Random thoughts and questions

I have to force myself to put away Salt & Vinegar Pringles, could eat an entire tube in one sitting if I didn't. This just means I eat them in two sittings, instead.

Awesome! I like droning on mine (still haven't mastered circular breathing though).

Fuck, there's a superbowl today?

So THAT'S why there's Ravens stuff everywhere, huh.

So my ex and I are going into business together. This will either be wicked awesome or a hilarious failure.

Which means I'm spending all day working hard drafting designs and prototypes, and by working hard I mean making ATASCII tilesets for Dwarf Fortress when I'm supposed to be working.


Staring at 8-bit Atari graphics in GIMP ≠ work, yet I persevere.

Is it practical and/or worth the effort to learn how to touch-type if you've been typing the 'wrong' way for 30 years? I average about 40-45 words per minute when I get a good head of steam going but part of me has always yearned to do it properly. Maybe it's my min-max nature as a gamer.

As background: I've tried Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing twice. The second time I progressed to where Mavis basically told me 'Look, you're still typing really slow. I can't move you to the next lesson unless we cheat. Do you want to cheat and move ahead even though you're still really slow?' I replied to her patronizing offer with a clumsily typed 'No!' then never loaded the program again.

Ordinarily I'd say that I doubt it's worth the time, if nothing is forcing you to. (Job-mandated split keyboards or something. God, I hate those.) I've had a slightly atypical typing setup for decades now, and while it's not quite as efficient as the Proper Way, it's fast enough and accurate enough that it doesn't irk me. And I imagine trying to relearn would be an exercise in frustration.

On the other hand, if you've got a yen for learning, eh, why not try? If Mavis Beacon isn't working for you, dig up some other teaching program, and see if it works better. At worst you've spent $20 on a game that turns out not to be much fun after all.

(Okay. At worst, you have a horrific touch-typing accident and cripple your hands forever. Which would suck. But I think the chances of that are pretty small.)

I'd say no. I took one typing class in college and did very poorly at it but proceeded to become a reasonably fast typist, probably 50-55 WPM, because I was a reporter. My technique probably isn't great, but I get the job done.

My parents and teachers always told us that we absolutely had to learn to type properly if we wanted to get a job when we were older, but I think maybe that says more about their expectations of us than actual workforce requirements. I type a metric butt-ton in my daily life (school reports plus reports for my research) and hunting and pecking while looking at the keyboard wastes some of my time but it doesn't limit me professionally. You only need to learn the right way to type if you are going to be transcribing dictation or notes, or for other incredibly specific speed-typing careers.

The proper response would have been to type: "Slowly, Ms. Beacon."

It's not like it'll change your career, but it's one of those handy high-investment, high payoff things.

The trick to learning touch typing is blind drills. Cover your hands with a cloth or piece of paper, and then have a program where you can see the keys you're supposed to be pressing and do those drills 30 minutes a day for a month. You will learn to type, so help you Mavis.

The trick to learning to touch type is to play MUDs where being able to input commands faster is an appreciable tactical advantage. Thank, Medievia, or however the fuck you're spelled; you're a shitty game, but you made me able to type!

Put it this way: you're currently driving a Geo Metro, and with just a tiny little bit of effort, you could be driving a Benz. If they could teach my whole sixth grade class to touch-type, surely a fine personage such as yourself can pick it up quickly.

a lot of the letters on my keyboard are either starting to fade away or have already done so.
I am really glad I memorized where all of the letters are before now because if I hadn't, my life would be incredibly miserable.

A, S, N, M, C, E and L are completely gone. ;~;

My previous keyboard had Q, W, E, and R completely gone.

That keyboard's seen a lot of DotA2/League of Legends.

I was watching the Superbowl, and there was a commercial with a bad cover of Smashing Pumpkin's Landslide. Turns out it was the Fleetwood Mac original. Huh.

Or you could just get this.

That's a cool keyboard. Reminds me of a Zaphod quote from Hitchhiker's Guide:

"It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me. I mean, when you try and operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you’ve done it."

I got quite competent at typing quickly (if sloppily) trying to chat while playing EQ. You could actually do that unless you played a bard, although it led to an amusingly high percentage of "mis tells." Some of which, when they ended up in guild chat, were either hilarious or excruciatingly mortifying, depending on whether you were the one who made them.

And now, hunting and pecking on my iPhone, I find that autocorrect won't let me type "mistells," instead insisting that I must mean "moist elks."

Times change.

In other news, fuck insomnia.

Absolutely not.
Unless you want to be a secretary or apply to jobs, where typing faster helps.

