Moments of atavism

[elfs]

Last week, I wore my kilt out and about. At one point, I was in a men's room and reached for the zipper-- which a kilt doesn't have. It was the first time I'd explicitly forgotten I was wearing a kilt. It was a common article of men's clothing covering the waist, of course it has a zipper.

Today was even weirder. Seeking to save wear'n'tear on my laptop keyboard, I snagged a spare Apple keyboard from a pile of unloved hardware that collected in one corner of the incubator's office space. I wonder if that happens a lot at incubators: folks bringing their home hardware in and abandoning it.

I plugged it in and started typing, and couldn't type anything. It was so weird. I tried typing "cd" and got "je." I tried "ls" and got "no". Concerned, I watched my fingers, and they were going to the right buttons. And then it hit me: they were going to the right buttons. But I'm a Dvorak typist. Somehow, typing on this old keyboard made my QWERTY habits come back hard.

A few seconds of practice and I found the Dvorak module in my brain, but that was just weird. Of course I can type QWERTY; you have to in this world, where too many keyboards don't come with a remap option, like on a Palm. I just don't all that often. Very weird.

Comments

[mauraanderson.livejournal.com]

I've never switched back from Dvorak to QWERTY by accident but I do occasionally fail in finding a particular letter for a bit. Like a strange mental blind spot.

I do have trouble going back to QWERTY now.

[areitu.livejournal.com]

I'm curious, as I've never met anyone who knows Dvorak. Did it improve your typing speed or accuracy over QWERTY in any way, once you acclimated to it?

I have an old IBM 101 Enhanced keyboard that I physically rearranged to Dvorak Left, though I'm right handed. I never got around to learning it and ended typing on it in QWERTY. Entering random-letter passwords sometimes took a few tries.

[mauraanderson.livejournal.com]

I'm not Elf, but I do use exclusively Dvorak keyboard layouts. I learned after having hand surgery last year.

I think my speed is about the same on Dvorak as QWERTY once was but I'm a very fast typist.

What I have noticed is that my hands are far less tired at the end of the day than they used to be. It took some dedication to switch but after about a month, I was comfortable.

I don't think it's as easy to write code with, though. But I write more words than code so I won't switch back.

It also has the side-benefit of making it very difficult for anyone to "borrow" your laptop. :)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much the same speed. It took about three weeks to break the QWERTY habit, and about three months before I stopped having to look up everything. Dvorak just feels right, and everytime I switch back to QWERTY I re-learn just how awkward and frustrating it is.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

No matter how much sense Dvorak might make, it's something I'd never touch. This is because I once went for a tech support job at a company I really wanted. As the hiring manager felt any good tech should be able to type about 40 wpm, that was part of the job description. HR took it too literally, and made all the applicants take a surprise typing test before their interview. Fail the typing test: no interview. I have a nice, fancy, ergonomic split keyboard at home. Needless to say, I was not happy to take a typing test on a standard Dell keyboard without any notice. It really galled me that clocking 39wpm on an unfamiliar keyboard did not at least buy me a night to practice on a regular keyboard before taking the test again.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I know only QWERTY. But my dad, despite being a professional writer, still does his old "hunt and peck" with two fingers.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I'm not too surprised by this.

I did a semester in Germany when I was in college (20 years ago now, in fact). One day, after being there about 3 months, I woke up, looked around my room and announced to the empty space, "I don't wanna speak a word of German today." My brain just Would Not Let me access any German. I had to fight to get sentences out. I was back to my old fluent self by morning.

On the flip-side: The next semester at my college started almost immediately after the German university's semester finished. So I had no time to transition back. When I look at my notes from that semester, they start out over half in German, half in English. As the semester progressed, my course notes gradually returned to English, with only a smattering of Deutsch.


Brains are Funny Things, aren't they?