Take a squiz at the excellent Kinesis ergo range here: kinesis-ergo.com.

A word of warning to anyone having one delivered to Australia - the import duty came to about $AUS100, as did the shipping...

After re-capping some basics in an on-line typing tutor (typingmaster.com), my tyoing is already at 26 wpm (30 wpm gross). My accuracy was only 85% (which the typing tutor called Intermediate) was mainly because my brain keeps forgetting which thumb has the space and whivh has the delete, combined with the fact that the program locked off a word once you typed a space.

My rythm, though, was only 43% which the program called Beginner - sheesh!

That's a pity, because there is almost no real reason for the average application to use mysql over postgres and a lot of good reasons TO use postgres.*

There are some nice howto's on shoehorning some of postgresql's advanced features into Active Record - like this one : Howto Use Postgres Views As Tables

* For a dissertation on why MySQL is not a good database see this article on OpenACS.org. Note that this article is old and some of the misgivings are dealt with in current MySQL versions, but not all - and those that are mostly require you to use InnoDB tables which remove much the speed benefit MySQl is supposed to deliver.

More up to date "gripe-lists" about MySQL can be found easily, such as MySQL Gotchas.

My biggest issue that prevents me from using it (even when it might seem a good choice) is the way that it makes arbitrary changes and casts to your data without asking. That's just going to make a big mess one day that I would rather not debug!

People who enjoyed this blog entry also enjoy Ruby on Rails, Postgres & other musings!