From QWERTY, vi, and csh to Dvorak, Emacs, and Bash in 120 invigorating days!

JK Eldon has a rather familiar article entitled From QWERTY to Dvorak in 120 Somewhat Miserable Days in which she outlines her transition from QWERTY to Dvorak over a four month period. She outlines all the reasons for doing so, and for not doing so, then goes ahead and does it anyway. Her main reason, that she wanted to learn to touch type, is an excellent one.

I made the same transition myself, although I did so 18 years ago. At Spry (later: CompuServe, even later: WorldCom) I'd been a Solaris user working in vi and csh, which were the standard tools Sun had been foisting on us for a generation. After the massive swap deal with AOL and the Great RIF, I was left with a generous buyout and time to re-up my skills. So I did what any self-respecting nerd did in 1998: I bought a shiny new computer, installed Linux on it, and made myself use Bash, Emacs, and Dvorak instead. (The new desktop, by the way, was a Compaq. Compaq is dead, and you may thank God for it.)

The learning curve Eldon experienced was pretty much the same one I went through. I write code, non-fiction, and fiction. Emacs's key patterns aren't friendly to Dvorak users, but I learned. I did go from 10WPM in the first month to almost 80 by the fourth month. I did put stickers on my laptop keys.

I never went through the "I hate myself" stage, nor the "God, I wish I'd never started this" stage. It wasn't that I was committed; it was that I'd set Dvorak up at install and never taught myself how to go back, so going back would involve learning a whole different set of tools or worse, re-installing an OS I'd finally managed to stabilize. The inertia inherent in that choice kept me persevering, and eventually I was good enough at Dvoark that I realized the MS Natural Touch keyboard I had was doing more damage to my wrists; the position you hold you hands in for Dvorak are different from QWERTY, and the MSNT caused me to bend my wrists outward unnaturally.

Fortunately for me, by 1998 I'd mostly been done with MUDs and IRC, and real-time "business" chat services would have seem ludicrous back then.

They're still ludicrous today.

Mindfulness: Sati and Karuna

While the mainstream press is still still touting mindfulness as an essential tool for your kit, there's been a very welcome wave of pushback that's dedicated to letting much of the air out of the mindfulness convoy's tires.

The loudest voices are those that claim that mindfulness strips the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness of its ethical foundations, simply adapting mindfulness as a way of calming the employees, making them more efficientr employees, and essentially co-opting what has been an essential spiritual practice into a tool of avarice.

But I suspect the recent spate of "it doesn't work" / "it's not cost effective" / "the science isn't there" articles is actually led by a counter-concern: mindfulness is most attractive to the most energetic of employees, the ones who are constantly sparking off new ideas and new projects. The biggest fear our corporate masters have is that sati will translate, as the Buddhists contend it does, into karuna: that is, that mindfulness will lead those who practice it best into the realization that most capitalism is bullshit.

The pro-mindfullness folks want employees to have just enough mindfulness to be more diligent and detail-oriented at their work, but they're deathly afraid that in the process their employees will develop compassion and an awareness of the transience of all things, and ultimately leae their corporate positions for something more fulfilling. The threat of actual mindfulness to the Gordon Geckos of the world is not to be understated.

Mixed signals from white nationalists...

VDare, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, is a political magazine that regularly publishes nationalist, anti-immigrant, and "pro-white" pieces. VDare may have started out as just an anti-immigrant rag, but it has devolved into a evolved into a neo-reactionary hot-house of silliness.

While tracking down the ridiculous VandeHei article this morning, I stumbled into VDare mostly by accident, and they put up a full-screen "donate to us" pop-up before I got any deeper. The pop-up, though, is hilarious.

It's bannered with a photo of two small children, white girls in white dresses with their backs to the camera, peering out over a meadow. VDare then exclaims: "We can have a world of clean, safe cities, advancing technology, sustainable development, and increased human potential. We can have societies that are prosperous, peaceful, and have high social trust. We can have a culture that generates great works of literature and art, just like our Western forebears." This is followed by a testimonial: "Our opponent, the elite native American secularist has gained victory after victory in his quest for a 'diversified' America," followed by a request to "donate today!" It ends with the tagline, "Keep America American."

I'm not sure what they mean by "native American secularist." Surely they're not talking about the continental aboriginals. It would entail a strange lack of self-awareness to not appreciate that "native Americans" would have loved to "keep America American" on their own, starting back in 1492.

But overall, the message here is so muddled as to be incoherent: we're already marching toward clean, safe cities. We have all the things they claim they want. Oh, and we have vibrant, colorful cities filled with the smells of a hundred different cuisines, we have we have Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and unbelievers, people of every color and nation and creed, getting along with high enough social trust to share the bus, the restaurant, and the sidewalks together.

As for the notion that we don't generate great works of art and literature, bullshit: we are drowning in it. We praise Shakespeare, but there are thousands of Shakespeare-quality playwrights and screenwriters living today. We know how to teach them to be great artists. We have the leisure and luxury of cranking out all manner of artists to the point where we're overwhelmed by the quantity of high-quality art, music, and literature.

For all of VDare's earnest hand-wringing about cities, it's clear that their vision is small-town, homogenous, and dull.

I'm all for the return of the city-state. It's clear that nations are ego-building exercises foisted on us by kings and princes, ideological constructs that demand VDare's flavor of homogenization.

Civilization, civics, civility and city all come from the same root, and all have a similar meaning, the most fundamental of which is this: A city is a place where one is likely to meet strangers. Civility is having the grace to maintain a residence and livelihood well in such a place. VDare's imagination would narrow a city down to "Strangers... but not too much stranger." It's a paltry imagination. It deserves its place on the ash-heap of history.