Technology ramblings from a dilettante of all things digital

Katie and I just got back from Key West a few days ago and this is my first chance to sit down and recap it all.  We flew down Wednesday, 5/27/2009, from BWI to Fort Lauderdale.  Then we immediately grabbed a rental and hoofed it on down to Miami.  Getting the rental car was pretty neat.  We used Alamo since we had a coupon, but I suspect they're all like this here.  We just checked in at a computer kiosk and then were led out to a parking garage with the key stuck in the driver side door and they just said "pick any midsize".  Maybe that's the norm, but it was new to me and kinda neat. 

We booked The Palms Hotel and Spa at Miami Beach.  I didn't realize there's a Miami and a Miami Beach.  They're two separate locations separated by nice little chunk of water.  I guess that just goes to show how ignorant and untraveled I am.  When we got down to Miami Beach, we went straight to the hotel.  It was like this weird mix of posh and projects.  The hotel itself looked very nice, but when we pulled up the parking situation was a bit of a mess.  The valet didn't speak any English, which wasn't surprising, so I had to whip out my "5 year equivalent" Spanish.  So after a while I found out that you could pay $27 a day to have them park in this crappy little lot or you could park on the street and feed the meter from 8am-6pm.  I parked on the street and was glad that we were only staying there one night if only for that reason.

The hotel itself was really nice and I did get a pretty good deal for it on Priceline.  I did think it was weird though when someone came up to the front desk asking about booking a room and he said that they're all booked up, but she should find a computer and check on Orbitz or Travelocity.  Apparently they block off x number of rooms for the travel sites and the hotel signs some agreement to not give the room them away themselves.

Anyway, as soon as we got settled in we took a cab to get some dinner.  There was a little confusion with the cabbie over where to go.  The bell hop said we should go to Lincoln St, but the cabbie said Ocean drive was better.  We went with Lincoln.  Basically Lincoln is a really wide street with shops and nice outdoor restaurants.  It runs east/west.  Ocean Drive is about 10 blocks south and runs north/south.  It has the ocean on one side and all the fancy clubs and a few restaurants on the other side.  After we ate dinner at a nice Italian restaurant, we took a taxi down to Ocean Drive just to check it out and say we were there.

After a quick cab ride back to the hotel, we made it an early night for the long drive down to Key West. 

We got up around 9am and left shortly thereafter.  We had one quick stop to try some native cuisine at the Southernmost Cracker Barrel in Florida City, FL.  The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful.  There are a TON of key islands like Grassy Key, Duck Key, etc.  I learned that the Keys have their own species of deer that can even swim between the islands.  I thought that was pretty cool.  Maybe I could hook some up to a boat and have them carry me around. 

The hotel we stayed at was amazing.  It was called The Reach Resort Waldorf Astoria Collection.  It had its own private beach right next to the pool and their indoor/outdoor restaurant, The Strip House.  This hotel was on Simonton Street, which is on the south side one block east of Duvall Street, which is where all the happening stuff is. 

So after settling in and switch rooms to one with a better "ocean view".  We set out on foot down Duvall Street.  There's no open container law in Key West, as you can clearly see in this picture and this one too.  We checked out a couple of different shops including one where they make their own really nice sandals.  I meant to buy one on our way back, but forgot to stop by.  A little while later we signed up for a Fury boat cruise that we would take the next day. 

The boat trip was a lot of fun.  They took us out 6 miles on a big Catamaran to the reef out there and let us snorkel for about an hour.  Aside from some chafing and every wave filling my snorkel with water, this was quite fun.  Although I must say, whoever invented the snorkel, Robert F. Snorkel or whoever, or at least the person that thought that using a short snorkel in open water was a good idea, I'd like to have a few words with them.

Later they took us to their hangout area.  They docked the ship with this little floating barge and and then we took off on parasailing, then jetskiing and inbetween they have some inflatable structures we could swim out to and climb on, like the inflatable 20 foot tall mountain.  Jetskiing is harder than it looks.  Our trainer seemed like he was annoyed he wasn't back at the bar killing his liver, as noticed by his smart remark after he almost ran me over with a jetski.  They also didn't train us beyond the gas lever.  I know now that you need to stand up when you go fast to cushion the blow and you have to lean the other way just a bit any time your jet ski starts to capsize.  The first time we felt it was capsizing we jumped out, then climbed back on and I let Katie drive, then 100 yards later I realized I lost my Maui Jim sunglasses.  Bummer.  Overall the staff was really nice though, and as soon as the jetski fiasco was over, they started serving beer and wine. 

