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 :)