1.05.12

     It's been a while since I updated. I'm still liking the tripod with my LS. I'd like to move away from it and go to a lapdesk at some point, but that's down the road when I've perfected my positioning. I think I'm making progress on that front, but it's definitely not dialed in yet. I've been working on my sitting posture, starting with getting comfortable in the legs and back, and adjusting everything else from there, on a daily basis. The past couple of days it's worked out pretty well.

     I got probably about 3 minutes into my last piece, and then I was ready to try out a new strategy I've been planning to start for a while. I completely abandoned the speed "tapes." The VITAC book suggests recording national news and practicing to that, and that seems like a pretty solid strategy. I really need practice writing spontaneously, and it's great for practicing a variety of names and terms instead of the same ones for two months at a time.

     The book suggests breaking the episode up into each individual story. First you listen to it in its entirity, and write down/practice any words you think might trip you up. I always come up with an alarming number of them, way more than I feel like I should have at this point. I've tweaked my theory so much though, I just don't have any of it in my muscle memory at all. Which is why I'm also going back through my theory book. That's something I've been trying to do for a long time, but I let myself get sidetracked with dictionary maintenance.

     Speaking of which, I got a lot done there. I finished all of my P and B inflected endings, and did 2-3 other things that I don't remember anymore. I have yet more I need to do, but I'm going to try to do that during non-practice time.

     After you run through the story without writing anything, you write the introduction alone until you've got it perfect, then the story, then the follow-up. It's awesome not having people blazing along at a constant 250 wpm anymore! I don't pick it up nearly as fast as I should; sometimes it takes me 2-3 hours just to get a 3 minute segment. But hopefully, you can't go wrong practicing at real speeds.

     I'm up to at least 130 wpm on all of my Phoenix drills, with an average speed of 150. I've been using the drill book for 30 weeks so far. Only another 30 to go if I keep up at this rate..

     For those of you following along, perhaps in your own dictionaries, here are the rest of the possible word-boundary errors I've fixed.

Final word parts:

light, ground, long, box, fish, hound, fight, shot, saw, bag, book, cuff, cap, string, sick, strong, break, sight, knife, pot, sake, proof, seed, spring, hood, cure, night, week, stop, pick, suit, shop, coat, drop, sack, paper, track, bite, lash, pipe, place, berry, play, lance, piece, field, spread, bug, bird, port, pit, beat, wood, weight, word, guard, bed

Instances that only affected one word:

heartthrob, hedgehog, henpeck, hitchhike, hoodwink, inkblot, ironclad, jackhammer, landlord, livestock, mankind, nightclub, paycheck, pinstripe, shoptalk, skyrocket, smokestack, spendthrift, sunroof, wisecrack, carefree, shipshape, sideswipe, switchblade, bedfellow, bellhop, jailbait, kidnap, netherworld, nosebleed, postpaid, postscript, snowplow, stopgap, teacup, wastebasket, watchdog, waterspout, wiretap, shopworn

I discovered that I was writing "fore-" and "fore" the same way (thanks StenEd), but I don't think I'm going to fix it. I also had a lot of problems with words that start with "up" (uphold, uphill, etc) and "air" (aircraft, airstrike, etc).

9.18

     I finally finished the VITAC book..sort of, anyway. I still have a few things in my dictionary I need to clean up, but I decided they weren't the most important things to get done right now. It only took me about 11 hours, which isn't bad at all, except for the fact that it took me about 3 months to get through those 11 hours of work.

     I got up to acceptable accuracy on that ridiculously difficult minute a week ago, and I'm still working on the first two minutes of that piece together. I hit 324 today, which was pretty exciting. I'm feeling even better about the Report-It, quite possibly the best I've ever felt, in fact. I got there by consciously forcing myself to get into proper position every time I started to write. Now though, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just going for what feels right/easiest and letting my shoulders tense up, so I think I need to examine that next time I write.

     I've gotten all of my drills up to 110 or better, and my average speed on them is now 134 wpm. In dictionary maintenance, I decided all words like "forum" should be written with *UM to avoid conflicting with the word "um," so I changed all 133 instances of that. I'm not so sure about it now since it contradicts my plan to add asterisks to words and keep them out of final word parts, but it always seemed wrong to me to use UM, so I guess I'll just give it a try.

