Sutoh by Sutohewst: Showdown in Das Kapital
Last weekend was the Ultimate Typing Championship in Austin, Texas, the only thing I was looking forward to all year in my perpetual state of unemployment...
Because I was one of the two finalists in the semifinal round, I earned a free ticket to South by Southwest Interactive, where keyboard manufacturer Das Keyboard held the event, and they naturally paid for my plane ticket and hotel stay, important because I have zero money and am in very, very, very bad financial shape. I had to leave my disabled mother at home this weekend to do this, which I wasn't so proud about.
The weekend took a very sour turn when my desktop computer died the day before the event. I was changing the cat litter before I left so my cats wouldn't choose to think outside the box while I was away and my mom was more or less bedridden. I moved the mouse around and got no response; likewise when I typed some random stuff on the keyboard. Given that I am using Windows XP (shut up), the only way to turn the computer off to restart it when you are getting literally no response from any of your peripheral devices is to unplug the machine, so I did that, and plugged it back in. Naturally, it went into safe mode, etc... I attempted to do a system restore, which worked like a charm once when I had a computer virus for the one time in my life, but it didn't work this time. In fact, whatever problem was going on caused the system to lock up again in safe mode after five minutes, at which point I had to unplug the computer again, etc... Eventually, I was able to go into safe mode, shut down successfully, and load into regular mode, but it continued to always lock up in 5-10 minutes and I was unable to do anything. Occasionally when the computer locked up and froze I got a blue screen of death reporting that memory was being saved to the hard drive, but although I probably know more about computers than 97% of people, I probably know more than only about 20% of my LJ friends, so I wouldn't remotely understand how to fix this. Eventually, it got so bad it won't even boot. We attempted to open up the machine to excavate the hard drive, but it appeared to be welded in and we did not know how to get it out. Further complicating things, we do still have a service plan for this computer, but if we send it in, they'll probably just replace it and replace the hard drive too. My mom is furious at me and has been basically giving me a stony silence for not downloading some thorough databases she made for her library books and her life history, and I do have no excuse. WHEN I receive my winnings from this hoedown, I am going to try and find somebody who can get the hard drive out of this shitbox so I can put it in an older computer. For somebody so broke, I have way too many shoddy computers all over the place because I never, ever get rid of past computers that my uncle sends periodically when he's through using them. What this meant was that my mom had no real way of contacting me online, so we had to use cell phones, but we never use our cell phones for anything, so we've accumulated a large share of minutes, so that worked out okay.
After unfortunately going to bed at like 4 am or so way too many nights, I tried to ensure I'd get a good night's sleep before the event on Friday night...and despite going to bed at 10:30 or something, I still didn't fall asleep until 1:00, so with a ridiculously early flight the next morning, I only had three hours of sleep and I was a walking log. I'm hardly a well-traveled man; I can't afford to fly over the place and this was only my second flight ever (the first was an unsuccessful job application in Chicago). Both plane rides were generally bumpier than they were last time, but I suppose that's because it's still (technically) winter now, whereas it was summer then. I still enjoyed the Ithaca airport's pretentious Les Nessman-style listing of the times at major world cities (something like: London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Ithaca). I as usual enjoyed laughing at the bizarre amenities at the Detroit airport, such as that infamous corridor between concourses A and B where each wall has an elaborate light show not unlike your average screen saver and ambient pseudo-tribal African muzak plays in the background (there were too many synthesizers and not enough percussion in my opinion to be "truly" ethnic, but considering I have no taste, I still enjoy it even somewhat unironically). The Detroit airport also for some reason has an elevated train, which also quite amuses me, and is the one airport I've seen (out of only four I have been to, though) with moving walks that robotically announce "Please watch your step as you exit the moving walk." I have no idea why that cracks me up. It should not, but it does. Seeing the Detroit airport was a highlight to my trip to Chicago, which says something about how awful that experience was, but it definitely wasn't the highlight this time.
Given that this was an inaugural event for Das Keyboard, they really didn't know what they were doing very well. I was told to board a Yellow Cab from the airport to the Radisson on Cesar Chavez St. where I would be staying. What I was not told is that apparently I was supposed to wait for both my opponent, Nate Bowen, and another person who was supposed to be picked up on the same cab. The cab driver and I had some language difficulties and he didn't really seem to understand that Das Keyboard had pre-paid for my cab ride (and I definitely didn't think I could afford to). Eventually, he phoned the base and worked things out. I was shocked to find out that I was supposed to wait for two other people, because nobody told me that. Since I was going out to dinner with my opponent and the CEO of Das Keyboard, I assumed that he was the other person, but I later found out that was not the case. Instead, it was Nate's girlfriend.
