It is a particularly slow day at the office. I just finished the last drawing set of the project I'm handling, chatted with a couple of friends, did my daily Yahoo! crossword and by 4 pm, I had absolutely nothing to do. I couldn't think of anything to write about in my blog, I was awaiting 6 o'clock like a TGIF crazed (but absolutely bored) lunatic. I was staring mindlessly at my keyboard, thinking of something to do (I already consumed my Holland waffles)... nothing. I refocused my eyes and noticed that some letters on my keyboard are starting to fade.

It was sometime during the half-hearted cleaning of my keyboard, when a question boggled me. Why are these letters arranged as such? QWERTYUIOP... Google Search: "Qwerty keyboard order"...

Apparently, it IS called a QWERTY keyboard. It was invented in 1868, by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter. The reason according to Wikipedia, was certain commonly used letters were separated to prevent typebars(?) from intertwining (aka make the typist type slower to prevent jamming). I thought the reason would be more scientific than that.

There is an alternative keyboard invented by Dr. August Dvorak in 1930 (uncreatively and narcissistically) called the Dvorak Keyboard. It looks something like this:


Who would convert to that? It took me too long to get used to typing on the regular keyboard without looking at my fingers 100% of the time (and using both hands, not all fingers though). According to Webopedia,

It has been estimated that in an average eight-hour day, a typist's hands travel 16 miles on a QWERTY keyboard but only 1 mile on a Dvorak keyboard.

Substantial difference huh. I still wouldn't consider changing keyboards. First of all, my fingers need the exercise. And secondly, I think its just pointless (so is this whole blog entry... hah!)



For all my Archi friends.
I was clearing up some files on my hard disk and found this Dilbert strip:



Liam Ball
This Yahoo! image for the new mail format is so amusing.

Labels: bloghopping, boredomville