     The next thing on my to-do list is to go through the NJCaptions conflict-finding sentences. I started doing it before I got the VITAC book, and now I want to start again from the beginning. I made it all the way through the first page in one sitting. I discovered that in StenEd, TOR- and -TOR are both TOR, which doesn't work at all, so today I spent half an hour going through all 700 -TOR entries and changing them to TO*R. I only had 53 TOR- entries, but I'm trying to write all of my initial word parts without asterisks, since that's how I learned most of them.

8.12

     Apparently at some point, I decided it was okay to define some "–ness" words using –NS rather than *NS. I realized that the other day, and I decided to go back and fix all of those entries.  It turns out I had 1,600 "–ness" entries, and about a third of them didn’t have asterisks, so yesterday I spent 45 minutes going through and fixing that.  I also looked at the next section of the VITAC book, which just happened to be alphabets.

     I was just thinking that I needed to really get in there and fix my alphabets, so, then of course I had to.  I spent about an hour evaluating which ones I needed and how I was going to define them.  I wound up with five. The first two I already used and didn’t change. An uppercase and a lowercase way to type the letters in my global window (or anywhere I happen to be, theoretically, but the global window is the only place I use it). Those are A*RBGS and A-PG, respectively.

     I also needed one for capital letters with periods, so that was easy, A*FPLT.  Then I did one for standalone capital letters, A*, and one to just attach a lowercase letter to the last word, A*PG.  I decided that I’ll use a separate stroke to go back and stitch a word, make it lowercase, or start it with a capital letter.  I haven’t figured out how I’m going to do that yet, though.

7.24

     I made it through three sections of the VITAC book in one day.  One was about homephones, which I pretty much had worked out already from StenEd.  The next was prefixes and suffixes, and luckily there aren’t that many in the VITAC book.    I did skip a few, and there are a few I still need to learn.  I spent most of the time in that section on the "medical and technical" ones.  The last section was 25 pages of words that might create conflicts.  Going through that wasn’t any fun at all.

     I think I might have found a good position for the BackJoy and the Report-It and everything.  It’s not perfect, so I’m still tweaking it, but maybe someday soon I won’t feel like I’m fighting to hit the right keys anymore.  I got my last minute on Wednesday, and I got that one and the one before it together yesterday at 96.5% accuracy.  The new minute doesn’t seem too hard, and it’s at 230 wpm.

7.17

     I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK.  The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well.  As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary.  I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.

     When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ.  But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.

     I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that.  The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without.  I have no idea why.

     I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago.  Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.

     The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary.  Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.

     The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG.  I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird.  I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far.  I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway.  I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project

     The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts.  I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it.  The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.

     It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway.  It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either.  And of course, the biggest  suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings.  I don’t see any reason to give that up.

     So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later.  I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.

     I got this BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast.  I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.

Task List: July

• Delete all entries that include -TD for words like "edited"
• Do 8 sections of the VITAC book
• Re-do the NJCaptions list of prefixes and suffixes
• Write through the conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site
• Delete unused briefs from my dictionary
• Global words/note errors in broadcast transcripts

6.21

     My new minute seems easy, but they always do. I got up to 214 at the end already, though. I wound up having to go down a speed on both of my drills today. One of them was SHR. StenEd says to do, for example, SH/RED for such things, but I picked up the idea of SWR from depoman. Of course, then I never actually learned it, so in order to write all five columns perfectly today, I had to drop down to 50 wpm. It felt good to get them at any speed, though.

     I more or less learned to do consonant + OE for suffixes, and consonant + O for prefixes. So "audio" would be AUD/YOE, and "audiophile" would be AUD/YO/FAOIL. Today I went through about 70 OE entries I had added asterisks to and got rid of the asterisks. The VITAC book suggests using STK for Z instead of S*, which I think is a great idea since I actually have had a few conflicts come up, with "s" words that I wanted to capitalize with an asterisk but couldn’t because that made a "z" word, and whatnot. As I was going through my O*E words, I changed a few "z" words, too. Then I changed all my "-zy" words to STKEU, and then I went ahead and just changed all the "z" words in the entire dictionary, which was only about 150.

     I don’t have the foggiest idea what "katzenjammer" means, but apparently I’ve got two ways to write it if it ever comes up.

6.20

     I’ve made things difficult for myself with the Report-It again. I realized that in the new position, I was focusing on keeping my shoulders down so I wouldn’t have tension in them. But that was a kind of tension, too, and I wasn’t completely relaxed in that position, either. So I needed to find a place to put the Report-It where my shoulders would be completely relaxed, and now that’s been driving me crazy again.

