Wednesday 22 November 2006

Pic of the day: I don't take pictures at work anymore, but here is my new at-home keyboard, glowing in the dark. Wheeeee! Eh?

Shopping spree: Keyboards

It is eerily appropriate that my year-ago entry refers to "tech lust". Perhaps this is something that recurs every NaNoWriMo (or November, as the month is still called by most English-speakers). This month I have continually fought off the desire to buy an Alphasmart Dana or at least a Neo. It would probably have ended up being the Dana. But I managed to resist that, albeit barely, reminding myself day after day that even if I had one, I had no time to use it where I did not already have a perfectly good alternative. I have these great desktop machines at home, one of them with speech recognition, and a passable laptop at work. I am also planning for its replacement, more about that later, I hope. But in the meantime I have also bought two keyboards.

Of course, keyboards are on writers' minds (and on the NaNoWriMo forums) this month. Still, I could have done with the old ones if I really loved the poor like myself. But I don't. I love myself very much and wanted to give me two new keyboards, one at home and one at work, so I did, one after another. The best that can be said for this is that the gratification of keyboard shopping may have helped me stave off the longing for the Dana. Still, it is a thing of the ego, so I doubt anything good can come of it. More about the ego later, I hope.

The keyboard I brought home is particularly shiny. The one at work is rather dull, black and official-looking. But this one is literally shining even in the dark, because it is lit from underneath the keys with a cold blue light. The keys are not see-through, like on some keyboards, so the light does not help with typing in the dark if you don't touch-type, in which case you probably don't need to look at it at all. I certainly don't look much at mine. It is exceedingly cool, though.

Besides the glow and the bright metallic-looking casing, the selling point is the game pad that comes with it. This pad is also backlit and has 9 keys and two different shift keys, giving 27 keys in all. I suppose I could program it with the letters of the alphabet and write with only one hand, but that is not what it was meant for. It is for gaming: You program it with macros which it types into the keyboard at the speed you choose. This could be turning on the testing cheats in The Sims 2 ([ctrl-shift-c] boolprop testingcheatsenabled true [Enter]) or start Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition ([Start] a a [Enter] d [Enter] [Enter]) or even to rapidly type a commonly used phrase in City of Heroes (/local "Fall before the might of Reboundancy the living plant, accursed herbivores!"). OK, so that is not actually a commonly used phrase, but you get the idea.

The truth is that I have not (yet) used the game pad, but it is shiny and a sufficiently advanced technology that it is nearly indistinguishable from magic. With enough lack of sleep, this looks like good enough reason to buy it.

Strangely enough, I did not write about keyboards in my novel. Perhaps I should have.