My typing speed has been historically poor. Naturally, I decided to track my performance on a spreadsheet. After three months of recording my results from completing typing tests (amounting to over 9 hours of literally typing), here is some commentary on my process:

Methodology

I started with Typing Academy to practice typing, but I also later moved on to other websites, namely Monkeytype and TypeRacer. Typing Academy tests using a random string of the most common words in the English language, and it was the only website I used that doesn’t allow typos to be deleted. While this meant I could kind of inflate my words-per-minute (i.e. WPM) metric, losing concern for using the backspace key, this also made the tests less “realistic.” Monketype also uses a series of random common words, but has a much more pleasing user interface (in my opinion). It tracks more metrics for each test, and incorporates the usage of the backspace into the test. TypeRacer, in contrast, grabs from a database of user-submitted excerpts from various texts on the internet. With sources ranging from Bruno Mars to J. R. R. Tolkien, these texts also required capitalization and punctuation, thereby giving a more “real-world” guage of my WPM. While Monkeytype was the most “fun” to use, I’d say TypeRacer improved my typing the most.

To document my results, I used Google Sheets. I wasn’t really sure at first what insights I wanted to get from my tests, so I mostly recorded for variables I thought could be helpful. For each 60-second typing test I completed on whichever platform, I logged the WPM, the error rate, the date, which keyboard I was using (my laptop’s or an external membrane keyboard), and which site I took the test on.

Visualization

I also used Google Sheets to create the graphs. The main one I look at plots the daily average WPM for each website over the day:

This graph automatically updates as I enter in more data points.

Analysis

Most notable is the consistent upward trend in the first couple months of each website. While I’d like to attribute this to my dedication in improving my typing skills, I also acknowledge the confounding variable of having seen the same words before. By the same token, the hiatus during spring break and afterwards resulted in noticeable plateaus to my WPM, an effect of being “rusty.”

Conclusions

The following are some takeaways I’ve gathered from this ongoing activity, some of which seem to fit into broader ideas:

I found that the laptop keyboard is more error-prone than a membrane keyboard (since there’s less travel distance), but this also means that laptops can be faster and less fatiguing.

Errors and speeding were more costly to WPM than a more conservative pace. It’s worth noting however, that spell check can batch-correct errors. For practical situations, you are probably better off blitzing and spell-correcting. Playing to maximize the metric of WPM would defeat its purpose.

Making progress visible gamifies the process of improvement, making the overall process of practice typing more enjoyable.

A pair of strangers crosses the street towards us, eyeing curiously the mass of photographers, cameras, and tripods all facing in unison down the street.

“What are y’all taking pictures of?” one approaches.

Lowering my camera, “So, today’s the Chicagohenge, which means that….”

Twice a year around the autumn and spring equinox, the sun crosses the horizon at almost exactly east and west. With Chicago’s streets built along the cardinal directions, this can make some unique alignments between the morning/evening sun and the city. The name of the event comes from the portmanteau of Stonehenge, the English structure which was thought to be used as a solar calendar, and the city name, Chicago.

This semester, potentially my last spring in Illinois for the next couple years, I thought I’d make the trip to see the Chicagohenge, at least once, while it was still convenient. In case you ever decide to go, here are some tidbits from my sunset excursion:

Relative to the date, I’d say you have around 2-3 days before and after the actual day of the equinox to see the Chicagohenge. Of course, you should look for clear skies in the east (for sunrise) or the west (for sunset) for an enjoyable experience.

Getting there is ultimately up to preference, and I had no trouble arriving by car. Parking garages in downtown are fairly affordable, and using SpotHero made life a little more convenient. 

The general consensus online is that the best streets to view the Chicagohenge are along Michigan Avenue starting from Van Buren Street. Although I only got to Adams/Wabash (Willis Tower is on this street), the view westward is supposedly good up until Kinzie St, north of Chicago river.

Although sunset wasn’t until ~7:00 PM, I would suggest getting to the area at least an hour early. Golden hour starts usually around 30 minutes before sunset, and with the additional time you can scout some compositions. As a forewarning, there will be tons of other photographers there, crowding the sidewalks and overpasses. If you decide to shoot from Michigan Avenue, the cross-traffic will inevitably intrude into some shots. Puddles and pedestrians are also your friend here, as they could provide some interesting street pictures. Another factor to consider are the trains on the L-Loop, which passes through the streets in this vantage point. They could be an additional component to the image, or an obstruction to the sun.

The light really starts hitting the streets, casting dramatic shadows and giving an orange glow around everything, around 10 minutes before sundown. Even after the sun crosses the horizon, you’ll still have some light to work with. 

Technically speaking, when shooting into the sun, I would try to expose for the sky instead of the streets, since the shadows are generally easier to recover in post. In contrast, a blown out sky is beyond help (except for if you want to use Photoshop). If applicable, I would also set my camera shutter release to a medium burst to compensate for the fast-changing scenery of cars and pedestrians. To get sunstars, you’ll need to stop down to a higher f-stop number and adjust your ISO and shutter speed accordingly.

