Special Characters

[Petrus de Calguarium]

Tim wrote:

> f you take lessons, though.  The keyboard layout becomes second nature,
> quite quickly.  You can do that with a program, you don't need to go to
> a school.  While it may seem overkill, for many, but if you do a lot of
> email, or programming, or any other regular typing.  It's worth it.  You
> also avoid getting painfully cramped fingers from awkward typing habits.

Yes, I took typing in grades 10 and 11. Had a beautiful blond with radiant 
blue eyes as my deskmate (we had desks with 2 people at each for typing) for 
one of the years. I took one look at her the first day of class and within a 
few minutes she was sitting beside me for the whole year. Oh, yes, typing. 
That's how it went in class, too.

I got up to 30 words per minute, after subtracting 5 or was it to words per 
minute for each mistake. I think my real speed was about 65 words per minute. 
I was retested about 5 years ago, using my present 4-5 finger system, and I 
type at about 35 words per minute, with great accuracy.

Considering that I type at a computer, often have a pen in my right hand at 
the same time as I type, have my left hand on the mouse while I'm typing, 
and, as it is with computers, often need to type unusual commands with alt-
shift or alt-FX or lots of diacritical marks in bask scripts or generally 
whatnot, I do not find stenographic typing to be at all useful for computing. 
Typewriters did not have a mouse or graphical interface. They did not need to 
select menu options. They did not need to type things like:

{ echo $( ps -fu me | egrep 'libflashplayer\.so' | egrep 
'npviewer.bin' | egrep -om 1 -E '\<[0-9]+\>' | head -1 ) ; }

on a regular basis.