I'm not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line I became a keyboard geek. I have a favorite keyboard. That, by itself, is definitely not so bad. Anyone in an I.T. related field is likely to have opinions on different keyboards that they've used.
Nope, my obsession goes deeper. So deep, in fact, that I'm only just now beginning to realize that it actually is an obsession. Yesterday, I thought it was normal. Today, I look back on the me of yesterday with a mixture of loathing and pity.
When I was using my
Libretto a lot, I thought that the
Twiddler was the best thing ever. I once made myself attempt to learn the
dvorak keyboard layout by popping the keys off and rearranging them. I lasted about a week before I gave up, out of utter frustration at my inability to unlearn the muscle memory that my fingers have built up from years of typing in that old-fashioned, outdated, rudimentary keyboard layout known as
qwerty (I hate you, qwerty!). On my
Treo650, I almost lept for joy when I discovered that the middle button (between the 4 arrow keys) was the Control key in my
Palm ssh client. I squealed with delight when I later discovered, after much annoyance with having to either use the stylus or a 3-button sequence to send an Esc keypress, that double-clicking the middle button accomplished that.
More recently, I have become enraptured of the
Alphagrip, which is basically a complete keyboard in the form of a
Playstation controller. It is phenomenal. Just imagine being able to lean back in your chair, put your feet up on the desk and be able to comfortably type! No more uncomfortably balancing the keyboard in your lap, where it's never positioned quite right, causing you to have to bend your arms in weird ways to align your hands with the home row. The mere thought sends a shiver racing down my spine and beads of anticipatory sweat to form on my brow.
So, imagine my giddy-schoolgirl dance of pure, unadulterated glee when I read a
Slashdot article about the
Optimus Keyboard , a keyboard where every key is a little color screen that can be changed to fit the current program you're running. Playing
Quake? Turn the keys into jump, shoot, weapon-switch buttons. Using the
GIMP (or photoshop, I guess...)? Make the buttons show the various paint and editing tools. Speak
Russian? Have the keys display a Russian character set.
It truly is a marvel of modern ingenuity, a keyboard to end all keyboards. It is like heroin to me. Sadly, like the Alphagrip, it doesn't yet exist. They're 'hoping' that it will be released in 2006, but as only one who has been crushed over and over by the constant delays in the production of the Alphagrip, I know the truth. I know that these keyboards will never exist: that they'll be forever coming next month, next year! That forever will I pine for the sweet release from the tortuous hell that is the qwerty keyboard layout, with only sickly sweet glimpses of future wonders. Because they know, that if one man possessed both the ALPHA and the OPTIMUS that it would hail a new day of fiery vengeance to be rained down upon the heads of all the mousey point-click-click-clickers! Blast the mousey point-click-click-clickers and their infernal clicking!