With only fifteen minutes until sunset, I was faced with two decisions: should I stay where I was on Michigan Avenue, and get the same perspective of the Chicagohenge as everyone else, or venture into the streets for other compositions? Risking it for the biscuit, I packed my bag and half-skipped half-walked a few blocks into the city, racing against the dying light. In between nearly getting run over by cars from kneeling smack-dab in the middle of the road to finding a massive puddle, I was able to find a number of keepers from the venture. Not to mention, I met a popular photographer. 

There’s gotta be a moral here, right? Fortune favors the bold?

Ultimately, you’ll be wanting more time, more shots, more locations, than Earth’s rotation will allow for. Of course, you could always return to the city throughout that week or even come back in six months. But, with the limited time you have for each evening, I say, chase the light. As I learned that Sunday, between staying or going, go! We often regret the things of inaction rather than action.

Firstly, why bother with a logo? For my sports photography, I supposed that having a logo would help people associate my work with a name, a brand. A mark in the corner of my images would serve this purpose while also helping to remedy the situations in which I’m not credited for the photos. Also, let’s be honest: having a logo, a visual identification of something, just sounded appealing.

Functionally, I also needed to consider the applications and style of the logo. For the most part, I would need something flexible, usable for various sizes and purposes, be it for a watermark in front of various backgrounds, profile picture, a stinger at the end of highlight reels, or even physically on stickers. This would most likely mean that my logo would be monochrome, with any text separable from the actual mark.

Stylistically, I knew that I wanted something more symbolic in nature, but also that I’d need a primary version that included my name; I’m not yet as famous as Nike or Apple, unfortunately. 

Before putting pencil to paper, I looked to compile some inspiration, creating a moodboard, if you will. Notice the geometric, minimalistic theme across all the references – I guess that’s just what spoke to me.

Yes, that is a Google Drawings canvas. From there, I started to sketch some designs in a notebook. On principle, a logo should convey ideas relating to the brand. So, for me, this meant somehow communicating notions of sports, photography, action, etc, while avoiding being cliche. For example, incorporating aperture shutters or image brackets just seemed textbook “stock.” I started with an arrangement of my initials and iterated from there, trying to find unique ways to assemble K and X. I also wanted to utilize someway, somehow that the triangular nature of the two letters, and their similarities typographically:

 

Amidst the many terrible drawings, I marked a few designs that I liked, and finalized on one that found a nice balance between form (visual appeal, essentially) and function. (Can you find the drawing of the one I picked?) After choosing a design, I moved to Adobe Illustrator, a vector graphics software. Because of how geometric the design was, I was able to create the logo from scratch. Otherwise, I would have uploaded a scanned copy and traced it out using the pen tool. At this point, I also tinkered with alternate versions of the logo and selected a typeface for the text.

After the mark was finalized, I created different lockups of the logo, for various applications (the all-white artboards are where the logo is in white against a transparent background):

And, viola!

** After almost two years with the logo, I have some irks with the logo: I think that the idea of sports photography, or at least creativity, could be communicated better, and that the design is somewhat too straightforward. Maybe time for a change?

Some lessons:

• Before my first sketches, I had attempted to design a logo straight from Adobe Illustrator. The designs were too simple, and I was somewhat hindered in creating designs by my own unfamiliarity with the software in comparison to good ol’ Ticonderoga. Don’t let the medium hinder your process.
• A lot of sketches led to dead ends, but I forced myself to be okay with these throwaways. “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
• Being somewhat novice to Illustrator, finding new tools and shortcuts saved time in the long run as I worked through the design. Understanding the fundamentals pays dividends.

“Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Truthfully, I picked this poem mainly because I knew it was used in the film, Interstellar. (Nothing like a good ol’ film score by Hans Zimmer…see previous blog post.) Nonetheless, examining further into Do not go gentle into that good night, I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for the piece and Dylan Thomas’s craft. Throughout this poem, Thomas, leveraging emotive diction and adhering to a regular structure, advocates for individuals to uphold courage and bravery at the prospect of one’s mortality.

 

Through metaphors and a characteristic tone involving detail and deliberation, Thomas develops his belief on how an individual should approach the prospect of their own death.

 

The first stanza introduces this central idea of the poem while providing a schema for the rest of the piece. With the first line, Thomas cautions against resignation, to “not go gentle,” into the metaphorical “good night,” a reference to the end of one’s life, just as the onset of night commonly signifies the end of the day. Thomas’s usage of “good” evokes an essence of “alluring,” describing the persuasive temptation for complacency by individuals amidst death. He reiterates the contrapositive of this sentiment in the following line, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day.” Instead of an attitude of docility, emotions of passion and energy are demanded at the “close of day,” again a reference to death when used in conjunction with “old age.” With the last line of the stanza, Thomas intensifies these emotions towards death, ending with “rage”, a primal behavior deeply embedded within human nature, having begun with “not gentle” and “burn and rave.” The repetition of the word also creates an emphasis on this particular magnitude of reaction. Again, Thomas uses time and light to refer to death. Essentially saying the same thing three different ways, Thomas conveys the importance of this virtue of proactivity.

