02 October 2008

Moved!

If you follow me via the FeedBurner feed (at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlexEaglesWeblog) then you are already getting posts from my new blog location:


http://jakeherringbone.com


I know it's strange to move from Blogger to Wordpress, just as I start working at Google. But well, Wordpress is really nice, and I'm in a linux dork phase so I wanted to host my own stuff.

If you're not following via FeedBurner, then stop reading this, and come to my new location!


http://jakeherringbone.com

05 May 2008

This is one thing I really like about electronic music: you have to be a super-dork to think this looks like a fun instrument to play:



I installed Reason 4 last night, which Gabe and I used among our tools in our laptop band. Reason 4 add this enormously complicated looking instrument called the Thor, which I know basically nothing about. So let me blog about it anyway.

The Thor is a synth of an analog waveform generator with such complicated options that there are arrows showing the flowchart and a table at the bottom listing part of the configuration. The knobs are a lot of fun - you can play one note on your keyboard and then just perform on the knobs. Best of all, it comes with patches from some electronic music savants, most notably, Plaid! It was a blast to play with a couple of their instruments.

December 16, 2007 was a big day for me, as longtime readers know. The great Dvorak switch, which hobbled my typing for quite a while, is finally over the hump, and I think it will end up being a success. Success in this case means lack of regret. I am back to a pretty reasonable speed on the zebra test: Accuracy: 100%, Gross Speed: 47 WPM. It's about where I was with Qwerty before going to the Das Keyboard. After getting married at the end of this month, I'll switch back to blank keys and I expect to get over the touch typing hump a lot faster, since I can already type a fair amount without looking.

Now, maybe this blog won't be the Dvorak blog anymore, but I will give a few parting thoughts to the topic. Dvorak is great if you like to be a one-man novelty act. This is partly because people tend to be conformist, and enforce that tendency on others by mocking differences. You'll get some blank stares from people who assume (probably correctly) that you'd have to be crazy to move around all the keys on your keyboard.

But also, although Dvorak feels better and is faster to learn, you're competing with 20 years (in my case) of qwerty. It took me 5 months to feel really comfortable with typing again. Now, mind you, I don't have a lot of discipline, so I didn't practice. I'm sure if I used a typing program (instead of deciding to write my own), it could have gone faster, but really, this has been a hard, hard thing to make myself do.

That said, it is now a major accomplishment, and I can move forward into the world even more special than I was before :)

23 January 2008

Arrival times on DC Subway


So awesome! I found that you can get the Metro's next train arrival times on your phone! It's exactly the same data you see on those electronic boards on the platform – I checked it for the Courthouse station, and saw that I had two minutes to make the train, and I ran down to the platform and just barely caught it.

It's extra nice that the page is intended to be displayed in a popup – so it's a tiny download.

1. Google “wmata <name of your stop>”
2.The second link (usually) goes to a small page showing the train arrival board. You can also find it on the station's page.

Like this: Clarendon

If you have an iPhone with the Jan08 update, add that sucker to your home screen!

21 January 2008

Typing speed update

I'm still on Dvorak. I guess that's really the big news, because it has been occasionally infuriating that I can't get words onto "paper" as fast as I think. But the more I get mad at this shortcoming, the more I'm reminded of how great it is to be a fast typist, and that's tho whole goal here.

I have taken the labels off five keys now, returning to their glorious and blank Das Keyboard state. I'm also still working on TypingHero, my Flex app that's supposed to make it fun to type faster. Gabe helped me out over the weekend to improve the wiring of my mxml views to their backing controller classes. It's great to work with true components, but it's frustrating that using best practices in Flex is so contrary to the examples and sometimes the language makes it awkward.

Sadly my speed has leveled out over this month, and is stuck at half my QWERTY speed...

1/7
Net Speed: 33 WPM
Accuracy: 97%
Gross Speed: 34 WPM

1/21
Net Speed: 33 WPM
Accuracy: 97%
Gross Speed: 34 WPM

I'll get a more useful and fun version of TypingHero soon, and of course I'll speed up my typing considerably using it. Of course!