When everyone had done their main activities, they took us back around 4pm.  We went back to the hotel to rest us and nurse our nice new sunburns.  We just hung around the hotel a bit, played some Bag-O and sipped on our alcoholic beverages.  When we finally worked up an apetite we tried out the hotel restaurant, The Strip House.  The decor was rather, um, "interesting".  It was pretty nice decor done up in a 1930's dark burgundy theme, with lots of framed photographs of 1930s nude female models.  So it might not be a place to take the children unless you're a tasteless white trash family, in which case you couldn't afford the dinner prices...or the hotel.  Anywho, that was pretty much our evening that night.  The boat trip really takes the energy out of you.

The next day we rented bikes and cruised around town a bit.  We checked out some local shops, got some nice touristy souvenirs and ate some Conch Fritters (pretty tasty).  Between the writing on a coffee mug and talking to a local merchant, I learned that Key West seceded from the US for about a month over the extra four hour delay from the border patrol illegal immigrant (drug) checkpoints.  Oh, and a plastic wrapped brick of drugs that washes on shore from a drug dealer dumping their load is called a "Square Grouper".  After some more biking, we went back to the hotel to lounge some more, then headed out for our sunset cruise.  Then we went back and wandered around Duvall Street a bit.  We checked out Sloppy Joe's where Pete and Wayne, some local band/comedy act was playing.  They were pretty good, but the only seats we could get weren't being served food and we were pretty hungry, so we checked out another local outdoor restaurant, Willie T's I think.  We stayed out a bit longer, then called it a night.  The next morning, we had to get up early and head straight back for our flight leaving out of Fort Lauderdale at 3:40. 

All in all it was a really cool trip!  It also didn't hurt to have a really great company, too!    Check out all the photos.

Okay, well maybe not everyone, but most of us.  For something a lot of us spend so much time doing these days, we don’t really seem to question how we do it.  There are the standard myths like that the standard QWERTY layout was to slow us down.  In truth, however, it was adopted from one particular brand of typewriter, the Remington No. 2, in 1878.  The original design evolved largely because of jams of the internal typing arms in early models.  I’ll save you the rest of the snooze inducing details of the history lesson.  You can check it out here, if you’re that interested. 

Since then, that old, bad, layout has just sort of settled in, like a cantankerous mother-in-law that’s come to live with you.  Then in 1936, along came Dr. Dvorak, with a new layout to make us all type at warp speed, reduce errors and protect kittens from climbing trees.  Check it out:

Dr. Dvorak studied how people type to optimize the behavior.  Notice all the popular kids are located on the home row: A, E, T, S, etc.  This lets users spend around 70% of the time on the home row.  Also, all the vowels are on the left side and the popular consonants are on the right, so the user is usually alternating right and left.  You can read the rest of the details here.

So what, you say?  Every keyboard and operating system is designed to use QWERTY and we are all taught to type that way, unless you weren’t taught at all and home grew hunt and peck style (I’m looking at you, Andre).  Some people claim to be pretty fast at hunt and peck, but they still need to look at the keyboard and are slower than they could be.  For comparison, here is the finals at the 2010 Typing Championship.  The winner won with 163 wpm.  Not too shabby by any means.  However, compare that to the Guinness World Record Holder, Barbara Blackburn, with a top speed of 212 wpm.  She also maintained 150 wpm for over 50 minutes straight!!!!  That’s right, granny could kick the pants off of the current fastest competitive typists, due in large part to the Dvorak keyboard.  The 2010 champion, Sean Wrona, even admits that Dvorak and another layout known as Colemak are better, but he seems afraid to take the plunge and switch: 
“I am frequently asked which keyboard layout I use. I have only ever used the traditional QWERTY layout. I recognize that Dvorak and Colemak may be better on the hands, but it would be too much of a loss of speed in my case to justify switching.” - http://seanwrona.com/typing.html

The reason I am rambling about all of this is because I have decided to take the plunge and switch to Dvorak.  I learned typing in a high school class and have been typing okayish with QWERTY ever since.  However, I find QWERTY kind of annoying and for something I spend about 8-9 hours a day doing, I’d like to do it in the best possible way.  I’ve got my Dvorak stickers, and I will be switching all of my keyboards at once, and spending 15-30 minutes a night doing typing lessons at keybr.com.  Windows, mac (not that I have one), and even android and jailbroken iphones all have Dvorak keyboard layouts available.  For a comparison, I have tested my current speed with QWERTY.  After 7:44 on keybr.com, I got an average speed of 50 words per minute, and a top speed of 62.  After I feel comfotable with Dvorak, I will be posting my new speeds, which will hopefully be a bit better.

