Technophilaelic Orientated Posting
I enjoy washing dishes, but Cinderella can keep the down on the knees floor scrubbing job for all I care. Oh well, my apartment does look a little cleaner now. I'd venture to say that it wasn't this clean when I moved in. Also decided to rearrange the kitchen. While not good for lots of people, I have only entertained one other person once. So I'm not too worried about the bachelorish feel. And besides, I like it.
This evening I showed lots of pictures from home. I suppose I should go through and delete a bunch of bad pictures and ones with family members loafing around the house in their underwear. But everybody loves to see a nice undy shot once in a while. Actually, probably not. I scarred several people for life.
This morning I was awakened by the phone. It is actually a very interesting feeling that I've not had the luxury of experiencing prior to Russia. In both rooms that I've lived in at home, I have not had a phone line in my room. That coupled with the fact that all three cell phones I've owned have had horrible reception in general, and in particular in my room, I have not been roused due to rogue phone calls. Alas, Russia brings with it many good and bad things - a not always good one is the phone calls. This morning it was nice, and I was sort of expecting it. I told Anastasia to give me a buzz around 6 my time. We chatted about who knows what for nearly three hours. Before you go whipping out your calculator to figure out how much she'll be in debt, she was using my calling card. The rates to Kaliningrad aren't astronomical, but compared to what net2phone gets you other places, they aren't cheap either. I think the rate is 18 cents a minute. Which is why I started looking for something less expensive. Everything seemed to be pointing to Skype. I had kinda-sorta used it for computer to computer calls and with the latest version for Macintosh, calling from computer to landline is supported. Wednesday evening, I gave it a whirl. I called the voice messaging system that my folks have on their phone and was going to leave a message. Unfortunately, the DTMF tones didn't work correctly and after three tries I gave up. But for 3 calls to the US totaling maybe 5 minutes I was only charged 7 cents. That was cool. So I called a real person. My old cell phone. And from my perspective it worked great. I could hear and understand everything the other person said perfectly. The other party did not have the same experience. At 0.017 Euros a minute it had all the makings of a happy (cheap) solution. I think the issue is my connection to the internet. At home I top out at 33.6, with 28.8 being a more regular occurrence. As I was watching the amount of out/in data while on the phone, the amount coming to me was always greater than the amount headed out. Judging from this rather imprecise measurement, I blame the modem speed (or lack thereof) for my telephony woes. To make matters a little worse, I took my laptop to the office today and connected - at 48 kbps. That means that my spliced/diced telephone wire in the apartment is to blame. Perhaps this is a good excuse to get broadband. With prices starting at $17 a month, it really isn't too expensive. I suppose if it cuts down on my phone bill of family/friends calling it would be a smart move.
Not much else is happening. On my vacation week I ended up visiting zero museums. I walked home from the office following the tram route one evening and stopped in a few stores. Bought a mouse to go with my keyboard. My mini-me mouse was getting to be too much for my hands. For maybe three weeks or so I've been having a nice amount of pain associated with typing/mousing on the computer and writing in general. Perhaps my years of horrergonomics (nice word, huh?) are catching up with me. As a result the past few weeks have seen me purchase wrist rests, rearrange the computer hutch, and consider learning the Dvorak keyboard layout. The closest success I ever had with Dvorak in the past was convincing brother number two to rearrange the keys of an old keyboard so that he could learn to type fast and efficiently. He played around with it for a week or so, then stopped if I remember correctly. With the advent of IMing he went from a hunt-and-pecker to a super-de-duper-four(or maybe five)-finger-wonder. I maintain that next to my mom (who has played the piano for 59 years), he can type the fastest out of anybody in my family.
What else can I say? At this very moment I am ~5 000 words behind in my novel. My plan is to only write on the week days of November. On the first week 1k words, second week 2k, etc. This puts me finishing my pile of rubbish with four or five days to edit and revise. I had wanted to set up a small blog so that people could read my prose as it evolved, but decided against it. Depending on what form it is in at the end of the month, I may post it someplace. Provided I ever start, I will be using the project to acquaint myself with LaTeX. I've heard computer dorks banter on and on about why everybody should use TeX for everything, but have never had the time or interest to learn. With my fairly recent conversion to OS X, I've lost the best (in my opinion) word processor to grace the face of the planet to date - WordPerfect. For simple documents, any text editor does the trick, but when I want something more than text, WP gets the nod. Now I achieve this via VirtualPC on my iBook. It is not, as they say, very quick. Usable for sure, but not what I want to live with for the rest of my computering days. Hence the thrust to learn LaTeX.
After a suggestion and some thought, I will be rearranging the troypix site. From now on, the albums added will be date wise, sorted in reverse chronological order. This will make it simpler to see what I've just experienced. I would like to also have a few albums sorted more categorically. I'm not sure exactly where they will go yet, but they will be clearly marked as FAVorites, or something to that effect.
This evening I showed lots of pictures from home. I suppose I should go through and delete a bunch of bad pictures and ones with family members loafing around the house in their underwear. But everybody loves to see a nice undy shot once in a while. Actually, probably not. I scarred several people for life.
