Wednesday 16 August 2006

Hope the phone doesn't ring

Bugger! I'm on call this week (I'm remaining on the on-call rota for my previous team [Applications Support], whilst I learn the DBA team ropes), so I've got the out of hours support mobile phone.
Novelist Supermum has gone out to her regular "Write Club" meeting. Our usual arrangement is that if I'm called out, then I'll give her a ring and she'll head for home. As soon as she's back I can set off. If we have to do this I reckon that I should be within the required response time.
Unfortunately this week she's forgotten her mobile. Bugger! (again).

I guess that if I am called in then I'll just have to wake the Hobbit's and take them round to Grandma Gandalf's, before I head into work.

Speaking of DBA team ropes, I discovered that my colleagues had played a little initiation trick on me. They'd physically swapped the 'o' and the 'p' keys on my keyboard. However the joke was on them. I didn't notice for a few days, mainly because I touch type using a Dvorak keyboard layout, as I'm not looking at the keyboard when I type (I'm looking at the screen) I didn't notice that the labels had been swapped.

4 comments:

Kim Knox said...

You only start to worry at 11:53...?

darkdwarf said...

No I started worrying earlier. I just posted my worrying later.

Anonymous said...

Hang on. That Keyboard layout would make playing 'Elite' & 'Doom' really difficult, as the A S D & W keys are in the wrong place :)

darkdwarf said...

Look a little more closely and you'll find that the 'A' key is actually in the same place, so that should make things easier ;-)

I take it that 'Elite' and 'Doom' don't allow you to set your own key preferences?

I have to edit using the vi editor on Unix every day.

This hangover from the sixties uses 'J' and 'K' for Up and Down & 'H' and 'L' for left and right.

Although there are other editors available you have to be able to use vi, because it's in the unix kernel and will always be there, whereas other popular editors may or may not be available, depending on the particular installation your on.

Therefore although I'm still mentally using 'J', 'K', 'H' and 'L' for navigation, if I look down at the keyboard (which I usually don't) I can see that I'm physically using 'C', 'V', 'J' and 'P' instead.
It's surprising how quickly and easily your brain can adapt and cope with this.

QWERTY is definitely a crap layout for speed typing. Apparently the guy who invented QWERTY (Christopher Scholes) acknowledged this by patenting a layout similar to Dvorak.

What I'd really like to find, just for fun, is an old typewriter (e.g a Remington or similar) that has the Dvorak key layout. Too much effort to try and manufacture my own.