When Life Hands you Lemons

Static judgment.

That’s my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.

I take my judgment of something, whether it be a first impression or a deeply-rooted judgment, and don’t let it change when I’m given the opportunity.

When my friend first told me that I do this, I didn’t take him seriously or let it affect me too much. But it was too late, he had planted a seed in my mind and suddenly I was spiraling into a world of realization.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, but I’ve been thinking quite a lot these past few days about how he’s right and why I do that. It may have something to do with my distaste for change (refer to my next-most-recent post). Regardless, my friend’s comment has made me think a lot and I’m pretty grateful for these realizations.

I realized that people change and people make mistakes. I was thinking back to my old church leaders, back from when I was first going out to church. I thought they were the epitome of perfect Christians, pillars of the church and steadfast forever. Boy, was I wrong. These people may have been role models, but they certainly are not perfect in any way–for some I found this out the hard way, from others I heard through the grapevine.

Through this, I also learned that you should not be setting an entirety of a person’s life as an example to follow. Since nobody is perfect, you should only be taking after parts of peoples’ lives. Life improvement is mostly made through watching those who come before you and emulating parts of the lives that you wish to follow.

Static judgement, though, is something that has to change.

—

We should also be expecting him on October 21st of this year.

Major things seem so different when they happen to people you’re close to. Or do they?

This month has been absolutely crazy. Earlier this month, my dad got stabbed. Several weeks later, my best friend got married, just after a month of engagement and three-to-four years of relationship. One event happened suddenly, without warning, and one was calculated, albeit very quickly.

Part of me still can’t believe that either of those things happened. I don’t want either of them to have happened (although one of them was a very happy, momentous occasion). When you hear about these things happening to other people, you just brush it off because it doesn’t really affect you that much. But these people are my kin and very close friend, and I just can’t help but brush it off. I don’t know what it is, I just feel like these things don’t affect my life all that much–that things will return to normal after a little bit of time, and if they don’t, then I’ll just get used to the way thing will be. I find that things don’t affect me that much even if they happen to me: I was hospitalized last year and now I’m just living life like it didn’t ever happen.

Waiting for things to go back to normal is impossible. Because things will never go back to normal. “It’s kind of like you’re going down a hallway, and all of a sudden the building collapses and you fall through the floor. Now you can go down this new hallway, but you can’t return to the hallway where you started.” – a very wise person I know.

The permanency of change is partially due to growing up, and growing up is partially due to the permanancy of change. Right when you sit down and get comfortable with where you are in life, something will happen, and you will be forced to make decisions that will change your life forever.

You should not lament change; you should welcome it. After all, a stagnant life is a life not worth living.

The internet has been around for quite a while, now (in technological years, anyhow). If we stop to consider its age, we should be shocked by how far it’s come in so little time. The official beginning of the internet happened in the 90s in the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN). I won’t go into further detail–if you’re interested in reading about the World Wide Web and its history, you can find them on Wikipedia.

Surely if you’re here reading my blog post, you know something about the internet. But if you had to guess where we’d go from here, what would you say?

We’re at the brink of an age where everything is interconnected. “Internet of Things,” they call it. In short, the Internet of Things is a concept where everyday objects like your microwave or your home thermostat contain embedded systems that relay information to servers through the internet. The servers will then take the relayed data and use them to make your energy usage more efficient. This idea is already being implemented in smart TVs and refrigerators, as well as with Smart Grid.

Once we reach the point where everything is connected, though… what happens? Suddenly the smart tag on your shirt is telling your phone that you’ve been sweating a little too much and is showing you exactly where your water bottle is in relation to your body. It’s possible that everything that gets created gets its on IP address–I’ve heard that there are more possible IP addresses in an IPv6 network than there are atoms on the planet, so we won’t have to fear running out of addresses.

Then bam. Everything’s interconnected. By the time this happens, someone has to have found a better way for humans to communicate. The internet was a pretty big breakthrough and so is wireless internet, but so were television, radio, telephones and telegrams. The internet has reached a maturity, now, that I’m expecting a new form of communication within the next decade or so. It will be slow to catch on, like all means of communication before it, but it will make Internet of Things more feasible.

Okay, the title is bad, I’ll admit. I’ll start writing better titles when I stop having to write research papers. But I digress.

In my last post I discussed an alternative keyboard method called Dvorak, where keys on the keyboard were arranged to be more efficient. If you’d like to read more about it, click “Home” up there ↑ and scroll right down to it. I’ll wait for you up here.

This time I wanted to talk about mobile text input, which has gone through multiple phases recently, as mobile devices have gone through an incredible number of transformations in the past few years. If you’ve been alive for more than ten years, you’ve more than likely seen one of these:

This is a Motorola Razr, and was one of the most popular phones around the time that it came out, despite it having an awful keypad. It wasn’t a terrible phone otherwise, but the important thing to note is its lack of buttons or touchscreen. These old, pre-smartphone phones (I like to call them “dumb” phones) were nearly ubiquitous, even though they weren’t all that useful for anything for calls and for texting.

