HikeArizona.COM

Every now and then I'm in awe that I can type period. It gets a little spooky when you can type faster than you can think. Admittingly I took three years of typing cause it was an easy A and the female/male ratio was definitely favorable Looking back wish I wouldn't have cheated through numbers. I'm better than maybe ten-twenty years ago but they slow me down. Also somehow picked up a bad habit of only using the left shift key. Get's a little awkward spitting out capital QAZ.

Our typing class had actual type writers not computers. I recall getting really frustrated on making a single mistake. In the third year of typing we jumped into the future with electric typewriters. They seemed cool at the time. Minus the fact you had to wait for them to warm up. Talk about a slow processor. Believe sign language was faster than the old bit to bit processors.

Anyhow, not looking for a response. I just get fascinated in the little things. Realize I could easily google typing and find out why the key board is laid out like it is but... I'm really more fascinated with how the mind works and this is only the tip of the iceberg. You actually get a feel for blind people. Without those tiny numbs on the F & J you'd be lost.

joe bartels wrote:. . .It gets a little spooky when you can type faster than you can think.

Our typing class had actual type writers not computers. . . . In the third year of typing we jumped into the future with electric typewriters.

. . . I just get fascinated in the little things. Realize I could easily google typing and find out why the key board is laid out like it is but... I'm really more fascinated with how the mind works and this is only the tip of the iceberg. You actually get a feel for blind people. Without those tiny numbs on the F & J you'd be lost.

Gets a whole lot spookier when somebody talks faster than they think. And they usually get elected.

No need to google when this old curmudgeon reads your posts. Since you had the old style typewriters where striking the key caused that little arm to hit the paper you'll understand the reason for the QWERTY keyboard. It was actually meant to slow down fast typists so that the keys did not get stuck to each other. Other keyboards have been proposed - the Dvorak keyboard - where the keys are arranged to speed up typing. But people stay with the old inefficient design since that is what they have learned. Most people are just creatures of habit and old habits die hard.

I'm always lost even with those tiny numbs.

Al_Hikes_AZ

Gets a whole lot spookier when somebody talks faster than they think. And they usually get elected.

What's even worse is that these are the people that also want to spend your money before they even tax you for it!

The human race never ceases to amaze me with the things we do. Look at what was accomplished by the Aztecs. It's incredible the technologies we have available today, and what we as a race can do with them. Funny thing is that it's all just a cycle. 4,000 years ago someone was saying the same thing you are Joe about something similar to them, like maybe carving statues out of rocks

for what it's worth, I hate the right-sided shift key too. No clue why.

Here's another old thread that was fun! I also took typing on ancient typewriters. I don't have problems with the shift keys, but am slow with numbers, and am occasionally dyslexic with letters. On this mini-laptop I have, some of the keys, including the apostrophe, are in the wrong places in order to make them fit.

I tend to think that the reason we have some good writing on HAZ, and not all the text messaging you may see on other forums, is because a lot of us do take our English seriously--call us nerds if you will--and we tend to set the standard for the website. At least, that's my seat-of-the-pants observation.

and now we are being pressed to type with our THUMBS!

I used to have a DVORAK keyboard in college. That thing rocked! I remember when I was in middle school (Shea Middle School), and I had to decide between typing and computers for an elective. Computer class was new, and all the rage, and I wanted to take it. My dad forced me to take typing because he knew it would be a lifelong skill that would be much more valuable than learning how to use a computer that would be obsolete in 6 months. He was a hunt-and-peck typist (and not even a good one at that), and he was right.

sundevilstormin wrote:and now we are being pressed to type with our THUMBS

This my answer to that is....... -.- it has many meanings ;)

We had typing as required course in eighth grade. Throwing the carriage return hard enough when typing at max speed was always a challenge. I'm a lot faster now than I was then, and my memory of the keyboard is more automatic the faster I type.

My dad was a lawyer, had a private practice down on Broadway and 2nd in San Diego for many years. He was a one-man outfit, usually had a secretary, did mostly civil law. He was an amazing guy--grew up dirt poor, and put himself through law school at night while working 10 hours a day in a furniture store, and raising a family, (he already had 3 kids when he started law school) and also doing volunteer work for the war effort during WWII (he was 4F so didn't serve)--he passed the bar exam Sept 1945, the same day my next-oldest sibling was born. I admired the heck out of him. If you think there was never an honest lawyer, you never met Dave Neal.

And he always told me that typing was the most-useful subject he took in high school.

RIP, Dad!

joe bartels wrote:Without those tiny numbs on the F & J you'd be lost.

Since when did they start including these two "numbs" on the F & J keys?

I don't know, but they'd be more useful if placed on more frequently-occurring letters, especially the "j".

Edit: I suggest "s" and "l".

Don't you mean "nubs"? And I have no idea what you are talking about. I never even look at my keyboard... Ok, I just looked at my laptop and PC keyboards and I see what you mean about the nubs. Well, that is where you place your index fingers when you start typing, of course. That is to locate the initial position of your hands whenever you begin to type. I wonder if my fingers notice the nubs, because my conscious mind does not. I type a reasonable 70 wpm and don't think much about it, except on this mini laptop due to the apostrophe in the wrong place.

On this laptop I can tell you there are also nubs on the delete and page down buttons. Now, that does stump me... Ok the PC keyboard has one on number 5 on that numbers-only keyboard to the right of the main keyboard, which I have never learned to use effectively.

Nuff of this. Who wants to go river rafting or cross country skiing with me?

What's weird is how your mind extends to an object that your body touches. I get this running a backhoe all day but especially a bobcat (because it uses your hands and your feet.) A backhoe is really a trip after running it over 8hrs straight because it articulates on so many joints. You can feel the difference between materials from the tip of the teeth on the bucket, so much so that you can tell the difference between a metal pipe and a tree root. After awhile you're not even thinking about what you're hands are doing operating it. It totally becomes an extension of you. You "think" it into position. I think the keyboard is the same way when you're typing fast.

When I used to work as an archaeologist, I was always amazed at the dexterity of the backhoe operators. They could work an area so precisely, taking just enough earth so that we could get at the layers below. At one site, we used to have these two roadrunners that followed the backhoe guy around, even on his lunch break, because he was always unearthing tasty treats for them.

Interesting to create a parallel between typing and backhoe operating! The sensitivity of the fingers + the idea that the machine becomes an extension of one's mind--can we come up with another example?

CAD drafting...I know lots of people who say that you can't design on the computer, that you have to us paper and pencil to draw out your initial thoughts. While I personally find that to be easier, I know other people who can do amazing things using CAD alone. They've just been using it for so long, it's second nature.

In response to azbackpackr:
How 'bout flying a helicopter. Same thing especially when I was instructing. If the student was thinking about the movement of the controls as opposed to what he/she wanted the aircraft to do they would over control the aircraft. Each control requires a coordinated, but predictable movement of the other three controls simultaneously which becomes muscle memory after a couple hundred hours. Then your free to multitask the other decisionmaking, navigating, communicating, activities to keep the greasy side down. Incidently for those on the Canyon thread I have never flown a helicopter in the Canyon. I also find the Mesa Pd copter rather annoying as they love to orbit at 500 feet or less over my neighborhood on a regular basis.

Using standard gear shifts.