2016-06-13.txt

Day 1
=====

Yesterday I ran across [Plover][], a piece of open-source stenotype
software.  I was looking up some details of the algorithms for matching
regular expressions, and somehow got from there to steno.  But I trawled
through my browser history and didn't see the actual connection, so i'm
not exactly sure how that happened.

[Plover]: http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

Anyway.  Seems like a fun thing to try, and it's relatively simple.
It's a chorded keyboard system where you enter (more or less) a syllable
at a stroke.  Your left-hand fingers enter the beginning consonant(s),
your right-hand fingers enter the final consonant(s), and the vowels are
split between your thumbs.  But it's just mnemonic (vaguely phonetic),
not exact letters.  So then you have a big dictionary which translates
your abbreviations to actual words.  And there are competing theories
about how translate from strokes to text, and it sounds like practising
stenographers will make temporary additions to their dictionaries for
each job.  Kind of a fluid thing.

Plover lets you do it on a normal QWERTY keyboard with N-key rollover.
Apparently there's a readily-available one for $40 US.  And you can
stick caps on your keys to make it easier to press two keys with one
finger and reduce the slant of a normal keyboard.  But...I don't know if
I'm that interested.  And Plover seems to have the obvious chording
algorithm, which means you don't have to hold down all the keys at once.
So I'm going to try it on my laptop and see how far I can get with just
arpeggiating the chords.

There seem to be a bunch of lessons and interactive steno tutors and
such.  But all the ones I've found seem to start you right off typing
words.  And that's the way Plover's default dictionary is set up: most
one- to four-key chords are mapped (but not all).  So it's hard to tell
which chord you actually hit.  And it just seems...overwhelming and
probably an inefficient way to learn.

I just want to drill the finger-to-phoneme connections until those are
solid.  Hooking them together into words seems pretty straightforward
and somewhat personal.  And even if it is difficult, it seems like it's
a separate process which builds on the muscle memory for keying the
phonemes, and mixing the two seems...again, inefficient.

So.  I found that you can just drop the main Plover dictionary from the
configuration.  This leaves an empty "user" dictionary and a small
"command" dictionary which looks like it shouldn't get in the way.
And if you remove all dictionaries it resets to the default
configuration, so it's easy to get that back.  This sends through each
stroke as an uppercased word so you can see exactly what you typed.

I spent a bunch of time hooking up some rudimentary JavaScript to
present exercises and accept input.  It's really clunky and needs a
bunch more work, but it's getting there.  I put in a whole bunch
(30-50?) of 10-30 second tests to see if it was working, and the top row
on the left hand is starting to become automatic (the STPH keys).

Hrm.  Maybe it was taking longer than that.  I just timed myself and it
took almost 40 seconds to enter 60 single-key chords.  And I know I was
*much* slower than that.  But I didn't spend that much time on it...
Hmm.  Let's say I've put in somewhere in the region of half an hour of
actual practice?  30 runs averaging a minute each?   That's probably
about right.

Currently a run is `S T P H  S T P H  S S S  T T T  P P P  H H H`,
followed by 10 randomly generated sets of four chords (all four chords
shuffled into random order).  The initial line does a good job of making
sure your fingers are in the right place and then reminding you where
each one is.  But I don't think that jumping straight into random
quadruplets is a good approach.  It would be better to do some
alternation.  Maybe keep one the same and switch up the others?  `S P S
P  T H T H  S T S P S H T H S H P H`, that sort of thing.  I suspect
that would work better.

I'll have to code that up and try it for the next set.  Which...should I
finish these four fingers, or move to the other hand for the sake of
balance?  I think I should finish this hand.  I'm fighting the tendency
to slip into a home position on the top row, and it really needs to be
between the rows.  Drilling the bottom row should help with that.

Then the question is whether to do a separate drill with only the new
keys, or introduce them individually into the ones I already know.  I'm
leaning toward the latter.  I don't know the first four that well yet,
so adding new keys one at a time should reinforce the rest while really
emphasizing the new one and burning it into my fingers.  Sort of like
the whole timed-repetition thing.  Only not really.

-----

I guess I should say something about myself.  My name is Joshua Grams,
I'm 36 years old, I've been a serious mostly-hobby programmer since my
family got our first computer when I was 13.

I had violin lessons for a couple of years when I was about 4 (3-1/2?)
and then switched to piano and had lessons until I went away to college,
and have played somewhat consistently ever since.

I'm also fluently bifingual (QWERTY and Dvorak).  The version of Mavis
Beacon that we had (version 3, I'm almost certain) offered Dvorak as an
option.  So of course I ran through the Dvorak lessons once I hit 45-50
wpm on QWERTY.  I liked the smaller amount of finger motion with Dvorak,
so it has been my preferred keyboard layout ever since.  I've trained my
brain to switch automatically, so when I'm on someone else's computer,
the typing comes out in QWERTY.  On the occasions when someone else has
Dvorak, I have to consciously switch back...

I've messed with Colemak very briefly.  And I got about halfway through
learning the one-handed Dvorak layouts when we had my brother's
5-month-old daughter living with us.  So my fingers are pretty
well-trained.  And my brain...I'm not fluent in any other languages, but
I had four years of high-school Spanich, two semesters of Latin and
three of classical Greek in college, along with several semesters of
linguistics.  And I sing a lot of early music so I can butcher the
pronunciation of French, German and Italian.  And I often trounce
English majors at word games. ;)  So...I'm expecting to pick up steno
quickly, but we'll see how it goes.

Anything else?  Oh, typing speed.  Mid-60s?  I'm no speed-demon, but as
a programmer I do quite a bit of typing.

Heh.  I guess I've come up in speed over the years.  75-80 wpm is *very*
relaxed, and I can consistently do 98-101 wpm for 60 seconds almost
perfectly (random common words, 0-2 errors).  That's in Dvorak: I'm not
going to bother testing QWERTY since I don't use it much.