STEVE JOBS AT HOME IN 1982 — “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” —Steve Jobs

Whoa, I didn’t know that his birthday is on Feb. 24th, two days apart from my birthday. Awesome.

It’s been a month since I switched to Dvorak keyboard layout for once and good. Dvorak is the name of a simplified keyboard that’s been remapped efficiently to ease stress on your hands in typing. It was created by this guy named Dr. August Dvorak, hence the name, who spent countless days researching keyboard layouts. God bless him.

I first heard about this layout back when I was in college. Boy, you get to learn a lot of stuffs in college. Three of my friends were Dvorak typists and they told me it’s better than Qwerty. So I tried to learn but it was too hard and I had to stay catch up with school and homework. I gave up shortly after attempting to switch.

On my first internship off college, I got bored so I thought again about learning how to type in Dvorak and this time, I lasted longer for about two weeks. I still struggled and was typing pretty slow. I gave up again.

Now, I’m in my full-time position as a webmaster for Google, I spend a lot of time typing and my fingers were starting to burden the stress. When I got a Kinesis keyboard, I thought it was a good time to learn Dvorak again and so I did and stuck with it. I’m happy I did and it’s so easy to type urls like google.com, evenly alternating fingers.

With this Dvorak layout, I learned two things about this keyboard. It focuses on alternating both hands wheras with Qwerty, there is a number of words that can be typed with only one hand. When I started to type in Dvorak, that was a bad habit to break as I wasn’t very used to alternate hands on almost every letter. Secondly, it actually uses all of your fingers, from your left pinkie to your right pinkie. I wasn’t used to engaging my pinkies as I used index, middle fingers and thumbs often on Qwerty and I wasn’t really touch-typing, although I could type pretty fast.

One other thing it taught me. My dad isn’t very computer literate and he couldn’t even touch type and would have to hunt and peck at every letter. I used to make fun of him about that as I couldn’t imagine how hard that would be. Touch-typing, that is, feels pretty easy to me, almost like writing. You probably feel the same way. Till you try to teach yourself how to type on Dvorak. And that is exactly the same kind of frustration that my dad feels when it comes down to typing. Computers weren’t around when he was born so I understood that now and I don’t make fun of him anymore.

One of my favorite parts about this keyboard is probably the period that’s above D letter on E letter. It’s so easy to hit that letter instead of awkwardly lifting your hand to reach period on the lower right bottom.

Since 70% of English words can be typed on home row, sometimes, Dvorak layout makes me feel like I’m typing on a piano, using all of my fingers almost equally, hitting most common letters on the home row with occasional reaches to other less frequent letters. Oh yeah, the record for the fastest typist in the world was accomplished with a Dvorak layout. :-) ‘enuff said.

For more reading on this keyboard layout,

Ma.tt » On the Dvorak Keyboard Layout
Kertong.com - The Dvorak layout
The Dvorak Keyboard and You
Dvzine.org/

Good luck!

I recently bought a nice-looking external hard drive from Vantec. Since I have both PC and Mac, I need to format the hard drive in FAT32 filesystem and by Windows Vista’s disk management, it doesn’t give you the option to format with FAT32, only in NTFS. That’s no good because Mac cannot write to NTFS, it can only read the filesystem. With some googling, there is a turnaround to this. The command line is your solution.

1. Go to ‘run’ from the start button and type ‘cmd’ to bring up the command window.
2. Type this in the command line: format (Drive letter): /FS:FAT32

That’s all! The format process will take a while, at least it will give you the percent it’s completing at.

Looks cool. And it’s made by Chinese. o_O

I gotta do this guide and banish Windows from this hard drive forever. :-)

Windows in your pocket.

In case you’re wondering why I bother to use Windows, well, there’s still some programs I need to use that isn’t available on Linux, like Sorenson’s Envision videophone program, NexTalk program to place TTY calls, and while I’m not exactly used to the GIMP program, I’m still using Fireworks to design websites. I know there’s a vmware but it’s slower and anything less than its optimal speed is intolerable.

The best part is that it’s portable, so when I go to see my parents for christmas, I just plug in my USB and start up the “mini” windows and do stuffs without messing up my parents’ computer. So I wouldn’t have to hear my dad saying, “What did u do with my bookmarks!?”.

Knowing that today is my last chance to finalize the transfer from dot5hosting.com over to dreamhost.com (although I haven’t gotten the last notice to let me know that my account is gonna be expired, I still better not take the risk and end up losing everything.), the first thing I did was try to figure how to retract the database from the mysql server. We the geeks call it mysql dump and with the friendly interface of myPHPadmin, this dump was as easy as you would save a file from the www. Then I gotta set up the database on the new server but dreamhost.com is more technical if not geeky as it doesn’t support localhost (default hostname for most database setups) and you gotta have to set up the hostname for the database. With the aid of docs thru dreamhost, I found a way to set up the database using my own hostname, which has a nice geeky feeling to it. Once the database has been set up, I used the import command to, well, import my blog into the new database, and then I simply copied everything thru ftp over to the new server. And here I am. Transfer complete. :-)

I just realized I only have two days left before I either renew my contract with my current web hosting server or change to a new server. Or this whole thing will be shut down and I lose everything on the server. I’ve broken the biggest rule in computing: always back up your data. Which I haven’t done so. Good thing I use Flickr as my image management. Since my current web server doesn’t allow shell access due to security reasons, I found this web hosting service that allows unix access at a good deal, $7.95 a month for two years.

I’m gonna go ahead and migrate over to the new server. I hope it’ll go smoothly without any hiccups. That’s if someone will notice. ;-)

*update*

I found this absolutely sweet deal, thanks to mymoneyblog.com, he used the coupon, ‘77OFF1YEAR’ to save $77 from $111.95 for one year ($9.95 a month) to only $3.95 a month. That sealed the deal for me. Hello Dreamhost.