Graffiti for the workplace. Plus, a FrogPad update.

I work on vital statistics software. The software is used by several States to process birth and death events. Perhaps I will talk more about what I do some other time, but it's not important right now. What matters is that we are the "Vital Statistics team" where I work, and often we are just called "Vitals".

From my office, there is a Chevron visible across the street. This Chevron closed down several months ago (how it managed to stay open for so many years is a mystery to me... the place seemed very poorly managed). Naturally, when a building is abandoned it becomes needful for said building to be covered in graffiti, and so soon the local talented midnight artists thoughtfully and tastefully turned this eyesore of a building into a beautiful monument to illegible scribbles. Sadly, the city didn't appreciate such fine art, and so they painted over the tags. But they missed one.

Over the months, the tagging has continued, only to be painted over every time... except for that one tag that still persisted.


One day, my colleagues and I were looking out of my office window with some binoculars (why is not important...), when we decided to get a better look at that one tag that always managed to stick around.


It appeared to say something about "vital". So we got a closer look.


There was some disagreement about the first word -- "ks", "its", "pi s", "ns" -- but we decided that the tagger was trying to pay tribute to us, and to recognize all the hard work that we do every day. And so, it was decided that the words said: "it's vital". And that, of course, is some clever wordplay.

I went over and took a photo of the graffiti (which is where the above photos came from), and I then proceeded to chop the letters out so we could print it as a banner. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to use the full width of the paper roll when I printed it out, so we were only able to make it about nine feet wide, but now we have a glorious banner that proclaims who we are, how important we are, and also shows that we have serious street cred. And even though we have to tell everyone who sees it that the first word is not "ks", we still feel pretty special... and also vitally important.

Here's how it looks as you enter our section of the office

I can even see it from my office

Also, there are barn swallows living outside our office this year, which are a new addition to our surprisingly diverse wildlife outside. Naturally, I'm particularly pleased since swallows are my favorite bird... not that I'm biased or anything...

Here they are right outside my office window - I apologize for the poor photo, but I had to hurry and they flew away right after I snapped this shot.

FrogPad update: I'm making fairly regular use of it at work now. I hardly ever need to look at the pad, unless I'm using some symbol that I haven't used much. I'm still not super fast with it yet, but my most frequent typing error now is actually due to typing too fast...

The pad has fifteen letter keys, each of which can generate five characters, plus they all have at least one "function" -- arrow keys, page up, esc, and so forth. So, to type anything besides the fifteen main letters, you have to push one or more of the five "modifier" keys. The most common of these is pressing the space key at the same time as one of the letter keys. So, for instance, you can type an 'e' by just pressing the appropriate key, but pressing it at the same time as the space key produces a 'z'.

The problem here is that there is a built-in delay in the algorithm, so if I'm typing, say, "the pad", it will often come out as "thzpad", because I type the space too soon after typing the 'e', and it changes the 'e' into a 'z' and the space doesn't get output. This happens a lot to me now, and it happened in that last sentence in fact ("it changes the" came out as "icchangegthe"). So there is definitely an upper limit on how fast I will ever be able to type. This error is a common one since the space key is easy to hit, and I can quickly type it after any character, even though I'm not that fast with the keyboard itself. So I need to train myself to be slower with the space key...

Today's typing speed (based on TypingTest.com):
Frogpad: 33 WPM
Standard keyboard: 93 WPM