The big rollover!

[duck_arse]

verbose? don't get me started.

we wouldn't be here without you mark. I dunno how you know what to read and what to skip.

[stm]

Congratulations Mark!

Thanks for the continuous and generous contributions to this forum.

[WaveshapeIllusions]

That's a whole lot of posts. This place wouldn't be the same without you.

[Mike Burgundy]

Nicely done. This is a milestone for you and DIYSB. I'm mentally including some more brilliant and helpful minds, too ;P

[PRR]

> that's over two days of continuous writing

Mark has been "online" here for 105 days.

Mark seems to average 330 words per post.

Times 20K posts, that's 6.6 Mega-Words posted.

Or a whole bookshelf of novels.

I have a piece, 10,000 words, took me about 30 hours.

So 333 words per hour.

So Mark's 6.6M words may be about 20,000 hours.

Which is 833 days solid writing.

Or more realistically: 12+ years of 9-5 M-F work (hour lunch, 2 weeks fishing).

He racked this up in 9.67 years (since Aug 2003).

Seems to me he's giving us 129% of a real job.

[Perrow]

Let us hope he writes way more than 333 words per hour, that's only about 5 words per minute. Posting on forums should be a bit quicker.

But, damn, that's a lot of effort. Thanks again.

[Mark Hammer]

> that's over two days of continuous writing

Mark has been "online" here for 105 days.

Mark seems to average 330 words per post.

Times 20K posts, that's 6.6 Mega-Words posted.

Or a whole bookshelf of novels.

I have a piece, 10,000 words, took me about 30 hours.

So 333 words per hour.

So Mark's 6.6M words may be about 20,000 hours.

Which is 833 days solid writing.

Or more realistically: 12+ years of 9-5 M-F work (hour lunch, 2 weeks fishing).

He racked this up in 9.67 years (since Aug 2003).

Seems to me he's giving us 129% of a real job.

I thought *I* had too much spare time, but I think you have me beat, Paul!    What can I say?  I got a typewriter in 1965, learned how to five-finger type (two on the left, three on the right), and went nuts.

[culturejam]

Congrats on the big milestone!

Mark, you are a true pioneer of DIY effects. The whole DIY landscape would look a lot different without your voluminous contributions. Thanks so much for everything you've done. 

[Mark Hammer]

Believe me, I'm no pioneer whatsover.  I just bought a LOT of magazines and books over the years, paid attention, didn't lose interest, and remembered a lot of it at just the right moment.

As the saying goes: "Those who don't know history, are doomed to build the same damn fuzzbox, over and over and over."  

But thanks.  I appreciate it.  Now, if I could only figure out what the hell Ton/puretube wrote!  I can't tell if he is wishing me well, ordering an obscure Icelandic beer, trying to use a keyboard where someone put the keys back in the wrong place after cleaning it, or directing me to give myself an extensive prostate exam with my needlenose pliers.

[armdnrdy]

Now, if I could only figure out what the hell Ton/puretube wrote! 

Ancient Greek:

κῦδος (genitive κύδεος) n, (kūdos)
1.renown, glory


ku·dos
1   [koo-dohz, -dohs, -dos, kyoo-]  Show IPA 

noun ( used with a singular verb  ) 
honor; glory; acclaim: He received kudos from everyone on his performance. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origin: 
1825–35;  irregular transliteration of Greek  kŷdos 

Usage note
In the 19th century, kudos 1  entered English as a singular noun, a transliteration of a Greek singular noun kŷdos  meaning "praise or renown." It was at first used largely in academic circles, but it gained wider currency in the 1920s in journalistic use, particularly in headlines: Playwright receives kudos. Kudos given to track record breakers.  Kudos  is often used, as in these examples, in contexts that do not clearly indicate whether it is singular or plural; and because it ends in -s,  the marker of regular plurals in English, kudos  has come to be widely regarded and used as a plural noun meaning "accolades" rather than as a singular mass noun meaning "honor or glory."

I love the internet! 

