doublexgeeks

Finally! November is done!

I’ve been pretty busy setting up an e-store on a friend’s website and came across a great open source program called Zen Cart.

It does everything I want, has GREAT community support, and has free templates. While further customization is a bit confusing, you can shell out for some great ones. The part that I like is that it has (fairly) simple set up for allowing you to sell virtual products! I’m doing this for a local music label, so this ability is extremely important.

Over all I will give it a 7.5 out of 10. What it lacks in simple customization it makes up for with the great community and FAQ files.

Congrats to my fellow bloggers who made it through NaBloPoMo!

Sometimes I really don’t get people. Really, really, don’t get people.

I know what it’s like to try and get a hot item, to drive from store to store, to get up early, stand in lines, the whole thing. I’ve even done the whole standing in line to see the opening showing a movie. NEVER have I felt the need to brutally injure another person.

People tend to (wrongly) think geeks are obsessed, social inept, and totally self absorbed. I doubt the people involved in this incident would have labelled themselves geeks, but they fit those characteristics perfectly.

Any time we forget our humanity we literately become animals, and that’s just what happened yesterday. If somehow you’ve missed this story, here’s the gist. Crowds were lining up outside a New York Wal-Mart, waiting for the super sales that are Black Friday. The crowd got rowdy and broke through the door, knocking over a worker. The crowd then proceeded to trample the man to death. Literately. He was pronounced dead an hour later. Four others were taken to hospital, including a pregnant woman, and others were injured. Other employees tried to help the fallen man but could not reach him for the chaotic crowd.

Disgusting.

Read the full article here on ABC news

What has been sucking my time dry lately? Planning Winter-een-mas!

If you haven’t heard of this amazing holiday before, you are missing out. Taking place the last week of January, it celebrates gaming and gamers. Seems silly? Well, it kind of is, but it’s also taken on a life of its own.

Winter-een-mas is the brain child of Tim Buckley of the webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del. One of the main characters created this holiday while suffering from mold-induced delusions. You can read the first arc here, from 2003.

I’ll talk more about this even when it gets closer to the season. Right now I have a complaint about technology (ironic eh). DO NOT offer services you don’t know how to use! I’m in the process of getting quotes for places to have this event, and one place in particular offers a nice e-form on their website. It’s very well designed from a form side of things. Even have an auto-response set up for it. Too bad they don’t know how to send it to the person that needs to see it.

I only sent it three days ago, so I did feel a little bad about calling and asking nicely what’s going on. Good thing I did, when I finally got a hold of the missy actually in charge of this at the local hotel, she informed me that they never manage to reach her, and gave me her direct email. She hadn’t received anything I had filled out! She was great, and now the ball is rolling.

I understand that they are an international group, but if you can’t coordinate that form, don’t have it. Give me a contact address at the hotel itself so they can deal with me directly.

I see this far too often, on small and large scales. Non-techies think this stuff is great, but give no mind to implementation.

Sometimes, simple is better.

I’ve heard of the Girl Geek Dinners a few times, but never really looked into them. I had assumed that they were some sort of dating service for geeks, but I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Starting in Londen, they have spread through the world, with dinners happening regularly in England (7 different cities), Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Iceland, Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Saskatoon, and Calgary), New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, and the USA (Bay Area, Seattle, NoVa, Chicago, New York and Carolina).

Ok, so they’re popular. What are they? One side effect of being a female geek is you tend to have a lot of male friends. I can count on one hand the number of friends I’ve had who are both female and geeky. Most of the time this is fine, but sometimes you just need another woman to talk to.

And this is where the Girl Geek Dinners come in! Everyone attending these dinners are female, with guest speakers on topics that relate to the unique interest of female geeks.

If you can manage to attend one of these I’d highly recommend it. They’ve gotten great reviews, and sound like a lot of fun! Visit their site to find out more about the dinners in general, and about ones happening in your area.

We’re into the final stretch of National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo.

I won’t lie; it’s been difficult and VERY annoying. Once this is over I will be switching to 3 posts a week with a random Saturday thrown in. However thus far I’ve succeeded! One looks out of place cuz the time stamp got messed up, but November will have 30 posts!

My posts lately have been way too slack, I know. I recently got my first paying webdesign client (yay me!), ontop of end of term school work. Once Christmas break comes I’ll have much more time to waste!

