First Quarter

I've been doing a lot more business CART now that I'm working for a new company. I get to cover lots of meetings, mostly about the status of various projects. It's really tough, because I never know what anyone's talking about. Every job is about a different topic with different speakers, and sometimes the meeting only lasts for 15 minutes, so I barely have time to get into any sort of rhythm.

One of my classes is cultural anthropology. The teacher uses a lot of what I like to call "$10 words"; one that sticks out is "tutelage." There's all kinds of weird terms, like patrilineal, matrilateral, Ju'/hoansi, ethnography, you name it. The teacher only talks at about 160 wpm, but it's tough keeping up with all the weird stuff that's not in my dictionary, or at least not in there the way I want to write it. It's kind of fun though to fingerspell something and then look over at the Auto-brief window and see if it was already in my dictionary or not. AB shows me a suggestion for the word in one place if it's already in there as something, and in a different place if it's not.

I don't have to edit the transcripts at all for this company (most of the time I don't even have to send one in), which is pretty cool. I still go through them for myself and identify problems/add words to my dictionary, though. I also run them through a Microsoft Word spellcheck when I'm all done fixing things, and I usually catch one or two more things I can change in my dictionary that way.

I was concerned that when I need to fingerspell something, I don't necessarily remember after the event is over that I had to fingerspell it, so it will never get in my dictionary. I couldn't find anything that would really help me search a tript for fingerspelling, so I came up with my own way of doing it. I go through the whole tript and find every instance of the stroke A* (which is my &A), and check for words I need to enter. Then I go through again and check for E* (which is &E). I figure most words probably had an A and/or an E in them, and call it good. I find a lot of first/last names that way.

I was actually getting backed up on transcripts that I needed to go back and look at for a couple weeks. If I had a repeat job for the same class/person, I would edit the transcript before that repeat job, but so many of them were just one-offs that I never had time to edit. I finally got them all cleared out today, though. It seemed like an impossible dream, but somehow it happened!

I'm kind of interested to get into captioning and hopefully have some commercial breaks. CART ends early a lot of the time (never during my anthropology class, unfortunately), but it can be non-stop writing for hours. It's really tough on my arm when I have to do that. If I could get in a few commercial breaks, I think it would help a lot with the pain.