Dvorak Update
I have been at this Dvorak thing for a couple of weeks now, and I have been making considerable progress. This weekend alone, I have improved my typing speed by 10 words per minute.
I admit that if I hadn’t converted my home keyboard and reconfigured my one at work, I probably would have already given up. It really takes forcing yourself to do it to make any progress. Instant messaging has become a near impossibility, and the same for typing blogs — hence the lack of new entries over the last week.
Anyway, I have found some interesting resources along the way. There is a typing game that really forces you to speed up, as well as one based on asteroid, and there are some awesome typing tests here. Probably the best online resource for Dvorak beginners is a set of lessons I found, which are specifically designed to teach Dvorak.
One of the most interesting things I have found is that the dubious claim that Dvorak allows you to type the most common words of English faster may actually be true. There is a typing test that comprises only the most frequently occurring words, and while my overall typing speed is now around 30 wpm on other typing tests, it is over 40 for this one.
Once I have been doing this for a while, I plan to post a graph of my improvement through time.