Also, 9 more days until my birthday :D

There’s an exploit in Gmail that allows forwards to be set up on your account and (as far as I can tell) allow your contact list to be viewed.

If you have Gmail open in one tab while you surf on other tabs, you’re exposed for this problem.

News hasn’t broken officially on the contact list, but you can see for yourself here (if your Gmail is also open): http://www.google.com/contacts/data/contacts?out=js

Don’t worry, that link is not malware. It shows the data being stored by the script. Still, my jaw dropped on that one. There it was; all my contacts for the world, or in this case a spammer, to see. Oh yes, a spammer got a hold of that and sent out a nice email to all my contacts, appearing to come from address.

While that exploit is annoying, it’s not a huge breach of security. But the forwarding problem is quite troubling. You can read about the forwarding exploit on CNET, but here’s the non-technical gist. By gathering your account ID, a person is able to create a filter on your Gmail account. By doing this they can receive all your emails, and you’d be none the wiser. So far the major attacks using this exploit have been using GoDaddy.com. Like most sites, it uses email verification to allow password changes. If someone has your emails, they can get your login information. A number of users have had their domains hijacked and held hostage.

Keep yourself safe; don’t surf while Gmail is open in another tab! I’ve been keeping Gmail open in Firefox, but surfing in Chrome.

Please share this with anyone you know who uses Gmail!

Let’s poke around Etsy for a while. It’s a treasure trove of fun, geeky, things, and is the place for finding unique handmade products. I’d love to get some stuff up on there, but as you can tell from the late post, tiiiime.

My favourite that I found: Jayne Cobb’s hat from his mom.
Created by fadingendlessly, it even includes the letter from Jayne’s mother! Pretty cunning don’t you think?

I almost never wear matching earrings, which is a feat since I have 5 holes in each ear. These would be the PERFECT addition to my growing collection of “weird” jewellery (although my kitten broke my d20 necklace, sad).
Created by reddhynes, there are other geek and non-geek products on her page as well!

Up next: w00t.
I use this word far too often, and ended up having to explain l33t sp33k to my mother because of it. I think what I like best about it is how traditional it looks. It’d look great in any home or apartment, or even office!
Created by thepinksamurai, who also has a number of interesting comic book images turned into buttons!

Mario is gaming. He is the icon for it, known by gamers and non-gamers alike.
RipleyBean created this lovely Christmas ornament. I’m impressed with the colours!

Add a bit of geek to your sense of class with these cufflinks from nephilimdesigns.

Myself I do a lot of cross stitches. I wish I could show you guys some but I’m mostly working on Christmas gifts right now. After the holidays prepare for a craft explosion!

Day one of Dvorak: I can get the right key on at most the third try and can now type at 12 WPM.

In other news I’ve come down with a sinus infection, so got about a fifth done today as I wanted to. However I got a jump on my Christmas craft gifts (yes, I know its November. Any crafters reading can back me up on the need to start early), and got my printer working after contacting HP tech support.

So, I’m lacking in ideas today, but came across these interesting blog tests. I know a lot of people who read this are also bloggers, so you might find these interesting. Let me know if you do the tests too!

First a small test: The Blog Readability Test

Not sure what test the used, but I’m not surprised I have a low rating. Even in my technical writing I tend to score low because of my sentence structure.

Next up: The Genderizer!
We guess http://www.doublexgeeks.today.com is written by a man (53%), however it’s quite gender neutral.
Yea, not so much :P

As a comparison, here’s Spark Life’s prediction of my gender:
It all adds up… we feel 24% certain that you are…
A Woman!
Compared to others…
85% more male than you — 4% like you — 10% more female than you

Now here’s an interesting one, Typealyzer
This gives you a Myers-Briggs analysis of your blog.
ESTP - The Doers
The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Sounds pretty close to how I portray myself on my blog! Again for comparison, here how I scored using Human Metric’s test:
Your Type is INFP (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving)

Idealist Portrait of the Healer
Healers present a calm and serene face to the world, and can seem shy, even distant around others. But inside they’re anything but serene, having a capacity for personal caring rarely found in the other types. Healers care deeply about the inner life of a few special persons, or about a favorite cause in the world at large. And their great passion is to heal the conflicts that trouble individuals, or that divide groups, and thus to bring wholeness, or health, to themselves, their loved ones, and their community.

