The Dvorak transition - Day zero

Today, or technically tonight, I decided to get rid of my old habit of writing using the qwerty -keymap and switch over to the more ergonomic and arguably faster (when used by a skilled typist, that is) alternative, Dvorak.

For those unfamiliar with keymaps, the current most popular keymap, qwerty (named after the first few letters of the top row), was specifically designed to be as slow as possible to type on in order to keep the early typewriters from jamming in the hands of a skilled typist, by placing the most commonly used keys as far away of each other as possible. Later (in the 1920's), this jamming error was fixed, and this guy called August Dvorak created a keymap where the most commonly used keys were located on the "home row" - the middle alphapetical row of keys on a keyboard - with vowels on the left and consonants on the right.
However, people had already gotten used to the inferior layout and didn't want to learn to write all over again, and the Dvorak keymap never saw worldwide acclaim.

Anyway, since learning a new layout is basically learning to touch-type from scratch, and the only way to learn touch-typing is by typing things, I figured I'd make a nightly log on the progress of my quest, at least until I get over the initial crankiness. Obviously this is the first entry.

So far progress is slow. On my old keymap I used to score 119 words per minute. On Dvorak, my initial result was 7wpm, after a few hours of prac hard, it was about 12. On the positive side, I already remember where all the keys are, so that I don't have to look at my reference sheet at all - I just don't have them in muscle memory like the qwerty layout.

For the record, it took me about an hour to write this message. Getting there!