Sarah Davies

Dvorak is a simplified keyboard layout that allows for easier faster typing. I’ve tried switching to it a few times by doing online tutorials, but I never spent enough time on them to become fluent. This time I’m taking a different approach. I printed out a cheat sheet from DVzine.org and I’m going cold turkey. I’m still pretty slow, but I’m getting faster, and I’m not switching back to qwerty unless I have a tight deadline, and then I’m switching right back!

I’m proud to say this entire post was coded in Dvorak!

Look what I made!
Marijuana | It’s time for a conversation

ACLU of Washington launched a marijuana decriminalization campaign aimed at suburban moms. It includes an infomercial available free on Comcast On Demand hosted by Rick Steves. ACLU has never done an infomercial before. Marches? Yes. Stickers? You bet. Spamming senators who vote for FISA? Daily. Lawsuits? When are we not in the middle of three lawsuits??? But never infomercials. We’re broadening our horizons. Reaching out into the great beyond that is rural America.

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The website is built on WordPress, just for ease of content management. Our privacy policy requires that any personal information we accept online is secure, so I had to actually hack a couple of WordPress templates and use iframes to make the forms appear from a different server. The flash video player is open source. The flash game I made myself (my very first flash project!).
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This is the first part of the site that I’ve convinced them to put under creative commons. The grand evil plan is to eventually have the main ACLU site that way too.

The newest addition to our family:

My new XO laptop finally arrived today!  I haven’t played with it much yet, but I set it up on a table at ACLU and people here keep walking up and composing songs or drawing pictures or making videos.  It really speaks to what an incredibly useful and usable tool this is.

Now to take it home and let the 6-year-old at it; hopefully she’ll be willing to do a video review for you, dear readers.   Stay tuned!