Have you ever started writing an email and found yourself thinking: “I haven’t had a drink in hours, yet I still can’t manage to string three words together without a typo. I must be going mad!” Only then do you glance down at your hands and realize that you’re not suffering from the shakes, but rather the letters on your keyboard are all switched around. And unless it’s nerdy April Fool’s day joke, you’re likely looking at a foreign language keyboard.

I’ve fallen prey to the non-English keyboard several times, including a long standing feud between me and a bilingual Russian/Armenian PC keyboard while living in Armenia. And although the occasional encounter during a short trip might be a minor inconvenience, regular exposure to an unfamiliar keyboard can be enough to send your head through a monitor.

Fortunately for those at risk of keyboard-induced head trauma, keybr.com offers typing lessons in a several different languages and keyboard configurations.

The on-screen keyboard shows you where the various keys would be on, say, a Brazilian Portuguese keyboard so that you can practice before you ever leave home. You can even choose to type content from any RSS feed, killing two birds with one Rosetta Stone.

Now if you’re sticking around home for a while and have decided it’s time to evolve from a hunt-and-peck typist, Mashable has profiled 8 great sites that will help you learn to type faster properly. (Whatever you do, don’t miss out on QWERTY Warriors.)

A while back I worked with Tadamon, a Montreal-based collective working to build solidarity between activists in Montreal and Beirut, to develop a poster for their campaign to boycott the Israeli apartheid of Palestine. Having spent six weeks in the West Bank a few years ago, and having seen the economic and humanitarian impact of this apartheid first hand, helping them out with this was a no-brainer.

In designing the poster we tried to strike a balance between the amount of information presented and aesthetic appeal. Personally I would’ve cut down on the copy even more than we did, but we did condense the info considerably, and kept clutter under control. We ended up with a poster that got the point of Tadamon’s campaign across quickly, while including more nuanced details for anyone who decided to stick around and read it.

The finished design was silk-screened and hung around Montreal, and is now available for sale at Just Seeds, a “visual resistance artists’ cooperative’, with the proceeds going to Tadamon.

Here are a few photos I shot from “Lady J”, a show that first played at the Montreal Fringe Festival this past summer. Billed as “a satirical look at the breakdown between municipal authorities and the communities they represent”, the play presents the rape and murder of “Lady Justice” by a cop, a priest and a policeman. The photos had been collecting dust on my hard drive for quite some time, but my friend Koby, who wrote the script and plays Joe the cop, was looking to spice up a grant proposal for her company, Mischief Theatre, so I finally dug the files out and got editing. It was a pretty fun shoot, set in the graffiti adorned alley behind Foufounes Electriques and lit by the three halogen flood lamps they were using for stage lighting.

This was was also a good excuse to give Adobe Lightroom 1.3 for a whirl, as I had put off upgrading for a ridiculous amount of time. I’ve been using the software since early in the public beta stage, and although I’ve been happy with it since day one, the most recent upgrades have made it far more usable. The clarity feature introduced in 1.1 is definitely one of my favourites, just don’t go overboard with it.

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In this week’s episode of CSI, the ever-so-stylish forensic team examined a murder victim’s Twitter messages as part of their investigation. Of particular interest is a brief exchange between the two CSIs on the values of bloggers:

“Some people just don’t value privacy.”
“They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.”
“Whatever.”

I wonder if Twitter has found its way into any real life forensic investigations yet, and if so, whether the real life CSIs were as condescending as their fictional counterparts. I am of the mind that those of us who value such openness are far less likely to have problems with privacy issues than those who falsely assume they can keep the minutiae of their lives secret.

Given that every goon in Las Vegas seems to know the intimate details of the CSI characters’ personal lives, I would venture to say their quest for privacy has been a colossal failure. Perhaps they should give up and start blogging.

Interesting note: The Twitter account name in CSI was kiraEDGE, a profile which currently exists, although it’s not clear whether it’s actually affiliated with the tv show or someone cleverly locked it down afterwards.

Via Laughing Squid.

Tim O’Reilly’s delivers the keynote on Monday afternoon.

Day two has wrapped up at the sprawling Messe Berlin, with the notable exception of tonight’s “Berlin Night” party. So before I head out to geek out on pils, it’s time for today’s GB&U.

The Good: The Web2Open unconference opened today, with several delegate-created workshops and discussions providing the intimate learning and networking environment that the standard conference sessions cannot. Kathy Sierra’s talk today was once again spot on, if somewhat repetitive. Jeremy Keith recited seemingly meaningless yet surprisingly hilarious prose about wrapping a comatose Roy Orbison in cling film.

The Bad: Having a wtf moment while using the conference’s feedback application. Kathy would not approve. Also, wifi was still spotty in the morning, although they solved the food shortage.

The Ugly: Neil Holloway of Microsoft trying to convince Tim O’Reilly that people actually enjoy advertising. (Tim then asks for a show of hands of who enjoys television advertising. Few arms budged in the massive crowd, so it looks like Microsoft still has some kinks to work out in their strategy.)