Japanese Keyboard & Blog

Mike,

Here are two pictures of where my fingers are doing their pecking these days. The first is my workspace, where you can see my laptop sitting next to a keyboard and the corner of a monitor “pcheliog2” (which is currently crunching away on a project). Look closely at the laptop screen and you might recognize someone drinking an Old Fashioned.
The 2nd picture shows the bane of my existence, the Japanese keyboard–it’s about half katakana and half english. The upper line of keys has different locations for “&”,”‘”, etc. In fact almost all of the symbol keys are mispositioned for american fingers. And the space key is shorter to accomodate more katakana keys. What a mess! No touch typing on this baby, for sure. When I set up my password, which ends in &&, for this computer network, I didn’t realize I’d need to log in on another workstation to copy files over, and that that workstation has an american keyboard. My password didn’t work on it because the & is over the 7 (where it’s ‘sposed to be). The only cure was to change passwords, and let the new one propagate through the network.
If you think the Japanese keyboard is an accident waiting to happen, you should see the Japanese Mozilla browser. It’s an accident in progress. I’ll try to send a picture of that one later.

Shamaru (alias rakkity)