Qwerty you, I opine!

[lethargic_man]

Following the suggestion of a cow-orker, I have levered the I and O keys off my keyboard and replaced them in the wrong order; also the V and B keys.

The result is quite interesting: When I'm looking away from the keyboard, of course, I can type fine; but when I look at the keys to type (as distinct from touch typing whilst looking at the keys), no matter how well I know where the keys should live, I keep either typing the wrong ones, or at best stopping myself halfway to correcting myself.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I seem to be able to type just fine when looking at my keyboard inspite of the labels almost all being wrong (I type dvorak but the keyboard is labelled in qwerty). Maybe practice helps :)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm not seeing the motivation behind the experiment; or at least, my life has rarely been sufficiently short of frustrations for me to seek new ones out.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I'm not seeing the motivation behind the experiment;

Interest, as to whether knowledge wins out over pattern recognition.

or at least, my life has rarely been sufficiently short of frustrations for me to seek new ones out.

I didn't keep them the wrong way around for long!

[iddewes]

...trust you.
I had an AZERTY keyboard on my last laptop but had the language set as English rather than French; mostly I just didn't look at the keys but when I got used to it anyway I just knew to press Z for W and , for M, etc. If you keep it like that long enough that sort of thing will probably happen to you, too. It was quite fun in that it meant no one else could type properly on my laptop.

Wierd!

[bluepork.livejournal.com]

Why would you do such a thing!?

I never look at my keyboard when I'm typing anyway, so this would just be annoying, but I'd get used to it. On our home computer which is a Mac, the " and @ are swapped from their normal UK PC places. Took some getting used to, but I don't really think about it now.

By the way, what's a cow-orker?

Re: Wierd!

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Why would you do such a thing!?

I already answered that in the comments.

By the way, what's a cow-orker?

Someone who orks cattle. Alternatively, try shifting the hyphen one letter earlier.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Do you know how to write German umlauts and French acents? I often had to get them out of my open office program by inserting them as symbols. My email system does not seem to accept them anyway. My printer cannot print them. It comes out as squares. I have the problem when I print out my CV.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Do you know how to write German umlauts and French acents? I often had to get them out of my open office program by inserting them as symbols.

The editor I normally use, Emacs, gives you a choice of way to enter them, and I can use that editor as an alternate editor for my mail program.

If typing in a web form, etc, you can type an accented character by typing CTRL-SHIFT-u + <Unicode hex character code> in Linux, or ALT-0+ <Windows-1252 decimal character code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252)> in Windows.

My email system does not seem to accept them anyway.

It should. Check if your email system allows a setting for character set. ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1) or Unicode or UTF-8 or Windows-1252 should all handle accented characters; if it's set to ASCII or 7-bit, it will not.

My printer cannot print them. It comes out as squares. I have the problem when I print out my CV.

Your printer driver should be able to handle them. If not, try pasting text into Wordpad or Notepad and printing from there. If the problem is only with OpenOffice, raise the problem in the appropriate OpenOffice feedback forum.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Thanks I will look into it.