Realizing a new Mira costs more than did my first car, I'm not gonna berate anyone for not making the jump, but to quote Ferris Bueller, "If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." I've had mine for roughly nine months, and in that time, fatigue has ceased to be an issue, my wrist pain has vanished, and now that I learned how to adjust the damn thing, my stacking problems (two strokes merging into one unidentifiable jumble of crap... like you didn't already know that) are vastly improved.

Now, I've dealt with writer stack since day one, when I shimmed my Stentura down to a stroke shallower than Paris Hilton. Of course, there was that decade where Stenograph's stance was there was no such thing as stacking, but with the end of the Cold War and the desclassification of several high-level documents, lo and behold, they've now acknowledged its existence and even showed the liasion committee at the Annual STAR Conference how to fine-tune the Mira to minimize the problem. Since everyone should love their Mira as much as I do and I'm not sure this procedure is actually documented anywhere, I offer this how-to guide:

1. Pop the hood on your Mira and turn the white Tension Knob to the right all the way to its stop.

2. Turn the reddish-orange Stroke Depth knob until the keys are at their highest point. This knob acts like a cam, so one click past the highest position takes you back to the lowest. You'll figger it out.

3. Spin all the Dials to 5½.

4. Turn on your Mira and go to Key Test (More, Diag, Key Test - Button #6, #2, #1 from the main menu).

5. You now want to adjust the Dial for each key so that the beep corresponds with the key hitting its stopping point on the downstroke. If you hear the beep before the key stops its downward path, crank up the Dial one click higher, e.g., 5½ to 6, and try again. If you get the beep late or not at all, turn the Dial back one click towards 1, lather, rinse and repeat. Do this for each key, including the number bar.

   If you have a hard time "envisioning" the bottom of the stroke, turn the Dial all the way to 8. Likely you won't get a beep without pushing über-hard on the key. Now back off the Dial click by click until you get the beep just as you feel the key hitting rubber. That's the sweet spot.

6. Lastly, readjust the Stroke Depth knob back to your desired setting, bearing in mind the shallower the stroke, the more likely you are to have stacking. Crank it up as deep as you can stand it.

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey