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So there I was, banging away at the keyboard, smoke coming out of it due to the speed of my single digit frenzy, proud that I can type at least ten words a minute as long as said words are not too long.
Yes another Orphan chapter was taking place. then my digits crossed as I was trying to type e with my left hand and p with my right. After untangling the mess and unknotting my damaged fingers, I started thinking.
Now thinking for me is dangerous, I go off in tangents and the result is that my beloved story, crafted and honed to imperfection gets left behind as I start 'thinking'.
How many novels could I write if I could type with more than one finger on each hand? War and Peace?; those huge great things by James Clavell; perhaps the occassional Harry Potter type book so I can make my millions?
If I can type at ten words a minute using two fingers can I write at eighty words a minute if I use eight? and what about the thumbs, are they useful for anything other than holding things and thumbing a lift? Surely, those great wordsmiths must use their thumbs too?
Deep thoughts.
Are well I had better continue with the story..........
Sue
Comments
You Are So Lucky
To be so dextrous is to die for. I think I can manage about half your speed. You must have 48 hour days where you come from in order to achieve your output. It took me nearly all day to do this comment!
A drink?
Dextrous? Isn't that a drink?
Sue
;-)
Not a Drink, Sue…
…but the glucose tablets I take when my blood/sugar levels get too low and I start going hypo; oh no, they're dextrose!!
Gabi
having a giggle
Gabi.
Sue Brown, I Love All Of Your Stories
I wish you well in writing your stories. Your stories all are sweet and sentimental. You make the characters come alive. I look forward to reading your stories.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
OK You Smartarses
I guess I deserved that, as I pick up on other peoples' mistakes. OK, OK, DEXTEROUS, All right!
Why would you limit yourself...
... to using your hands? You've got 10 more digits on your feet, you could be working on a second PC on a second story at the same time. You slacker you!
BTW - one of the most proliffic writers I know of (Isaac Asimov) claimed in an essay once that he attributed his output to having four stories/books going at the same time. One for each hand and one for each foot. (This was back in the typewriter era. Who knows what he could have done with modern word processors...)
Another point - in my case at least - adding additional fingers does increase typing speed. I can misspell words much faster using all the fingers on both hands. But it's not as much faster as you indicate. I guess I'm challenged. I've been looking for a way to do a direct brain dump, but haven't found one.
Direct brain dump??
Annette,
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Hugs
Diana
I had a thought -- warring, warning, John just had a thought!--
One keyboard per limb means five keyboards at once if you are willing to risk a bruised nose, six keyboards if your a guy, but that last keyboard need to be waterproof.
I TOLD you it's a bad thing when I think.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Seven for girls
Ouch!
I once read an SF story about an alien heptapus shape changer who disguised itself as a human female because of the appropriate number of appendages. :)
- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
New insult?
A brand new way to slam some guy, "You couldn't use the sixth keyboard if your life depended on it!".
Of course, any one of several snappy comebacks suggest themselves. Like: "Not if you were holding it!". Insult and double entrende all in one short reply. ;)
KJT
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"
Janis Joplin
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Now, now ladies
I'm the one with the potty mouth here.
A comeback could be, "Hey, babe, I can use one but only if it has *big* keys, if you know what I mean."
Sorry I had tickets to an inprove group at ComedySports tonight and I guess it rubbed off.
* * * *
Let's be the dainty and refined gals we know you both are, Erin and Karen.
Seven, Erin? Not unless you put sticks ....
...
OH my!
Though I did once see a woman driving while eating a burger and brushing her hair at the same time, no one else in the SUV. I sure hope she was moving the wheel with her knees.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
If only
spellchecker would correct the words instead of just highlighting.I could really fly.I noticed when i try to go to fast my writing becomes a garbled mess that one can't interpret.I's before E's instead of E's before I's,words shuffled so bad it's like a guess what the letters spell game.words run together and mile long sentences.Why oh why won't spellchecker work and let me fly?.Lol Amy
Spell checkers won't pick up on the wrong homonym
so in your comment Amy you said you, 'go to fast' it's incorrect but no spell checker would pick it up (unless the Microsquat tm does).