I was really not looking forward to meeting Nate because he is um, a billion times more sophisticated than I am. He does programming for Conde Nast, reads much more profound stuff than I do, has much broader music taste, has traveled all over the world, etc..., etc.... I was very unfair to him in my mind thinking he was going to mock me for being some lowbrow charlatan or something (which I am but still...) He was nice. However, his girlfriend, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate, was more or less the snob I pictured Nate to be and when she somehow hijacked our dinner (it was supposed to be just the CEO, Nate, and myself, but the CEO decided to pay for her and was even contemplating buying her a ticket to SXSW Interactive on Sunday because she was whining about not getting to see Nate compete, even though she was NOT invited), I was completely left out.
My alimentary tastes are even worse than my cultural tastes, as I am the pickiest eater in existence and gag in response to many foods to which there is no logical reason I should be gagging, but I was able to survive that and not particularly embarrass myself in that way. Nonetheless, Nate's girlfriend (I didn't even bother to learn her name, so I'm sure I was being tremendously rude) was going on about her luxurious vacations and gourmet dinners and various elite conversation topics that were far out of my league. She was hogging most of the conversation in general even though she wasn't supposed to be there. The CEO of Das Keyboard, Daniel Guermeur, was born in France and has likewise traveled the world and she seemed to charm him tremendously. Much of the rest of the conversation consisted of Nate talking about cutting-edge programming stuff with the CEO, which was also tremendously out of my league as I never had a CS course past the 200 level (of course Nate didn't even go to college, and I suppose going to college is almost a hindrance in terms of high-tech today...) So I just sat around gloomily waiting for this to end. All the other three participants took alcohol, but I did not, as I did not wish to lower my performance for the next day, plus I've never been into drinking anyhow. Nate was the only one of the six semifinalists whose typing speed I really didn't have a great gauge on because I talked to or raced the other four semifinalists quite a bit, and I thought he might have an excellent chance of beating me if it was a short text.
Even though the Ultimate Typing Championship site itself said that the finals would consist of one typing test, they apparently changed the rules when it came time for the actual event. I was breathing a massive sigh of relief when I learned that the competition was actually a best-of-three. Considering I knew I was faster than anyone else after Jelani Nelson and Dan Chen (also two of the fastest typists in the US on MANY sites) withdrew, I no longer seriously doubted I would win, and boy, did I need the money. One other concern I had was that they had people practicing standing up (they were giving away a free keyboard every day to the fastest two typists at the booth, besides our contest which was the Main Event). I had never done a typing race standing up, and I was worried that might hurt my game somewhat. We were allowed to sit on stools, however, so the only difference was that there were spotlights over us and massive crowds hovering around the Das Keyboard booth.
Despite the spotlights, the crowds, and the commentary from various Das Keyboard officials throughout the event, I did not type any slower than I usually do on the first text, which was a relatively ordinary 500-word text clearly from some philosophy essay (there were a surplus of a prioris, etc...):
-- START OF FIRST TEXT --
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience. But the expression, "a priori," is not as yet definite enough, adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, "he might know a priori that it would have fallen;" that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience. By the term "knowledge a priori," therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience. Knowledge a priori is either pure or impure. Pure knowledge a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. For example, the proposition, "Every change has a cause," is a proposition a priori, but impure, because change is a conception which can only be derived from experience.
-- END OF FIRST TEXT --
I typed that in 163 wpm, which is more or less my average, while Nate only managed 110 wpm. I think I rattled him and intimidated him in some practice races, especially a one-sentence race where I hit my all-time record on that of 213 wpm (although my all-time record was a 222 wpm race on TypeRacer).
The second text was much harder, and they CLAIMED that every key on the keyboard was included, but that wasn't quite right as I didn't see any tildes there. They also included long strings of letters and numbers and abrupt shifts from entering one type of text to another. I won that 124 wpm-79 wpm to claim the Ultimate Typing Championship.