     You know how sometimes, your machine just isn’t quite in the right spot, and you have to slightly adjust your own positioning to account for it, and really fight to get down every word, because you can’t stop to move the machine? I’ve been writing every word like that for the past month. It’s going to be good when I get it right though, I know it is.

     I finally got something right today. It was a horrible day for practice. I spent the first 2 hours messing with the Report-It. I didn’t record how long I spent on the drill book, but it was a long time. I finally made it all the way through yesterday, and I also went back and re-did an exercise for the first time. Each day I’m going to do the two that I have the slowest currently recorded speeds for. My worst speed, which was only on one exercise thankfully (the FR one), was 50 wpm.

     Unfortunately, I couldn’t best that speed yesterday. But today, I doubled it! I got the words at 100 wpm. I decided that if I have a misstroke already defined in my dictionary, and I write the word that way, it counts as being correct. It doesn’t matter if I’m training myself to write it incorrectly as long as it translates and doesn’t conflict with anything. That took a long time though, writing all 65 words enough times to double the speed, and then I had to do my next-slowest exercise. SKW, 55 wpm. I couldn’t even do it at 55 though. I had to drop it down to 50.

     It was well past my normal homework time by the time I started speedbuilding in earnest (8 hours past, in fact) and I wasn’t expecting much out of it since I never really got the Report-It where I wanted it. But then, I wrote my piece (or at least the last two minutes, which is all I’m counting for accuracy) all the way through, and it was at 95% accuracy! After writing the same 4 minutes over and over for the past month, I finally get to move on to..the last minute on this piece!

     I know what you’re thinking: if you could write 2 minutes individually at 95% accuracy, and it took you a month to be able to write them together at 95% (with 2 minutes in front of them), maybe that speed is too high. But I maintain that it would’ve happened a lot faster if I hadn’t been struggling with the Report-It the entire time.

     StenEd teaches that "any" is NI and "-ny" is N*I. That’s a little weird, though. None of the other –y suffixes have asterisks, so why not just make "any" N*I or something? I was just going to leave it, even though the VITAC book says “-ny” should be NI, but I decided I’d rather go for consistency, so I changed all 176 dictionary entries that had the N*I. Now I have to learn to write "any" as NE. That’s what the book suggested, and I liked the idea of leaving N*I open for other things. I also found a few dozen entries that started with "OR," which I can’t have because that’s my stroke for the word "or," so I fixed those.

6.15

     I am starting to show some progress on my piece again, although I don’t really feel any better about it.  I'm consistently getting to 250 wpm at the end, and I have even hit six strokes per minute a couple of times.  Both times were when I was trying very hard to go as slowly and write as cleanly as possible.  It’s so weird how I always wind up going fastest when I’m trying to write the slowest, and I write the slowest when I’m trying to go faster.

     I had time for about two more hours of dictionary maintenance today. I started by going back to the suffixes.  The general consensus on depoman was that I should have as many prefixes and suffixes as I could use, but I decided that I hadn’t done all of that work in vain.  I finished weeding out all the suffixes that needed to keep their asterisks, like the ones that are just words like "woods,"  and also ones that included –th and –v. I put all of those back in my dictionary.  Then I deleted all of the suffixes that started with DL- that I made when I went through the NJCaptions list.

     Then, I went through all 780 suffixes that were left and took the asterisks out of them.  Then I had about 800 suffixes that needed to be reintroduced into my dictionary, now sans asterisks.  As I put them back in, if there were any conflicts I mostly just didn’t enter the suffix.  I know a lot of them came from Mark’s dictionary, and those aren’t exactly vital for me to have.
     My plan now is that after I go through the VITAC book, I’ll go back through the NJCaptions list again and make suffixes and prefixes again, because I’ll probably want to make them differently than the first time around.  After I’ve done that I’ll have to go through the big list of conflict-finding sentences on the Phoenix site.

     After that I went through my dictionary and found all of the words that start with RI or TI or anything like that and either changed them or got rid of them.  The one problem I didn’t fix was that fact that StenEd teaches that DI should be used for di- and –dy, which doesn’t seem like a good idea.  But I’m not going to worry about that for now.

