It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I’ve taken myself off the good pain meds b/c I’m not really in pain and I don’t like the side effects, nor do I like the phrase, “the mechanism of action is unknown” but it down regulates mu receptors, and I don’t want to engage in activities that could potentially cause pain. One activity I would sorely love to do is lay out all of the tablecloths and linens Mr. Big Food’s Aunt Bea sent me last week. They look just beautiful, but unfolding and refolding tablecloths is a 2-handed activity, so it will have to wait.

So I’m bored. Yesterday I 1-handed typed out a longish post that had something to do with Stu Kauffman and complexity theory (sort of) and trying to make the point that you should be critical of what you read. I suppose I could come back to that. Boooring. Not right now.

So I’m bored and then I thought “How can this be? You have crappy old books!” I picked up the first one I happened to pass, Gregg Shorthand Dictionary Anniversary Edition (1930) and wondered if it is possible to do shorthand on a keyboard.

Pitman shorthand isn’t very practical in modern society because it relies heavily on thick vs. thin lines. Today’s writing instruments offer very little variation in that regard – because the days of the flexible fountain pen have tragically long since passed. (Of course, you could argue that shorthand in general isn’t practical in modern society, but then you wouldn’t be reading this post.)

That cracked me up.

Gregg shorthand is entirely possible in today’s world of boring pens and pencils. The speed of Gregg Shorthand comes primarily from:

1. Alternative letter forms that are faster and easier to write than our traditional alphabet.
2. A list of “brief forms” (abbreviations) for common words. For example, “men.” instead of “morning”.

For the first step, learning the letter forms is quite easy and takes very little practice. For the second step, most of the refinement in Gregg Shorthand over time has primarily been tweaking the brief forms: how many, and what they are. Learning the brief forms is not easy, and takes a lot of memorization and work. https://www.leeholmes.com/blog/2014/04/04/gregg-shorthand-from-a-regular-qwerty-computer-keyboard/

Dude then goes through a few numbers on shorthand speeds, wpm typing speeds, & such.

To improve either your Gregg Shorthand skills, or regular typing skills, you may be able to increase your speed even further through regular learning and use of brief forms. But how? By integrating it into your regular daily typing, that’s how.

Attached to this post is a simple “Shorthand Keyboard” application to let you do exactly that.

The idea, as I currently understand it, is that you type in the brief form, and the app converts it to the long form.

TTYL!

Aurgh.