-- START OF SECOND TEXT --
1.a) [MAN] A man ordered 2,000 drums of pink ping pong balls in Paris, France. Each drum contained 100 pink ping pong balls. He paid $120 (80 Euros!) per drum, which means he spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls. 1.b) {BALL} These pink ping pong balls measured 40mm (how many inches?) and were given a 1 star rating [1 star?]. [FRIEND] His friends all asked him, "why did you order so many pink ping pong balls, how can you afford to spend that much, and what are you going to do with them?" His answer: "I'll tell you tomorrow." [MAN] Every day his friends asked the same question, and every day he gave the same answer: "I'll tell you tomorrow." {BALL} The pink ping pong balls started decreasing in quantity: only 189,000 left, and then only 172,000, and then 163,000, and then 147,000, etc. {BALL} One day 90% of the pink ping pong balls were gone (100% - 10% = 90% right?). His friends were really feeling frustrated with him now and demanded an explanation, "Tell us what the &^%$ [blip] you're doing with all of these @#^& pink ping pong balls!" [MAN] The man's response: "I spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls for a project. I have now used 90% of those, as you have observed. I promise to tell you tomorrow." [FRIEND] His friends decided to wait one more day and pronounce the alphabet to kill some time: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ then wrote a code word with strange signs: /a/&B#R{+1}>>[Bb] = X0 - 3 + @a rooftop ^ 32 + 12443678923458789 && 1 2 3 < 4. . The next day they were gathered in the man's house for the big revelation. The man stated, "Of the 200,000 pink ping pong balls I ordered I have 137 left. Would anyone like them?" His friends all groaned and said, "[---] no! Give us an answer!" The man began again, "Friends, I am about to unveil a great invention." He took a deep breath...and died. His 7 friends would never know why the man spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls, and neither will you.
-- END OF SECOND TEXT --
The people at Das Keyboard started almost from the get-go hyping my first text speed as an all-time record because apparently Guinness used to but does not currently have records on fastest typing speeds, and supposedly one of the typing records was 158 wpm for three minutes on a personal computer. The record that gets reported most often is Barbara Blackburn's record of 150 wpm over 30 (or was it 50?) minutes, and given that, I would have imagined the PC record for three minutes would have been WAY higher than that. Still, if I typed a 574-word text at 163 wpm, I probably was typing for longer than three minutes (note: a word for wpm purposes is defined as 5 characters so if the average word length in that text was less than 5 characters, that may muck that up) and it could count toward a three-minute record. I don't really care in pursuing that further though, as I would rather find a job and continue updating my site and etc...
There was a good amount of press for this, mainly in Austin, although I told the Ithaca Journal, Cornell Daily Sun, and Syracuse Post-Standard to see if any were interested (since I live in Ithaca, went to Cornell, and grew up in Syracuse...only Ithaca was interested). A rather inaccurate article appears at Gearlog.com with a video here (man, I bet even most Scrabble players don't have the array of nerdy mannerisms that I have displayed throughout this video). Another brief blurb was posted on YouTube by Austin's NBC affiliate here. I also got several Twitter namechecks from bloggers who were there and called me "pal", which was beyond weird. I received a couple of business cards, one from a market research firm in North Carolina that I did follow through with, and one with an army contractor that I did not. It was exciting, but I guess there's not a lot more to say about the typing championship itself (granted, I've spent more time typing my report than I did actually typing at the convention).
Now to Woodstock for Geeks itself. I don't know what I was missing, but SXSW Interactive was WAY smaller than I was anticipating. Maybe it's just the effect of going to a supersized high school and a supersized college, but I was shocked that this convention was pretty much limited to about three exhibit halls in the Austin Convention Center. Exhibit Hall 2 was the "gaming room" where there were all sorts of video game exhibits pretty much. The most obvious exhibit there was one for Rock Band where there were always 5-10 people doing rather bad versions of karaoke and air guitar (I heard if I recall correctly Bon Jovi, Boston, Elvis Costello, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Mountain, and Weezer while I was there...very obvious tracks one and all). There were also several racing simulators (given that I am a hardcore racing fan and playing with several of said simulators when I was a kid, it's almost criminal that I only spent five minutes at those booths, but whatever). There was some makeup booth where people could give each other a better virtual reality appearance; I didn't really pay any attention to that though so I may be getting the context wrong. There were also some bizarre bean-bag chairs for no apparent reason. I nearly fell asleep in one (unwise because I was carrying a laptop in a bag with me, hence why I decided to wake myself up.) There were MANY other exhibits, but I don't really remember them. I mainly just walked around, took stuff in, and forgot everything.