As promised, I am going to talk about switching to Dvorak!

I had planned to do this in a very logical order, talking about the history, pros and cons, and then learning advice. But I do feel compelled to share this!

I’m typing this with a Dvorak keyboard.

Ok, at 9 WPM I’m not the greatest. I’ve now switched back to QWERTY just so I can get this done in a somewhat timely fashion, but the point still stands. In a few hours I’ve gotten proficient enough using the new layout that I can muddle through it. I had read that Dvorak was fast to learn, but this blew me away.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled post.

The Dvorak keyboard was designed by Dr. August Dvorak in the 1920s, with efficiency in mind. While a number of articles say that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists, to prevent the heads from getting tangled, I can’t really find any proof of it. Take it as you will. QWERTY had been in use for over 50 years before Dvorak came along, so as you can image many people were stuck in their ways.

Anytime you try to introduce new technology and methods, it’s difficult to win over people. The best way to break into the market with a product like this is to be picked up by a major group. The United States Army was supposedly considering switching to Dvorak keyboards, but with the outbreak of WWII change was not in the cards.

So is it really that much better? I put the previous paragraphs into a keyboard compare applet to see what the results were.

The biggest numbers to look at are distance, and home row. By staying on the home row you don’t put as much strain on your hands, and with less distance to travel (by staying on the home row) you need less time. No matter how much arguing there is on the internet, there is definitely some difference. While it’s anecdotal evidence, it’s interesting to note that the world fastest typist used the Dvorak layout.

So, should you learn Dvorak? If you type a lot, sure! I have posted to this blog every day minus one since I started it over a month ago, and most of my posts are between 500 and 1000 words. I’ve probably written over 30,000 words so far! Less strain on my hands and faster typing would be welcome. I’m sure my fellow bloggers can share that sentiment.

Now we arrive back where we started. Is learning Dvorak hard? Not at all! I’ve started to pick it up in a few hours. Vista, and I believe XP as well, have this handy language tool bar that you probably turned off because it takes up space. Turn it back on and that’s your key to learning Dvorak! You can switch between the two, going back if you have to.

I’ve found this site, ABCD, very helpful. It’s a bunch of exercises to help you learn where the keys are. The folks over at The World of Stuff also have a lot of resources to help you learn how to make the switch.

As I mentioned, you can use the language bar to switch your existing keyboard to a Dvorak layout. You might think that this would make it more difficult to learn, but it’s really the opposite. The hunt and peck method is really a security blanket, and by elimating that you force your brain to really remember what it’s doing, and build up that kinetic memory that is vital for touch typing. Already I can tell when I’ve typed an o for an n (same fingers, different hands) without looking.

Of course I have a cheat image open just in case

So far I’ve found the layout very natural. Punctuation is easier, and things just seem to flow. If it has the letters A O E U H T N or S, I’m set. The biggest change I’ve noticed is the work the, which corresponds to the letters kjd; it’s like a strum, so natural.

But what is the most important reason to switch to a Dvorak layout? Geek cred! It should totally be worth at least 20 points.

I’ll be sure to keep everyone updated! As a reference, my current (QWERTY) typing speed is 85 WPM. We’ll see where I am with Dvorak in a few weeks!

Sorry for the lateness! I had a client meeting today (first one!) for my web design business, but it was in my house so I went on a cleaning spree. Washed the walls and everything. Probably went a little overboard with it really, but better that then look like a slob.

One quandary I had was how much geek to leave out. This lady is hiring me to do a website for her company, a fairly geek profession for sure.

I left the living room as it, set up a second account for myself on Erik’s computer (didn’t need it), and frebrezed the hell out of everything. It looks almost creepy out there. I piled the left over hard drives and defunct floppy drives neatly on the shelf, which probably wasn’t noticed but made me feel more professional.

However the meeting went well. I’m very hopeful for this. She wants me to do a lot of advertising work, and even some spy work for her (which I am amazing at btw).

I also successfully dodged questions about my education. I was complete honest, but don’t sound like a chronic drop out (3.5 years of a biology degree, 1 year of medical radiography, now doing website admin. Yes mom, I will graduate someday.)

In other news, I’ve decided to learn how to type dvorak style. More on that next post!