10.23

     Looking through every dictionary with B in it is turning out to be more useful than I thought. I'm discovering a lot of potential word boundary conflicts. So far, I've come up with -log, -list, -lift, -top, -mark, -stick, -plate, -rack, -store, -worm, -dock, and -neck. I also had to figure out a way to distinguish between "ball," -bal, and -ball. I was already doing BA*UL for -ball since I discovered a problem with that a long time ago, but I had never actually changed the dictionary entries to reflect it! I wound up doing BAL for "ball" and B*AL for -bal, so the only part I have to try to remember is B*AL.

     I still have 35k entries to go through, but at least I feel like I'm doing a little more than just getting in a few inflected endings a day.

10.16

     I'm trying out something new with the Report-It: focusing on my wrists. Trying to make them straight instead of tilted down. So far I can either get into a position where my shoulders/arms are comfortable, or I can get into one where I can actually stroke the keys, but not both at the same time. Someday.

     I got all of my drill speeds up to 120, and my average drill speed is now 140. I also spent about two and a half hours going through my dictionary and deleting all the briefs for phrases that I didn't even know were in there, because I never learned them. They just came pre-loaded on the StenEd dictionary. I wound up deleting 2400 (or actually, moving them out of my dictionary into their own dictionary, since I'm trying to remember not to actually "delete" anything anymore).

     While I was doing that, I discovered some more things that could have been word boundary problems. I found some phrases like "bill folded" that made me wonder if BIL/FOELD was defined as "billfold," and, in fact, it was. I wound up fixing issues with -fold, -rest, -watch, and -end. I also realized I was using the same stroke for fer- and -fer, and in fixing that I also fixed -vent and -tile. I'm trying to remember to asterisk any word ending that's also a word on its own.

     My next big project is to go through all the entries in my dictionary that have B and/or P in them and add inflected endings to the verbs. Eclipse 5 has the awsome feature of automatically translating your integral prefixes and stuffixes, which is great except in the case of N. NG and ND cause way too many conflicts, so I don't want them to be automatically translated, which means I can't have BG/BD or PG/PD in the table, either, and I'll have to manually enter all of those.

     I've got 45k entries with B in them, and I only knocked out 4500 in my first go at it today, so I'm not going to be moving on anytime soon.

StenEd: Y U No Be Conflict-Free?

     I've hit a major roadblock in my speedbuilding, and it's really starting to become aggravating. I haven't made any progress in a whole year. I'm supposed to have been "graduated" by now! Ugh. All I can do is keep plugging away at it, I guess. I don't know what the big problem is with this 2-minute section, though. It's really starting to lose all meaning at this point.

     I did finally accomplish something, though: I made it through the list of conflict-finding sentences! At first I was just going through it and if the sentence didn't produce a conflict, I moved on. But sometimes that was just because of a particular brief I had. So I took a closer look at what the sentence was trying to show me (that you shouldn't have the same outline for PER-, -PER and PER, for example) and made sure I wouldn't have any conflicts in any situation, not just the one presented by the sentence.

     I discovered a lot of flaws in my own personal theory, and in StenEd, the above example being one of them. At the end of the exercise, I had a problem with: -con, -ran, -less, -fin, -den, -mine, -lean, -net, -lent, -rise, -set, -let, -size, -sit, -stance, -ate, -wait, -pal, -lay, -nut, -plain, -lies, -man, -jer, -win, est-, -til, -mit, Ron-, and -ster. A lot of them are easy fixes, like adding an asterisk to the word part and leaving the actual words as they are, and I didn't have to change a huge amount of entries. However, there were some word parts that took more work. They were, with number of entries I had to fix: -tic/tic/tick (200), -cal/cal/-cal (345), ter/-ter (277), -rate (113), -ton (115), and -ship (92).

     Tick/tic/-tic was particularly problematic. TIK for tick, obviously, and T*IK for tic, but I couldn't do T-K for -tic because that's my "it can." So I went with T*K. The real problem is going to be remembering my resolutions for all of this stuff. Why couldn't StenEd have just actually been a conflict-free realtime theory, instead of being one "most of the time"?

     With all the stuff I had to fix, I was beginning to think I should've just left the asterisks in all of my ending word parts, because now I have to try to remember which ones have asterisks and which ones don't. I tried to delete the vowels or do something other than just add an asterisk to make it easier to remember.  Hopefully the number of ones I wound up just doing asterisks for is going to be small enough that I can learn them without inducing massive amounts of hesitation.

     I also spent about half an hour going through all of my capitalized entries and forcing literal case on names like "De Niro." I already had most of them done, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any and it would all be consistent.