[artifus]

thank you, mark. here's to the next one - cheers! x

[PRR]

> that's only about 5 words per minute.

Yes, copy-typists can do 50 to 200 words a minute; peckers can copy close to 20 words a minute.

*Composition* is slower.

Mark's posts show that he reads the posts he replies to, organizes his thoughts, ponders how to get them across clearly, without distracting tpyos and abbr.

Technical writing (like fiction!) goes even slower than business correspondence

How slow? I have just one not-trivial project where I know the time well: 330 words an hour. Yes, it was modestly complex, integrating established themes and characters from several series by another author and trying to get the events and motivations reasonable (no shootings before he steals a gun, no 400-mile drive in an hour...).

Some published numbers:

Average WPM – composition using keyboarding
Experienced typists = 18.1
Inexperienced typists = 10.2 (612w/h)
Foulds, R. A. (1980). Communication rates for nonspeech expression as a function of manual tasks and linguistic constraints. Proceedings of the International Conference on Rehabilitation Engineering. Toronto.

Average WPM – composition using keyboarding
Experienced typists = 6 (360w/h)
Graham, S., Harris, R.K., MacArthur, C., & Schwartz, S. (1991). Writing and writing instruction for students with learning disabilities: Review of a research program. Learning Disability Quarterly. 14, 89-114.

Recommended Keyboarding Speed (WPM)
Adults – secretaries/admin assistants = 50-65 (3,000w/h)
Nicholson, Bridgette. Custom Typing. Custom Solutions.

"...magazine feature, assuming 800 words. ...might take you 12 hours..."
66 words per hour.

"...order an article of 800 words, they're charged ... $260. These blog posts of that length take about an hour and a half to two hours to write... usually beginner-level material..."
400 to 533 words per hour

The first few Hardy Boys books were about 35K words and written *very quickly* (without re-writing) in a month between other jobs. Say 120 hours: 291 words/hour. (Pay was $85: 1/4 cent a word.)

Programmers hate LOC, but many average 50-100 LOC per day. In modern dialects that may be 40 characters or 10 words per line, say 700 words a day, 10 words an hour.

[duck_arse]

are we paying him by-the-word or by-the-hour?

[edit:] by-the-post?

[Mark Hammer]

You'll be interested in Tim Salthouse's research on older typists.  My doctorate is in aging so I'm familiar with it.  Tim, and others, studied typing in younger and older adults, as a paradigm for examining what makes for skill preservation over the lifespan, in tasks which would not demand physical strength or endurance.  Ironically, even though the most dependable factoid of human aging is a decline in "processing speed" and lengthening of response time, whether it is pressing a button, finding a word, or buttoning up a sweater, older typists manage to maintain fairly high typing speeds well into their 8th decade, even though you'd think that typing is fundamentally the same sort of task as pressing a button as fast as you can.  The magic factor is that they plan ahead.  It may not be conscious knowledge of how to turn words into keystrokes, but knowledge of the keyboard and patterns of strokes is guiding their movement, the same way that the dot that was visible in the middle of the hole on old rotary phones would allow people to line up their index finger and be instantly ready to dial the next number when the dial came to rest.

Incidentally, I was listening to a show from last November by the Grandmothers of Invention (a Zappa tribute band, led by Napoleon Murphy Brock), and original Mother Don Preston is still playing keyboards.  Don turned 80 the day of that show, and his touch and speed are still dazzling.  That guy can work a Moog like Jan Hammer in his prime.  If I asked him to press a button on the elevator, though, he'd be every bit as slow as your own grandmother of that age.

I only WISH people were paying me by the post!  I'd be a very wealthy man, and my wife would actually encourage me to spend "more time on the forum".

[digi2t]

the same way that the dot that was visible in the middle of the hole on old rotary phones would allow people to line up their index finger and be instantly ready to dial the next number when the dial came to rest.

Woah... I`m old enough to remember those phones. There`s another piece of trivia, for my already overloaded hampster. 

