I’ll bet that I type faster than you. Not that I’m the fastest typist in the world or anything but just compared to the average typist I’m pretty quick. In speed typing tests I run in the high 50s to low 60s with an average of 2-3 mistakes per minute. (Here’s a good place to take a typing test.)

The reason I type fast and accurately is that I use the Dvorak keyboard layout. Simply put, it’s a keyboard layout that takes advantage of common letter combinations and frequency of use to optimally position the keys for speed an accuracy. You can read much more about the details at Wikipedia.org.

I learned about the Dvorak keyboard layout during my first year at Northern Arizona University. As a Philosophy and History major I had to write a lot of papers so I was already a pretty fast typist. As soon as I finished my last exam for the Fall semester I converted my keyboard over to Dvorak and used small sticky labels to label my keyboard according to the new layout. During the Christmas break I practiced for about 30 minutes a day just copying text from books or whatnot. Buy the time the Spring semester started up I was able to type almost as fast on Dvorak as I could with qwarty Within a few weeks I had far surpassed my qwerty speeds and my typos dropped dramatically. (Didn’t do anything to help my spelling though.)

I didn’t run into any problems until I got my first job out of college doing HTML markup. (How a Philosophy and History major ended up doing HTML markup is another story.) The problem would be that when someone wanted to come over to my PC and work with me I would have to switch back and forth with the keyboard layouts. We were using Windows 2000 at work so this wasn’t exactly easy to do. My manager really freaked every time it came up.

When I started learning the Dvorak layout I had anticipated that my qwarty skills would remain roughly the same. That it would be like speaking two languages. In practice though it hasn’t worked out that way. Today for me to type on a qwerty keyboard is pretty much hunt-and-peck. That really sucks because I spend a decent amount of time at other PCs helping my coworkers with their Actionscript coding. I believe that if I practiced I could get my qwerty speed up a little but it will always be hunt-and-peck.

With Windows XP it is very easy to convert from one keyboard layout to another if you set it up that way. And XP, for better or worse, applies the keyboard layout on a per application basis. That means that I could be helping someone in Flash using the Dvorak layout and they could switch over to Outlook and reply to an email in qwerty. You can do this with keyboard shortcuts that you set up or leave by placing the language bar on the task bar.

I was also very happy to discover that Ubuntu supports the Dvorak layout. It was surprisingly simple to switch over.

I’ve continued to use the standard keyboards that everyone else uses. On a few occasions I have tried to re-order the keys but that never works. On my Dell laptop I was able to re-order a few of the keys like “[, ], /, =, \” etc. Those are the ones that give me the biggest problems.

Obviously with Dvorak you don’t look at the keyboard to type. In fact, if you asked me to point to what would be the “j” key on Dvorak I wouldn’t be able to tell you. That’s a bit of a downside when it comes to things like Photoshop. I’m big on keyboard shortcuts so if I want the crop tool I have to hit the “i” key, which is Dvorak for “c”. So you can see where I’m going with this. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard then sometimes it’s hard to find a key by sight. Most of the common ones I know but a lot of the time I have to put both hands on the keyboard just to find the “k” key. That part sucks. That’s also why I would love to have that LED Keyboard!

I’m still glad that I switched over. The speed and comfort with which I can type more than makes up for the drawbacks. And if I can ever get my hands on a good Dvorak keyboard that has the same split design as the ones I’m used to then I’ll jump all over it. (I use the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.)

Oh, and the really fun part of using Dvorak is watching someone sit down and try to type who doesn’t know that I’ve switched. I love watching them go through that WTF moment. I’ve actually suffered that myself in reverse when I typed in a system password, thinking that I was in Dvorak but not. And then trying to figure out later what I had typed. That was a real mess.

Here’s a cool article about the future of TV.

How Battlestar Galactica killed Broadcast TV (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html)

Here’s a quote from the article. My comments, for what they’re worth, are below.

Widespread piracy of television programming has short-circuited this process, connecting the producer directly to the audience. As yet there are no viable economic models connecting the television producer directly to the audience. Industry pundits talk about audiovisual downloads through some system like Apple’s iTunes Music Store, and perhaps we’ll see something like this in the near future, but this works against the simple fact that people do not expect to pay for television programs. People will pay for movies, when they choose to pay for movies, but they won’t pay for television programming. Not if they can get it for free. The audience is not at all involved in the economic value chain of television production; that’s been the rule for a half-century. It’s reasonable to presume that any attempt to change the economic behavior of the audience is doomed to failure.

I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and I watch it every week. But never on TV. I haven’t seen a single episode via broadcast TV. I began, as the author above mentioned, downloading each episode with eMule - an open source P2P program.

I really can’t stand to watch broadcast TV with all the commercials. It interrupts the flow of the story and is just a plane nuance. But, until recently a necessary one. As the author mentions. The economic model is based on producer, distributor, sponsors, audience.

But the author doesn’t think that there is any way to eliminate the middle man - distributor and sponsors. He doesn’t think that people will pay for a TV show. Of course he wrote that before iTunes began selling episodes of BSG the day after they aired.