Don't get me wrong, it won't hurt you and being a better typist is a good thing, so if you have the time, feel like doing the work or just like that sort of work, then go for it - but as somebody who writes for a living, writing faster wouldn't benefit me in any significant way where taking the time to learn it couldn't be better used for a myriad of other things.
If I did a lot of interviews and was the kind of journalist, who likes to transcribe every word to paper before picking what quotes to use, then yes, it would help. But I'm not and I do not, so it won't (when I did interviews I took notes old school, I only taped the interview if it was a difficult subject or somehow adversarial where I was afraid the subject would later claim to have said something different).

Fuck you, Muller. You are not the European for yummy. You, sir, are no Fage.

Goddamn kids. Fuck, I'm getting old. ;(

If you're really in it for the speed, learn on Dvorak. I can't say you'd get a whole lot faster on QWERTY, and even if you could, it would take a long, long time. The whole point of QWERTY was to get people to slow down so they wouldn't jam up typewriters.

You can get Dvorak training videos on Betamax tapes, or HD-DVD if you feel more modern.

That's why no one can type faster than 45 WPM on QWERTY. :P

QWERTY may set a lower maximum theoretical typing speed, but there are plenty of people who can hammer out 70-90 WPM on QWERTY. DVORAK increases that maximum but it in no way is easier to learn or conducive expediting to the learning process, especially if you already have a fairly functional grasp of QWERTY.

This is partly a myth and all tests I've seen show no real measurable benefits in DVORAK over QWERTY - geeks just love it, because it appeals to their sense of neat logic.

My mother typed over 100 wpm on a IBM Selectric in the '60s. I'm still amazed at that.

Yes, I know. I am one of those people, and it took me 10 years to get to 90wpm with no errors. Most of the time though I sit around 80wpm, which is fine since I don't do much transcribing and my brain doesn't come up with words fast enough for me to need to type that quickly.

Offered without comment:

The Typing of the Dead.

Ditto. I wouldn't say it took 10 years. I had a typing class in junior high which got me to probably 60+ WPM and then I got faster gradually with time.

I'd do better on typing tests but the damn things tend to ding you for fixing errors as you type, and I can't get over the urge to hit the backspace key when I know I've hit the wrong letter, so that tends to slow me down in addition to adding to my error rate. Nonetheless:

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 411
Words Per Minute (WPM): 82
Time (seconds): 105
Errors: 59 (8.21%)

I'd have to guess that in a typing test that lets me fix errors as I go, I'd be around 60-70 WPM with 100% accuracy in the end.

Ugh, I hate the ones that won't let me hit backspace. The highlighting slowed me down a bit too; I read whole words, not individual characters, so I got confused a few times at where I actually was in my head vs. on the keyboard, if that makes any sense.

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 445
Words Per Minute (WPM): 89
Time (seconds): 101
Errors: 7 (0.93%)

When I finished my high school typing class, I was barely at 30wpm. I guess I just had an awful learning curve. The coolest thing though was the "keyboard condoms" that covered up the characters. Unlearning hunt-and-peck was something I struggled with, and I wouldn't have made it if we hadn't had those for our class.

We used the old IBM Selectrics (which were responsible for starting my love of typography, incidentally) with a manila folder taped over the keyboard, so you had to type not only where you couldn't see the keys or your hands, but with your hands hitting that damn cover every time. Our teacher kept saying "Use only your fingertips to depress the keys" - yeah, well, not everyone's hands WORK THAT WAY, dick. So as a result I developed a weird hand position where I type mostly with middle and ring finger while using my index fingers almost exclusively for the number keys. I still average around 65-70 words a minute, which is fine since it is not 1964 and I am not a secretary taking live dictation.

Yeah, that was just the first test I found. I hated the highlighting and the backspace bullshit. Nice error rate despite that!

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 485
Words Per Minute (WPM): 97
Time (seconds): 93
Errors: 49 (6.52%)

AMATEURS AGAIN. And I haven't even had my coffee yet.

Please.

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 603
Words Per Minute (WPM): 121
Time (seconds): 74
Errors: 36 (4.84%)

edit - Ooh the one about touch typing is much easier than the one about DNA.

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 666
Words Per Minute (WPM): 133
Time (seconds): 63
Errors: 28 (4.01%)

I don't think I'm getting to #1, but I'll settle with #2.

Were there different scripts? I did the one about the three branches of government. That one was rough.

Damn. This was on the "mobile phone" test:

Keystrokes Per Minute (KPM): 544
Words Per Minute (WPM): 109
Time (seconds): 81
Errors: 27 (3.68%)

Yeah I think it's randomized every time you load the test.

Damn. That kind of defeats its usefulness for comparing between people. Ideally, we'd all take a test with the same text.