@HenryAWallace
playing a musical instrument, you are not keyboarding but typing. Save Typing Day!

I, for one, am furious about the war on Typing Day! Still, I plan to enjoy it and wish the same to everyone else.

(-;

@eyo
something like Candy Crush. Are you getting any of this rain up there?

Happy Monday! I'd be totally unfit for military duty, woo hoo! Section 8 (military)

Free Software, Free Society
https://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/

Project goals

The aim of this Free Software project is to provide valuable help to individuals and schools all over the world in learning or teaching how to type.

Free Software can be a valuable resource in education. Not only can it be technically or pedagogically superior to proprietary counterparts, but it can also promote the values of the GNU project in the schools:

Freedom
Cooperation
...

is there a swiping day for phone and tablet users?

thanks

@Arrow
of the science deniers, real hard core.

What you need is a blue tooth keyboard, then you could use two or three fingers and a thumb. Try to have a comfortable day.

OK class open that 'Touch Typing' textbook and fake it while just doing 'hunt and peck'.

A thought:

Galileo Galilei - Talk about a guy who had problems with 'science deniers'. AmIright or what?

I got nothing more...and my finger hurts.

Have a great day all.

@Lookout
New Orleans, but for the life of me I have no clue what to emphasize about today's part of it in a one liner or why they picked today. The actual battle lasted from Mid December to Mid January. Ah well, thanks for the history and the video.

The Eighth of January is an old fiddle tune to which Jimmy Driftwood added lyrics.

Traditionally, the tune is recognized as an American fiddle tune - a reel, to be precise. As such it is solely an instrumental tune; however, in 1936 a teacher from Arkansas found that using his guitar to teach history to his students had a profound effect on what they would remember about their lessons. (What a novel idea!) That teacher's name was Jimmy Driftwood. He took that American fiddle tune and wrote lyrics to it that would teach his students a lesson in American history - the war of 1812, specifically, the Battle of New Orleans. In 1959, Johnny Horton sang Jimmy's song and topped the charts with it. It remains at #28 of Billboard Music's All-Time Top 100 Songs and #1 on the Billboard's All-Time Top Country Songs list.

http://www.rockremembers.com/2009/02/battle-of-new-orleans-8th-of-januar...

Here's Hank's band playing the tune...(2 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTBg9-kbuw]

It is icy this morning in my corner of Dixie. They are calling for 40 today so it should melt. I'm hanging here in the house till then - decks, cars, and so on are covered with a layer of ice. Always plenty of chores inside or out.

I hope you all have a good one!

@riverlover
learn touch typing, but now I'm a peeker. I have lazy fingers and manage to muck up my keyboards so that keys have wildly different pressure needs, or stick, or whatever. When I get moving, I use the best finger for the job, so that the v in moving was actually done with the right index finger while the left one was still lagging on the t, but the one that stands alone was done properly with the left one.

Thanks mucho for the information on the ice over and related issues. Not something I've ever really thought about but it must play havoc in the area. We learned all about the rivers and canals as vital transport routes, but never really too much about nasty details like freezes and floods.

Try to stay warm and good luck with the mice.

At least I can use more than index fingers, which is what my father did. My mother typed his thesis. My fingers can no longer feel the Braille alignment thingies on the keyboard. So I peek or stare at the keyboard and glance up before I hit enter. Works for me.

I have one or more mice in the kitchen. Killing fields will commence shortly. The mousetrap has actually been improved since those wood ones that could snap fingers. Plastic ones that go through the dishwasher. My dog is too short to counter-surf.

For those of you not Great Lakes connected, this cold snap has wreaked havoc with the end of shipping season. Iceover started fast, and cold also meant mechanical failures. A week of a ship frozen into the Snell Locks on the St Lawrence had a happy ending after a boiler and three tugs were deployed. And there were ships behind that that could not transit. All full of commodities. Daytime shipping only now, convoys of the remaining ships. Some may still be frozen in for the winter. The unfortunate crews.

@Azazello
club, but the probably wouldn't let me work there. Just as well. Periodically, when folks are spewing some of that "links to Russia" crap, I remember that the Clintons have the same links via their link to Trump, or even shorter one's due to their own direct links to Putin. All that 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon shit, however, doesn't differentiate between "once delivered papers to the offices of" and "goes to the same parties and social functions as".

Nancy, FWIW, blew up her own credibility so much that she pretty much never crosses my mind anymore except as another obstacle.

and we ain't in it.
Pelosi's son celebrated New Year's Eve with Trumps at Mar-a-Lago

@smiley7
such, and good luck on the roads and highways.

Good keyboard skills can wind a journalist who can rite and spel gud in proper journalistic format, AP style and all that a re-write job. I knew one once, He did regular stuff, but when there was breaking news near deadline time he'd be over in a corner with the phone trapped between his ear and shoulder, both hands dancing on the keyboard, and probably a cig in his mouth, composing a story on the fly as some reporter in the field poured information in his ear. Don't know, all-in-all, if that was a great gig or a bad one.

going to the Hill tonight, all day tests for the trial drug tomorrow, going to be a long 24 hours, seven in the car.

Not being able to type fast, being a self-taught picker, saved me from Ambulance chasing in my first job in journalism when the editor realized i wasn't capable of deadline stories. Phew!

Thanks for the OT, el, and have a great day and week everyone!

@hecate
forever and a day. Do you know the name? I'd like to use it in the future now and then.

Because, as you note, he died 46 years ago today; and yet, he is still here.

I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it.

It’s simple. There’s nothing at all complicated about it.
War—There won’t be war when you decide you won’t murder other human beings.

You cannot hate without hating all; and you cannot kill some without killing all—because the welfare of any man is the welfare of all men.

Have you ever looked at a man?
There is something helpless and majestic about a man.
If you believed in anything, you could not kill a man.

A man has two legs. He’ll build a house—from cellar to rooftop, with his own hands. He’ll put seeds in the ground. He’ll watch the sun and the rain at work. He’ll take a woman to bed. He’ll find enough tenderness and love to get him through the day. You’d think that man deserved a little something. You’d think that man was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration. You’d think that maybe someone would say, Let’s just let him alone for a while, and see what he can do.

They try to fix it so nobody’ll care what happens to a man anymore.
I don’t mean millions—I mean any one man anywhere.
If anything is worth anything it’s because one man is worth something.
If any one man isn’t worth something, then nothing whatever is worth anything.
It’s all got to come back to any one man anywhere or it isn’t going anywhere.
Don’t tell me how interested in Confucius or Jesus Christ you are.
Tell me how interested in any one man anywhere you are.
You don’t get it.
You’d cry.
You’d cry if you could feel that.
It’s all got to come back to one man or it isn’t going anywhere at all.

it looks more and more to me like the only really important idea
is to say yes to anything that brings life
and no to anything that brings death

This house. Do you see this house?
It is a house where human beings live.
There is a strange dignity about them.
They are looking at you as I talk.

Don’t you understand? I have arisen not from the dead but from the living. I am not a voice crying in the wilderness. There is no winter here. No dark. No despair. The lights are going on in my house. There is no darkness anywhere. There are only sick little men who have turned away from the light. I have all my lights on. And it is my own face I see in the blazing windows of all the houses on earth.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYq3mIBZLw]