5 million keystrokes in a year

That’s how many times i pressed a button on my keyboard at home in the last 365 days. After getting my new XPS 420 in may last year, i splashed out and got a logitech mx 3200 keyboard and mouse combo.

The keyboard has many cool features and one of them is a character counter. It current reads 4,883,454. That’s quite a staggering statistic. Almost 5 MILLION buttons i’ve pressed on my home keyboard in a year. Given the fact i usually spend around 5 hours in bed and 9 hours in college for about half of the year, i’ve probabled pressed double that amount of keys between my netbook and college PCs.

I do most of my blogging at home, and given the fact i’ve racked up a word count approaching 400,000 on this blog over 2 and ahalf years, it’s not that surprising really when you think about it. 300 blog posts at 500 words each make up about 4000 characters each. So that’d be 1.2m right away just used up on blogging and in reality it’s probably much greater than that – i’d say 50% is down to blogging.

I’d be interested to see if anyone else can provide these sort of stats, because i’m pretty sure i’m smashing the average user’s character count I spend a lot of my time writing… whether it’s blogging, writing plans, reports, posting on forums, emails etc… i always edit and spell check and re-word things too before i’ll publish or send anything so that contributes to the character count as well.

It’s a tremendous waste of kinetic energy though. 5 million times i’ve pushed a button that could have been powering something or generating energy. All be it on a small scale. Anyway, it just goes to show how valuable fingers are. I can’t think of what film it’s in, but some guy threatened to break another guy’s legs and he said “Go ahead – i don’t need them anyway, i’m a computer programmer”

That’s kind of the way i feel. So long as i have my brain and my hands, i’ll be able to work. I do use both hands too when typing and i’ve noticed a great improvement in the speed at which i type since i started blogging. Anyway almost 5m on the clock and heres to another 5m!