two-finger typist

I'm a two-finger typist.

I basically use my two index fingers to type all the letters, though my thumb does the space bar and I use my little finger for holding the shift and control buttons. I'm quite quick, but it's more because I've kinda learned the keyboard than because it's an inherently quick technique.

One of the things with touch typing is it gives you the ability to not look at the keys while you type. Well, I've learned the keyboard to such a degree that I can almost do this with my two fingers. Especially if I kinda relax my brain. If I think about it too much, I start to loose the ability.

However, I make a lot of errors, but they're errors caused by a specific thing - my left finger hand seems to be quicker than my right.

The best example of this is the word "of". I virtually never actually type of. I type "fo", because my left finger gets to the 'f' just before my right finger can get to the 'o'.

Anyway, this is my last post for the week, as I have Friday and Monday off work. Hurrah and Huzzah!

Let's just hope I don't blow all my time doing useless stuff and actually get some things done. It'd be good to come out of a weekend 'ahead' for once.

the end of furuba

I'm on the verge of polishing off Fruits Basket, or furuba as it's known.

I've kinda not read furuba for a very long time, but now that it's finished publication I've gotten around to finishing it. That should reflect badly on the manga, btw - I really enjoy it, it's just, I dunno, I kinda stopped reading.

There are a variety of reasons for that.

First and foremost is probably that I found it very emotionally draining. I'm a bit of a soft-touch when it comes to drama and I cry all the time, like some sort of big girl's blouse, but that's how I am. Furuba is/was a veritable blub-fest for me, and not always in a sad way. A lot of it's crying for joy.

There's also quite strong emotional connection in there for me - my mum died of cancer and there's a lot of lost parents stuff in Furuba (not always through death - it's more of a general theme).

So yeah, it got to the stage that I was blubbing a lot and while I enjoyed it I wanted to take a break.

Another issue was that it doesn't really work broken up. No, that's the wrong way of saying it - it's more like it works far better read continuously. I was experiencing a heck of a lot of frustration with the 6-month wait between volumes, so it seemed sensible to build them up.

I then discovered that the series ended with volume 23 and it then seemed sensible to wait until I had them all before reading again. What I didn't really think about was that meant, with 6-month gaps, it would be around 4 years before I would start again :/.

A problem I've always had with furuba is the sheer number of characters. I mean, it's based on Chinese zodiac, so you've got at least 12 main characters for starters. When you add in the other main characters and the secondary characters, and the occasional/incidental characters, there must be 30 characters you need to keep on top of.

That's a heck of a lot for my meagre brain. Especially when they all have unusual (to me as a westerner) names. When two characters are discussing an off-screen third is when I struggle the most. I'm often referring back to the front of the book where some fo the main characters are listed out, though it's a long way from being comprehensive.

The above may all read like criticism, but a lot of it isn't really.

I mean, lots of characters has made for lots of interesting plotlines, for example. And my rubbishness with names is my own problem, not the fault of the manga.

So yeah, I've been really reading it with some gusto and remembering why I liked it so much too.

you have new construction options

The old Anno obsession doesn't seem to be abating.

Even though I did my best to abstain, I still played for several hours over the weekend. Several hours that could have been put to better use, but that's my life, I guess.

I'm this close to finishing the quest (you can't see but I held my thumb and index finger really close together then). I've got just one more chapter to do. I didn't start it yet, because it turns out it's some timed missions and I didn't want to get trapped into playing it for that long.

Instead I tried one of the scenarios. This was an opportunity to try out some fo the theories I've been developing about the placement of things.

One thing I've discovered is it's easy to get trapped into getting carried away with your industries and neglect enlarging your population. The problem with this is that you rapidly run out of cash.

The basic idea of Anno is that you produce goods that your population needs. Some of these, like basic food and drink they can take raw (so fish and spices they take as-is), but others you have to process.

However, things ramp up in complexity. So your population starts as peasants, with only pretty basic needs, but they then become citizens, with slightly more complex needs. Some of these needs require you to do processing.

So they need clothes, like linen garments. Well, you can't grow linen garments, but you can grow hemp, which a weaver can weave into linen garments.

