11.6

     I finally got the two minutes together that I was working on. It only took me 7 weeks. Way longer than it should have, but I just can't get the positioning right. It's like when you type on someone else's keyboard. On your keyboard, you can type 100 wpm. On an unfamiliar keyboard, suddenly you're knocked down to 60. I feel like I've been writing on someone else's steno machine for the past 8 months, and it hasn't gotten any more familiar than it was on the very first day.
     I decided to go back to my old teacher's strategy of speedbuilding: learn the minute at a slow speed, then bump it up a speed until you're comfortable with that, and then bump it up one last time to your goal speed. I don't know what kind of progress I'll make with that strategy, but for now I'm liking writing at 180 wpm.
     I'm down to 8,440 entries with "B" in them that might need inflected endings added. I figured out a lot of ways to weed out things that weren't verbs, like looking at words that end in "y" or "s" or whatnot. I've also continued finding word parts that need to be asterisked: bone, stroke, nose, son, late, lock, hand, time, foot, wear, print, note, step, land, head, walk, and hold.
     I ran into particularly tedious problems with "out-" and "sub-". The old StenEd "out-" is O*UT, which is my "-out," so I had to move the asterisks in those outlines from the first stroke to the second one. I don't like the idea of "sub" and "sub-" being the same outline, so I had to add an asterisk to all the strokes that come after "sub-" (or at least the ones that are words on their own), like "submarine" and whatnot.