I’ve been working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon over the past few months. Great book. This passage, in particular, really struck a chord with me:
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.
I’ve associated with many nerds through the course of my life and these words ring SO TRUE. This is something I’ve been somewhat aware of for awhile now, but it’s something else entirely to see it written so succinctly.
On an unrelated note, this Free OCR website is a great way to get text out of Google Books.
Solo Piano #13 (mp3)
Something else I was playing around with this evening. I’m not sure where I keep coming up with this overly somber music. Probably a combination of the instrument itself and the fact that I can’t play very fast.
Solo Piano #12 (mp3)
Here’s an alternate version of Solo Piano #11 in A minor. Amazing how much easier it is to play this riff after taking a day off. I knocked this out in two takes, versus something like 40 for Saturday’s version.
Solo Piano #11 (mp3)
I’ve been working on basic root-fifth-octave left-hand arpeggios, so this is just that over C major with a little melody on top. SURPRISINGLY hard to get a decent recording of this, just a lot to keep track of.
More typing! This is totally working.
Rounds: 10
WPM: 68.7
Time: 52.3 seconds
Correct: 299.0
Incorrect: 2.0
Accuracy: 0.9934
If only all skill acquisitiion could be reduced to free Flash games on the internet.
Solo Piano #10 (mp3)
Dinking around on the black keys and this just fell out. I know it sounds like it’s building up to something but I assure it is not. Please don’t be disappointed.
More typing practice today. Here are the results:
Rounds: 25
WPM: 62.72
Time: 57.8 seconds
Correct: 302.2
Incorrect: 3.28
Accuracy: 0.9893
Numbers up across the board, which is promising. I’d like to get the mistakes down before moving on to more than just the f and j keys.
I sat down for some more typing practice this afteroon, knocking out 40 rounds of the exercise I linked to earlier this week. Today’s results:
Rounds: 40
WPM: 58.6
Time: 61.45 seconds
Correct: 301.925
Incorrect: 4.375
Accuracy: 0.9857
I had two mistake-free rounds. I found that focusing on accuracy rather than speed led to overall faster times, which makes sense since mistakes really screw up the typing flow.
If you’re interested in doing something like this, I’ve been storing my results in vaguely Markdown-ish data files which I then process with a simple Ruby script.
To follow up on last week’s post, I spent some time today with some free online typing tutorials. I worked on lesson #1, which focuses on only the f and j keys. Here are my results:
Rounds: 5
WPM: 56.0
Time: 65.0 seconds
Correct: 302.0
Incorrect: 13.0
Accuracy: 0.9587
I’m feeling good about this — those numbers are right in line with how I see myself as a typist and there’s a clear path to improvement. STAY TUNED.