 

The succeeding four stanzas parallel the first stanza and further develop Thomas’s central idea, illustrating the application nature of this quality of persistence through sub-segments of “old men.”

 

The first group Thomas looks at is “wise men.” Through their experiences and learnings, they’ve developed truths about the world they live in. Thomas consequently states that they conclude that “dark is right”, or that death is necessary in the process of life. “Their words” can be interpreted as the wisdom each “wise man” imparts on the world, but having “forked no lighting,” does not create change. Thomas conveys that this segment of humanity should not be content with this outcome as they face death but rather persist in their core beliefs, acknowledging but defiant.

 

Thomas develops a similar sentiment for “good men,” those characterized by their dedication to serve the world. Though, like the wise men, they find an unfulfilling finality to their actions, “their last wave by.” In contrast to the stillness and serenity found in a“green bay”, protected from the larger bodies of water, the “frail deeds” are insignificant against the sea of suffering found in the world. Thomas advises these men, with this knowledge, to similarly fight the good fight against the inevitable.

 

Even for “wild men,” Thomas finds similarities in their plight. In their constant search for joy throughout their time, “[catching] and [singing] the sun in flight,” they “learn, too late” the superficiality in these moments. As they meet old age, they experience a certain emotional dissatisfaction with passing time, “[grieving] [the sun] on its way.” Allusions are also made to the Greek tale of Icarus, who fell to his death having flown too close to the sun with his waxen wings and ignoring the warnings of his mentor. Again, Thomas communicates that the next best action is to act in response to the unresolved tension, instead of resignation.

 

Likewise, with “Grave men,”’ or those who lead life pessimistically, Thomas details the conundrum they face. That, too late, “near death” and with “blinding sight”, they realize their life was merely their perception of reality, that even “blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay” or that even the disfortunate have the capacity to find optimism in life. This stanza most likely was in direct reference to his dying blind father who had served for his country. As a result, Thomas speaks here to his parents and others that, it’s in fact not too late to live life to the fullest, to do away with their old limiting beliefs.

 

The last stanza provides closure to Thomas’s theme, providing insight into the exigence of the poem. Confirming these theories of the previous stanza, Thomas directly references his father who is close to death, “there on the sad height.” Through all the exchanges he and his father may have had, Thomas now expresses one desire for his dying man, to do as he described for all old men to do and to not give in. 

 

Embedded throughout the poem the common motif of light, particularly in the astronomical sense. Whether to describe the elation of how seniors led their lives (“sang the sun”, “deeds might have danced”, “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors”) or as a euphemism for death (“dying of the light”, “good night”), Thomas draws a connection between the cyclical, ubiquitous quality of sunlight and that of life and death.

 

Alongside using semantic techniques, Thomas makes deliberate syntactical choices to cogently develop his central idea, closely adhering to the structure of a villanelle. A villanelle consists of “five stanzas of three lines (tercets) followed by a single stanza of four lines (a quatrain) for a total of nineteen lines” and “is structured by two repeating rhymes and two refrains: the first line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.” In Thomas’s poem, the emphasis created by the repetition of “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” structurally and thematically unifies each stanza together. Additionally, the tone of the poem, solemn and legato, is crafted by the implementation of an iambic pentameter–a pattern involving 10-syllable lines and alternating stressed and unstressed syllables–and frequent usage of commas, giving breathing room for each object of each phrase of the ABA rhyme scheme and a constant 10-syllable strengthens the relationship between lines in each stanza. 

 

Weaving the technical and creative qualities together in this poem, Thomas advocates for grit in the uphill battle–an enduring persistence to the brevity of life.

For my people that have inbox-OCD, here is a way to automate the labels for your Gmail:

 

1. Navigate to Settings, and go to “See all settings”

2. Go to the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab.

3. Click “Create a new filter.”

4. A box will appear with a bunch of blank fields. This is where you create the rule for a specific type of incoming email. For example if you wanted to create a label for, let’s just say, “Amazing People”, you would specify in the “From” field, “kxu1@stu.naperville203.org.” (naturally)

     a. If you know a bit of programming, this query can become pretty powerful. Check out this Google documentation page for more query operators.

6. You can “Search” to confirm you are getting the query results you are looking for. Click “Create filter”.

7. Check the actions you want to do to future matched emails. Click “Create filter”.

8. Violá!

 

In the things that you do repeatedly, examine whether you can automate it, streamline it, make it better. Build systems around yourself for success. If you get 1% better every day of the year, you’ll be 37 times better by the end of it.