Ed's Big Plans

Brief: There are a few typos that I consistently make. I have concluded that these things have been trained into my brain some how. No matter how much I want to correct them, they just keep showing up. Even conscious efforts to “not type it wrongly this time” are only partially successful. It’s … like a speech impediment for my fingers.

Part of me wants to conjecture about motion planning, the cerebellum, buffer overruns and the QWERTY layout — but a larger part would rather not.

Here’s a list of words that get these automatic typos — Yes, I know I use four fingers on my left hand plus three fingers on my right hand to type — I think this scheme was inherited from an obsession with the DooM series of first person shooters when I was a primordial computer user.

• total → totoal — redundantly drummed ‘o’ with right middle finger.
• schematics → schemaitcs — incorrect priority given to right middle finger ‘i’ over left index ‘t’.
• blast → blasy — incorrectly increased reaching distance between left middle finger ‘s’ to left index ‘y’.
• desktop → dekstop — incorrect priority given to right middle finger ‘k’ over left index ‘s’.
• people → poeple — incorrect priority given to right middle finger ‘o’ over left middle ‘e’.

If you have a patch for my brain, please let me know.

Silly: One day, Dave messaged me and said that his e-mails weren’t getting through to me. I was puzzled as he was using the g-talk service, meaning he has my valid g-mail handle. As it turns out, the device he was on didn’t have copy and paste available for that field, and he simply couldn’t see the ‘t’ in my address.

Incidentally, that’s one dysfunction of the human visual system I’d like to purge– reading something over and over, only to make exactly the same lexicographical mistake each time. It’s an evil broken heuristic… remember kids, it’s a ‘feature’, not a ‘bug’.

I then messaged him the MD5 hash of my e-mail address along with the one for the incorrect address…

Correct:   2f776881db0ca037c145e74a6c41721c
Incorrect: 35c56bee61e9914929f4a3242d44c339

Don’t worry, there’s no practical value in doing this

Note: to get the MD5 of an arbitrary string on a *nix system, just type this in the terminal…

echo "arbitrary string" | MD5

It almost amuses me as much as catting arbitrary binary files…

Irony should be easier to deploy. It should have a generic-like type signature, so we know how to use it flawlessly each time.

Irony i<Notion, Meaning, Alternative> = new Irony<Notion, Meaning, Alternative>();