[geeks] grudging praise for a Microsoft product

[Phil Stracchino]

der Mouse wrote:
>> I do ... well, [something "nonstandard"].  And it works fine, as long
>> as I don't *think* about it.  But if I start thinking about what I'm
>> doing, then I get the centipede problem and my typing goes all to
>> hell.
> 
> Interesting.  Maybe my typing has moved further down out of my
> conscious, or maybe I'm just better at detached introspection, but I
> find it perfectly possible to watch myself typing without disrupting
> it.

Oh, I can *watch myself* with no problem.  The more engrossed I am in 
thinking about, say, the code I'm writing at the time, the less I need 
to visually confirm what I'm typing.  It's just that if I start 
consciously thinking about how I'm typing instead of just letting my 
hands do it, then I get all screwed up.

> One thing I find intersting is that the pipeline appears to be
> something like six keystrokes long.  Another is that I type words, not
> letters, to some extent; when I make a mistake, it's easier and usually
> quicker to delete the whole word and retype it, rather than try to fix
> it, even if it's a long word like "integrated" or "impossible".

Yeah, I've noticed the pipeline effect too.  My most common class of 
typo is race conditions -- the left-hand pipeline and the right-hand 
pipeline get out of sync, so I end up with a word with all the right 
characters in it, except that two of them (not always adjacent) are 
transposed.  And particularly for short words, I do often find myself 
backspacing up to a typo before my brain manages to interject "You know, 
it'd have been quicker just to replace the one character."


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
          Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                  It's not the years, it's the mileage.