Exhibit Hall 4 was the "trade show" where Google, Microsoft, and Oracle were the big names, and for some reason Chevrolet seemed to be debuting some car there but didn't bring any representatives there to guard it. I have no idea what the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Times were doing there...the fit just doesn't make sense at a techie convention. Das Keyboard had its booth there, and that's where this competition was. There were other fun but more restrained events there as well. The most annoying event was one of those carnival-like things where you hit some metal object with a hammer and it shoots up to the top and rings a bell (words are failing me; sorry, I know these objects have proper names but I have never studied carnival engineering, and am just feeling too lazy at the moment). That was right across from the Das Keyboard booth and I was worried that would be a distraction, but they agreed to not run their exhibit while the event itself was going on, thank God (especially because I had the closer computer console). There was also a job board in Exhibit Hall 4, but there really wasn't much of anything I felt I could do as pretty much all those jobs were for people who MAJORED in CS and all, and nobody takes me seriously considering all I've done is an obsessive database-driven site about a trivial topic, and yeah, I feel I'm really good in php/MySQL...that's not enough. Well, I suppose it's okay for somebody who was a statistics major and wasn't even a CS major (mainly because I wasn't good enough for CS at Cornell, a perennial top ten program...I would have been had I stayed in Syracuse and went there, for sure...) But it was embarrassing that despite knowing more about computers I am sure than 95%+ of people in the general population, for the crowd reading my blog, or my Facebook friends, or ESPECIALLY the people at this convention, probably 80% know more than I do, and it is so embarrassing, considering how borderline prodigious I was when I was like four. Finally, reversing my trajectory after that tangential whining, there was a rather small room at SXSW just for bloggers. I REALLY didn't get what that was about...
I came home and man, have I been slothful. Last week I was entering a crazy amount of data on my site. I entered something like 33 races the Wednesday before I left. Obviously, still having a non-functional desktop computer is limiting that. I still do have my laptop and I could enter stuff there, but I am just not feeling like it and I haven't really done much of anything. It's appalling. I am probably a few months from finishing my site (at least my initial goals with regard to my site), and when I do so, then I am REALLY going to master Scrabble in my free time to justify pretending to be friends with several of its greatest players. I'm hoping all my time isn't free because I really, really, really want a job but even civil service is sitting on their butts even though I kicked butt on those exams, and even Staples and Home Depot aren't hiring me, nor is the Holiday Inn seemingly interested in having me as a night auditor, even though I live ACROSS THE STREET. I know I need to move out of Ithaca to get a real job, I guess, since I don't have enough education for an academic job, but I just can't afford to move... Mainly, I'm just waiting for my check for both bills and to pay for a professional to remove our hard drive so my mom's data aren't lost and so she won't be furious at me anymore.
College basketball is the only other sport I remotely follow besides racing, and even though I didn't enjoy my Cornell experience all that much, it was cool to see them score the first Ivy League win in the tournament since 1998, and their first ever. I grew up in Syracuse, and it was cool to see them get their first #1 seed in my life (even though I really do not see them going far enough to justify their seed...)
Even after this contest is over, I remain a typing addict (when I really should be continuing archival work on my site so I can finish it soon) and I have entered the INTERNATIONAL competition on intersteno.it. It mainly involves Eastern European typing students, but typingzone.com, one of the most acclaimed typing measurement sites (where I am the fastest all-time in English AND French) pays for 12 of its members to participate in this international competition and I was confirmed. You're allowed to take 10-minute typing tests in up to 14 languages. Either you can just type in your own language and compete for the mother-tongue championship (the fastest typing speed corrected for errors in your own language) or you can compete for that and the overall (where you type in all 14 languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and I don't remember what else I'm forgetting...) Dan, who was second in the US Ultimate Typing Championship semifinals to me before withdrawing won the overall Intersteno competition the past two years, and I am embarrassed to admit I'm probably going to go for it myself (even though I should not, since there aren't any prizes except for a medal, which makes it rather pointless...)
That is really about it. Still unemployed with no hope for the future, but hey, I won something cool and at least I can say I'm a national champion in something almost nobody cares about, even if it doesn't have any meaning in the real world!
