*Not a technical blog, you’ve been warned.

Over this last weekend we had our neighborhood block party.  This year, my contribution was to plan the live music portion of the event.  For this I was able to get 2 solo acts and a 3 piece band to commit to playing for "all the hot dogs they could eat." 

For the past few weeks I’ve experimented with alternate keyboard layouts with the long-term goal of increasing my typing speed.

At first I tried Dvorak, which is the most popular alternative layout.  I found it cumbersome to learn.  Almost every key is in a new position.  After a couple of weeks of practice I had mostly memorized the layout, but was still only typing at 16 WPM.

Then, while clearing out some bookmarks I found a link to the Colemak layout.

In my last post I set a goal to switch to the Dvorak layout over the next few months and I’m looking to double my typing speed.  To do that, I am practicing typing on the Dvorak layout for a 10-15 minutes a day for a while and as my speed improves I’ll add time.  I’ve found that switching layouts is startlingly easy, so I thought I’d share how to do it (instructions are for Windows 7 and may vary for other versions).

So, I read one blog by Steve Yegge linked from CodePoject about typing speed (which is a great read if you have the time).  Then Steve Smith tweeted his blog post on the same subject, which was in response to Jeff Atwood’s post.  Apparently all 3 articles are from 2008, but I read them like they were news today.

A quick post showing how to create a combo box that shows a single line, shows multiple lines when expanded. Obviously you can extend this to show any two datatemplates for collapsed and expanded.