As I learn to type, I had been wondering how getting addicted to my Kinesis Advantage contour keyboard would affect me for exams... both at school, but also for the bar exam.

For those unfamiliar, the Kinesis Advantage looks like this:

Here's a closeup of the keyboard layout.

The registrar's office at school doesn't seem to say much publicly about it. I'll have to find out more about that. The software doesn't prohibit it. And lots of folks who use Securexam allow it. I need to confirm.

At least this year, the California Bar Association uses ExamSoft. They explicitly allow external keyboards and mice:

External keyboards and equipment such as a mouse and floppy disk drive are allowed; however, the use of keyboards or other equipment that are wireless will not be permitted.

So, that's good news.

In the meantime, it's slow going. In typing drills, which tend to be somewhat focused and repeatable, I've hit as high as 88 adjusted words per minute in Key Advantage Typing, and somewhere around 70 AWPM in Mavis Beacon. However, when I start doing dictation or typing paragraphs, especially those with numbers and symbols, I'm capping out at around 30 AWPM.

In regular work, the Kinesis can be very aggravating. The Command key is tough to get to. Control is near-impossible. In my line of work, ctrl-c is pretty common, and I find it incredibly tough to use. I think I'm going to invest in the Kinesis pedals, and then I can map Shift and either Command or Control to each of the two pedeals I intend to end up with. Kinesis does also invest in a triple action pedal. In principle, one pedal unit with three functions would sound more appealing than 2 or 3 separate pedals, but I've read contrary suggestions.

We shall see.

Just want to mention that I just realized that I have been missing major portions of your posts since you switched over to the new system. Cause there is this "read more" link that I didn't notice and never clicked on.

I understand the need for such things (maybe) when you have lots of really long posts. But in general, I'm not a fan of that concept. I like to go to your blog, scan down, and see everything there is to see. OK, if there are comments, I click through to comments sometimes. But... anyway.

Tis a style thing I guess. And there are good arguments on both sides. But I'll put in my vote against "read more" and for putting the whole post on the main page.

Thank ye for listening. :-)

I actually don't know that I post enough to worry about the length of the articles. And you're the second person to mention this to me. However, a quick look at the configuration options, followed by a quick change in the settings, didn't result in a change.

I'll have to see what I can do.

Well, the setting I found fixed it for new posts; however, it turns out it stores the "teaser" separately. I just updated the table (mysql> update node set teaser = body ; ) to fix this.

Of course, it just dawned on me that I did it rather indiscriminately, and I no doubt hit some non-blog nodes. Heh. Oh well.

I agree that this is an improvement. It wasn't a conscious decision, it's just the way the software came. I'm clearly still setting it all up. There's a lot more here than existed on WordPress.