humans have meandered into this page.
|
|
"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."-Unknown
Now in the process of trying to come up with witty names for this rant, I looked up the word southpaw. I knew that it referred to left-handed folks, but didn't know whether or not it was considered derogatory. So…
south-paw (sòwth páw) noun
Slang.
A left-handed person, especially a left-handed baseball pitcher.
[From the practice in baseball of arranging the diamond with the batter facing east to avoid the afternoon sun. A left-handed pitcher facing west would therefore have his pitching arm toward the south of the diamond.]
Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V., further reproduction and distribution restricted in accordance with the Copyright Law of the United States. All rights reserved.
So apparently it is not disparaging. Thank goodness, you know what they say, "Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate." That's all I need, more people offended by my using the term southpaw. What I did find interesting is the etymology of the word. I was mildly surprised; I'm a fairly big baseball enthusiast and I didn't know that reference. You learn something new every day.
I suppose it is a question of ergonomics. Or perhaps just space management. If you hadn't noticed by now, I illustrate… on a computer even. I'm more of a hobbyist than anything else, but I still, at very least, pretend to take it seriously. I also have a Wacom drawing tablet, a gadget where you can essentially use a pen to draw on this… well, tablet. Well, the tablet is sensitive to not only position, but also pressure and pen angle, so it makes it very intuitive to draw on it. And needless to say, you can use the way you would normally use a mouse (point and click).
Another funkiness about my computer is that I have two monitors attached to it. It makes it very easy to do multiple things at once, so you can drag windows back and forth and have two applications full screen at a time. However, the tablet doesn't work well when doing this. You basically have two options. First, you can have the tablet only work on one screen (presumably your main screen), which then renders the items on the second screen unreachable. Second, you can have the coordinates of the tablet map to both screens, which then introduces weirdness between the tablet and screen coordinates; if you draw a circle, you get an oval. Much more than you wanted to know about my computer, I know….
So what I ended up doing is keeping both the mouse and the tablet. I only map the tablet to the first screen and use the mouse when I need to navigate to the second screen (or when I'm not drawing). This introduces yet another problem. You see, I'm right-handed and also a touch typist, which would imply that I type with both hands, and then I would need to set up both the tablet and mouse on the right side. This makes reaching for whichever happens to be further away pretty awkward. Things would be so much easier if I were ambidextrous. Well, technically, I don't really know how tough it would be to use my left hand for either of these functions.
On a side note: Well, it would appear
that my hands (yes, as in my actual physical hands) are
noteworthy. [Why would I lie?] I've gotten probably about half a
dozen unsolicited comments on them. Some have said that I have
artist's hands, which I wince at, since I dislike the term artist. Others have described them as
delicate, which I am not entirely sure how to interpret. And
finally, I've also been told that I have magic fingers, but that's
more of a reference to my giving good backrubs, or so I hear… another
nasty rumor. Ironically, or perhaps maybe not so ironic, is the fact that
only women make comments on my hands. So for those of you who are
particularly interested in hands… now you have a picture of the
infamous pair.
Terrific, now I'm going to get mail from those women who have a hand fetish. Not that I would mind so much, have you, aside from the fact that maybe it would be a bit awkward if that's the way the relationship starts. "My what lovely hands! Could I interest you in dinner?" [Oh, I feel so cheap!!] Well, that and the little bit about performance anxiety… I mean, what would be the expectations from a woman with a hand fetish?
"Okay, now gesture…"
"Oohh, point…"
"Ahh, clench…" […my fists. Get your mind out of the gutter!]
I've always prided myself on being open-minded, so why don't I subject myself to a taste of what left-handed folks have to go through? Now the next question is… which device do I attempt to use left-handed? You see, I would need more precision to use the tablet, but I use the mouse considerably longer and more frequently. So, I decided to start using my mouse left-handed. [Well… Duh! Look at the title…] Madness!
I suppose that I got my first taste of what left-handed folk go through years ago when I borrowed a pair of scissors from my friend Noel, who is left-handed (Keep up here!). He lent me his pair of left-handed scissors, and he did warn me that they were left-handed scissors. Naturally, I first thought that he was joking, which is not surprising, if you know Noel… He deadpans incredibly well. And then, of course, I actually tried to use the scissors. [Sweet Lord! Is this what all southpaws go through?] Apparently, scissors not only work on the pressure applied from the obvious angle (when you look at the hinge), but also by mild tangent force that you instinctively apply (to push the blades together). Well, I could not for the life of me use the left-handed scissors (well not with my right hand anyway) and Noel ended up doing the cutting. You realize, of course, that left-handed folks have to go through this every day. Sheesh!
So if you have seen my desk at work, you will realize that making room for roughly a square foot of space, so that I can move my mouse from one side of my keyboard to the other, is somewhat of a task. It has been rumored more than once at work that I may have the messiest office. Of course, that was a few years ago, now my office is debatably the second messiest in the hallway, but enough about how messy my office happens to be. Believe it or not the task was much more easily done with my mouse at home. Well, I use a total of about seven computers (some at work, some at home), and I didn't switch all of them. Have to keep myself on my toes, you know…
There's also the task of reversing the mouse buttons, which incidentally you can do. After that it is simply a matter of getting used to navigating the mouse with your left hand, which is much more easily said than done. Well, do this in a number of computers and don't switch them all, and before the end of it all, you would be thoroughly confused. Actually, not really, but it is a good story.
That was about a couple of weeks ago. How has it been? Maybe I happen to be exceptionately coordinated with my left hand, which I doubt, since I do most everything right-handed. It has been relatively painless. The first couple of days were almost agony. I instinctively reached for my mouse with my right hand across my desk. I could certainly control my hand well enough to find a button and click it. However, when it came to more complex maneuvers it was a bit of a task. For instance, there's a certain fudge factor to double-clicking; it is on the neighborhood of a few pixels. If you deviate my more than this, it will register as two separate clicks. There is also dragging things, where you keep the mouse button down and move the mouse. That also took some getting used to, but otherwise things were fine. There's also something else people instinctively do with their mice that they don't really think about… they pick up their mice. What I mean is this… If you're running into the right side of the mouse pad and you need to continue to move the mouse to the right, you will instinctively lift the mouse from the pad, move it over a bit to the left, put it down and continue moving it to the right. You don't believe me; do you? Try it; I'll wait.
You didn't try it; did you? That hurts. Well, there's that little maneuver that I also had to get used to, but besides that it wasn't that big a deal. Just remember that not everything is going to work precisely the same, and just do what is comfortable. If you think this is bad, try writing with a fountain pen and being left-handed. What a mess!
Now there are some definite advantages to using a mouse with your off-hand. Think about the number of things you always do with you main hand. Oftentimes, you stop working on your computer since you can't navigate your mouse and do whatever else with the same hand. Take for instance, eating a sandwich. How often do you either put your sandwich down to use your mouse, or forgo using your computer at all? Well, no longer, now you can do both. I know… I'm so easily amused. Or drinking something… or well, you get the picture…
December 5, 1999