Party Bus

Last week I had the pleasure of attending The Blanks (aka "Ted's band" from TV's Scrubs) concert on campus. The concert was great and very entertaining, but my evening was just getting started as I left the concert. I live off campus and catch a bus to get back home. Well, it was raining fairly hard, which means I was running to the bus stop. I noticed lots of other students running to the bus stop, but figured that they were just getting out of the girls basketball game that night. I made it to the bus stop in time to get onto a bus and even have a seat (a rarity during the post-basketball game bus rush).

Well, to make a long story short, there was a special event going on that night, numerous buses had been chartered to take undergraduate students participating in rush week. I ended up on one of these buses. But I realized this about 15 minutes after we left the bus stop. After I realized something wasn't quite normal about this particular bus ride, I pulled up the gps feature on my phone and my suspicions were confirmed. We were headed west and I needed to go east.

After I asked the driver where we were headed, the other passengers caught on to the fact that I didn't belong- that I wasn't where I wanted to be.

Typing in Stereo?

"Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible." St. Augustine

I don't remember who or when, but I was once told that the current setup of the common keyboard is set up to intentionally slow you down. Maybe I wanted to believe it because I've never been a particularly fast typer. Truthfully, instant messaging chatting improved my speed and accuracy more than any of the exercises I ever had to do in school...but I digress.

I was skeptical of this so I decided to research it. The keyboard setup we're all familiar with is nicknamed the "QWERTY," after the letters on the top left (go ahead, look). After doing some research on the internet, I discovered that the other setup is the "Dvorak" (named after it's creator) and after reading from this site, I learned that it is designed for the one hand/finger typer- it couples commonly used letters closer together to limit the distance traveled to type letters (think of the letters Pat always picks on Wheel of Fortune: RSTLNE). Click here to read what Wikipedia has to say about Dvorak and see how it is setup.

I read somewhere else that in studies QWERTY users could type just as fast as Dvorak users. I guess that means that you should probably just go with what you're used to. But I wonder, how much do I do that makes things harder for me? How often can I "not get out of my own way"? How often do we, as Christians, do that? Search for a way to simplify and increase the effectiveness of what you're doing.