(identity 'myron)

Sun, 09 Oct 2005

Dvorak Progress Report [/personal]

Well it seems that my wrist pains are all but gone now, but since I'm taking a three-pronged approach of exercises, periodic breaks and using the Dvorak keyboard, I don't really know which has been the most successful remedy. I am sure of a few things, though: 1.) Dvorak is by far the more comfortable layout, 2.) I can still type in QWERTY just like before switching to Dvorak, and 3.) the previous point does not apply when I'm drunk.

I've discovered that in a drunken state, I'm actually hard-wired to Dvorak and have huge difficulties typing in QWERTY. This is really odd considering how many more years I've spent with it. Something else interesting is that I never made a conscious effort to memorize either layout while learning them, but I can tell you exactly where each key lies in Dvorak and which finger to use to hit them. The same is not true of QWERTY at all, which seems to have remained with me through muscle memory alone.

It's been one week of retraining and Mavis Beacon tells me I'm at 52 wpm. Mostly fast enough to avoid getting frustrated typing over IM. But now I'm really curious how far I can go and if I can surpass my older QWERTY speed of 80-90 wpm. Time will tell.

// posted at 10:34. permalink   comments