Because I was one of the two finalists in the semifinal round, I earned a free ticket to South by Southwest Interactive, where keyboard manufacturer Das Keyboard held the event, and they naturally paid for my plane ticket and hotel stay, important because I have zero money and am in very, very, very bad financial shape. I had to leave my disabled mother at home this weekend to do this, which I wasn't so proud about.
The weekend took a very sour turn when my desktop computer died the day before the event. I was changing the cat litter before I left so my cats wouldn't choose to think outside the box while I was away and my mom was more or less bedridden. I moved the mouse around and got no response; likewise when I typed some random stuff on the keyboard. Given that I am using Windows XP (shut up), the only way to turn the computer off to restart it when you are getting literally no response from any of your peripheral devices is to unplug the machine, so I did that, and plugged it back in. Naturally, it went into safe mode, etc... I attempted to do a system restore, which worked like a charm once when I had a computer virus for the one time in my life, but it didn't work this time. In fact, whatever problem was going on caused the system to lock up again in safe mode after five minutes, at which point I had to unplug the computer again, etc... Eventually, I was able to go into safe mode, shut down successfully, and load into regular mode, but it continued to always lock up in 5-10 minutes and I was unable to do anything. Occasionally when the computer locked up and froze I got a blue screen of death reporting that memory was being saved to the hard drive, but although I probably know more about computers than 97% of people, I probably know more than only about 20% of my LJ friends, so I wouldn't remotely understand how to fix this. Eventually, it got so bad it won't even boot. We attempted to open up the machine to excavate the hard drive, but it appeared to be welded in and we did not know how to get it out. Further complicating things, we do still have a service plan for this computer, but if we send it in, they'll probably just replace it and replace the hard drive too. My mom is furious at me and has been basically giving me a stony silence for not downloading some thorough databases she made for her library books and her life history, and I do have no excuse. WHEN I receive my winnings from this hoedown, I am going to try and find somebody who can get the hard drive out of this shitbox so I can put it in an older computer. For somebody so broke, I have way too many shoddy computers all over the place because I never, ever get rid of past computers that my uncle sends periodically when he's through using them. What this meant was that my mom had no real way of contacting me online, so we had to use cell phones, but we never use our cell phones for anything, so we've accumulated a large share of minutes, so that worked out okay.
After unfortunately going to bed at like 4 am or so way too many nights, I tried to ensure I'd get a good night's sleep before the event on Friday night...and despite going to bed at 10:30 or something, I still didn't fall asleep until 1:00, so with a ridiculously early flight the next morning, I only had three hours of sleep and I was a walking log. I'm hardly a well-traveled man; I can't afford to fly over the place and this was only my second flight ever (the first was an unsuccessful job application in Chicago). Both plane rides were generally bumpier than they were last time, but I suppose that's because it's still (technically) winter now, whereas it was summer then. I still enjoyed the Ithaca airport's pretentious Les Nessman-style listing of the times at major world cities (something like: London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Ithaca). I as usual enjoyed laughing at the bizarre amenities at the Detroit airport, such as that infamous corridor between concourses A and B where each wall has an elaborate light show not unlike your average screen saver and ambient pseudo-tribal African muzak plays in the background (there were too many synthesizers and not enough percussion in my opinion to be "truly" ethnic, but considering I have no taste, I still enjoy it even somewhat unironically). The Detroit airport also for some reason has an elevated train, which also quite amuses me, and is the one airport I've seen (out of only four I have been to, though) with moving walks that robotically announce "Please watch your step as you exit the moving walk." I have no idea why that cracks me up. It should not, but it does. Seeing the Detroit airport was a highlight to my trip to Chicago, which says something about how awful that experience was, but it definitely wasn't the highlight this time.
Given that this was an inaugural event for Das Keyboard, they really didn't know what they were doing very well. I was told to board a Yellow Cab from the airport to the Radisson on Cesar Chavez St. where I would be staying. What I was not told is that apparently I was supposed to wait for both my opponent, Nate Bowen, and another person who was supposed to be picked up on the same cab. The cab driver and I had some language difficulties and he didn't really seem to understand that Das Keyboard had pre-paid for my cab ride (and I definitely didn't think I could afford to). Eventually, he phoned the base and worked things out. I was shocked to find out that I was supposed to wait for two other people, because nobody told me that. Since I was going out to dinner with my opponent and the CEO of Das Keyboard, I assumed that he was the other person, but I later found out that was not the case. Instead, it was Nate's girlfriend.
