Swapping keyboards is complicated

http://www.sense-lang.org/typing/games/balloon.php?key=EN

My current favorite typing tutor. I have swapped to a Kinesis Freestyle keyboard and its been a bit of an adaption curve. This site provides some useful exercises to help get me back up to speed.

I started by moving the whole keyboard to the ideal 30 degree split but found it too much too soon and put it back together. I have since been progressively moving the angle and adapting slowly.  I am still not a fan of the key layout. I appreciate the loss of the numeric keypad but I have some kind of brain failure with the backspace and delete keys. I constantly seem to be getting them backward. Mainly because the delete key is approximately where I expect the backspace key to be which works the reverse of my intuitive expectation, then when I realize the mistake, I have to consciously think about the solution and it gets very messy. Suffice to say its working itself out but breaking long habits is challenging without the regular practice of a keyboard trainer.

The other irritating thing is the keys on the left hand side of the keyboard. They are essentially useless. They are sort of shortcut keys to reduce RSI but need to be completely learned. My biggest problem is I keep trying to feel for the lower left ctrl key which used to be the left most bottom key, but now its not. I keep hitting the shortcut key for context menus instead.  Like I said, irritating but not life ending.

I have also been using the Evoluent upright mouse for a while. I would say that my adaption to it has been less useful. I still habitually try to hold it from the top down. And I find my coordination and precision is pretty crap when I do hold it the right way. Rather than driving from the wrist, I find I end up moving from the elbow which is much less precise. Probably from lack of practice. Still its a whole new set of muscles and nerves to train so it would be good to get some mouse training games happening.
I happened to do some timed testing tasks with it the other day and my coordination was a bit slower than usual and it made me feel like I was fighting the mouse rather than it being an intuitive extension of my hand.

Blah.  I am still not game to try the Kinesis advantage keyboard. I'm worried that if I adapt to that I will get even less capable with all the normal keyboards I use every day. As a Tech I need to be able to work on any of the computers in the place and not being able to drive the keyboards I find would be a big disadvantage. I'm still wondering if I can maintain two similar sets of competency without making a mess of both (as usually happens for me)