doctors, SWMBO dragged me to a physical therapist who quickly diagnosed it is sciatica caused by muscle fibrosis around the nerve sheath. Sounds bogus to me, except that the treatment has been miraculously efficacious. [Hah! Efficacious - first time the word has been used on the bbs! I rock! ] After the first treatment I have been pain-free for the first time in months. The treatment consists of incredibly painful deep massage to break up the fibrosis. To give a bit of perspective here, I have been told by numerous people that I have an extraordinarily high pain tolerance level, and this treatment pegs out at 10 on the pain scale. This therapist can feel the fibrosis with his fingertips (very bad, "muy mala en cada pierna") whereas I can feel nothing out of the ordinary, but he unerringly and without fail goes immediately to the most painful spot. I appreciate very much that he is willing and able to cause serious pain as a necessity for the treatment, as opposed to an ineffective regime that might allow his victims err, clients a degree of comfort.

He says he has seen my problem often enough to be quite confident that the root cause was sitting immobile in front of my computer for hours at a time without ever leaving my chair. When I get engrossed in something (such as my budget spreadsheet or my home design program) I have been known to sit for six or more hours without a break. He says he will fix the fibrosis, but if I don't change my habits the problem will return.

He wants me, without fail, to get out of my chair and stretch every 40 minutes; after three hours of this to stretch every 30 minutes. Just a brief break - 10 or 15 seconds is all. I will not think to do this unless I have a repetitive reminder.

Is there some simple way to have a pop-up reminder accompanied by an audio sound (like a bell) show up on my screen at 40 minute intervals? And even get fancy and go to 30 minute intervals after three hours? I would need to be able to reset the start time of the routine whenever I started working with the computer.

I don't know if this would be an application, or if there is something in the OS (like Task Scheduler) that would do the job. Probably an application...

tanstaafl.