Chapter Three: Done; Keyboard Woes; Prepping for NaNoWriMo

Reading: Great Fool: Zen Master Ryokan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings (Ryuichi Abe & Peter Haskel, eds. & trans.)
Listening: YUI, "It's all too much"
Redraft: Book One, Ch. 4, v.30.0 (on hiatus until after NaNoWriMo 2009)

Looking back through my redraft printouts, I came to the unpleasant realization that it took me a full (read: neither the-better-part-of-a nor even a-day-less-than-a) month to rewrite Chapter Three. Granted, I could only make this realization upon actually completing the Chapter Three redraft at roughly 12:08 a.m. this morning--an accomplishment which fills me with equally inordinate levels of pride and exhaustion--but the cold, clear fact remains that this will likely be the last chapter of Book One I shall rewrite before diverting my creative attention to my project for NaNoWriMo 2009. That I still don't know precisely which story will comprise that project only underscores the need to prepare before I type out the first word on Nov. 1st.

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Before I delve headlong into the month-long distraction that is NaNoWriMo, I thought I should pause for a somewhat elegiac note. Early last morning, I came to the sober conclusion that my Kinesis Contoured Keyboard, despite having provided what I believe was the best, most ergonomically sound typing experience of my $1000+ foray into the realm of ridiculously priced keyboards, would have to end up on the eBay chopping block. The reason, infuriatingly enough, lies in its American build quality: the tiny membrane switches at the top of the keyboard, which control hotkey essentials like the function keys and the print screen key--the latter of which I remapped to open My Computer at a key press--have either gone slightly non-responsive, or, in the case of the aforementioned print screen key, hyper-responsive, resulting in my email responses being incessantly interrupted by a never-ceasing torrent of My Computer windows. Seeing as this particular keyboard ranks among the most expensive to have ever crossed my desktop--the only 'board to top it is the Topre Realforce 91U that I'm typing on right now--its failure after a mere two years of ownership becomes particularly distressing. Coupled with the battleship-like build I've come to expect of my Japanese-made keyboards, along with my previous abortive ownership of the U.S.-made Das Keyboard Professional, my outlook on all U.S. keyboards has pretty much soured. A true shame, as no keyboard quite stacks up to the Kinesis Contoured's design. Only its implementation leaves much--too much--to be desired.

(Even as I type this entry, my RSI started to act up, and I was forced to switch to one of the Filco Tenkeyless models--ironically, the one that shares the same Cherry brown keyswitches as the Kinesis.)

(EDIT: and two hours after typing this post, I'm switching the Cherry-brown Filco for the Cherry-black. I swear, if the Kinesis Contoured came in a Cherry-black model, I'd plunk down another $300 just to give it a whirl, despite Kinesis's quality issues.)

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I'll follow up shortly with my progress in whittling down the three potential NaNoWriMo candidates this year to the one that will, with any luck, grow to 50K words (or more) by Nov. 30th. That and an updated entry on my writing desk, as soon I get it tidied up enough so that it won't break the camera when I take the picture.

Overclocked & Overdue

Re-reading: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Redraft: Book One, Ch. 3, v.30.0

So it's been about two weeks since the last post. As could be expected, the lack of activity is mostly due to the fact that I haven't gotten as much work done on the redraft as I'd hoped--though with any luck, I might be able to make up for some lost time this weekend. If so, another post will be quickly forthcoming.

In other news--all of which, oddly enough, are computer-related--the new CPU heat sink I ordered from Amazon arrived this week, and after working up the courage to open up my desktop again, I removed the old stock heat sink and attached the new one. The new heatsink is nearly three times the size of the original, and required that I remove a vent tunnel from the side of my PC case in order to fit. At first, I was worried that I had done something wrong during installation, because the temperatures seemed to actually be a little higher than they had been with the stock cooler. However, after some digging through the BIOS, I realized the sink's fan was seriously underpowered, running at roughly 10% of its full RPMs. With a small tweak, things started to work smoothly, and I managed to improve my previous overclock (2.0 to 2.4 Ghz) to 2.66 Ghz, all with temperatures equal or better than they had been when the CPU was running at factory settings. Now other overclockers have apparently been able to crank this particular CPU model up to 3.0-3.2 Ghz without resorting to water cooling systems, but I found the system to be a little unstable--and running a little too hot--when I pumped the speed up to 3.0, with what I perceived as only a marginal performance boost over 2.66 Ghz settings. Moreover, at 2.66 Ghz everything from Photoshop to Fallout 3 appears to run just fine, the latter without the occasional drop in frame rates that I encountered at 2.0 Ghz, so I think I'm perfectly fine with the computer's current settings. At the end of the day, the desktop named Episteme now has the following stats:

