Headway

I'm finally starting to feel good about my realtime. Out of the last three news broadcasts I've practiced, my lowest accuracy was 98.83%. I'm starting to not get freaked out when I make a mistake, and be aware of what's being said while I fix mistakes. I still haven't gotten any work from the company I signed a contract with, though. I'd really like to get my feet wet and see where I stand on some actual CART work.

I'm feeling so confident that I even sent out "applications" to five CART/captioning companies, but I haven't heard anything back. It's frustrating because I've been working so long to be "ready," and now that I've put myself out there, no one seems interested in taking me on.

I'm intimidated by the captioning aspect, too. I live in an apartment, and we don't have a single landline, let alone the three or four I might need for captioning. We only have basic cable, and if I started captioning the traditional way, I'd have to buy a TV, modem, coupler, and amplifier, at least, plus AccuCap, which would be $3k alone. I have enough saved up for all of those things, but I'd much rather not have to get them.

In less stressful news, I finally hit an average of 180 wpm on all of my speed drills! I've been gunning for that goal for a while. I'm also doing a lot better making my corrections make sense when I practice realtime; making sure I have a dash before and after the correction word, if it doesn't come right after the error. I was having a problem with dashing before and using a comma after, but that's only happening rarely now.

I finally finished all my -NAIR corrections, and I've moved on to -ia, which I now write as KWRA*. Nothing in that group of 744 words seems to be defined the way I write it now, so that's my next project.

I made some changes to auto-brief; namely, I learned that you can tell it not to suggest certain letter combinations, which is really helpful. I don't ever write -TD or -SZ (or at least, not on purpose), and now I won't get suggestions with them. I also noticed sometimes it would suggest a brief with -TZ in it, which was just crazy (for me, anyway). For some reason after I did that, I lost my pop-up window. It was really weird, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back, until a few days later, it magically reappeared on its own!