Tag Archives: Geek

Dvorak and Writing: A Love Postponed

February 12, 2010

My courtship with the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout has come to a sad end. I was Dvorak only for most of a month at home. I hated it. Typing was painfully slow, and I made many typos. Going from 70 words per minute down to 8 is more frustrating than I though possible.

Most annoying was feeling slow of thought. I think quickly. I’m sure I’m not alone. Neither my mouth nor my fingers can keep up with my thinking, which results in strange typos and misspoken sentences. Slowing my typing down also slowed down my thinking. I had to mentally back up and repeat things constantly because my hands had no hope of keeping up. It made me feel slow, thick and stupid. That feeling frustrated me more than the actual slowness of typing.

Then, I began to get better. I could see how Dvorak could be more efficient. I could type entire sentences without my fingers ever having to leave the home row. I became eager for more. In the evenings, I practiced typing exercises.

During the day, my job continued its constant demand for correspondence. And reports. And status updates. I set up my work keyboard for Dvorak as well, but I wasn’t getting everything done. I would have had to work double shifts each day to write everything I needed to write, if I continued to use Dvorak at my current speed.

So at work, I used Qwerty, and at home I used Dvorak. Both suffered. My typing at work was slower because the newly forming muscle memory for Dvorak clashed with Qwerty. And my progress on Dvorak slowed dramatically because I was reinforcing the Qwerty habits more than I was the Dvorak.

Dvorak will have to wait for now. Perhaps when I have a vacation, or a slow time at work, I can take it up again. The time to relearn how to type is a luxury I don’t have now.

Here are a few things you should consider before making the Dvorak plunge yourself.

  1. Work – The one thing I saw coming and the one thing that brought this to an end. If your work requires a lot of writing, then finding the time to devote a month to Dvorak may be very difficult for you. It may not even be possible at work, depending on the applications with which you have to work. Older operating systems and applications may not support Dvorak without a Dvorak wired keyboard, and those are expensive.
  2. Gaming – This one I should have seen coming. A lot of game functions are based on the position of keys, not the letter on the keys. Pressing ‘I’ for inventory is no harder in Dvorak. Using WASD for up, left, down and right becomes impossible. There are numerous workarounds, but none I tried were very elegant. Changing the keys in every game you play would be too much trouble. Setting them to default to Qwerty works, but then you have issues when you have to “Press ‘C’ for character info.” A friend recommended I try an AutoHotKey script to manage keyboard layouts for applications. I didn’t get to this before giving up on Dvorak. I may try it next time.
  3. PC sharing – My learning Dvorak was a pain for my Amy. If you share your computer, then switching to Dvorak becomes a bother for anyone else using it. I set the PC so it could switch between layouts, but it still caused her problems. Individual profiles would help, but someone will always be forced to use a keyboard with a mismatched layout.
  4. Smart phones – Once you’ve adjusted to Dvorak, the Qwerty keyboard on smart phones will trip you up. My iPhone doesn’t support a Dvorak layout. I expect it isn’t on the upcoming iPad either. This may be a problem on other smart phones as well. I expect it’s not supported on Blackberries with physical keyboards.  Something else to keep in mind if you are a gadgetphile like me.
  5. Confused looks – Be ready to explain to a lot of people why your keyboard looks so funny and why you are trying to learn a new one. A surprising number of people in my tech company were totally unaware of Dvorak. Even among those who knew what Dvorak is, many saw no point in learning it.

I’ll write on this again when I get the chance to take up Dvorak once more. In the mean time, if you’ve taken the Dvorak challenge, share your insights in the comments.

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How to Kill that Time Wasting Website

January 8, 2010

In 2010, I intend to waste less time on websites that really don’t benefit me. Aggregate media sites tear huge chunks out of my free time, and I get very little out of that spent time. Wasted time aside, sometimes the stories linked from these sites affect me negatively. Does hearing about police brutality nine states away improve anyone’s day?

These sites suck away time that could be spent doing something worthwhile or enjoyable. Even just sleeping would be more beneficial, since they often grab me late at night, when I’m just fuzzy headed enough not to realize how much time I’m spending.

clorful cablesTo reclaim that time for writing and other activities, I’ve blocked those sites on my computers. It can be done easily and doesn’t require you to buy expensive software. 

The key to blocking these sites easily is the hosts file. Hosts is a file that Windows and Linux (and I’m going to guess Mac) use to map host names to IP addresses. Normally, when you type www.google.com into your address bar, your computer asks your internet service provider where to go. They point your computer to Google’s servers. However, when you type in an address that is in your hosts file, your computer goes where the file tells it instead.

