blogwaffe

Jeff points out that

3M is donating 50 cents to City of Hope for each of the first 200,000 notes posted on its website. It literally takes fifteen seconds.

There’s currently 108,619 notes, and the effort ends on October 31, so get to it!

As you may have heard on the streets, I’ve been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for some time now. I started after spookily hearing several Dvorak tales (most notably from Ellen and Matt) within just a few days of one another; clearly it was a sign from the heavens. The switch on my laptop is now permanent; the meticulously placed sticky notes I had pasted to each of the keys on my laptop have now been removed, and the keys themselves have been ripped out and put back in their new positions. It is the beginning of a new era.

Though I’ve not gauged it in a long while, I bet my words per minute is in the triple digits on a QWERTY keyboard. You may, then, wonder how fast I can type on the new layout. Not too quickly, as it turns out, though I have gotten dramatically better over the past two weeks. So what’s the advantage? Far less hand and finger movement. I still make lots of typos and I’m yet fairly slow, but I imagine those things will continue to improve whereas the reduced hand stress was an immediate benefit.

And speaking of lots of typos, it’s been really interesting to see what kind of typos I most regularly make. The most common, obviously, is hitting a letter’s QWERTY position instead of its Dvorak position; “s” is particularly dangerous in that regard. More surprising are the ‘look ahead’ typos (hitting the key that should come immediately after the one I actually want), and the ’second order’ typos. The latter only happened during the first week or so but were truly bizarre and came in two different varieties. The first was the ‘flip-flop’. Suppose I need to hit the “i” key. On a Dvorak keyboard, the “c” key sits where a Qwertyst might expect the “i” to be. A flip-flop typo would therefore be hitting the “j” key which is the key occupying the “c” position on a QWERTY keyboard: second order. The second sort of second order typo I call the ‘flop-flip’. It’s the same except that the error pattern is Dvorak-QWERTY-Dvorak instead of QWERTY-Dvorak-QWERTY as is the case for the flip-flop.

Additionally, some letter combinations, like “or”, are more deeply QWERTY ingrained in my mind than others and, indeed, more so than their constituent letters are by themselves.

In short, the process is still in the ‘adventure’ stage.

I have joined the ranks of responsible citizens of this great nation we call .us. I have been summoned for jury duty (which seems to be called “jury service” in LA county). Following Jeff’s and Heidi’s lead, I’ll be going down to the courthouse sometime during the week of September 19th. It seems the lot of us that got .ca.us IDs around the same time are starting to get drawn. I’d be interested to hear if other generations of caltech grad students experienced something similar.

I had thought about postponing my service on the grounds I’ll be both teaching and taking classes around that time. I decided, though, that I’d rather shuffle my teaching schedule and miss a couple classes than serve after the term was over (you can only postpone a maximum of ninety days: Christmas); it seems a smaller inconvenience.

What amazes me, though, about the process so far is that I was required to register via telephone after receiving my summons. No online registration? Get with the times, LA.

I know you’ve always wanted to post on blogwaffe. Or perhaps you’ve dreamed of publishing content on Apparent Horizons or \_jeff_{krimmel}.

Well you can’t.

Sukah.

But you can hit up the next big thing (next great American novel, big) over at email for pics (dot com).

In a way, I’m a little sad to see it go. My unconventional port and I have been together for a long time now. It’s been a source of conversation, intrigue and misplaced pride. Sadly, the pros of moving on outweigh the cons.

For those of you who hadn’t noticed after this ~day of being offline: http://blogwaffe.com.

I didn’t want to name names until all had settled, but I’m now very happy to say that blogwaffe is being served by TextDrive. I absolutely could not be happier with the service or its people. TextDrive’s servers are fast, highly configurable and very usable while all the while the folks running the show are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable nearly to the point of being scary. I had a couple questions about the best way to move the site over while maintaining the old links. Not only did they have answers, they had implementable solutions. Many thanks to Ryan, Jason and the lot.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a loud shout out to Matt who was responsible for setting us up the bomb in the first place. So thanks, Matt.