Aliso the Geek is a casualty of that shuffle, at least for now. Just as the past three months have demonstrated, I won’t really be adding new posts. I will still be moderating comments and replying to them, and all my content will still be here for reference.

Will I pick up this blog again in the future? I don’t know. That’s my honest answer.

I won’t be disappearing from the blogosphere, though. My husband and I are starting Two in Queue, a blog for gaming couples. It will have game reviews, opinion pieces, discussions about games or the gaming lifestyle—all coming from a couples or co-op point of view.

Two in Queue hasn’t launched yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to be notified when it does.

One final note: A profound thanks to all my readers for helping to make my blog a success. It has been an awesome experience.

The Good

• One of the two distinguishing features of this keyboard is the alignment of the keys: they are in a grid instead of being staggered. This means your fingers aren’t reaching up and down at an angle. This is making touch-typing in Dvorak a lot less annoying, because it’s easier to find keys outside of the home row.
• It looks awesome. It’s small, sleek, and very “techy”-looking.
• It’s well-made. I can’t attest to its durability over time, but it feels very high-quality. The keys are sturdy, the frame is sturdy… nothing about it feels flimsy.
• The key presses are somewhere between an old-school keyboard and a laptop keyboard—low-profile keys with a somewhat deep press. Takes a little getting used to, but feels pretty comfortable after a while.
• It worked out-of-the-box on my Mac. No drivers, no hassle.

The Bad

• Some of the really customized keys—like the Calculator, Mail, Browser, and Desktop keys—don’t work on the Mac. I can’t figure out a way to make them work, because the computer doesn’t even register them as key presses.
• There are no little retractable “feet” to make it sit at an angle. I’ll need to get a wrist pad in order to really use it comfortably.

The Neutral

• The other big difference this keyboard has from all others is the placement and size of common functional keys, like Backspace, Enter, and Shift. The Backspace and Enter keys are in the center of the keyboard, so you press them with your index fingers instead of your pinky. I really like the concept for two reasons: one, your index fingers are stronger so having them in the center makes sense. Two, it forces me into reaching for keys with the proper hand. Hitting the “Y” key [on a QWERTY keyboard] with my left index finger now means I’m hitting the Backspace key. It’s messing me up a little, but hey, I should be using my right hand for that key anyway.
• The Shift keys are tall rectangles instead of long ones, which means I’m much more likely to hit it when I aim for it and I’m not looking at the keys.
• I had to switch the Alt and Command keys in my System Preferences so they’d be in more familiar positions. This is also the only way to get Command keys on both sides of the keyboard instead of only the left.
• The non-staggering of the keys means I’m hitting a lot of wrong keys in the top row. I’ll get used to it, but it’s a learning curve nonetheless.

I bought the Dvorak package that included a clear skin for the keyboard, and also a black QWERTY skin. The skins fit perfectly on the keyboard and stay in place while I’m typing. The texture on them is really nice, too.

There is a one-button switch to go between QWERTY and Dvorak, with a little indicator light so you know which mode it’s in. If you’re on a Mac, switching to Dvorak on the keyboard and in the System Preferences makes the key mappings all messed up, so be sure to do just one or the other.

So far, I really like this keyboard. I’ll write another review with my final conclusions after I’ve been using it for a week or so. In the meantime, wish me luck on learning Dvorak! It’s slow going so far, but I’m improving…

The chain of events leading to my decision to become even geekier started with one of my favorite pasttimes: aimlessly surfing the web. I came upon this blog post that talked about the Dvorak keyboard layout being a much faster & more efficient way to type. Well, I like efficiency, so the next logical step was (of course) to drop all plans for the night and learn it. I followed his link to DVzine.org and printed out their comic about the history of keyboard layouts, and if there was any convincing left to be done, that did it.

Next I decided to pop the keys off my keyboard and rearrange them, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I bricked my keyboard in the process. (I’m typing this on a spare.)

Anyway, a couple of typing tutorials later, I got bored, so here I am. I’ve been typing this entire post in Dvorak, and I’m cruising along at a whopping 10 words per minute. But just like being forced into driving a manual transmission by losing my automatic, I know that this is the quickest way to learn it. Wish me luck!

Oh, and if you do decide to follow in my footsteps, don’t brick your keyboard!

Update: The hardest part of this is definitely keyboard shortcuts. I never realized how much I looked at the keyboard for those.

