You Care Too Much About: The Dvorak Keyboard

Hey everybody. So I've decided to start a new series on Life of a Pastry, called You Care Too Much. Every week (or several times a week, depending on how much free time I have), I'll write about a website whose author is clearly far more passionate about something than they ought to be. Today on You Care Too Much: the Dvorak Keyboard.

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Dvorak-Keyboard.com starts off promisingly with this quote about its author from PC Magazine:

"Randy Cassingham, a Dvorak keyboard nutball...."

...that's it. That's the quote. Since I don't know how that sentence ends, I have decided to compile an incomplete list of possibilities:

"Randy Cassingham, a Dvorak keyboard nutball..."
...smells like a shit bird wearing an ass hat.
...would hump his computer if it could give consent.
...is holding a gun to my head. Help.

Now that that's done, let's move on to the actual bulk of his page. But first, we need to know what a Dvorak keyboard is.

Look at your keyboard right now. Do it. Now look back up at the screen because this article's not over and you're being disrespectful if I may say so myself. Did you notice how fucking inconveniently your keys are arranged? No? Well Dr. August Dvorak did. Also, as Cassingham makes sure to stress, Dvorak's name is not pronounced like that of 19th century Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, a very important fact because so help me God if it was then this whole thing would be fucking bullshit.

Fuck you.

Anyway, Dvorak spent some time (twelve God-damn years, to be precise) studying the way our hands work and how placing keys on certain parts of the keyboard makes typing that key easier, blah blah blah. Long story short, he invented a keyboard that is, according to many people, more efficient. How much more efficient? Whereas a good typist's fingers will move 20 miles in a day when using a QWERTY keyboard, they will only move one mile a day when using the Dvorak layout, meaning you can search for twenty times as much porn with the same amount of finger effort.

.00003 miles

Now, far be it from me to question "finger-miles" as a valid unit of measurement, but what does that actually mean? If you assume a hand stroke of six inches up and six inches down, four strokes per second, and five fingers per stroke, then congratulations, your jack-off finger-mile time is less than four and a half minutes! So does this mean people are going to start doing finger marathons?

Not what I meant...

No, it doesn't. Because finger-miles are bullshit.

Anyway, now that you know what a Dvorak keyboard is, we can get back to talking about Cassingham's beautiful website. I could spend all day making fun of Randy's "looks like a Word document" web design style, or his childish fear of the word Hell, or the fact that he refers to himself in the third person in an article he himself wrote for his own web page. But the fact is, there's something much more important to talk about.

Scroll down and look at what Cassingham has to say about why Dvorak keyboards are not in popular use. He says that there are members of the General Services Administration (GSA) who have personal "vendettas" against the Dvorak system.

Fucking vendettas.

Listen, Randy. The Corleones and Tattaglias had a vendetta, and bitches died because of it. Same with the Montagues and the Capulets. Same with God and fucking Satan. My point is that having a vendetta requires more bad-assery than anything the GSA could ever muster, so calm down and leave that fucking word alone.

The GSA has decided to stick with QWERTY.

--Pastry