dannnex

i've never felt dumber than just now when I decided I should probably relearn proper typing technique. My wpm generally hovers around 80 when I type the way I'm used to (thumbs  for space, first 2 fingers of each hand for letters, pinkies for shift on the left and delete on the right. never use ring fingers ever.(side note: I just realized that I type the same way I play bass. ring finger almost never does nothing in bass, you only use your first, second, and 4th fingers. i wonder if me playing bass for 9 years impacted that. huh.)) so when I found a site that teaches proper technique and my wpm drops down to like 20, its frustrating. its hard too because I feel like I type how i read, i don't type/read each letter individually, I just type/read the entire word at once. so when these typing courses have you type meaningless strings of characters, its really hard to get it accurate because there's no muscle memory associated. 

its extra frustrating because I used to know this. spent 3 years in elementary school doing mavis beacon typing during computer lab. that was like 7 years ago now so i guess it makes sense that i've lost it.

on the topic of typing, my dad is the fastest typer I've ever met, and he has a cool reason for it. way back in the late 90s/early 00s (i think) he got a job at a call-in center for deaf people. apparently there used to be these devices deaf people would have where when someone called them, the words that person spoke would be printed onto a screen. But obviously back then we didn't have speech recognition, so this was done manually with an intermediary. That's what my dad did. He listened to what the hearing person would say, then had to type it in real-time and send it over to the deaf person. So he got really really really good at typing, because you have to type in real-time, and people talk fast. He has crazy stories of the things he heard people say too.