Checking in on the Dvorak front

My apologies for the long blog silence. It was in large part due to a major meltdown on the polyphasic sleep front in the fall (more on that later, in a separate post, when I don't have papers due). The Dvorak experiment, being in many ways smaller and easier to manage, was also less exciting, and therefore provided less blog fodder. (As I'd mentioned before, I don't want to turn into one of those people who blogs for the sake of blogging; I'd prefer to post only when I have something meaningful to say.)

It has been more than a year since I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak, and it was a great decision in most respects. The one real fear I had -- that I would somehow "unadapt from QWERTY", and thus never be able to use most anyone else's keyboards -- was not as big of a problem as it initially appeared. I'm on a laptop, so the situation usually doesn't arise in the first place, and when it does, my years of QWERTY usage, much like bicycling or swimming proficiency, tide me over quite adequately. That small inconvenience is worth the typing speed I've gained (most applicable in note-taking during lectures, and in my own writing).

Anyhow, in the way of routine checking in: 54 wpm, with 4 mistakes. By way of comparison, the last such test, taken almost eight months ago, yielded 42 wpm, with 2 mistakes.

The sample text, interestingly enough, was excerpted from Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. I'm a fan of Paine (and I say that almost in the way one might say "I'm a fan of Tolkien" -- almost). I'm also taking a class on the French Revolution, and another on the history of (European) law, so I might just have a head filled with revolutionary sentiment and human rights this quarter.

In a similar vein, one of my typos turned "troubling" into "troubnits", which sounds like a particularly obstinate case of head lice.

I need a new experiment.