I’m a shitty typer, which is remarkable considering how much time I spend doing it. I think I learned how to type with my index and middle fingers when I was a little kid and got good enough at it that I never had a reason to improve. That is ALL ABOUT TO CHANGE.
I watched this awesome Vim for Rails Developers screencast over the weekend, and while it was full of useful Vim tips, the thing that stuck with me the most was the authors encouragement to learn to touch type. He set a bar of 80 words per minute as the speed at which your brain isn’t slowing down to match your fingers. I’m not sure how scientific that is, but it seems like nice round number and a reasonable goal.
I spent some time with Typeracer and a few other online tools and I’m pretty close, hitting something like 75 words per minute with regular consistency. I feel like I backtrack a whole lot, though, and I almost never use my pinky fingers. I looked around for some good touch typing software, but the only thing that looks any good is Mavis Beacon for $40. Probably worth it, but a little pricey for an impulse buy.
I’ve been working on a little app called DOIT to manage my daily goals from the command line. Here’s my list from yesterday:
> doit yesterday
Wed Mar 30 2011
_ create
X exercise
X meditate
X practice
X read
It’s all written in CoffeeScript, one of my favorite little languages. Check it out on GitHub.
Lullaby (Weezer) (mp3)
This is a cover of “Lullaby,” one of my favorite Weezer songs. Here’s the original for reference.
Solo Piano #8 (mp3)
Simple song, arpeggios over C / G7. If you want to hear something more complex, try “Runaway Love” by Justin Bieber ft. Raekwon and Kanye West.
Solo Piano #7 (mp3)
I’ve had this one in my head for a few days, and I spent a good hour and half playing around with it tonight. I easily could have spent twice as long on it, but once the audio started distorting in my head, I knew it was time to call it a wrap and go to bed.
The chord progression is Bmb5-Bb-F, which is a trick I might’ve stolen from the Beatles or might have just made up. I probably just made it up.
I spent some time working on the site this weekend, including adding a new visual design and the ability to filter posts by content type (see the little ‘audio’ and ‘text’ buttons above). Visual updates include:
Webfonts! I grabbed League Gothic and Sorts Mill Goudy from the League of Movable Type and converted them for the web using FontSquirrel.
CSS3 techniques, including text-shadow for the header, border-radius for the category buttons, and RGBA all over the place.
Also, the whole thing’s orange.
Adding the content type filtering turned out to be a little bit tricky, just based on the way I set up the rendering system. I think it will be cool, though — I added per-type ATOM feeds, and I’m hoping to be able to serve up the audio feed as a podcast once I figure out the nuances of iTunes and get much better at playing piano.
Having this whole site in a git repo has made both posting to and customizing the site much more enjoyable than having to go through a web interface. I WILL NEVER GO BACK.
Solo Piano #6 (mp3)
Trying a little verse/chorus thing. Verse is Em/Am. Chorus is F/G with a blue note added for flavoring.
Solo Piano #5 (mp3)
Inspired by Brothers on a Hotel Bed, pretty much my favorite Death Cab song ever.
Solo Piano #4 (mp3)
Progression is I-bIII-IV-bvi-V (C-Eb-F-Abm-G). I really dig that flatted minor sixth. I’ll have to work that in to something else.
I was feeling pretty down about this time last week. I was putting off practicing piano all week, and then trying to make up for it with a marathon practice session the night before my lesson. It was enough to keep from embarassing myself in front of my tutor, but that’s about it; I wasn’t making any progress to speak of.
I considered that maybe piano wasn’t for me, that if I really wanted to do it, I’d just do it. I also considered that it won’t be fun to play piano until I’m good at it, and I won’t be good until I do a lot of unfun practice.
I mentioned these ideas to my friend Melodie, who suggested that I try to practice for ten minutes a day. Sage advice, it turns out. It’s always daunting to think about playing for 30 minutes or more, but I’ve had no trouble getting motivated to sit down for ten minutes.
I’ve applied the same principle to meditation, something I’ve wanted to do for years, but was unable to start for whatever reason. So far so good: I’ve practiced piano and done some basic meditation every day for the last week.