Because I don’t want to write the post tonight that sums up my typing adventure.

And today:

Whew, broke the 30 wpm mark, here I come 40!

So…typing…actually, things are really starting to come together! I have passed the point of wanting to back to simple hunting and pecking – in the few times that I have accidentally fallen back into my old habit I found it to be an awkward and fumbling experience (yes yes you can come up with your own joke to insert here.) I’m also starting to wander into that realm where my fingers are starting to “find the letters on their own.” It’s kinda neat, I think of a letter and my fingers will for the most part just hit that letter. Apparently at some point it will actually transfer over to words and they will magically appear on screen just as soon as I think (would could be good or bad) and that is when I believe I will have truly arrived in the typing world.

Until then, here’s my latest typing score!

Oh, and I can now get up to level 3 on typing of the dead – that’s got to count for something right?

Quick update: That typing test was a day old – I was feeling like I was on a typing roll so I decided to crank another one out and this was the result:

No post yesterday but that certainly doesn’t mean that I didn’t get in some typing in – I was committing copious amounts of code yesterday as I was trying to hit a deadline (which, depending on your point of view, was a good or a bad thing. Anyway, here’s todays test:

Well, a little slower but the accuracy was a better so that’s a good thing right? Right?!

So last night I started to finally get some return on this painful task of learning how to type…and it all started with a tutorial (start dream sequence……….now!)

I was wanting to play around with some asp.net mvc stuff and I came across a task that I usually aproach with great trepidation and gnashing of teeth: the online tutorial. Probably not scary for most of you but I have two unwritten rules when it comes to tutorials – I have to finish it and I have to type the code (no copy and paste sir – especially not now when I need the practice.) Understandably, my inability to type made this a daunting task as I usually ended up performing this inane cycle of insanity to finish the darn thing:

Look at the code sample
Look at the IDE
Look at the keyboard
Look at the code sample and memorize a small chunk of text to type
Type
Repeat the above 2 steps until all code is typed
Look at the IDE
Type to fix what I messed up
Look at the IDE
Repeat until all typing mistakes are fixed
Look back at the code
and over
and over
and over again…

Quite asinine isn’t it?

Last night, while my typing is arguably slower, the whole process was so much smoother as I never had to look at the keyboard. This new process went something like this:

Look at the code
type what I see
verify

Wow, I cannot express how much more pleasant of a process that was than the madness I used to engage in. Like, dare I say, it was actually fun?

And now, here is the typing of the day!

Not monumental but at least some improvement…

Whew, things are starting to get better but I am definitely still having issues with a few of the more nefarious letters:

B: You sir, are a difficult key to get a hold of. My left index finger has to stretch so far to get a hold of you that it’s making my right index finger a little jealous. In fact, lefty has overstepped his bounds a few times but I swiftly erase what he has done and force righty to keep up his end of the bargain.

UIO: This trio of surreptitious vowels has been giving me trouble since day 1. Interestingly enough, I keep having trouble differentiating between U and O, and I and E.

P: This one probably wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t having to type “public” and “private” all day long. But I do, so it is.

But of all my lettering woes, I hate B the most.

And now for today’s typing test!

You know how marathoners talk about hitting that point where there is no will to carry on? It’s the precise moment when all of the cons of actually running a very long distance start to stack very heavily against all of the pros and there is really no motivation to continue other than sheer will and commitment.

I totally hit the typing wall today. Big time. In fact, I’m still pushing through it. I was dreading really diving into some code with my current self-imposed handicap and sure enough, it was pretty painful. It went very much like this:

p…u…b…l…i…c…*space*…f…

See where I’m going with this? Plus, to give myself more practice I’ve been ignoring all intellisense which some folks see as down-right sadistic and I agree. Painful and necessary.

I’m still with it – but I needed a little motivation so I thought I’d share a couple of the phrases that I culled from the various “programmers need to know how to type” posts that started me on this whole journey. This whole awkward and painful journey.

If you don’t know how to touch type you won’t understand until you do. There is something, well, just “cool” about being able to see words appear on the screen as you think them without giving any conscious thought to directing the individual fingers and keystrokes.

If you are going to use a tool on a daily basis, I can’t imagine any reasonable argument against taking the time to learn to use it well.

http://jit.nuance9.com/2008/11/typing-im-programmer-not-secretary.html

non-touch-typists have to make sacrifices in order to sustain their productivity.

It’s just simple arithmetic. If you spend more time hammering out code, then in order to keep up, you need to spend less time doing something else.

But when it comes to programming, there are only so many things you can sacrifice! You can cut down on your documentation. You can cut down on commenting your code. You can cut down on email conversations and participation in online discussions, preferring group discussions and hallway conversations.

And… well, that’s about it.

So guess what non-touch-typists sacrifice? All of it, man. They sacrifice all of it.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

Steve and I believe there is nothing more fundamental in programming than the ability to efficiently express yourself through typing. Note that I said “efficiently” not “perfectly”. This is about reasonable competency at a core programming discipline.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001188.html

And I’ve got to be honest – there are a couple of design issues I’m kinda struggling with…like:

I never use the caps lock ever (and I kinda wonder if anybody else does either) and it bugs me that it sits there so close to my pinky. Seriously, it is a gigantic button sitting right smack next to my home row and here I am wondering if I’m ever going to be able to take a stab at it. Tragic I tell you, simply tragic.

My right pinky rests on the semi-colon? Really? I mean, as a programmer I realize that I use that bad-boy fairly often but I can think of a key or two that I use more often like say, I dunno, E or R or T.

Oh T, how I wish you were on the home row.

Overall, the typing is getting better – I’m finding more and more that my fingers are just starting to find the keys without me having to painfully will them over there. The part is cool.

Whew – things are getting better but still difficult. Here is how most of my conversations went down yesterday:

Jason: “Hey Paul, how is it going?”
Paul: “I…a…m…d…o…i…n…g…”
Jason: “Are you there?”
Paul: “…f…i…n…e”

Yuck. Plus, I had major issues with passwords. I so wanted to just to revert back to my old typing style because I couldn’t look at the keyboard AND I couldn’t look at the letters I was typing. Needless to say, it was a long day.

Let’s see where my speed is at today!

Not a momentous change but it is progress…

Hopefully better tomorrow!

Remember when I said I would update you in a week on how the typing was going? Well, I need the practice now…so here are the things I have discovered thus far (probably nothing new for you but again, I need the practice)

This is a painful transition. I’m fairly comfortable with my low-grade hunt and peck and having to relearn everything is kind of maddening, it’s like my brain knows what it wants but my fingers aren’t ready to deliver yet.

Typing of the dead is a lot of fun, and I’m finding the tutorials to be much better than what they have on Mavis. This is really a fun way to actually learn something – the graphics are old school arcade (well, the game is fairly old), it’s really intense to play, and it’s much more rewarding to save humanity than to copy old tomes word for word. Oh, and it’s full of zombies…like, overflowing.

I’m finding myself frustrated whenever I need to use the mouse…I’m longing for the little red track mouse thing on my old thinkpad.

More soon, this whole typing thing is supposed to get easier right?