This morning I was awakened by the phone. It is actually a very interesting feeling that I've not had the luxury of experiencing prior to Russia. In both rooms that I've lived in at home, I have not had a phone line in my room. That coupled with the fact that all three cell phones I've owned have had horrible reception in general, and in particular in my room, I have not been roused due to rogue phone calls. Alas, Russia brings with it many good and bad things - a not always good one is the phone calls. This morning it was nice, and I was sort of expecting it. I told Anastasia to give me a buzz around 6 my time. We chatted about who knows what for nearly three hours. Before you go whipping out your calculator to figure out how much she'll be in debt, she was using my calling card. The rates to Kaliningrad aren't astronomical, but compared to what net2phone gets you other places, they aren't cheap either. I think the rate is 18 cents a minute. Which is why I started looking for something less expensive. Everything seemed to be pointing to Skype. I had kinda-sorta used it for computer to computer calls and with the latest version for Macintosh, calling from computer to landline is supported. Wednesday evening, I gave it a whirl. I called the voice messaging system that my folks have on their phone and was going to leave a message. Unfortunately, the DTMF tones didn't work correctly and after three tries I gave up. But for 3 calls to the US totaling maybe 5 minutes I was only charged 7 cents. That was cool. So I called a real person. My old cell phone. And from my perspective it worked great. I could hear and understand everything the other person said perfectly. The other party did not have the same experience. At 0.017 Euros a minute it had all the makings of a happy (cheap) solution. I think the issue is my connection to the internet. At home I top out at 33.6, with 28.8 being a more regular occurrence. As I was watching the amount of out/in data while on the phone, the amount coming to me was always greater than the amount headed out. Judging from this rather imprecise measurement, I blame the modem speed (or lack thereof) for my telephony woes. To make matters a little worse, I took my laptop to the office today and connected - at 48 kbps. That means that my spliced/diced telephone wire in the apartment is to blame. Perhaps this is a good excuse to get broadband. With prices starting at $17 a month, it really isn't too expensive. I suppose if it cuts down on my phone bill of family/friends calling it would be a smart move.
Not much else is happening. On my vacation week I ended up visiting zero museums. I walked home from the office following the tram route one evening and stopped in a few stores. Bought a mouse to go with my keyboard. My mini-me mouse was getting to be too much for my hands. For maybe three weeks or so I've been having a nice amount of pain associated with typing/mousing on the computer and writing in general. Perhaps my years of horrergonomics (nice word, huh?) are catching up with me. As a result the past few weeks have seen me purchase wrist rests, rearrange the computer hutch, and consider learning the Dvorak keyboard layout. The closest success I ever had with Dvorak in the past was convincing brother number two to rearrange the keys of an old keyboard so that he could learn to type fast and efficiently. He played around with it for a week or so, then stopped if I remember correctly. With the advent of IMing he went from a hunt-and-pecker to a super-de-duper-four(or maybe five)-finger-wonder. I maintain that next to my mom (who has played the piano for 59 years), he can type the fastest out of anybody in my family.
What else can I say? At this very moment I am ~5 000 words behind in my novel. My plan is to only write on the week days of November. On the first week 1k words, second week 2k, etc. This puts me finishing my pile of rubbish with four or five days to edit and revise. I had wanted to set up a small blog so that people could read my prose as it evolved, but decided against it. Depending on what form it is in at the end of the month, I may post it someplace. Provided I ever start, I will be using the project to acquaint myself with LaTeX. I've heard computer dorks banter on and on about why everybody should use TeX for everything, but have never had the time or interest to learn. With my fairly recent conversion to OS X, I've lost the best (in my opinion) word processor to grace the face of the planet to date - WordPerfect. For simple documents, any text editor does the trick, but when I want something more than text, WP gets the nod. Now I achieve this via VirtualPC on my iBook. It is not, as they say, very quick. Usable for sure, but not what I want to live with for the rest of my computering days. Hence the thrust to learn LaTeX.
After a suggestion and some thought, I will be rearranging the troypix site. From now on, the albums added will be date wise, sorted in reverse chronological order. This will make it simpler to see what I've just experienced. I would like to also have a few albums sorted more categorically. I'm not sure exactly where they will go yet, but they will be clearly marked as FAVorites, or something to that effect.
posted by Troy on 21:25
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Mac OS 10.3.6 contains an updated Calculator.
"As a result the past few weeks have seen me purchase wrist rests, rearrange the computer hutch, and consider learning the Dvorak keyboard layout."
In my experience, wrist rests, wrist exercises, workstation rearrangement, and personal rearrangement are all stopgap solutions and had little, if any, effect on my problems. Flat keyboards are stupid and qwerty is stupid.
Stupid is the right word. Trying to work around a flat keyboard, which is not designed for anything other than getting all of the keys on the board, is like trying to build up head strength by pounding your head against a brick wall.
In any case, a decent wrist rest like the 3M gel variety is better than nothing.
Dvorak is probably a ten-fold comfort improvement over stupid qwerty. This makes sense because, if I recall correctly, qwerty typists' fingers travel 10 times more distance than Dvorak typists'.
I would estimate that switching from a stupid flat keyboard to the Kinesis contoured keyboard was another ten-fold improvement. I can work all day on the contoured board but if I use a stupid flat keyboard for 1 hour, I'll be hurting.
Thus the combined improvement with both Dvorak and Kinesis is 100 times! Maybe that's exaggeration, but they've helped me tremendously.
One more helpful thing is the 3M gel wrist rest for mousing so that you don't have to support the arm as much from the shoulder.
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