It’s the little things that you notice. I was writing something, and just happened to notice that I was looking off into the distance while I was typing. It was one of those choices I made when I was very young. I was in High School, our school didn’t have a typing class, and I decided I needed to learn how. I don’t even remember why. It might have been my mom’s stories about learning, with those typewriters with no letters on the keys, when she was growing up.<\/p>\n
Anyways, I remember taking one course, one of those summer enrichment things, up at Northern Secondary. I seem to recall I also took magic, stained glass, and board games, but those might have been different years. (Come to think of it, it might even have been before high school…) Interestingly, I remember this being my choice, perhaps an odd choice for a 12 year old. I don’t even remember why I thought it would be useful, but I remember acutely that I knew it would be. Perhaps similar to my choice to pursue chemical engineering over computers, as I knew that no matter what I did, I would be using computers.<\/p>\n
I remember taking that one course, and it being fun…They had these cool puzzles where they gave you a sequence of commands to type, making simple versions of what I could only find online as ‘typewriter art’: https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1250&bih=694&q=typewriter+art<\/p>\n
(Kind of early ASCII art, I wonder how much crossed over…)<\/p>\n
In searching for the above, I found:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.rapidtyping.com\/online-typing-games\/isogram-puzzle.html<\/p>\n
It’s Mastermind, but with words! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n
Which apparently has also been published:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/boardgamegeek.com\/boardgame\/5662\/word-mastermind<\/p>\n
In a couple of different forms:
\nhttps:\/\/boardgamegeek.com\/image\/1029413\/word-mastermind
\nhttps:\/\/boardgamegeek.com\/image\/1151419\/word-mastermind<\/p>\n
Anyways, I took these classes, but I don’t remember really using my typing until we had an email group in undergrad called the ‘Mailstrom’, often hitting 3 digits of messages per day, where quick wit (and quicker typing) was key.<\/p>\n
I suspect there was also some training from playing computer games, but that would really only train a few keys (mostly ctrl and alt, from that era), and the mental mapping probably wouldn’t be from the hand motion to the letter.<\/p>\n
And right now, I’m touch typing this, and it seems so normal\/natural. Such a weird skill. Happy typing! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s the little things that you notice. I was writing something, and just happened to notice that I was looking off into the distance while I was typing. It was one of those choices I made when I was very young. I was in High School, our school didn’t have a typing class, and I … Continue reading Touch Typing<\/span>