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.

When I first read this headline, I had to do a doubletake to make sure it was December 1st and not April.

I mean seriously, this president is leaving office with the second lowest approval rating of all time, the nation at war(s), a failed economy, and having drastically lowered America’s world standing, but there are still people willing to give him awards? Oh, right, Christians.

Rick Warren, mega-pastor and master of irony, invented this award specifically for the occasion. I guess we should expect nothing less from a man whose claim to fame is as a leader of self-described “sheep,” who consider it a virtue to ignore reason.

The medal is to be awarded for

“alleviating…pandemic diseases, extreme poverty, illiteracy, self-centered leadership and spiritual emptiness”

Well, I sure as hell can’t speak for everyone, but here on the home front diseases are up, poverty is skyrocketing, literacy is down, I am feeling pretty ignored by my leadership, and lack of spirituality is at a lifetime high.