I was really not looking forward to meeting Nate because he is um, a billion times more sophisticated than I am. He does programming for Conde Nast, reads much more profound stuff than I do, has much broader music taste, has traveled all over the world, etc..., etc.... I was very unfair to him in my mind thinking he was going to mock me for being some lowbrow charlatan or something (which I am but still...) He was nice. However, his girlfriend, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate, was more or less the snob I pictured Nate to be and when she somehow hijacked our dinner (it was supposed to be just the CEO, Nate, and myself, but the CEO decided to pay for her and was even contemplating buying her a ticket to SXSW Interactive on Sunday because she was whining about not getting to see Nate compete, even though she was NOT invited), I was completely left out.
My alimentary tastes are even worse than my cultural tastes, as I am the pickiest eater in existence and gag in response to many foods to which there is no logical reason I should be gagging, but I was able to survive that and not particularly embarrass myself in that way. Nonetheless, Nate's girlfriend (I didn't even bother to learn her name, so I'm sure I was being tremendously rude) was going on about her luxurious vacations and gourmet dinners and various elite conversation topics that were far out of my league. She was hogging most of the conversation in general even though she wasn't supposed to be there. The CEO of Das Keyboard, Daniel Guermeur, was born in France and has likewise traveled the world and she seemed to charm him tremendously. Much of the rest of the conversation consisted of Nate talking about cutting-edge programming stuff with the CEO, which was also tremendously out of my league as I never had a CS course past the 200 level (of course Nate didn't even go to college, and I suppose going to college is almost a hindrance in terms of high-tech today...) So I just sat around gloomily waiting for this to end. All the other three participants took alcohol, but I did not, as I did not wish to lower my performance for the next day, plus I've never been into drinking anyhow. Nate was the only one of the six semifinalists whose typing speed I really didn't have a great gauge on because I talked to or raced the other four semifinalists quite a bit, and I thought he might have an excellent chance of beating me if it was a short text.
Even though the Ultimate Typing Championship site itself said that the finals would consist of one typing test, they apparently changed the rules when it came time for the actual event. I was breathing a massive sigh of relief when I learned that the competition was actually a best-of-three. Considering I knew I was faster than anyone else after Jelani Nelson and Dan Chen (also two of the fastest typists in the US on MANY sites) withdrew, I no longer seriously doubted I would win, and boy, did I need the money. One other concern I had was that they had people practicing standing up (they were giving away a free keyboard every day to the fastest two typists at the booth, besides our contest which was the Main Event). I had never done a typing race standing up, and I was worried that might hurt my game somewhat. We were allowed to sit on stools, however, so the only difference was that there were spotlights over us and massive crowds hovering around the Das Keyboard booth.
Despite the spotlights, the crowds, and the commentary from various Das Keyboard officials throughout the event, I did not type any slower than I usually do on the first text, which was a relatively ordinary 500-word text clearly from some philosophy essay (there were a surplus of a prioris, etc...):
-- START OF FIRST TEXT --
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience. But the expression, "a priori," is not as yet definite enough, adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, "he might know a priori that it would have fallen;" that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience. By the term "knowledge a priori," therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience. Knowledge a priori is either pure or impure. Pure knowledge a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. For example, the proposition, "Every change has a cause," is a proposition a priori, but impure, because change is a conception which can only be derived from experience.
-- END OF FIRST TEXT --
I typed that in 163 wpm, which is more or less my average, while Nate only managed 110 wpm. I think I rattled him and intimidated him in some practice races, especially a one-sentence race where I hit my all-time record on that of 213 wpm (although my all-time record was a 222 wpm race on TypeRacer).
The second text was much harder, and they CLAIMED that every key on the keyboard was included, but that wasn't quite right as I didn't see any tildes there. They also included long strings of letters and numbers and abrupt shifts from entering one type of text to another. I won that 124 wpm-79 wpm to claim the Ultimate Typing Championship.
