So I paid someone on-line … and elected to let the bank send them a confirmation email (just to speed up the order process).
That worked ok. Then I checked my statement …
FEE: PAYMENT CONFIRM – EMAIL CH…..N F……..E ## R 1.05-
R1.05 to send an email? Seriously?
It’s == it is
Don’t they have proof readers?
I notice that Facebook is now measuring “responsiveness” from companies… i.e. how long a company takes to respond to a message posted on that company’s Facebook page.
Which in principle I suppose is not a bad thing… but guess what their benchmark is? I quote:
“Turn on the icon by responding to 90% of messages with an average response time of 5 minutes.”
Do they seriously expect every company with a Facebook page to dedicate four or five (3 shifts plus weekends…) people to monitor their Facebook page 24/7? What on earth where they thinking? Continue reading
Just a roundup to bring things up to date. At some point between my last post and now, I started helping Ian Prest with his Keyboard Layout Editor website. So this has resulted in a more rounded version of my design.
I won’t bore you with every little changes but the bigger steps were adding Tomatoro buttons for start/stop and end. The idea is that there is a built-in timer for the Pomodoro technique as an aid to productivity (or to limit goofing off, if you like).
KLE was now showing the author and title of the design so I removed it from the space bars. I then helped IJP implement backgrounds, so we could get something more realistic like this: Continue reading
On Father’s day my daughter and I went to see the new Disney/Pixar film “Inside Out”. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should… It’s not just for kids but it is indeed ideal family fare.
In recent years Pixar has been fronting their films with a short, which hearkens back to how cinemas used to work when I was a kid … there was often a ‘serial’ to encourage you to come back next week, newsreels (no TV back then), or animated shorts for the kids.
This time around, we get a bittersweet romance between two volcanoes, which takes place over the course of millions of years. The twenty-somethings don’t know enough about life to appreciate it, but the older people will, and the young kids will just enjoy the animation and music. Speaking of which, it’s a really plaintive and infectious song, sung with a ukelele. It’s available to buy on Amazon or iTunes, and you can listen here courtesy of YouTube:
Continues from Part 6
As I continue to tweak (and wait for components to arrive), the Internet has delivered some other designs and ideas, which have some similarities to my design. First up is the μTron split ergo keyboard, which looks like this:
μTron keyboard
Continues from Part 5
I had been reading assorted keyboard-enthusiast websites like GeekHack, DeskThority, etc. and seen comments about how useless the Caps Lock key was. So I thought I would do something more useful with that key, and turn it into a Delete key instead. I kept the Caps Lock function as a shift action on that key. And to balance things, I did the same on the right hand side, so now you have a Caps Lock facility on both sides.
I thought it would be useful to have the plus and minus keys more accessible, so added them on the inside. Getting a bit crowded there now.
Programmer’s KeyBoard v 1.75
Yes, that centre column above the Enter keys is way too busy. While working and analyzing my own key usage, I noticed that I use the / much more than the +. Programmers, especially in HTML etc, use -, _ and / a lot more than people who type English text. So I had to make a plan. I also decided that Workman-P had put the I where it did for good reasons and I should leave I where it should be … So I swapped it back, and put the ; where it had been… which should reduce the likelihood of hitting the wrong : or ;.
Continues from Part 4
When ordering the keycaps I had to make a few colour changes. Also changed the Esc logo from an airplane to the international symbol sign, and asked the FontAwesome people to add it to their collection
Programmer’s KeyBoard v1.64
Decided the Yin Yang symbol was a bit too clichéd and Eastern, so switched it for something more interesting. I had seen the symbol in FontAwesome but had no idea what it was, but my interest was piqued. But the Internet always delivers, and a few days later I stumbled across some Star Wars symbols and there is was… a quick visit to Wikipedia and it’s fate was sealed. The Rebel Alliance lives. I also noticed that recent Microsoft keyboard designs have started playing down that key, and the Menu key, so I decided to combine them into one. I was looking for an extra key, because the period and comma were buried in the numpad, and while useful there when dealing with numbers, it was a bit inconvenient the rest of the time for such frequently used characters. I added some extra ones.
Continues from Part 3
So after a laborious and rather nerve-wracking process, I have finalised the colours and ordered the keycaps. I reduced the number of colours and combined functional groups in the process. Was also limited by which caps in which sizes and colours were available. Was not able to get matching ‘indicator’ (the typing ‘home’ keys) for the Alpha chars. But I never used them anyway, I’m not a classically trained touch typist 
. Cost was almost US$ 200. Ouch. Next up is the switches, once I find someone trustworthy to sell them to me.
For the record, here’s the design now.
Programmer’s Key Board v1.63 by Ian Douglas
Continues in Part 5