But one of the tricky things about it is that you can't manufacture hemp until you've got some citizens in your population that need it. This means you can't pre-build: the need arises before the means of fulfilling it.

To add further complication, there's two types of population in the game: the occident (i.e. what you start with - the West) and the orient (the Middle East). Eventually you end up with settlements of both of these across your islands. Islands are clearly delineated too: green occident ones and desert orient ones.

But here's the thing: some of the goods are inter-linked. The easiest example of this is spices. You can only grow spices on orient islands, but oriental people don't have spices as one of their needs, occidental people do, so you have to grow it in the orient and ship it to your occidental population.

However, there are things the orient doesn't have. For example, you need 'tools' to build almost everything, but tools are made from iron, which is only found on occidental islands.

Add into that fertilities - you can only grow certain things on certain islands - and the fact that you can only get advanced oriental buildings by 'buying' higher diplomatic ranks and you can see how complex things can get very quickly.

Which is where I come unstuck - I get so carried away with the industrial stuff, I forget to keep building my population properly and my accounts go into the negative (red). Now in some ways that doesn't matter - the game doesn't end if you run out of cash - but it does mean you can't build new stuff... like new houses to increase your income :/.

Oh - forgot to mention yesterday that the bread pudding was something of a success. Certainly it was very edible, although somewhat ironically, since the recipe was essentially custard + bread, it could have done with some custard to accompany it - instead, I used the left-over double cream, which was good, but some custard would have been better, I think.

how much? blimey.

Bit of an odd weekend.

It was my intention to do a whole bunch of stuff and, to be fair, I did do a whole bunch of stuff. The oddness was that some of the things I did took absolutely ages, which meant that there just wasn't the time to do everything I planned.

I think part of the problem was that I remembered that this weekend I've got a four day weekend. So, rather than cut my loses on the things that took a long time, I went ahead with them anyway, thinking that I could play catch-up next weekend.

The big problem with this is that I then end up with far too much to do at the weekend, especially when my primary aim is likely to be to relax.

One of the things I really do have to do but didn't get the time to is move some credit card debt around. I've not really been paying proper attention to them and one of them hit a (low) limit and I don't want to incur any over-the-limit charges. I could increase the limit, I guess, but that would be a little counter-productive.

A thing I did do - and one of the ones that took a lot more time than anticipated - was sort out my e-bay auctions. I've ranted before about the utterly retarded thing e-bay has done with postage costs.

I have a work around using the "courier" option, but the problem with it is that it means it's a lot more effort, because I have to actively ask people what postage they want (generally I offer 1st class recorded and regular second class). This generally adds a whole bunch of steps into the process that mean it takes longer.

But anyway, the thing I wanted to mention is that the e-baying went surprisingly well. I mean, there was the usual thing of stuff selling for meagre amounts, like 5p or £1 when they cost me twenty time that, but a couple of things actual sold for half-decent prices. So yeah, it's not all bad news.

I've been trying to work out ways I can slice out extra spending. One of them was to kill off my AOL subscription. This was originally for dial-up modem that I kept in case my broadband went totally tits up.

However, in all the years I've had broadband it's only gone tits up to that degree twice, and even then the time it took to fix wasn't enough for me to break out the dial-up. Plus we have broadband at work (admittedly it's just about the world's slowest broadband, but it's quicker than dial-up).

Also, there were two other factors. Firstly, I'd heard it was a nightmare to get them to cancel and secondly they were planning switching it to "broadband" and charging more than double.

Obviously, the second one didn't make sense - my broadband wasn't with them, so I dunno how they figured it was broadband, but the more intriguing one was that cancelling my subscription was actually incredibly easy. It just took one two-minute phone call. I phoned up, asked to cancel, they did it. It was really that simple :/.

At the time I was worried they'd done something sneaky and maybe not cancelled it properly, but it seems they have ad I've not been charged since.

Another thing I'm thinking of cutting down or reducing is my phones. I have a subscription phone, but I should really switch to a pay-as-you-go service, because I just don't use it enough to justify the expense.

And also I need to investigate my BT landline - they suddenly seem to have basically doubled my bill for no apparent reason :/.