Dvorak, Day 47

37 wpm, 5 mistakes. I am making an effort to touch-type, hence the increased number of errors.

Today's text was taken from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Huzzah for early SciFi!

Dvorak, Day 38

33 wpm, 0 mistakes. Today's excerpt came from Shakespeare's Henry V. It was the "once more into the breach" part -- a great bit, methinks. This typing test has good taste, I must say.

Dvorak, Day 29

30 wpm, 2 mistakes. Today's passage was excerpted from Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

I'm posting increasingly infrequently simply because there isn't much to report with this sort of experiment, except for the relevant data point. My apologies for... well, being boring, I suppose.

Polyphasic Sleep: A Reflection

It has been a full quarter since I embarked upon the polyphasic sleep experiment. Overall, I would say that it was a good idea. I liked it enough to resume Everyman this quarter. (I went monophasic over Spring Break, to avoid suspicion, and it was quite a surreal experience!) Some thoughts:

• Uberman is not for me. It's not that it's physically too difficult (I had enough consecutive successful days to demonstrate otherwise); rather, my schedule simply doesn't accommodate such a rigid sleep cycle. Between my extracurriculars (such as debating in a different time zone a few weekends per quarter) and my classes, it was getting impossible to fix my schedule such that I had the same twenty minute periods free every day.
• For the sake of a good roommate relationship, I need to time my core sleep such that I wake up at a relatively normal hour every day. While I can go to bed as late as I want to, I can't set alarms for 7:00 am, because my roommate would not appreciate being woken at that hour.
• In retrospect, I probably should have kept to a slightly more rigid schedule of naps. By the time I switched to Everyman, I had gotten a bit lazy in that regard. I took naps whenever convenient, so long as I got in the right number of naps.
• I seem to like lunchtime, right before dinnertime, and between 11:00pm and 2:00am naps.

At this point, I don't think polyphasic sleep is an experiment anymore; it has become more of a lifestyle choice. I shall soon be readapted, and I don't plan on resuming regular posting on the subject -- I'll post if anything out of the ordinary happens.

Dvorak, Day 14

My apologies for the hiatus. It is Spring Break, and I am home for a few days, since I am conveniently debating in the area this weekend. I have spent most of my time with my parents and sister -- it is good to be home.

My typing speed is now 25wpm (3 mistakes). Today's passage was an excerpt from Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech (delivered before Parliament during the Battle of France). Churchill was a wonderful speechwriter, a personal favorite, and this is one of his best, methinks. It calls to mind the valor of such men and women as Leonidas of Sparta, Boudica of the Iceni, and Roland of France, battling valiantly against insurmountable odds -- the stuff of legend.

Dvorak, Day 4

19 wpm, no mistakes. Huzzah for linear improvement! (Actually, it's not really linear, seeing as it's day 4 rather than day 3. We can call it linear with regards to taking typing tests, as opposed to day-by-day.) At this rate, I'll be back at my old (QWERTY) typing speed in a little over a week's worth of typing tests. Of course, that's tremendously optimistic; the curve will flatten, I'm sure.

Dvorak, Day 2

As you may or may not be able to see, I have taped a very small diagram of the Dvorak layout right next to the camera of my Macbook (the camera itself isn't visible), which should help quite a bit with touch-typing. One of the small benefits of the old black Macbook -- the screen of the new aluminum one (Caradoc uses one) extends all the way to the edge, and one probably wouldn't want to mar the glass by taping anything to it.

Today's speed is 14 wpm, no mistakes. An interesting aside: the typing test text was excerpted from Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Yesterday's was from Romeo and Juliet ("But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?"). I hope my familiarity with certain texts in the public domain doesn't artificially inflate my measured speed.

I do hope this learning curve keeps up. I had to write a two-page assignment today, but I will not have much time to practice in the coming days, as I have finals.

Dvorak, Day 1

First of all, a very happy Pi Day to all my intrepid readers!

This is my new keyboard configuration. The picture quality isn't great, so perhaps you can't see it very well (click on it); I wrote all the letters and symbols in the corners of little clear stickers and affixed them in the Dvorak layout. (By stickers, I really mean the adhesive portions of those sticky bookmark tabs -- they're sort of like Post-its, but plastic -- that I cut into squares.) The A and M stickers haven't fallen off or anything; those letters are in the same place in QWERTY and Dvorak.

Now, Caradoc just popped all the keys off his keyboard and rearranged them. I am hesitant to do so for several reasons:

1. Tampering with the hardware can void the warranty. (My computer is a year and a half old, so any warranty is probably out, but if I ever have to take it to the shop again, I don't want any trouble on that score.)
   
2. Having both layouts visible is more user-friendly for anyone borrowing my machine.
3. Eventually, I hope to be able to touch-type in Dvorak on a QWERTY (essentially a blank) keyboard. Not only will I be able to avoid the first consideration, I would be able to tell if anyone tried to use my computer. Anyone who wasn't well-versed in Dvorak wouldn't be able to do anything at any speed, including changing the keyboard settings back to QWERTY.

My Dvorak typing speed today is 10 wpm, no mistakes (that's looking down at the keyboard, though). You can only imagine how long this post took!

Experiment 2: Dvorak

My second experiment! I thought this day would never come! And the timing is quite nice, too. The polyphasic sleep experiment has become sufficiently routine such that it can no longer really be called an experiment. Incidentally, it was Caradoc (the friend who, as you may recall, chickened out of Uberman) prodded me into this one -- not that it took much prodding; I was looking to try something new anyhow. (On the sleep front, he is considering Everyman for next quarter. Finally!) Anyhow...

What is Dvorak?
The more appropriate question is, "Who was Dvorak?" August Dvorak (distantly related to the composer of the same name) created the eponymous Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which is optimized for typing speed and ergonomics. The QWERTY keyboard, the current industry standard (and I write "current" in almost-futile hope that one day, Dvorak will gain widespread usage), was originally deliberately designed to slow typists down. Recall that the alphanumeric keyboard was originally designed for the typewriter, as the computer had not yet been invented. Typewriters, except for the electric models developed later, operated by means of mechanical hammers, sort of like the ones in pianos, with characters engraved on the striking surface of the typebar. These small moving parts jammed and tangled if too many of them were moving at once; hence, the keyboard was arranged to maximize the amount of time it took for a typist to move from one key to the next. Given that the advent of computers rendered such a system obsolete, Dvorak came up with an optimized keyboard. Unfortunately, because the QWERTY keyboard was already entrenched in the consciousness of the typing population, Dvorak never caught on.

Enough of the impromptu history lesson; I've probably bored you half to sleep. The experiment itself is pretty self-explanatory: I will try to retrain myself from QWERTY to Dvorak. I hope to pick up touch-typing along the way. (I never did learn how to type properly in the first place.) I'll track my progress using an online typing test; I think I like this one. I'm at about 57 wpm (words per minute) on QWERTY now. On Dvorak, it's liable to be 2 wpm.

Note: I typed this post entirely in Dvorak! (It took forever, but it happened.)

Days 43-45

Again, nothing particularly interesting has happened lately. It's the last week of classes before finals, so things are über-hectic (but not interesting, at least from a sleep perspective). This is really just a check-in post.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 12
Letters: 12.15