Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I just had to fix several images for the Essential Blogging book. There was a typo in several of the screenshots – I used “weblob” rather than “weblog”.
It would be funny, but after a while, I get tired of mistakes. I get tired of using the wrong word, but one that’s phonetically similar. I get tired of misspellings. I get tired of not being able to type “wierd” without error even after months of trying to train myself to spell it correctly.
I get tired of the embarrassement.
I typed a comment in a weblog once that had to do with President Bush and the so-called “choking incident” that happened a few months back. Except I used “chocking”. My typo generated a lot of joking. Not the nice, gentle jokes and teasing that I usually get with my regular weblog visitors (all of you). Nasty, demeaning stuff. Needless to say, I never went back to that weblog.
To add to the problem, my keyboard is going bad on my laptop and my SHIFT, CTRL, ALT and several other keys aren’t working properly.
Typos and keyboard problems. And stress because of the move – stress makes things worse. I’ve actually written some emails that were completely illegible though they passed all spellchecks. Why weren’t they legible? Because when I’m overworked, when I’m stressed, I use weird (did I spell it correctly that time?) words in place of the intended ones. Perfectly good words used absolutely incorrectly.
Reading’s a problem at times, too. The Unix Power Tools book is based in SGML rather than Word. I didn’t know it was going to be SGML-based or I would not have taken it on. I can read XML, HTML, and so on, but not when there’s extensive use of what I call disruptive markup (contained within the text rather than surrounding it) and named entities. These things disrupt my reading, make it difficult for me to “see” the words. Long web pages do this also – anything longer than the width we tend to use for our weblogs.
Don’t get me wrong. I can read books, magazines, content in Microsoft Word, standard text editors, PDF files much faster than normal (last time I was tested, I checked out at over 2000 words a minute). But new environments make me extremely uncomfortable until I “train” myself with them.
So I use “vi” or Notepad instead of sophisticated development environments because I’m comfortable with these simpler tools.
I don’t play games because they frustrate me. I can’t play chess. Computerized tests scare me to death. Math has always been a challenge. However, these things don’t bother me that much. Well, not too much.
But I love to write. It probably means more to me than anything else in the world. I live for my writing.
And it’s hell being a writer when you have Dyslexia.