Case: Antec NSK 4480B
Motherboard: Asus P5K-VM (775 Socket)
CPU: Pentium Dual-Core e2180 @ 2.0 Ghz (overclocked to 2.66 Ghz)
CPU Heat Sink: Thermaltake TMG i1
RAM: 3.25 GB (x2 2Gb Kingston PC2-6400 (800 Mhz))
Graphics: Palit ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256mb
HD: WD Caviar SE16 640GB 7200 RPM SATA
External HDs: x2 WD MyBook Essential 3.5" 7200 RPM (one 500 GB, one 1 TB); Seagate Free Agent 2.5" 500 GB 5400 RPM
Monitors: x2 24" Monitors (Gateway & Unbranded HP (refurbished unbranded, so it technically doesn't violate my moratorium on HP products); each @ 1920 x 1200 resolution)
Keyboard: Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless 87-key FKBN87Z/EB w/ fake ALPS "fukka" keyswitches
Mouse: Kensington Slimblade Trackball
Tablet: Wacom Intuos4 Medium

I had been using what has, up to this point, been my favorite keyboard of all the myriad models that I've acquired and used over the years: the Kinesis Contoured. Its ergonomically cupped design, coupled with its brown Cherry keyswitches, really made it a powerhouse for a typist like me. The only thing that could have made it better was if it came in black Cherrys, which I've always found superior in tactility over the "tactile"--though I would call them mushy--browns. However, the Kinesis has a questionable build quality that makes it susceptible to nigh-inexplicable bouts of phantom input, especially around the membrane-type command keys at the top of the keyboard. Once before, an overactive keypad button rendered the keyboard nearly untypeable--it would convert several of the QWERTY keys into a makeshift number pad. Somehow, a thorough cleaning and unplugging/plugging of the keyboard's internals managed to bring it back from the cusp of death, and it served well for about six months. Then, when I was rushing to send an email before heading up to work, it started to actuate the Print Screen button over and over and over again. Now, on a normal computer, these incessant phantom keystrokes wouldn't affect functionality, but I've remapped that particular key to open up My Computer at a single button press, and so it resulted in me being interrupted every other second by a My Computer window. I'm going to try to clean it again in the hopes that the problem once again resolves itself, but even if it does, the unreliability of the keyboard makes me think it's future may lie in an eBay auction. When compared to the battleship-like build quality of Japanese keyboards like the Filcos, Topres, and Happy Hacking Keyboards, the Kinesis--like so many of our consumer goods--put U.S. manufacturers to shame.

On the bright side, the Kinesis's persnicketiness has enabled me to get to know my newest acquisition better, a Filco Tenkeyless with the newly revised "fukka" fake ALPS keyswitches. White ALPS keyswitches were renowned for their clicky-clacky feel--about as close to a buckling spring as mechanical switches have come--but, as far as I know, are no longer in production. Another "fake" ALPS keyswitch was previously available, dubbed "XM" by Filco, but it possessed a very balky feel, requiring too much pressure (even for a hammer-stroke typist like me) to be used effectively. The fukka switches are supposedly manufactured in the same facilities as the original ALPS keyswitches, and thus more closely replicate their feel (though I've heard from true connoisseurs that the original ALPS are still a touch better in tactility). purchased this keyboard based on my faith in the users geekhack.org forum, planning to resell my other "fake ALPS" Tenkeyless on eBay if I found the difference definitive, and their advice did not disappoint. This keyboard is a close second to the same model fitted with black Cherry switches, though it's quickly growing on me, and I am generally partial to clicky switches, the only (somewhat inexplicable) exception being blue Cherry switches, which just seemed too anemic to me, and somehow interfered with my usual typing tempo.