[jdub]

I got a typewriter in 1965

What's a typewriter?

Seriously, Mark, thanks for the time and sharing of knowledge.  We've all learned a ton from you.

[Mark Hammer]

the same way that the dot that was visible in the middle of the hole on old rotary phones would allow people to line up their index finger and be instantly ready to dial the next number when the dial came to rest.

Woah... I`m old enough to remember those phones. There`s another piece of trivia, for my already overloaded hampster.  

Once upon a time, Dino, I could use that little tidbit to show Intro Psych students who might be in other areas (e.g., engneering) the possibilities for linking psychology to their chosen profession.  Indeed, it was "human factors" cognitive psychologists at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, who came up with that one.  Dialing times were up to 30% faster when there was a little dot to aim your finger at while waiting for the dial to come to rest.  When things went from dials to buttons, the same folks looked at phone number input time as a function of button layout.  Keep in mind that a large share of calls at the time (before call waiting and voice-mail) ended up in busy signals or no answer.  In which case, much of the time people spent taking up a transmission line WAS the time taken to dial a number.  Shorten the time it took, and you needed fewer transmission lines to manage traffic (again, no multiplexing over high speed digital lines), so strategies for reducing dial time were important financially.  The human factors folks found that fastest dialing/button-pressing times were achieved by a numeric keyboard laid out in the now-familiar 3-rows-of-3-plus-1 pattern found on so many devices from computer keypads to TV remotes.  Among many other patterns tried out, they HAD considered a circular arrangement of buttons, corresponding to the rotary dial, figuring familiarity would be important, but it was easiest and most efficient for users to plan out their movements according to the heuristic of bigger-going-to-the-right, and bigger-going-from-top-to-bottom.  Of course, if I were teaching the same course today, very little of that would have ANY meaning for any of them.

These are the same folks that plan out automotive dashboard displays.  I have a neighbour/friend who works in the area, and he's been working on operating room displays that allow surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists to look up and get a sense of how the patient is doing at a glance.

Your little factoid for today.

[garcho]

You should have a radio show Mark. No theme, just whatever comes to mind.

Thanks to these stupid smart phones, there's new meaning to the phrase 'all thumbs'. That's what the younger generation will be when they're finally octogenarians.

I feel lucky for being born in the 70s and in the last generation to see a world of rotary phones turn into a world of computers. My mother grew up on a farm without plumbing. My grandfather was a union organizer, back when working a 16 hour day was the norm. His father was a blacksmith who worked on a dirt floor under a thatch roof! ah, the "old" Minnesota. Hell, when I was born, guitar players were making DIY pedals using through-hole components! Imagine that.

[Mark Hammer]

I have to go see the cardiologist next week (just routine stuff).  I find his phone number very easy to memorize.  It ends in 8086 - a processor that USED to be considered fast and powerful, but 30 years later, not so much anymore.

This is a VERY easy association to make for a cardiology patient! 

With the advent of cellphones and other mobile devices, displacing landlines, telephones are more associated with a person than with a place.  Traditionally, one of the earliest lessons in etiquette that many children received was being coached to call a friend's home up and ask "Hello, may I please speak to so-and-so".  And of course, you HAD to ask, because the phone was at a place where the intended person might be, but wasn't necessarily.

Now, with kids in the single digits having their own phone, a call can begin with "S'up?", and little more.

Oops, slipped into old fart mode.  Just give me a second to adjust......there, got my shades back on, and I'm kickin' it...old school.   

[Jazznoise]

The quantity aside, I find the QUALITY of the posting here is excellent. People go away, chew on problems, came back with ideas. Everyone's out to help, and sincerely interesting in seeing more cool stuff. I'm very grateful for the 4 years I've been lurking around here - so thanks Mark for your time. And everyone else. It's been emotional. 

Anyone who wants to get into audio electronics, I tell 'em to just come here and read. And read. And read. Of the maybe dozen guys I know into it in Ireland (It's a small island), most come here. Like 10 of the 12.