     Then I discovered that I don’t have to worry about the next four concepts in the VITAC book, because they’re already accounted for in my theory.  The last concept halfway was.  Since I use EN to start words, I’m not supposed to use it in the middle of words, but I do, so I had to go through about 250 entries that were in my dictionary and either delete them because I wouldn’t write them that way anyway, or change the EN to just N.
     The next thing I had to fix was the fact that I both started and ended words with EL, so I had to fix/delete 113 entries for that. I didn't have to worry about the next concept, but the last one in the "word boundary errors" section is a doozy. The book says to use ER for -er and -or, and to that end, gives you a list of 268 -or words that you should make sure translate properly in your dictionary. Based on how I break up words, it turns out most of these would involve a tucked R - activator, for example, is just ACT/VAIRT.
      Now that I think about it, actually, I'll probably just come back to the list another time. I want to go through the book and figure out what things I need to change in my writing before I go back to just dictionary-building. So that's the first section of the book "done." It took me 6 hours, and I still have 8 sections left.

6.13

     I am getting really good at fingerspelling "mastectomy."  I’ve got it defined 16 different ways in my dictionary.  I’ve done about 4 hours of dictionary maintenance today.  First I went through and fixed all the "-y" suffixes that had asterisks in them, like –ty, -ly, etc.  That was 2500 entries.  There were another 1200 I didn’t have to fix because I never got around to adding the asterisks to them in the first place.  That took up most of the time.  I was going to delete all the asterisks I added, but I couldn’t figure out a way to find them for anything else, so I guess I’ll just have to do those as I find them.

     Then I decided I ought to get the rest of my prefixes and suffixes in order before I went through more of the book.  According to the book, you’re only supposed to have "true" prefixes and suffixes defined as such, that is, ones that attach to root words that can stand alone.  Using the example from the book, stuff like "URE" isn’t supposed to get defined as a suffix because it's really just a word part and it might mess up other stuff. 
     I decided I should delete all those extra prefixes and suffixes I have in there.  I spent about an hour and a half going through the suffixes.  I decided to keep all the ones that are words, like "field" and "land" and whatnot, because that's how I make compound words, by adding asterisks to them, and I’m going to keep doing that.  That’s how I’ve always done it.

     I also decided to keep my special alphabets. I have a different way to write –by, -bi, -bee, -be, -bey, etc. for all the consonants.  That'll help with proper names and whatnot.  So, after I got through about 1300 of the suffixes, it occurred to me that I really do use a lot of those "word parts," and I think real captioners do, too, so despite what the VITAC book says, I might want to leave them in.  And I might have just wasted all of that time.
     Ever since one of my theory classes, I’ve had a table of 50 briefs I want to learn that I practice every day, either to memorize them (which usually doesn’t take long) or to get the fingering down.  For a while now, I haven’t been adding any new ones to the list because I wanted to incorporate the ways I’ve been changing my writing into the table so I could start actually learning them.
    I guess it’s a good thing I never got around to it, since I decided to unlearn that stuff anyaway.  Today I finally added a couple of of the "-y" suffixes to it: ten words each from –dy and –ry.  Then I remembered that I wanted to put the Phoenix-inspired changes I made to integrated endings in there first, so I had to figure out what to put in.  I wound up doing ten words each that end with –ling and –ned, since I have to remember to stroke the endings on those separately now.

Operation Delete All Asterisks

     I also had time to actually start on the VITAC book.  The very first thing it talks about is distinguishing starting, middle, and ending sounds.  For example, with the long E, it says you should do RE to start, no matter what the spelling is, RAOE in the middle, and RI at the end.  That’s actually what I already did when I learned StenEd, but then I added an asterisk to RI, because I thought it would conflict with things like ridiculous, which I wrote with RI.

     I did a horrible job recording what I changed, with StenoMaster and my asterisks and suffixes and everything, so I decided that with the VITAC book, I was going to make a list of everything I changed and actually practice and learn all of it.  I realized, though, that I never fully, 100% committed to and learned the asterisk in all of the -y endings -- -ty, -ry, -ly, etc.  So I had to put them on the list of things I needed to practice and learn. 

     And then I thought, since I never really learned this asterisk business in the first place, and since the VITAC book is going to have a different solution for any possible conflict I would have had that I was trying to avoid by using the asterisks…why keep trying to learn the asterisks?  Why not just go back to writing everything the StenEd way, and only make changes from the VITAC book?

     It was an incredibly freeing thought.  I haven’t made any progress at all in my writing for the past ten months because in September, I started with the StenoMaster, and in January I gave up on that and started with the asterisks, and somewhere in there I added all of these suffixes. I literally have 2000 suffixes and 500 prefixes. All of that pretty much destroyed my writing altogether. 

