Older: 
Thoughts to Paper
Flying from Raleigh to Boston
And now, on a lighter note.................
My Executive Admin, Brenda, sent me an email noting a few typos in the second video blog entry. When I went back and looked, I realized that I had turned off the spell-checker and was typing without a net.
This caused me to think a bit about how technology has altered getting information out of our heads and into a long-term form other than a recording. In my school days, there was no such thing as a PC.........I know this is hard for some to believe, but we actually did everything with pen or pencil and paper. While my handwriting was mediocre at best, generally my spelling was excellent and the number of times I had to erase a mis-spelled word was virtually zero.
The advent of typing has made this a very different task. Unfortunately, I have never learned to be a true touch typist, and, while being relatively quick, do rely somewhat on seeing the keyboard. The interesting thing is that the communications between my brain and my fingers seems to be difernet than when writing. When writing, I seem to think a character at a time, while when I type it seems to be blocks. The result is that whenever I tyos a word that ends in "ent" (different for example) , it comes out as "differnet".
The only conclusion I can come to is that my conscious brain is sending the word in blocks to the sub-conscious to type and, due to the fact that I type the word "net" about a thousand times a day, there is no way to override typing those three letters in association as "net" This seems to extend to other typing (i before or after e for example). Another example is my fingers hit the wrong key on the keyboard, if I were hand writing I would never put an i in put (it becomes pit). Unfortunately, as u, i, and o are grouped together on the qwerty keyboard, such finger misses become hard to detected.
The net (notice, spelled correctly) result is that I have become heavily dependent on spell-checkers, not because I cannot spell the word, but I seem to be challenged getting it through the IO system to the paper (screen/file) correctly. It seems I spend about 30% of my time when typing a document going back to find and correct these issues.
I am curious, is this a common affliction? Do I need to take a real typing class? If you have true touch typing skills, does this not occur? Is it too late to teach the old dog new tricks?
As a close, this is a mea culpa for the next time a typo sneaks into the posts. Regardless of the voracity of spell-checkers, I fear I am doomed to be that nitworking guy.
