July 19, 2000

New keyboard, overlapping projects, web searches

Went down to DC for a couple days for work stuff. Looks like we'll be rolling out the framework sooner than I thought, and for a site I've been working on since mid-1995. Neat.

When I got home the new Kinesis Ergo keyboard I ordered had arrived, and I'm using it now. It's very humbling to not only have to teach my hands (and wrists, and fingers) what do to again, but also to realize that certain motions I have always done were, in the touch-typing sense, wrong. For instance, since the keyboard is split into left- and right-hand sides, I can't cheat anymore with the middle keys (y and n, in particular) with the wrong hand. I also had a tendency to chord certain uppercase letters with the same hand -- definite no-no.

General typing speed (not using any funny characters, just 'letter' typing is not bad after an hour or so of practice. However, I suspect that many of the single-hand chording incidences will appear when I start coding (perl) in xemacs :)

Also got a couple out-of-the-blue net things recently. deusx sent an email and said he'd heard about SPOPS and was curious if/how it overlapped with Iaido. Since that isn't really discussed anywhere except here, I assume that he found it through the diary entries. It also lights a fire under my ass to actually release the stuff as a proper project.

And a fellow navy brat from my youth (as in 6 or 7 and earlier, since our dads knew each other) was poking around the web for her name (who hasn't done that? be honest) and found a story I'd written which had her name it it. Funny. Even funnier is that she lives in the D.C. area. Everyone seems to pass through that place at some point in their lives...

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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