Patrick's Saturday Six #254

With everything going on at work, the past couple of weeks have been exhausting, with the result that I haven't posted much. So I'm easing back into the water by playing Patrick's Saturday Six. If you want to play too, click here.

1. When you write a note to a friend, do you tend to write in cursive or manuscript?
Most of the time when I write to friends now, it's via email. But if I'm writing to a friend on paper, it would generally be in cursive. However, all through college and graduate school I took notes in manuscript. A physics professor once said my notes looked like they were typed. I took it as a compliment.

2. Think back to grade school when you learned how to write: which manuscript letter gave you the most trouble? I absolutely loved learning to write, and I don't remember any particular letter giving me trouble. However, I do remember that my first grade teacher insisted that when writing anything, we must space it so that our right index finger could fit between each letter, and she would check this and make you start over if you hadn't complied. I found this requirement infuriating because even at the tender age of six, spatially that simply was not pleasing to my eye.

3. Did you find cursive easier than manuscript? Not that I remember, but I was quickly seduced by the curves of cursive, and eventually that led to a fascination with calligraphy, which I spent some time (and many pens) trying to master.

4. How do you type on a computer: the four-finger “professional” method, the “hunt and peck” method, or something in between? The professional method. I learned to type in summer school while I was in high school, and I still type about 75-90 wpm. It was not considered the cool thing to do, to learn to type, back then, in the dawn of The Age of Aquarius. I remember there were feminist posters of Golda Meir (later to become Prime Minister of Israel) that read "But can she type?" Uh-huh. There was no question in my mind when I was young that whatever I ended up doing in this life, typing would be a handy thing to have mastered.

5. Take the quiz: What Keyboard Key Are You?

You Are "alt"

Some people might find you to be strange, mysterious, and even a bit off putting. You tend to be drawn to and influenced by alternative lifestyles. You're definitely not normal. Once people get to know you, they realize you're interesting, intriguing, and very intelligent. You have a lot of knowledge stored in that big brain of yours. Most of it is useless knowledge, but some of it is very useful.

6. As a general rule, how often do you use the key mentioned in the answer to the previous question? For what it's worth, I find that I end up using the Alt key many times a day.