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.

The intricacies of intellectual property law baffle me, in their often convoluted and retrograde manner of dealing with digital information. I can’t even imagine how a young child might begin to understand the legal “rights” and “wrongs” of file sharing, and the possible repercussions of downloading the latest Shayne Ward album.

Fortunately there is no longer a need to guess, as TorrentFreak has posted an illuminating interview with “Hannah”, a nine-year-old girl, in which they talk about downloading music, lawsuits, and what pirates are (answer: “they have parrots”).

Here’s a choice excerpt:

TF: Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

Hannah: Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF: Why is it illegal?

Hannah: Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

Via Kottke.org.

My nomination for best sports-related quote of the year goes to Ottawa Senators’ forward Dean McAmmond:

“People say I have got concussion problems, but I don’t have concussion problems. I have got a problem with people giving me traumatic blows to the head, that’s what I have got a problem with.”

McAmmond comments on his third NHL concussion, suffered when he was leveled by Philadelphia Flyers prospect Steve Downie in a preseason game Tuesday.