     Of course, now it’s going to be hard to unlearn what I have trained myself to do with the asterisks, but I think it will be for the best.  There are a few suffixes I’m going to have to remember to do with asterisks.  I looked through the entire VITAC book last night to see just how many there were.  It only took about half an hour, and I discovered that there aren’t many.

     I think giving up on these asterisks, and all the extra prefixes and suffixes that I never learned anyway, is the most exciting thing in steno since I learned about StenoMaster, which I was quite excited about.  The VITAC book actually does suggest one StenoMaster principle, which is using F instead of S/K, so BAFK instead of BAS/K.  That's still a hard one for me, but I've never stopped trying to use it.

    Unfortunately, now I have to go through my dictionary and delete all the things I put in with asterisks, which is going to be quite a project indeed.

Square One

     I’ve been feeling very frustrated with my writing lately.  I feel like I've changed so many things from StenEd.  I started with integrating endings, and that opened a whole can of worms and conflicts.  Now when I write, I’m always trying to remember to incorporate endings, or remember which ones I can’t do, and especially now that I read about the ones I can’t incorporate on Phoenix, I’m worrying about that, too.

     When I got the Magnum Steno book, I decided to put all the prefixes and suffixes in my dictionary, and that caused some conflicts, so I tried to change the way I write some things.  I never practiced them, though, so when I tested for Caption Masters, a few things came out wrong, and the instructor suggested that I add asterisks to all of my suffixes.  I didn’t really know what was or what should be a suffix though, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to figure out "is this actually a suffix, or just a second stroke" when I was writing, so I decided to add asterisks to all of my second strokes, but I didn’t really commit to it, and I just kind of do it when it comes naturally, but it’s still something that slows me down when I write.  Even though I should just do an asterisk on all of my second strokes, I always have that moment of hesitation where I wonder, "do I need one here or not?"

     Then I bought the Broadcast Captioning Training Manual from NJCaptions, and I decided to add all the prefixes and suffixes that were listed in it to my dictionary, and that caused all kinds of conflicts and problems and things I had to come up with alternate ways of writing in order to fix.  I started using DL- at the start of my suffixes, because there were times when the outline for the suffix by itself was a regular word, and I needed to use that same outline as a prefix and a suffix, so I put the asterisk in the prefix, and then I didn’t have any way to distinguish the suffix, so, DL- worked great.  But I didn’t want to have to remember which ones needed DL and which ones didn’t, so where possible, I just created all of them with DL-.  So that’s another thing I have to think about; remembering the DL, and all the other things like it that I added.

     That’s basically the extent of it, but I feel like it’s really hurting my speed.  It seems like every time I hear a word, I experience massive hesistation where I have to think, "how am I supposed to write that now?" It’s all for the better because my writing will be truly conflict free, unlike it was with just the StenEd, where, for instance, the outline for the word con, and for words starting with con and for words ending with con were all the same.  But I almost feel like I’ve created this mutant theory, and I need to go back to square one and go back through my theory book and start completely over and do it all again, spend six months writing through all the exercises and word lists and train myself to write the way I want to now.

     I don’t have time for that kind of thing though, not unless I stop speedbuilding, and I certainly don’t want to do that.  I think, though, before I start going through my dictionary wholesale and trying to fix everything to at least translate properly when I remember to write it the way I want to, I’m going to work through the VITAC book, since I’m probably going to change even more things as I do that.  It talks about what is and what isn't a suffix, and has ways to fix basically all the conflicts.  I wish I had started with it and only changed things based on it to begin with.

     In other news, I got my minute today.  I don’t feel too much accomplishment about that though, because it was only at 215.  That’s the annoying thing about Realtime Coach.  Even though it says a piece is at a certain speed, it’s really not.  It’s all over the map.  It could start faster than it says it is, and then get slower than it says it is, and then be at the right speed for a minute.  It’s crazy.  I decided to just ignore that and practice the ones that say they’re the speed I want, though.

5.18

     I ordered the VITAC book.  I had the bright idea to e-mail VITAC directly and see if they knew where I could get one, and someone e-mailed me back the next day saying I could call and order from them.  It’s a good thing I had poked around the VITAC site a bit, because the e-mail simply came from the author of the book and had no subject!  I discovered this morning that there are actually still three seats open in the Caption Masters class.  I guess the other display was an error.  So I might still be able to take that in July, and all the information in the VITAC book might be discussed in the class, but that’s all right.  You can never have too many steno books, I guess. 