Another update: Keyboard shortcuts can be saved! There’s a second Dvorak option in Mac OS 10.5 (it’s one of four options in 10.6) called Dvorak – Qwerty that converts the keyboard to Qwerty when the command key is held down. I will probably try to get used to the keyboard shortcuts in Dvorak eventually, but in the meantime, I won’t accidentally quit an application when trying to cut and paste. Hooray!

KA-POW!

HTML 5 rocks my socks. Now my blog is built with sock-rockin’ code of the future! I wanted a fresh look to go along with the new code, and also to go along with my trip to PAX in two days!

That’s right, I’m off to my first ever gaming conference. What kind of gamer has never been to a gaming conference before? Me. I’m beyond excited… I’m bouncing off the walls. I’ll even be armed with a Flip camera to record all the awesomeness.

Just like my trip to Big Nerd Ranch, this trip will be covered both here and at the Brave New Media blog. I leave on Thursday, which I’m dubbing Day 0 of the PAX Extravaganza. Check back Thursday night (or early Friday morning) for my first PAX post!

In the meantime, head to blueberrymuffintops.com to read about the team I’m going to PAX with.

The most common searches in the search engine traffic to my site (from Mint).

I’ve had Mint installed on my website for a while. I like the up-to-the-minute stats, so I can sit there and watch the page refresh every 2 minutes and see the numbers change.

I’ve also known about MintPopularPostsWP for a while, but I’d never used it before. It uses Mint to determine your most popular posts by page views instead of the number of comments. (Way more accurate!) Notice I have the list of popular posts in my sidebar now.

One of the things that has blown my mind about my blog is that second third most popular post being so popular. My Big Nerd Ranch posts get a lot of traffic because they linked to my blog as a review of the class I took, but that doesn’t explain the other post’s abnormal popularity. I didn’t write a lot of iPhone posts after my trip to the Ranch, so it’s not the general focus of my blog anyway; I’m known more for my WordPress stuff. So how does this post pull traffic from any remotely related Google search for this iPhone code?

Well, it happened through the magical algorithms that search engines use to determine ranking. The more hits a page gets, the more reputable it is to a search engine, and the higher it goes on the list. The higher it goes on the list, the more hits it gets. The more hits it gets, the higher it goes… and so on. Somehow my page became the #1 search result on multiple search engines (check out the images below).

I’m not trying to brag or complain here. It’s just really weird that a blog about WordPress programming gets the majority of its search traffic from one little iPhone development post. Don’t get me wrong—traffic is good—but this little quirk is also responsible for my blog’s high bounce rate.

Anyone else have a weird search engine experience to share?

…but developers, seriously, get crackin!

Hi folks.  Alison has asked me to write a post and explain her absence.  I shall do my best.

December was a busy month for us, professionally and personally.  As a result, she has been unable to blog, or give users of SimpleMap the support she feels they deserve.  To top that all off, she is currently in bed with a nasty head cold (who says I never get her anything fun?).  At any rate, she will be back on the grid 1/4/10, and doing her best to get caught up.

Have a safe and happy new year!

The Barretts.

I was then greeted by a folder icon with a question mark on it.

Somehow, my computer had lost the ability to find its own hard drive. My husband and I worked on my computer the rest of the evening—about seven hours that night—and several hours the following day before we could get it to see the drive at all. We still couldn’t boot from it, of course, but at least we could wipe it and reinstall the OS.

We finally succeeded, after three tries. The install kept freezing at 2% or so.

I had a two-day-old backup, so I still have most of my data. Time Machine is a godsend, but I turn it off when I play WoW because it brings my frame rate down to around one frame per seven seconds. That’s quite a problem when you’re healing nine other players while fighting Onyxia. I basically lost a weekend’s worth of work, which sucks, but isn’t horrible.

Running a surface scan revealed that after zeroing out my drive, I still inexplicably had corrupt blocks on the drive. My hard drive is probably going to physically fail for good sometime in the near future.

Until I can afford (in money AND time) to get a new drive for my computer, I might have to lose another day or two here and there, relying on hourly Time Machine backups to save my butt. Development on SimpleMap and all of my other projects has pretty much come to a halt for the next week at least.

Trust me—I don’t like this any more than you SimpleMap users out there do. I’ll do what I can to get 1.2 out of beta soon.