To begin, you need to open your hosts file in a text editor. In Windows 7 or Vista, you’ll need to start notepad with administrator rights. In Windows 7, the hosts file should be found in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\. In earlier versions of Windows, it should be in a similar location. Just do a file search for “hosts” without the quotes, if you’re having trouble finding it. In Linux, you can edit hosts using gedit with super user or root privileges. The file is usually found at /etc/hosts.

Now that you have your hosts file open, you need to add these two lines at the bottom.

127.0.0.1   www.nameoftimewastingsite.com
127.0.0.1   nameoftimewastingsite.com

Now save the file, and your browsers will no longer be able to go to that webpage. The 127 IP address points your browser back at your own computer instead. If you need to unlock the site again, just delete these lines from the file or place ‘#’ symbols at the beginning of each line. A ‘#’ tells the computer to ignore this line.

If blocking the site permanently is more extreme than you’d like, you could try an add-on to your browser, such as LeechBlock for Firefox. LeechBlock and add-ons like it allow you to block particular sites for a set amount of time or a set schedule. You could have it block the affronting site during your best writing hours, but leave them available at other times of the day.

Just by blocking a few websites I often went to out of boredom, I’ve already reclaimed several hours that would have been lost to random browsing. The new year is just a week old now. By 2011, the time reclaimed will really add up.

Do you use any tools or tricks to limit aimless browsing and distractions when you’re on the computer? If you have a neat trick to share, let us know in the comments.

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The Physics of Writing

December 17, 2009

bouldering_shrunk There is one definite thing that I have learned in trying to become a writer: Writing has inertia. “Writing has no mass!”, the geek inside me complains, “Therefore it cannot have inertia.” Still, inertia is the most fitting description of my experience with writing so far.

Early on, I put great effort into my writing. I wrote often, and thought about it more. I finished my first story and wrote for my blog often. I frantically scribbled down notes for other stories. All this was building up the writing inertia.

Then, I let life get in the way, and I stopped pushing so hard. For a time, the writing pushed me instead. It drew me to write when I maybe wasn’t focused or in the mood, much as merry-go-round will drag or carry you once you’ve spun it up. But each day, I put less into my writing, and it slowed down until it came to rest.

Newton would tell you, if he could bothered and wasn’t dead, that any object at rest will stay at rest until acted upon by an outside force. This blog post is that outside force, my first shove to get the weight of writing going again.

Like any object, I can accelerate my writing with either a large force over a short time, or a small force over a long time. Both achieve the same momentum in the end. Last time, I chose the large force over a short time. And last time that momentum was undone by small forces over time.

This time, I will try to build my momentum with small forces. With a small but constant effort, I may be able to build my momentum without exhausting myself as I did then.

So again, it comes down to what so many others have said in blogs and books. Write every day. If you will be a writer, you must write every day. Practice writing every day. You may build the momentum of your writing how you will, through great effort quickly or through constant steady work, but once that momentum is built, you must use that constant work to maintain that energy.

Write every day. If you are not writing, you are not a writer.

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Call It a Moral Victory

September 29, 2009

I run Ubuntu on my netbook. I wanted something lighter than windows Vista since netbooks don’t have much power. I’m also a proponent of Open Source / Free Software.

For most of my needs, Ubuntu works out just fine. It does all my email, web browsing, tweeting, etc. like a charm. The big problem I was running into was no decent blogging software. I had started using Live Writer on my desktop machine, and really liked it. I wanted something like that on the laptop as well.

Unfortunately, most of the blogging software for Linux is less than stellar at this point. I admit I didn’t try them all, and I’ve heard some good things about Bilbo Blogger.

However, today I was struck by the blindingly obvious. Use Live Writer in Linux. A little homework showed that it wouldn’t work in WINE, the compatibility layer Linux uses to run some Windows programs. But it will work in VirtualBox.

VirtualBox seals off a small portion of your computer to run another operating system at the same time as your main operating system. In this case, Linux running a small copy of Windows as another program. That copy of Windows is what I use to run Live Writer.

A little more tweaking, and it my desktop looks like some Frankenstein’s Monster of operating systems, with both Windows and Ubuntu menus at the same time.

I’m a little disappointed that I had to resort to a non-free solution. At least my computer is still running under a free operating system. It’s a victory in principle if nothing else.

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