I can type fast enough to mess things up quite well, what I want is a programme that thinks for me as well, not anticipates like (Microsh!t and Google) but thinks from square one. I'm sure it would write better stories than I do.
Sue, thumbs are used for the space bar in touch typing (silly name, how can you type without touching the keys?), not that I can do it.
Angharad
Angharad
In the beginning
Everyone was talking "user friendly".
So Microsh!t invent a grammar checker that tells you that people can't enjoy themselves (apparently it's grammatically incorrect - go figure)
Imagine a piece of software with a slightly less than patient approach to some of this site's writing styles (mine for instance).
"You can't say that, you %^$£*& idiot"
"Oh for f***s sake, get it right will you..."
I think I'd spend more time laughing or crying than writing, however fast I could type.
NB
grammar checking
Anyone else remember the easter egg in M$ office 97 that went something like this?
open Word, type in "I'd like to shoot Bill Gates" and spell check came back with something like "I'll drink to that"
But the best was the one in excel to bring up the flight simulator. Ah, those were the days :D
Hugs
Diana
Fun, I think they call it
Nowadays, it's been replaced with heavy doses of cynicism!
NB
Another use for thumbs
Is on those lousy little touchpads on laptops - you know the ones? you type this great response and all of a subdden, your thumb accidentally highlights the the entire page and your next keystroke wipes it all away? /sigh
Hugs
Diana
If microsoft made cars...
...we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to
buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason,
and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn, would cause
your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would
have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought
"Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable,
five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run
on five per cent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be
replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out
and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the
door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of
Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they
neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option
would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or
more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the
Justice Department.
12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn
how to drive all over again because none of the controls would
operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.
Found it!
Enjoy!
From IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Vol.
26, No. 2,
March, 1990 -- p. 209, author name n.a. --
Catching Misspilled Words with Spilling Checker.
As an extra addled service, I am going to put this column in the
Spilling Checker, where I tryst it will sale through with flying colons.
In this modern ear, it is simply inexplicable to ask readers too expose
themselves to misspelled swords when they have bitter things to do.
And with awl the other timesaving features on my new work
processor, it is in realty very easy fro me to pit together a colon like
this one and get it tight. For instants, if there is a work that is wrong,
I just put the curse on it, press Delete and its Well sometimes it
deletes to the end of the lion or worst yet the whole rage. Four bigger
problems, their is the Cat and Paste option. If there is some test that is
somewhere were you wish it where somewhere else
you jest put the curse at both ends and wash it dissapear. Where you want
it to reappear simply bring four quarts of water to a rotting boil and
throw in 112 pounds of dazed chicken. Sometimes it brings in the Cat that
was Pasted yesterday. But usually it comes out as you planned, or
butter. And if it doesn't, there are lots of other easy to lose options...
It would have missed most of them dee,
but it would have picked up on 'dissapear'.
Angharad
Angharad
I found this on linguistic humor:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9509e&L=li...
My favorite?
HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH GOOD
from the Casey Stengle School of Brooklynese
(1) Just between you and I case is important.
(2) Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
(3) Don't use no double negatives.
(4) A preposition is something you should never end a
sentence with. (or as Sir Winston Churchill once
said; "This is the type of nonsense up with I will
not put!").
(5) It is always good practice to never split infina-
tives.
(6) About sentence fragments.
(7) Don't write a run-on sentence you have to punctu-
ate it.
(8) When one is writing, it is important to maintain
your point of view.
(9) Proofread your work. Do not tolerate mispellings!
(10) Watch out for irregular verbs which have croped
into the language.
(11) Don't say the same thing more than once. It's
redundant and repetious.
(12) If the writer is considerate of the reader, he
won't have a problem with ambiguous sentances.
(13) This sentance no verb.
(14) You should be aware of the conditional case if you
was to use it.
