Questing Quirky Qwerty

First, a bit about following and commenting
I'm about a day behind on commenting and following, but I'll be back to it in the early evening tonight and over the weekend. As you can see at the bottom of the right sidebar, I follow a ton of blogs, and have quite a few more that I have not yet placed in the sidebar but will soon. I'm pretty good about following up with comments on all of the blogs I follow.

When I find a blog that is listed somewhere as needing new comments, I usually follow them on Google Friend Connect, Google+, Networked Blogs, and Linky. I don't follow on social networks unless they follow me first, just because it takes so long when I'm following so many people. I do follow other bloggers back, however.

One thing that makes it much easier to find new commenters is when they leave a link to their blog when they comment. That way, I don't have to go searching for their blog. In fact, there have been one or two blogs I have not even been able to find. You can just paste the link in plain, or create a link like this:
<a href="YOUR_BLOG_URL">YOUR_BLOG_NAME_OR_URL</a>.

For example, I have the following typed into a plain text editor, which I bring up and copy for pasting into comments when I'm browsing through blogs:

#atozchallenge, Kristen's blog: <a href="http://kristenhead.blogspot.com/">kristenhead.blogspot.com</a>

Note that the part in quotes after href requires the "http://" at the beginning of the link. These comment signatures help so much!

My Macbook Air qwerty keyboard

Now, on to quirky qwertys
When I worked in a regular office, I had what was called an ergonomic keyboard. It looked weird and took some getting used to, but it was truly helpful at combating carpal tunnel syndrome.

Yes, I used to have carpal tunnel in my right arm, and it was extremely painful. The pain seemed to start in my hand, and went all the way up to my shoulder. I started using this weird special carpal tunnel hand mold they bought for the office, and it worked really well. The mold taught me how to do the correct hand exercises to reduce the pain.

The most worn keys

Soon after getting the mold, they started buying ergonomic keyboards at work. They stopped after people got frustrated with them and tossed them aside. I decided to give it a shot, and actually became a big fan. It really does help.

Now that I work from home, I no longer have that special keyboard. Additionally, the keyboard on my Macbook Air is wearing out. So, I thought I may buy a new ergonomic keyboard to use with it.

The culprit fingernails

I actually have a travel keyboard that I use with my laptop at times, just so I can set the screen farther away from me and just have the keyboard on my lap. But I think that would be much easier if the keyboard were ergonomic. I'm just beginning to feel a few pains of carpal tunnel again, and I really don't want to have to deal with that.

What is a qwerty keyboard?
In case you were wondering about the title of my post, most keyboards are also known as a qwerty keyboards. That is because the letters on most keyboards, reading from left to right, begin with q-w-e-r-t-y. Some companies tried introducing new keyboards in which the keys were in a different configuration, but they never took off.

The reason for the new configuration was that researchers had found that the most optimal configuration of keys that allowed the fastest possible typing was not the qwerty configuration. The reason nobody bought the new configuration, however, was because they were already used to the qwerty configuration. That's really too bad, because I would have liked to try it out ... but then I would be the only one using it, and I would have had to switch back to qwerty.

This is similar to the ergonomic keyboard I used to have.
Check it out here.

I was considering buying this adjustable travel ergonomic keyboard,
but I'll have to look into the reviews. It snaps into its own cover, to keep it safe!
Check it out here.