Learning

New Habits

This blog is ancient, but let’s start a new habit with it. Let’s publish something. Every day. It doesn’t have to be on the blog, but writing is one of the easier things I can do. I also have a bunch of videos on my harddrive that I could edit and upload to YouTube. I just want to be creating something that I can point to every day.

I am actually a bit surprised that I was able to get the tooling for this blog back up and running after all these years. All it took was installing rbenv, an old version of Ruby - 1.9.3 - and an old version of bundler - 1.0.14 - and then everything worked. I hope to get a new site up before too long. I’ve started working on it here, but as you can see it has stalled. It’s hard to find time for things like that with a baby!

The Great Dvorak Distraction

I am pretty fast at typing. I am by no means the fastest ever, but I can hold my own. I don’t really worry about how fast I can type, but I do slightly worry about repetitive strain injuries. Therefore, I have allowed myself to be distracted from learning to read faster. I have been playing around (yet again) with learning the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout, and I am (still) convinced that it is dramatically better than the traditional QWERTY layout.

One Week of Reading

Well, I have been trying to read faster for about a week. My progress has been . . . disappointing. Granted, I have not actually “practiced” that much, but I have done a fair bit of regular reading, and most of the time I am conscious of trying to read faster. However, according to the first resource I consumed since embarking on this speed-reading adventure, I should spend time practicing if I really want to get fast.

On Learning to Read . . . Faster

I am a slow reader. I have known this for a while now. I have even tried to do something about it at one point, but a recent post by my cousin made me realize just how much potential reading speed I’m missing out on. She took the staples reading test that has been going around recently and found that she reads at 748 words per minute.