(15) The smothering of verbs is a cause of the weaken-
ing of the sentance impact.
(16) Avoid the utilization of enlarged words when shor-
tened ones will do.
(17) Perform a functional iterative analysis on your
work to root out third generation transitional
buzz words.
(18) Make sure you hyp-henate properly.
(19) Sentences should be written in the active voice
when giving instructions, so that the subject of
the action can be identified clearly.
(20) Avoid the use of dyed-in-the-wool cliches.
(21) The defacto use of foreign phrases vis-a-vis plain
English in your written tete-a-tetes makes the
sentance harder to understand.
(22) Continuity of thought, logical development and
smooth transitions are important. Never leave
the reader guessing.
(23) Beware of malapropisms. They are a communist sub-
mersive plot.
(24) Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
(25) Each pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
(26) It has come to our considered attention that in a
large majority of cases, far too many people use a
great deal more words than is absolutely necessary
when engaged in the practice of writing sentances.
(27) Be careful of dangling participles writing a
paper.
Spell check?
I don't think that's a good idea.
I may have said this before, but a friend of mine had typed a report for the Westland company. Her spell checker was set to auto-correct, where it found the next nearest word to fit the bill having not recognised Westland.
Forunately, the people with whom she was working had a sense of humour for the replacement word for every instance of Westland, was Wasteland!
I can't even begin to imagine what kind of stories would emerge from that crappy piece of software here...
NB
I'm a 2 fingered typist ...
... I once set out to learn to touch-type but delayed it. Now I have the time, a relatively minor spinal injury stops my fingers from moving independently, which is a pity. I used to edit a small magazine in the days before 'everyone' had a PC so most contributions arrived as hard copy. My wife used to stick the hard copy over the vdu and tpye it in very quickly, leaving me to proof/edit it; it was amazing how few mistakes there were. There are time when I'm never sure if I should love that women or hate her for being so bloody clever :)
What does surprise me is that even though I have to watch the keyboard my fingers must 'know' where most of the keys are. This was brought home to me last year on holiday in France. One camp site had internet access and I checked emails etc. I discovered the qwerty keyboard isn't universal; French keyboards have a different layout, perhaps other nationalities are different too. I found it surprisingly difficult to maintain my usual low standard of typing accuracy.
Geoff
User Friendly-NOT!
I had the misfortune to have my old laptop go down on me (now, now, ladies- behave) a couple of months ago, and it was terminal so I had to buy a new one. I got one with Vista Business instead of Windows XP like my old unit. If anyone out there is in the same position my advice is DO NOT get Vista. Windows XP has its faults but Vista is TERRIBLE. Are you listening, Mr. Gates, or whoever's running Micros!!t now?
I'm getting mad and I'm not going to take it anymore!
You should have bought…
…a Mac, Joanne! They are really user friendly, and anyway Mr Gates nicked a lot of his ideas from Apple in the first place. I had two PCs before I made the change and I have never regretted it. In fact I have NEVER bought a new Mac, all mine have been "pre-enjoyed" and as Macs are the industry standard in the publishing world that is good enough for me. My present one is a G4 Titanium laptop which I can boot up in either OS9 or OSX, so I can run all my old OS9 stuff on it as well as OSX.
An Macs are not as prone to viruses (viri?) as PCs.
Gabi
Gabi.
...or, at least, shopped around.
Laptop PCs loaded with XP are still available. I've heard that two out of the top four laptop brands still offer XP. The stories go that one of the these brands reverted to offering XP as well (despite furious resistance from M$), having converted 100% to Vista; and the other expressed little interest in the swich and XP is still their principal offer.
These are tales - though the continued availability of XP-loaded laptops is a fact in the UK. If the stories above are also true, then I'm pleased, because it represents a possible consumer-centric countervailing force against a certain company with far too large a market share for consumer comfort; hopefully strarting to move that company from contiuning to offer us "what we ought to want" rather than something useful (see NickB, above, passim)
Xi