Need any more convincing?  Here are 7 reasons to make the switch.

I'm a big Remember the Milk (RTM) fan.  I love the power of the lists, tagging, locations, etc.  I believe it has a lot more potential as an easy to use, powerful, tasklist.  There are still several annoyances and limitations to it, however.  One of the biggest is the level of effort required to get a task into RTM.  We all have those AHA moments, "ooh!  I need to..x", and one of the main tenants of Getting Things Done is to "empty your head".  The harder that is to do, though, the less likely anyone is to jot down an idea when they think of it.  That's why I carry a voice recorder in my car and why there are various products to help us facilitate this perpetual mind dump.  So, along those lines, I would like to share a solution I've found to submit a task to RTM in under 5 seconds, depending on how fast you type.  If your typing isn't quite up to snuff, well....that's between you and Mavis Beacon. 

For this project, you will need

• a computer
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Slickrun (micro command line on crack)
• a Remember the Milk account
• some hot coco (optional)

Okay, soooo, the idea here is that RTM users have an email address that they can send messages to and those will show up in their RTM inboxen.  Add to that, that RTM has a smartadd syntax so you can assign the list, tags, location, due date, etc in one pass.  So the idea here is that you have a command line statement that will send an email to your RTM account, using the supplied argument as your subject.  So for this I am using Slickrun because it so fast and easy, to trigger Thunderbird to create an email and send it to RTM for me.

Let's get prepped:

1. Install Thunderbird and slickrun
2. Pick your favorite shortcut key combo to bring focus to slickrun.  I think the default is WinKey+Q or WinKey+W.  I prefer WinKey+A.
3. Hit your key combo or use your mouse if you prefer the scenic route.
4. type "add" (without the quotes) and hit enter.  A new magic word form will popup.
5. Fill out the form with the following arguments, using your actual RTM email

Filename or URL

MagicWord (use whatever you want here, I like rtm)

rtm

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird"

Parameters: (copy that text verbatim, including the quotes)

-compose "to='dan.xyz@rmilk.com',subject='

Okay, let's skip ahead to using this little gem:

Simply hit your slickrun key combo, type your magic word, then enter your RTM task using smartadd syntax and make sure to add a closing quote and the end of it (to match the opening quote in the command argument)

Hit Enter

TBird will open a new window.  Hit send and go about your day.  It may take a few seconds for the window to disappear.  Feel free to minimize it (or stare at it if you're easily entertained).

This will also work for other systems that have email addresses you can send to, such as evernote.  Here's an example of the command line for evernote.  Make sure to grab your actual email address out of evernote settings of course.

-compose "to='dan.abc@m.evernote.com',subject='

Enjoy!  Let me know if you found this helpful or not.

I definitely fell off the wagon a bit.  I was doing pretty well through June.  I had a personal record 5K time  and I got down 214 lbs.  In July I somehow fell out of my groove.  I put all my weight back on and my cardio has definitely regressed.  I think taking a vacation in late June combined with a few other factors messed me up.  Mostly, I wasn’t sleeping enough so I couldn’t make my morning working.  I still wanted to work out, but I wasn’t keen on strolling into work at 11:00am.   That’s enough stalling, now onto my numbers:

Current State of Affairs:

Height: 5’11”
weight: 227

P90X Fit Test

As you can see, I made slight strength and cardio gains.  If I hadn’t fallen off the wagon 2/3 the way through, I’d have slight weightloss gains to match.

It’s a journey, not a one time photo shoot.  So I’m going to pick myself up and get back in it.  I did a full P90X workout day for the first time in a few weeks.  I’m gonna do another P90X/Insanity round for the next 30 days, combined with clean eating, then its on to Asylum for me.