-- START OF SECOND TEXT --
1.a) [MAN] A man ordered 2,000 drums of pink ping pong balls in Paris, France. Each drum contained 100 pink ping pong balls. He paid $120 (80 Euros!) per drum, which means he spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls. 1.b) {BALL} These pink ping pong balls measured 40mm (how many inches?) and were given a 1 star rating [1 star?]. [FRIEND] His friends all asked him, "why did you order so many pink ping pong balls, how can you afford to spend that much, and what are you going to do with them?" His answer: "I'll tell you tomorrow." [MAN] Every day his friends asked the same question, and every day he gave the same answer: "I'll tell you tomorrow." {BALL} The pink ping pong balls started decreasing in quantity: only 189,000 left, and then only 172,000, and then 163,000, and then 147,000, etc. {BALL} One day 90% of the pink ping pong balls were gone (100% - 10% = 90% right?). His friends were really feeling frustrated with him now and demanded an explanation, "Tell us what the &^%$ [blip] you're doing with all of these @#^& pink ping pong balls!" [MAN] The man's response: "I spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls for a project. I have now used 90% of those, as you have observed. I promise to tell you tomorrow." [FRIEND] His friends decided to wait one more day and pronounce the alphabet to kill some time: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ then wrote a code word with strange signs: /a/&B#R{+1}>>[Bb] = X0 - 3 + @a rooftop ^ 32 + 12443678923458789 && 1 2 3 < 4. . The next day they were gathered in the man's house for the big revelation. The man stated, "Of the 200,000 pink ping pong balls I ordered I have 137 left. Would anyone like them?" His friends all groaned and said, "[---] no! Give us an answer!" The man began again, "Friends, I am about to unveil a great invention." He took a deep breath...and died. His 7 friends would never know why the man spent $240,000 on 200,000 pink ping pong balls, and neither will you.
-- END OF SECOND TEXT --
The people at Das Keyboard started almost from the get-go hyping my first text speed as an all-time record because apparently Guinness used to but does not currently have records on fastest typing speeds, and supposedly one of the typing records was 158 wpm for three minutes on a personal computer. The record that gets reported most often is Barbara Blackburn's record of 150 wpm over 30 (or was it 50?) minutes, and given that, I would have imagined the PC record for three minutes would have been WAY higher than that. Still, if I typed a 574-word text at 163 wpm, I probably was typing for longer than three minutes (note: a word for wpm purposes is defined as 5 characters so if the average word length in that text was less than 5 characters, that may muck that up) and it could count toward a three-minute record. I don't really care in pursuing that further though, as I would rather find a job and continue updating my site and etc...
There was a good amount of press for this, mainly in Austin, although I told the Ithaca Journal, Cornell Daily Sun, and Syracuse Post-Standard to see if any were interested (since I live in Ithaca, went to Cornell, and grew up in Syracuse...only Ithaca was interested). A rather inaccurate article appears at Gearlog.com with a video here (man, I bet even most Scrabble players don't have the array of nerdy mannerisms that I have displayed throughout this video). Another brief blurb was posted on YouTube by Austin's NBC affiliate here. I also got several Twitter namechecks from bloggers who were there and called me "pal", which was beyond weird. I received a couple of business cards, one from a market research firm in North Carolina that I did follow through with, and one with an army contractor that I did not. It was exciting, but I guess there's not a lot more to say about the typing championship itself (granted, I've spent more time typing my report than I did actually typing at the convention).
Now to Woodstock for Geeks itself. I don't know what I was missing, but SXSW Interactive was WAY smaller than I was anticipating. Maybe it's just the effect of going to a supersized high school and a supersized college, but I was shocked that this convention was pretty much limited to about three exhibit halls in the Austin Convention Center. Exhibit Hall 2 was the "gaming room" where there were all sorts of video game exhibits pretty much. The most obvious exhibit there was one for Rock Band where there were always 5-10 people doing rather bad versions of karaoke and air guitar (I heard if I recall correctly Bon Jovi, Boston, Elvis Costello, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Mountain, and Weezer while I was there...very obvious tracks one and all). There were also several racing simulators (given that I am a hardcore racing fan and playing with several of said simulators when I was a kid, it's almost criminal that I only spent five minutes at those booths, but whatever). There was some makeup booth where people could give each other a better virtual reality appearance; I didn't really pay any attention to that though so I may be getting the context wrong. There were also some bizarre bean-bag chairs for no apparent reason. I nearly fell asleep in one (unwise because I was carrying a laptop in a bag with me, hence why I decided to wake myself up.) There were MANY other exhibits, but I don't really remember them. I mainly just walked around, took stuff in, and forgot everything.
