Mirror in the Bathroom

Wade in the poignant thoughts of The English Beat.

Mirror in the bathroom please talk free. The door is locked: just you and me. Can I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating. Mirror in the bathroom I just can't stop it. Every Saturday you see me window shopping. Find no interest in the racks and shelves: just a thousand reflections of my own sweet self, self, self...

Mirror in the bathroom you're my mirror in the bathroom. You're my mirror in the bathroom. You're my mirror in the bathroom.

Mirror in the bathroom recompense for all my crimes of self defense. Cures you whisper make no sense. Drift gently into mental illness.

Mirror in the bathroom please talk free. The door is locked: just you and me. Can I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating. Mirror in the bathroom: mirror in the bathroom...


I heard this on the way to work and I never really listened to the words before. I like the first verse. Let's see how my typing does after a typeless week.

Pictures?!!?

Nope.

I have been thoroughly distracted by MLB Network the last two days. Yesterday I watched Carlos Delgado hit four home runs in a game, which happened to be a very good game, too. His third home run tied the game at 6, and his fourth tied the game at 8. Julio Lugo hit a home run and it was his fourth night in a row doing so. The Blue Jays ended up beating the Devil Rays 10-8 in a game that had no significance at the end of the season.

Today I watched most of Tom Seaver's 300th win, and now I'm watching Gaylord Perry's 300th win. Funnily enough Dave Duncan was the pitching coach for both, and the games were both against the Yankees. Duncan came out to talk to both of them, but they both pitched complete games. Also, Tom Seaver's was on my first half birthday and the Yankees fans cheered him, even though they ended up losing the division by 2 games that year, so a win would probably have been much better for them. I have seen no fewer than fifteen Jehri curls.

When this game's over I'm going to go for a run then bust out my camera fo sho.

Pictures

Just kidding, still no pictures. I have tomorrow off, so perhaps I will run around photographizing everything. PERHAPS.

It finally stopped raining yesterday and is all sunny, but the weatherman is a jerk and says more to come this weekend. Boo! I responded to the rain by sitting indoors and doing nothing. Sorry health, you are no match for the weather.

The last post was an attempt to screw with my typing results data with repetition and high characters per word (6!). It worked pretty swimmingly as my CPM rates jumped up and my WPM sort of fell. Blah blagh blar ba gdf

I am feeling entirely unmotivated in finding adequate content. I want to keep typing to make my Dvorak dominate QWERTY hardcore, but my brain is bored with itself. Reporting my daily typing and exercise activities and eating habits is not entirely satisfying. Just keep typing. Type whatever. Come on just a little more you can do it. Don't stop you are almost there. And I'm done.

What up boreosphere

It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining. It's raining.

Graphs and tables

I have been tinkering with the layout of this place trying to figure out the way I want to present the useless data I have been collecting about my progress towards my goals. I'm not sure if I've quite got it. For now there is a graph on the sidebar, which links to the larger image. I gave up (for now) on having a script make the graph and just made it into a jpeg. I guess the plan could be to have a graph every ten entries.

In the footer I threw in the actual data. As you can see in the table, as well as in the graph, I have been keeping track of the characters in each entry. I'm not sure why words per minute is the stat of choice for typists when the characters per word can have a significant effect on that speed, as you can see in entries 6 and 9. My WPM for both QWERTY and Dvorak dipped quite a bit in these entries, while my CPM (Characters per Minute) only dropped slightly. Since these posts were also the ones showcasing the uncommon letters, my guess is that using those letters might have been the cause for the lower CPMs. An ambitious goal may be to look at the frequency of each letter in each entry. We'll see about that.

I also started timing myself going to and from work. This was mostly to show when I've been biking (not much since it got cold and rainy), but I also wanted to look into optimizing my route. There aren't a lot of options when biking, but I do take a few different paths to and from work.

Eventually I'll also start keeping track of when I run and do other activities. Stay tuned for that!