     Yesterday I was on depoman searching for posts about something or other, and I came across the suggestion that one should add dictionary entries from the machine to practice fingerspelling.  And it’s a useful thing to be able to do, anyway.  So I spent a good hour yesterday getting that all set up.  I’m still trying to figure out my alphabets, though.  I need to have a way to fingerspell in capital and lowercase in realtime and in the global window, so that’s four alphabets.  I spent some time on it today and I think I have it worked out.

     I got my two minutes together today, and I also managed to stack three words, although not on that final take.  "Here and staying" came out as STKPHAOEURG.  I got to record a drill exercise at 120, which is better than I’ve done for the past 2 days,  but I also had to record one at 50.  Apparently, I have a really, really hard time with "fr-" words, which is weird because FR is my brief for from, which I write all the time.

     It’s really fun to be able to do things from the machine.  After every take, I go back and write any mis-strokes five times, along with the words before and after them.  It was always a hassle to take my hands off the machine to scroll down through the take, but now I don’t have to!  

5.15

     I got my minute today!  I practiced writing it for about half an hour, and then on the very last runthrough before I was going to take a break, I decided to loosen up a little and not be so strict about accuracy, and I got it at 250 wpm (at the end, anyway) and 96% accuracy!  It took me exactly a week, which isn’t bad at all.  I think it was easier material than the rest of the piece has been, though.

     I realized that I really like writing to a metronome.  It’s almost calming, knowing that everything is going to happen at exactly the same speed.  I also like how there’s not really any pressure, at least not right now when I’m just seeing what my top speed is on all the exercises.  Yesterday my average speed actually went up from 125 to 129, but today it went back down to 127.  I had to record something at 75 wpm, which is insanely slow.  It had to do with PL-, which I’m apparently very bad at. “Fruit” was thrown in, too, though, and I guess all of those PL- words with an FR- word in the middle really threw me off. I think I have problems with F- in general.

     The Phoenix book talks about how important keyboard position is, so you’re able to reach all the keys easily.  I decided to try lowering my machine a bit.  I use the plastic case it came in as a lap desk, so to lower it, I opened the case and started writing on just the thicker half.  It looks weird and I don’t know if I could do it if I had a desk in front of my legs, but it seems to feel a lot better.  I should probably buy a real lap desk, but I like the idea of not having to bring it with me or spend money on it.

     I think the new position has helped, though, because ever since I got the LS, I’ve had to actually put my fingers on the home row to figure out where the machine is every time I take my hands off it, which I never had to do with the SRT. I had to define 150 null strokes because I would of course never hit the home row, but it would still help me know where I was.  I created my last one on the 6^th.  I can’t really be sure if I’m using the null strokes less, but it seems like I am.

     I don’t know if it was inspired by the Phoenix book or not, but I also decided to file my nails extremely short.  I always kept them short to help me write, but I was never truly writing with my fingertips like you’re supposed to.  I filed them down yesterday after my practice, as low as I could go without hurting myself.  They look really pathetic now and it’s actually rather depressing.  I like writing with them short, though.  It feels like being barefoot.  I can feel the keys a lot better.  I’d like to say that’s why I got my minute today, but I don’t think that was it.  I’ve been feeling more confident about it for the past couple of days, and I think I was successful in focusing on being slow and accurate with this minute.

     I started incorporating endings into my root words about nine months ago.  I went crazy with it and added everything you could.  It turns out that it wasn’t quicker for me to write that way, at least not right now, so I’ve backed off of some of it.  I added -L as an option for –l and –ly, but it created this problem where it would suggest it for both things on the same word, and I just now got around to taking it out of the integral prefixes and suffixes option.  I went ahead and added it as an option with an asterisk, although sometimes I do write it without one, like SLOEL for slowly.  I always get things like that popping up as suggestions, and I’ve started declining them when I think I won’t use them, to leave them open for Translation Magic to do something else with.  I wonder if I should just take them out of the table altogether?

     I found out yesterday that all the spots for the Caption Masters program in July are full.  I was going to re-test at some point before July, and I checked the status every day, and it magically went from three seats open to none, so I guess they weren’t updating it, because I doubt all three filled up in the same day.  That kind of pulled the rug out from under me, but maybe I can change the way I practice on my own.  I want to get a copy of the VITAC book because it deals with how to change your writing and your dictionary to get ready for realtime, and that’s definitely something I’ve been trying to work on (and struggling with) recently.  The only problem is you can’t buy the book anywhere!