14 Jun 4705 - Put Dvorak on D-Counter

Like with all service-based jobs, being a witch-doctor means waiting through slow periods for jobs to come one after the other faster than you can handle. Here I have been waiting, and here I have about four more tasks tonight than I can reasonably accomplish, although three of those may simply vanish if I can't get a ride.

So stick around, why not? Even if Darryl kicks you out, you should just turn the volume down and stay until you please. That will give me time for the other few rituals I need to do, and maybe even my dinner!

If you hang around the GMU campus much and like coffee at all, you should go buy a gift card from Saxbys. Saxbys is, of course, Bassy's nobody, but emotionless husk though he be, he knows which heartless to hire to brew some excelsior blends. Also it just opened, so everything is clean and well kept and everyone is super-friendly and just learning how to do things the right way, so no corner-cutting. In another year it will be one surly barista behind the grimy counter sneering at you if you order anything that takes more than two steps to make. I'm looking at you, whole-milk-only-no-sugar-two-Sweet&Low-half-decaf-half-regular-frothless-caramel-macchiato orderist. They don't have a tip jar yet either. I'm telling you the iron is hot. Their store hours are 5:30 to 23:00, I am given to understand every day, although that's probably just the weekday hours.

I propose that we organize a posse some night and storm the place. Not so far as to beast them with a flash-mob. Go there in posse, each bring a poem or brief story, order some drinks, pick a corner, stand up and speak aloud. They may not have a stage yet, but they shall. Or I suppose we could find a way to cart a hub around and line up laptops on the bar-like window seats and play Starcraft or Diablo2 for hours. Anyhow patronize this place. That's an order. Unless you don't like coffee. Then you should accompany me because you like my company.

The work has been as gray as the sky this week, slow and chilled. There have been few clients, or many on days when I get to put my headphones on and generally ignore clients. One LA rotated out, one birthday with way-too-sugary cake (approaching the limit of hyphen density my trans-dimensional editor allows), one deck idea, one life, one love. The week of five features. Among the over-arching laxity acrimony came Matt from elsewhere on the floor, who has his own office, role, and ideas about what the lab is for. I'm not sure what he does exactly, aside from occupy perhaps twice my volume in atmosphere and saunter from place to place with a permanently incensed look on his face, as if you had just cuttingly criticized his corpulent carriage. Today he needed some space in the far side of the lab to hold a meeting using the projector, which this morning was obscured from view by a table with a pile of our old equipment thereon, and a bookshelf full of the MML's newish stuff. And could you move all of this so I can hold my meeting? Bossman complied, saying he needed to junk the junk anyway, and would yous LAs cart it away? Sure.

Some of this equipment needed to be sent back to some inventory house somewhere on campus. For those there are barcodes and forms. Equipment without barcodes, though, is trash, and we had first dibs on anything we wanted, mostly some old cables, speakers, mice and keyboards. We threw the rest away, after plundering the lion's share of the pile for our personal eventual contest piles of the one who dies with the most toys. I snagged some power cables (those always die on me, so it will be good to have spares), a set of speakers, two optical mice, and a keyboard that I didn't have the heart to throw away.

For the keyboard, I decided to remove the keys, clean underneath, and rearrange everything in the Dvorak setup for the day I bother to teach myself how to type that way. This challenge presented almost no difficulty from a mechanical standpoint, and a few quiddities worth mention. Dell stock keyboards are designed with the subtlest of nods to ergonomic need. If you turn one on its side and look from caps lock to enter key, you will see a gentle arc within the home row, which gives asdfg a different angle than, say, zxcvb and so on. When the keys are then rearranged, this geometric uniformity shatters, and so my new dvorak-compliant keyboard has a funny hilly look to it, as if some of the keys really want to be pushed, and others are shy. The next problem was eff and jay keys. In the qwerty setup, eff and jay are reference keys. Each has a little bump on the bottom of the key that you can easily feel, blind or no, and find your way around the keyboard that way. Now the bumps are little help to anyone, but that wasn't my problem with the transfer. For some reason, the keyboard designer decided to thus give eff and jay special runners that were aligned with a channel on the bottom of the key instead of the top. Every other key on the board, even non-letters (except 5 on the numpad of course) has a channel in the top face of the square stem, and a matching runner in its home. So when I seated the eff in place of the wy, and it stuck down and didn't rebound, I was perplexed. I discovered the channel and runner feature of the keys themselves, and proposed a solution to myself, and acted. Procure blade, shave off runner. No runner equals smooth action. This particular feature would make sense if the stems were circular or something, but they're squares. No idea what design was thinking, doubly so for the reverse style for reference keys. The only thing I can think of is this feature makes it easier to assemble the keyboard if you are blind. Even then it isn't a great help.

So the keyboard is not entirely intact, but I have a dvorak now, and can maybe in another year or so convince myself to spend time typing to people with it instead of my posh qwerty at home. I'll also look into setting up more than one mouse on a system and dual-wielding them. That alone would be worth the price of purchase (free) and worthy, maybe of a how-to article on instructables or something. No idea what kind of app would need it...two player same-system Quake 3 anyone?

Also, I may be late or absent tonight. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll be doing the time warp again.

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