Words: 301
Characters: 1232
QST: 3:38:30 PM
QET: 3:43:33 PM
QWPM: 59.80
DST: 4:07:15 PM
DET: 4:20:38 PM
DWPM: 22.57

Go go gadget graph

Some other abusers:
Chad Qualls
Robb Quinlan
Humberto Quintero
Quinton McCracken
Quilvio Veras

You thought you could escape, didn't you?!

Yesterday's post lacked q's. Time for some quibbles! Why can't people stop right at the limit line? A quandary! I never noticed this until I moved here, but some people consistently stop like five to ten feet before the limit line at stoplights. Quite absurd! And guess what? Sometimes the sensors on the ground don't register someone that far back from the limit line and the light cycles past them. They are quacks! Okay, so this quibble is really from about a year ago when I was stuck behind someone to turn left who was not at the limit line and the lights cycled through two or three times before this person pulled up for the light to turn green, but I've noticed no fewer than three cars in the past week resting far behind the limit line and it is only a matter of time before something like that happens again. Quibble time over: a quick quibble!

I decided I'm going to make a gadget to go on the sidebar that will create the graphs I have promised. There is probably an existing gadget that could do this for me, but that's no fun. I got some javascript code from the internets that creates a line graph, and I'm going to make some sense of it and make it my own a bit before throwing it up there.

I will also have a gadget to report stuff like: yesterday I did three sets of 25 sit-ups and three sets of 12 push-ups. Then I can quit posting such reports and have more time for my stupid quibbles. Look out!

Words: 290
QST: 10:41:00 AM
QET: 10:46:02 AM
QWPM: 57.62
DST: 1:07:45 PM
DET: 1:22:12 PM
DWPM: 20.07

Alex Rodrijquez

You know who else did performance enhancing drugs in 2003? Here is a lizt:

Javier Vazquez
Javier Lopez
Richie Sexson
Mike Piazza
Jason Jennings
Manny Ramirez
Trot Nixon
Carlos Zambrano
Paul Quantrill
Jose Cruz, Jr.
Pedro Martinez
Alex Sanchez
Raul Ibanez
Miguel Tejada
Luis Gonzalez
Barry Zito
John Smoltz
Esteban Loaiza
Ichiro Suzuki
Xavier Nady
Livan Hernandez
Edwin Jackson
Ramon Ortiz
Nate Cornejo
Erubiel Durazo
Carlos Quentin
Xavier Hernandez
Dan Quisenberry

Sorry, dudes. Time to come clean.

Words: 77
QST: 9:20:30 PM
QET: 9:22:23 PM
QWPM: 40.88
DST: 9:33:00 PM
DET: 9:38:10 PM
DWPM: 14.90

Spoilerz: This post had 5.481 characters per word. The next highest was 4.966 on the other uncommon letter post. After that they were all between 3.983 and 4.322. You'll see these results graphically eventually...

Whoops forgot a title

My to-do list for today:

• Deposit check
• Go to mall
• Clean bathroom
• Do laundry
• Go for run
• Put stuff on eBay
• Go to market
• Make cookies
• Post on blog
  • Charts
  • Pictures

Welp, nothing succeeds as planned. I got a good amount done, but not the most important two at the bottom! Those will have to wait I guess. I also have to take pictures for putting stuff on eBay, so that goes with the blog pics. The laundry is overwhelming. There are about 6 loads to do. The dryer in my apartment tends not to make everything completely dry unless the load is relatively small, and the rain made me not want to take a trip to the laundromat (Word wants to capitalize that for whatever reason, but I refuse).

I had a soda today and I'm not sorry! Lisa asked if I wanted to eat at In-N-Out for lunch and I said sure before thinking about the fact that I probably would not find a burger there very enjoyable without a soda. That's probably a feeling I need to do away with, but for today it was pretty awesome. I had a medium with one refill, and I miss it already!

Today I also made some cookies. Lisa was craving some yesterday and I didn't get my fill of my family's traditional mincemeat cookies over the holidays, so I baked a batch. I'm used to making them with a mixer, but today I had to make them "by hand". That's a lot more difficult than I expected. Regardless, they good!

