Twitter , Facebook, Blogs, IMs, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Yelp, it’s a truckload of information on me on the net as well as a truckload of great places for social interaction but the problem is this: it’s still a truckload.

There’s gotta be a better way.

I recently started taking FriendFeed seriously and glad that I did.  It’s my favourite social media platform and allows me to discover and discuss various topics in realtime.  I haven’t really been using it to it’s full potential to aggregate all of my networks into one place nor have I really gone and fine tuned all of my social platforms and this has caused at least one problem.  I keep forgetting whether I have accounts at some of these places.

The other thing is that while Facebook has an image gallery section, Flickr does it better.  FriendFeed is better at having conversations than Twitter, but Twitter has way more activity.  These duplication of services kill me, and I don’t want one place to do everything because if it does everything, it generally does it badly.  Web-apps that are focused are way better at doing that one thing than an app that does several. Yes, I’m looking at you Facebook.

I also detest the clutter that accumulates as some of these web-apps grow (again, Facebook, I see you there).  I want to have clean interfaces and focused content for each app while still having somewhere to aggregate all of it. And so, the great social media consolidation officially begins.

photo credit: zappowbang

The Dvorak keyboard, one of those weird ideas that makes sense but no one in their right mind will learn. I mean, we have a layout that’s been used for a really long time, that’s a difficult habit to break! Well, let me just say this: I’m typing this in Dvorak, and I love it.

Yes, that weird layout is what I happily type in. In fact, I not only type faster in Dvorak than in QWERTY, which is kind of the point, but I find it a lot more comfortable as well.

Why Dvorak?
I’m lazy. I really don’t like doing something the “right” way if I can do it faster the wrong way. QWERTY is what I learned in school but they layout never quite worked for me so I looked into what people were using as an alternative and found Dvorak.

There’s a history behind the QWERTY layout and Dvorak layout that I really don’t want to go into, so I’ll sum it up: qwerty’s layout is random and Dvorak is based on which letters are used most for the home keys. I mean, no one thinks having the semi-colon on the home row is brilliant.  Ah, that useful semi-colon, comes in handy all the time!

How to start using Dvorak
This may come as a shock, but just start using it. Every source I’ve read says you can pick it up in a few weeks, it took me several months which leads me to conclude that I’m dumb and stubborn.  Go me.

I started with stickers on my keys but that didn’t work too well, the stickers had a habit of coming off. The reason I didn’t just pop the keys out and switch them was because the keys are not all the same shape, it was like typing on a keyboard that needed dental work.

After fighting with the stickers until I had a quasi-reasonable grasp of where the keys are, I then kept an image of the layout as a desktop background. If I ever forgot where a key was, I’d check the desktop. Throughout this, I kept doing typing exercises until I just remembered where all the keys were.

Do I ever use QWERTY?
Have to.  The login page for my iMac is set to qwerty and I haven’t the foggiest clue how to set it to dvorak.  To this day it drives me bonkers.

To make a long post short, I highly recommend switching to Dvorak if your wrists hurt and you want to start typing like you did when you first were allowed near a keyboard!

So I finally finished my move into my new place.  Took a lot longer to get settled in than I anticipated but what can you do?

So far, I’m about ready to finish an illustration project which is now later than I wanted it to be (see above re: the move) and am still piecing together everything I need for a short I’m directing at the end of the month.

At some point in time, I’m really going to have to figure out how to be way more organized.  I’m having scheduling conflicts up the wazoo.

Well, I can’t think of a better way to kick off this blog than to mention I begin filming today.

It’s an 8 page short film called “Two Way Street” and the bulk of the filming will be shot on Sunday.  Saturday’s shoot is going to be a quick exterior shoot, no dialogue, just me directing a single actor and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.

The problem is that, doing this guerrilla style, there might be too much traffic on the street to get the shot I need which means I’ll have to composite something in post.  I hate fixing it in post.  It’s never as good as getting the shot during production.