I learned to type on a typewriter sometime after they became electric but before they had spell checkers.\u00a0 I was never very good at it, but it got me through a metric boat load of term papers. Particularly important since my handwriting has been pretty illegible since I learned to hold a pencil.<\/p>\n
In college, I learned to program in a variety of arcane languages all of which depended on entering large quantities of numbers and special symbols into a keyboard.\u00a0 Touch typing was pretty useless, at least the version I was capable of because I never really got much past the letters and an occasional period or comma.\u00a0 Out of a sense of self preservation I developed my own technique that involves 4 fingers and one thumb across two hands and requires me to stare at the keyboard while I type.\u00a0 I can still manage 30 wpm which gets me by for what I do and provides an unnatural source of amusement for Kim who can type 1,530 wpm while looking at me, carrying on a conversation, and knitting an afghan.<\/p>\n
Anyway, along came 2-way pagers, smartphones and other things that forced me to learn to type with just two thumbs.\u00a0 The technique is different enough to require a learning curve, but I managed.\u00a0 Still, I’d barely hack out a sentence while Kim explained the finer points of why the Celtics have been the dominant force in basketball for the last 3 decades with just two digits.<\/p>\n
Well, now we’re up for stage 3.\u00a0 The Swype technique<\/a>.\u00a0 The new Droid X phone is sporting a new keyboarding method where you don’t touch each letter of the word, but rather trace a path through all the letters of the word.\u00a0 Samsung and HTC are also planning offerings.\u00a0 This is the method that recently shattered a text messaging speed record. And yes, here’s yet another learning curve, but I’m hopeful as this seems somehow different enough to maybe give me an edge.\u00a0 Oh who am I kidding?\u00a0 She’s gonna smoke me again.<\/p>\n
![\"Swype\"](\"http:\/\/www.blogcdn.com\/www.engadget.com\/media\/2010\/06\/100624-swype-01.jpg\" "\\"Swype\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"