I could still download each episode from Bit Torrent or eMule or something similar. But that takes time. Once the episode runs it takes a few hours for someone, usually a few people, to make their copies available. Then they begin to spread, slowly at first but picking up speed exponentially as more and more people have the bits to share. In my experience with a variety of shows that I watched in this manner I would say that on average I could watch the show in question about 36 hours after it aired - give or take. But sometimes I would download a file that was frakked up and have to start over. It didn’t happen often but it was a real nuance when it did.

Now that iTunes and Google are making TV shows available I have a reliable source to download from. And for $2 it’s a bargain. Not only do I get the show that I want to watch, without commercials, but I also get something that I can watch repeatedly if I want. But you know what is best about all this? I get to support the creator of the show. I’m voting with my money and telling them that I love their show. I hope that enough people are downloading to provide a revenue stream that will allow them to keep the show running indefinitely.

Chris Jordan’s presentation at TED is sobering. I’m not up to date in the field of contemporary art but I can’t imagine that there is a more important artist for our time. His message to try and help us understand our culture better so that we might consciously change is exactly what we need.

On a tangential note: I used to play the game Civilization II for hours. ( Civ is a simulation game where you manage the development of a civilization from huts to space ships. ) I found it fascinating to manage the growth of a civilization. Although climate, and the number of competing civilizations, were the biggest factors in how a game began they all ended the same for me. By the 1500s I would have dominated the world and from there all my time was spent building a vast, sprawling civilization that transformed every inch of the land into a city. It’s just what I did.

But the simulation is very good. Near the end all my efforts in managing the civilization were in effect to clean up the mess that I created to get to that point. In the game industrialization comes at the cost of, you guessed it, global warming. So once industrialization was well under way I had access to create solar plants and recycling centers.

By the very end of the game every city had maxed out its productivity, taxes were set to practically nothing, and there was no military. It took a huge management effort to get my civilization to that point but that’s what always happened.

Oddly enough I think that’s why I’m optimistic that we’ll reach that same state in our real civilization. But there was one major difference: I was the benevolent despot that managed single handedly. Any chance we could manage that in a global civilization with conflicting cultures and governments?

Check this out: Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have produced the highest recorded temperature ever - 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit (2 billion K). This is the same lab that secretly recreated the Flux capacitor allthough publicly they still deny it.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7002721793

When I think about these scientists working/playing with the Z-machine I think of little boys out in the back yard with a magnifying lens burning leaves, ants, ect. Now that they are older and smarter they have a much bigger magnifying lens but they are still just playing. Any one see Real Genius? You get the picture. (Tell me guys, was it like lazing a stick of dynamite?)

There’s a big difference between a site that doesn’t work/look right in FireFox and one that actively disables the use of FireFox. I had that happen with McAfee. I recieved an email stating that my virus protection was about to expire. I followed a link in the email to purchase a renewal and got a message that I couldn’t use FF. I was frakking pissed. This wasn’t some complex AJAX site. It was a simple click and purchase. I went ahead and used IE to make the renewal after bugging customer support for a few weeks. In the end it was just to much effort to switch virus protection apps vs the simplicity of renewing but I know that I will NEVER put McAfee on another PC.

The parable of this post: Disable FireFox at your own peril.

I checked my site stats and about 90% of my visitors use FireFox. This is my third month writing this blog and I’m getting roughly 1000 unique visitors a month.

You almost have to expect results like these for things like security software and such – though Norton is WAY over the top. But why in the world should Yahoo Instant Messenger make such a hit on boot time?

Check out this new digital camera by Seitz: The Seitz 6×17 D3 digital scan back.

Here’s what you could do with this camera:
You could easily make a 12′ by 4′ print. That’s 12 FEET by 4 FEET.

If your car battery dies you could use your digital camera to give yourself a jump.

You’d have a really good excuse to get that terabit flash card.

If you wanted to take a group portrait of EVERYONE - 6,649,000,000 people - and each person got just one pixel then you would only need to take 42 photos to get everyone in the photo.

If you could take photos continually, 1/sec, for just 2 hours and 42 minutes you would have a digital collection roughly the size of the Library of Congress - 10 terabytes.

You would need 8 Apple Cinema Displays ( 2560×1600 px ) walled together to see every pixel.

It is estimated that if you had a Dell XPS 700, with a dual core 3.73 Intel chip, 4Gig DDR2 RAM, and a 1TB RAID 0 it would take 2.58 times the current age of the universe to stitch together the aforementioned group photo. (or you could wait a couple of years and get a top of the line desktop running Ubuntu and get the job done in an afternoon.)

Samsung has a new monitor.

I just took a quiz over at QuizFarm to see which crew I would best fit in with. Looks like I’m most like Mal, which isn’t half bad.

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) The universe is erupting into war and your government picks the wrong side. How much worse could things get? It doesn’t matter, because no matter what you have your friends and you’ll do the right thing. In the end that will be all that matters. Now if only the Psi Cops would leave you alone. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 94% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) 88% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 75% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 69% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Moya (Farscape) 56% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 44% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 25%

I just took a quiz over at QuizFarm about which crew I would most fit in with on a SciFi spaceship. It looks like I’m most like Mal, which isn’t half bad.

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) The universe is erupting into war and your government picks the wrong side. How much worse could things get? It doesn’t matter, because no matter what you have your friends and you’ll do the right thing. In the end that will be all that matters. Now if only the Psi Cops would leave you alone. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 94% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) 88% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 75% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 69% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Moya (Farscape) 56% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 44% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 25%