No magic touch

The quick brown fox jumpes over the lazy dog.

Anybody who doesn't recognise this sentence has probably never taken a typing course. The sentence's claim to fame lies in the fact that it is a pangram: every single letter of the roman alphabet is represented in it.

I have never had any typing lessons and it shows. Over the years I have developed my own, rather random, way of typing using more than two, but definitely fewer than 10, fingers. I can't say it's very effective. Truth be told, I am a really bad typist. When I was writing my thesis last year I probably spent more time hitting backspace than I did getting the right strokes.

At the moment I am living in limbo a little bit. I am waiting for my project to kick into gear (and for the proper motivation to help it get there!) but have not much else to do either. I have decided to try and do something useful with my newly found spare time. With an eye on the fact that I am about to start writing yet another thesis, I have begun to teach myself touch-typing using an internet tutorial. After all, I can play piano so how hard can it be? It's not like playing a Chopin nocturne trying to match up 21 notes on your right hand with 11 on your left, is it?

Well, you'ld be surprised. Even though, unlike on a piano, you don't usually have to hit several keys at once and they all follow a neatly defined linear sequence, I'm still having a lot of difficulties with it. Old habits die hard and if you've been improvising for so long, it's not easy to stick with a system all of a sudden. I am practising and slowly have managed to get my words-per-minute count upto around 40 from the 25 it was two days ago but I am nowhere near to being a professional secretary yet who can hit the keys at 65 wpm. As long as I can see some improvement though I'll keep practising, waiting for the RSI to kick in.