A Predilection for Obfuscation

Todays stats show small improvement, I broke 50 3 or 4 times today which gives me hope that it will happen regularly

Wpm: 45.11

Max wpm:  50.4

Error:  6.27%

I have been super busy lately but I have been taking test almost every day I’m in town. To save time, I’ll just post the most recent results:

Wpm:  44.9

Error: 5.09%

Max Wpm : 51.20

All in all I am very happy with the way things are going. My tests are getting more consistent and all the practice is really speeding up my typing in day to day tasks.  As a side note, I have been experimenting with test length and I have found that if I take a 1, 3, or 5 minute test my results are about the same at the speed I am at. So, with that being said, I have switched from 3 minute tests to 1 minutes tests.  I now take between 10 and 15 tests a day and I find that at the end of the day there is some improvement.

Todays test were the best I have ever had.

Wpm:  45.52

Error%:5.7

Max Wpm: 51.2

This is a great way to start off the month of March. I hope the numbers keep going up.

        I have a confession to make, I LOVE metadata. I think it is the bee’s knees. Or if you prefer, the cat’s pajamas. It is just so damn versatile and useful. However, even though most of us use metadata in our day to day lives, when I mention it to the average person all I usually get is blank stares. Metadata is basically data referring to other data. Such as the song title, artist and album that iTunes uses to keep track of the music in your library. But it can do so much more than that! So, I though I would go over some of the less common things that I do with metadata and some of the things I would love to do in the future.
The first use I came across for metadata that really sold me on it was trying to make playlists in iTunes. See, me library is very large and I found that my playlists were disorginized with duplicates and misplaced songs. And I came across the idea of using the comment section of every song to keep track of the different thing a song is and then using smart playlists to auto-magically sort those into playlists. See, this way of making playlists has several advantages over the standard playlist. these advantages are:

1. once a file is tagged, it is tagged for good. So, if you accidentally delete the playlist, you can just recreate it and all the same songs are there.
2. It is self updating: So, once you put the tags in the comment section, they put themselves into any playlists looking for those words.
3. you can use as many words as you want to tag a song. so, if the song reminds you of a certain girl, tag it with her name; if it is also just generally romantic,the tag it like that as well.
4. it transfers between music players. If you are ever considering switching to Amarok, or media monkey or to winamp; the comments with your tags in them will transfer with your music and you can recreate your smart playlists.

There are some problems though. One is that you have to use a standard language to tag or you will start missing songs. So, instead of tagging with party and Party! and parties and such, you just have to decide on one version and remember to stick with it through all of your songs.

Another thing that I use metadata on is pictures. Many of you will be familiar with this from facebook and flickr but I also do this in picasa. It was actually really tough to find out how to do this because I couldn’t find it listed in any of the menus or the shortcuts. Eventually I tracked down the shortcut which isctrl -k. With this feature you can identify who is in each picture and where and when it was taken. Which is really nice when you want to make an album of a certain person, place or time period or just if you want to find a certain picture. Another benefit of tagging in picasa(oriPhoto, or even Vista’s picture management software) is that these are saved in with the EXIF data and stays with the picture if you ever upload it to flickr or picasa web albums.

Another form of picture metadata is geotags. This allows you to assign a location to a picture and view it in a map setting or even in google earth. In picasa, you can tag all of you photos locations with google earth, which can be a little time consuming but very rewarding when you have an entirely novel way of interacting with your photos.

In the future, I would love to extend tags into my digital video collection so I could search for movies. For example, a comedy starring John Cusack or a drama that has subtitles and get back a list of the films that match my criteria. I would also love to buy a scanner, and scan all of my documents into pdf and have them searchable. but that is for another day.

today my speed stayed very consistant but my errors were higher than I would like

Wpm: 42.43

error%: 5.91

Max Wpm: 47.6

So, all in all not a bad day.