I did go for a run, though, plus I did some sit-ups and push-ups.

Words (minus to-do list): 245
QST: 11:46:00 PM
QET: 11:50:19 PM
QWPM: 56.76
DST: 11:54:10 PM
DET: 12:06:01 AM
DWPM: 20.68

Notes on the previous post

I was interrupted a little over halfway through the Dvorak portion and had to start over, so I sort of got a second chance. I gave the QWERTY run a 2nd go after the pitiful 1st performance, but I still only managed 47 WPM, so I kept the original try. Since there were also relatively longer words in the last post, too, I decided to look into the character count and see how much my words per minute might have been affected by it. I am going to start tracking the amount of characters in each post, but I am not going to post the results, yet. I think I might on Friday along with some graphs and other stuff. Maybe I'll include some hot pixxx.

As for today's activity and dietary report: I drove to work and made my lunch. Unfortunately it is projected to rain tomorrow, so I probably should have biked today while I could. Oh well. I also had two pieces of cake and I might have another later because it's my birthday.

Words: 177
QST: 6:51:45 PM
QET: 6:54:52 PM
QWPM: 56.79
DST: 7:00:45 PM
DET: 7:10:06 PM
DWPM: 18.93

Aj quickz xone

Today I jogged to the zoo and it was quite exciting. The zebras were jumping with quiet exhilaration. A quirky xylophone player came with the jazz. I quaked in amazement at his excellent jam. A jaguar quickly zoomed in sight with exemplary agility. It's juicy prey was overzealous and was soon quavering with exhaustion. The lazy quails just excreted.

Words: 59
QST: 3:57:00 PM
QET: 3:58:19 PM
QWPM: 44.81
DST: 4:06:20 PM
DET: 4:10:10 PM
DWPM: 15.39

Findings

Today I decided to try my hand at using Dvorak at work, which brought about some interesting (relatively) observations. I use a lot of ctrl-c and ctrl-v at work and it seems to be a much more convenient group of keystrokes using the QWERTY layout. I imagine I'll have to start using the right shift more than I do now, which appears to be never. That's probably not a good habit. I've noticed I have pretty bad habits with QWERTY. I generally use only one or two fingers and am not terribly consistent as far as which finger presses which letter. For the most part, though, I feel like I am developing pretty good habits with Dvorak as far as using the "right" fingers for each letter. It probably helps to not have the letters in front of me. If I can't remember where a letter is I think which finger presses it rather than looking for it. The only keys I have trouble with are the ones I use the least often (q, j, z, x). That makes good horse sense. I've only used any of those letters twice in this post and it was the same one! Perhaps I'll have to do some qjzx exercises (hey x what's happenin'). I could probably use some punctuation practice, too. Let us see what these keys do-/=\?+[]{}

Oh! I also accidentally found that ctrl-; enters the date in excel. Neato!

Words: 239
QST: 4:23:30 PM
QET: 4:28:00 PM
QWPM: 53.11
DST: 4:39:10 PM
DET: 4:52:44 PM
DWPM: 17.62

Edit: I should have said right ctrl not right shift, but I do need to use more right shift.

The Super Bowl Was Yesterday

I didn't bring a lunch today, but I drove back home and made a sandwich. That counts! Kept it simple with turkey, cheese, lettuce and avocado on wheat. It was quite a good sandwich in this man's opinion. I heard someone open a soda at the office and I really, really wanted one, but I resisted temptation. Hooray for me. I also ran after work and I even got Lisa to come with me. She did well and I'm proud of her!

Tomorrow I'll bike to work and do push ups and sit ups when I get home.

I probably shouldn't spend too much more time on this because I have to finish my cover letter and apply for a job!

Words: 121
QST: 9:05:30 PM
QET: 9:07:35 PM
QWPM: 58.08
DST: 9:09:25 PM
DET: 9:16:27 PM
DWPM: 17.20