More New Stuff

Another new idea I picked up comes courtesy of Phoenix theory, via Jade King on her FB group. I think Phoenix doesn't use the asterisk for conflicts, and they teach the idea of stroking R-R after something there might be a problem with. So, mat might be MAT, and Matt would be MAT/R-R. I absolutely love it! I've used it for all sorts of things - Mayhew, Wei, Wie, Barr, Busch, Cannes, Pitt, Starr..the list could be endless! I'm fairly good about being able to use the asterisk for things like that, or being creative like KA*UN for Kahn, but there's only so much I can think of. As with all things, now the problem will be remembering which things I used R-R for. But if anything comes up frequently enough that I can actually remember it, it will be an easy stroke to use.

No one ever really said a.k.a. much in CART, but it seems to come up a lot on TV. Not only is it annoying having to fingerspell it every time, it looks weird in all caps when the rest of the sentence is also in all caps, so I came up with AIK/R-R as an outline for it.

I've also made briefs for a couple buzzwords that come up a lot - best practices (BIKTS) and takeaways (TA*EZ).

It took me forever, but a few weeks ago I finally figured out how to do credits properly. They're supposed to pop on in their entirity regardless of the fact that most captioning is roll-up and done in two or three lines. At first I thought I would just have a stroke with the entire caption as the definition, but that was still roll-up. Then I figured out how to read in a block file, but with the stations that do two lines, for example, only two out of three credit lines were showing up. I knew I could probably just ask the captioning company or a FB group, but I was determined to figure it out myself.

I finally happened upon the answer in the sports section of the new NJCaptions (now C2CC) captioner's manual. You can put a "position" tag in your stroke that reads the block file; and you put the pop-on as a script command in that block file, and voila! If you're doing an opening credit, you can put the position tag for the rest of the programming in its own stroke, and stroke that after you do the opening credit to put it back to two lines or however many you need. I feel so much better now that I can do the credits properly!

New Ideas

A new month already, and I actually have time to update within the first week! I don't have any interesting updates on anything, so I'll just have to write about some things I never have time to get to.

Steve Kosmata started doing a cool thing where he posts a short video once a week about stuff you can do in Eclipse; that's what inspired me to take a look at my most frequently used three-stroke words, although I had seen the suggestion to do that before. Last week he brought up the old "conflicts for not having to write puncutation" idea, which I'd also seen kicked around, but I just didn't want to get into it.

In the video, he mentioned using it for words that typically have a comma when they start a sentence - therefore, so, oh, etc. I didn't want to get *too* into it, but those seemed like they might work, so I sat down for an hour and a half or so and played around with it. It turned out to be a bigger project than I was expecting. There are so many words like that, and they could come at the beginning, middle, or end of the sentence, so you might need a comma before, after, before and after, or no commas at all.

I experimented with it, and if it didn't seem like it was going to pick correctly 99% of the time, I didn't go all the way with it. A couple of them I was able to do all four choices for; some of them I could only do two; and some of them I wound up tossing out the idea altogether. There are a ton of words I didn't experiment with, so I'm going to tackle one of those a day. Now the hard part is going to be remembering what words I don't have to write commas for, and in what situations I don't have to write the commas. I really haven't picked up on that at all yet, but I only put things in a couple days ago.

I also changed the function keys on my IE to act like S, so hopefully that will cut down on untrans from accidentally hitting them when I mean to hit S. I wanted to use them for speaker IDs, but it's just a project I don't want to start right now. On the LS, I used to occasionally reach my pinky too far and hit plastic instead of a key, so maybe having the function keys in the space where that plastic will be, and functioning just like the S, will actually be helpful.