Exhibit Hall 4 was the "trade show" where Google, Microsoft, and Oracle were the big names, and for some reason Chevrolet seemed to be debuting some car there but didn't bring any representatives there to guard it. I have no idea what the American Civil Liberties Union and New York Times were doing there...the fit just doesn't make sense at a techie convention. Das Keyboard had its booth there, and that's where this competition was. There were other fun but more restrained events there as well. The most annoying event was one of those carnival-like things where you hit some metal object with a hammer and it shoots up to the top and rings a bell (words are failing me; sorry, I know these objects have proper names but I have never studied carnival engineering, and am just feeling too lazy at the moment). That was right across from the Das Keyboard booth and I was worried that would be a distraction, but they agreed to not run their exhibit while the event itself was going on, thank God (especially because I had the closer computer console). There was also a job board in Exhibit Hall 4, but there really wasn't much of anything I felt I could do as pretty much all those jobs were for people who MAJORED in CS and all, and nobody takes me seriously considering all I've done is an obsessive database-driven site about a trivial topic, and yeah, I feel I'm really good in php/MySQL...that's not enough. Well, I suppose it's okay for somebody who was a statistics major and wasn't even a CS major (mainly because I wasn't good enough for CS at Cornell, a perennial top ten program...I would have been had I stayed in Syracuse and went there, for sure...) But it was embarrassing that despite knowing more about computers I am sure than 95%+ of people in the general population, for the crowd reading my blog, or my Facebook friends, or ESPECIALLY the people at this convention, probably 80% know more than I do, and it is so embarrassing, considering how borderline prodigious I was when I was like four. Finally, reversing my trajectory after that tangential whining, there was a rather small room at SXSW just for bloggers. I REALLY didn't get what that was about...
I came home and man, have I been slothful. Last week I was entering a crazy amount of data on my site. I entered something like 33 races the Wednesday before I left. Obviously, still having a non-functional desktop computer is limiting that. I still do have my laptop and I could enter stuff there, but I am just not feeling like it and I haven't really done much of anything. It's appalling. I am probably a few months from finishing my site (at least my initial goals with regard to my site), and when I do so, then I am REALLY going to master Scrabble in my free time to justify pretending to be friends with several of its greatest players. I'm hoping all my time isn't free because I really, really, really want a job but even civil service is sitting on their butts even though I kicked butt on those exams, and even Staples and Home Depot aren't hiring me, nor is the Holiday Inn seemingly interested in having me as a night auditor, even though I live ACROSS THE STREET. I know I need to move out of Ithaca to get a real job, I guess, since I don't have enough education for an academic job, but I just can't afford to move... Mainly, I'm just waiting for my check for both bills and to pay for a professional to remove our hard drive so my mom's data aren't lost and so she won't be furious at me anymore.
College basketball is the only other sport I remotely follow besides racing, and even though I didn't enjoy my Cornell experience all that much, it was cool to see them score the first Ivy League win in the tournament since 1998, and their first ever. I grew up in Syracuse, and it was cool to see them get their first #1 seed in my life (even though I really do not see them going far enough to justify their seed...)
Even after this contest is over, I remain a typing addict (when I really should be continuing archival work on my site so I can finish it soon) and I have entered the INTERNATIONAL competition on intersteno.it. It mainly involves Eastern European typing students, but typingzone.com, one of the most acclaimed typing measurement sites (where I am the fastest all-time in English AND French) pays for 12 of its members to participate in this international competition and I was confirmed. You're allowed to take 10-minute typing tests in up to 14 languages. Either you can just type in your own language and compete for the mother-tongue championship (the fastest typing speed corrected for errors in your own language) or you can compete for that and the overall (where you type in all 14 languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and I don't remember what else I'm forgetting...) Dan, who was second in the US Ultimate Typing Championship semifinals to me before withdrawing won the overall Intersteno competition the past two years, and I am embarrassed to admit I'm probably going to go for it myself (even though I should not, since there aren't any prizes except for a medal, which makes it rather pointless...)
That is really about it. Still unemployed with no hope for the future, but hey, I won something cool and at least I can say I'm a national champion in something almost nobody cares about, even if it doesn't have any meaning in the real world!