There were two primary input methods on these devices, represented with “Abc” or “T9.” The “Abc” input method (I have no idea what it’s called) was very simple, but required you to push a single key multiple times to get the letter that you wanted, and if you accidentally pushed the key too many times, you would have to start over. The main folly with this input method was that the letter “S,” which is one of the most commonly-occuring letters in the English language, requires a person to push the 7 key four times to be printed. The other problem with this was that words with letters on the same key or double letters (particularly double S) takes an incredible amount of time to write, slowing down everything for everybody. Try writing “Mississippi.”

T9, on the other hand, is predictive text. Here’s how it works: each key has a few letters on it, and if you’re looking for a letter that’s on a specific key, you only need to hit it once. For example, “and” is written with the keys 263. Push that and the phone will predict the word for you. It’s incredibly simple and incredibly fast.

When smarter devices started rolling out (I’m talking Blackberries and Palm here), they came out with full-button QWERTY keyboards, yet they were compact enough to fit in your pocket. This means that the buttons on the keyboard were incredibly small; sometimes they were so small that you could push six or seven of them with one finger at once. And then for some inexplicable reason, when companies made the choice over to full-length touch screens, they decided to follow the trend of making the QWERTY keyboard standard–on touchscreen, no less.

I don’t know about you, but I make a lot more mistakes on my touchscreen keyboard than I ever would have on my full-sized keyboard. The buttons are too small and there’s no haptic feedback to tell me where the F and J keys are or even if I’ve touched between the keys. This also discounts the fact that a smartphone is so small that you have to type with just two thumbs, rather than all of your fingers (which, inevitably, leaves tablets in this weird gray area in between).

People have come up with a solution to this problem, called Swype. Swype allows you to kinda just wave your finger across the screen and hope for the right word to come out. The problem with Swype is that if your phone is too large (and your hands are too small), then you’ll have a hard time creating words since you aren’t allowed to lift your finger during the word’s input.

Maybe I’m silly, but I propose we go back to using T9. Instead of the phone emulating a QWERTY keyboard with tiny keys, it can emulate a nine-button key pad where all the buttons are large enough to reduce errors. You can even text without looking, guessing the location of the button on-screen. Maybe we can combine T9 with Swype input if people get even more lazy.

We should be working harder to solve problems by finding better and efficient solutions through innovation, rather than addressing those same problems by reverting back to what people know but doesn’t make sense.

If you’ve seen me and used my phone recently, you probably know what this post is going to be about.

Let me turn your world sideways for a second. That’s kinda like where I turn your world upside down but have to stop halfway because whatever I’ve said isn’t all that exciting.

The QWERTY keyboard layout is archaic and should be changed.

If you’re familiar with some basic keyboarding history, you should know why the QWERTY keyboard layout is used: it was created back in the days when we still used typewriters and it was designed to set the most common letters of the English letter apart from one another. Doing this would prevent the strikers to come out and colliding with each other, essentially causing a jam, whenever a typist was typing especially quickly.

Along came the creation of the Dvorak keyboard, named after its creator (pronounced deh-VOH-rack, contrary to the way you pronounce the composer’s name… which inevitably bothers me). The Dvorak keyboard had the opposite design goal as the QWERTY keyboard: to put all of the English language’s most common letters right next to each other and on the home row. The most common vowels and consonants are under different hands, which means that most words can be written by using fingers on alternating hands.

This is a stark constrast to many words written on the QWERTY keyboard. There are common letters on the top row, and stretching your hand feels natural. But there are some pretty common letters on the bottom row, and scrunching up your hand definitely does not feel comfortable, especially when you’re learning to type for the first time.

By moving the most common letters next to each other, Dvorak touted that you could achieve a much higher typing speed and reduce hand fatigue in the process.

So if the Dvorak keyboard is so great, why hasn’t it caught on yet?

Through testing by Dvorak himself while he was still alive, results showed that typing speed only increased by an average of 5%. By this time, the QWERTY keyboard was already nearly ubiquitous and companies weren’t willing to dish out the money to retrain their employees for such a small increase. On top of this, the claim that the keyboard decreases hand stress was was virtually unprovable, and likely didn’t matter for anyone who didn’t spend eight hours a day typing at 90-100wpm anyway.

However, I think we should still make the transition. Now before you ask, yes, I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout. In fact, I wrote this entire post using Dvorak. And, yes, it took me a long time.

I’ve been using this layout on my phone for about two months now, which defeats the purpose, but I also think we shouldn’t be using the QWERTY layout on cell phones, either.

Tune in next time for my opinions on that.

Set up Dvorak on your computer.