10.19.13

I'm still enjoying CART, although sometimes it can be pretty boring, and I look forward to classes where the instructors say more/faster so I don't have any downtime. And sometimes I have to shower after lunch, which kind of bugs me. But I think it's worth it. I wish I had more work. I don't have any classes at all on Fridays. But I'm only working for one company, so I haven't exactly run out of options on that front yet. I'm waiting until after the CBC/CCP exam on 11/1 so I can see how I feel about that before I reach out to more companies.

I love the idea of doing remote CART exclusively, but I don't like the idea of not working during the summer. I'm not sure what else I could do during the summer, though. I guess I could do some captioning, but I'd have to buy AccuCap, which is $3k, and I'd need to have phone lines installed, and get an audio coupler and all of that stuff. I guess it would be worth it to have income during the summer, but I wish there were an easier way to get summer work.

I've been going through my dictionary maintenance list, and I've noticed a disturbing trend of finding things that I wanted to go back and fix - like "-cal" words not working when I stroked K-L - that weren't defined that way just because it was wrong to write them that way. -cal is KA*L, and K-L is -cle, so of course "magical" wasn't defined as MAG/K-L. I should probably reinforce KA*L, not define all the -cal words as K-L and KA*L. I guess it doesn't hurt to have them in there as K-L, too, where it doesn't cause any conflicts.

I think the problem is when I'm doing realtime, I just write the first thing that comes to mind, and it isn't always the right thing, even though it makes sense at the time. I don't like going through and rewriting (in the case of -cal) 580 words the wrong way, though. I'm almost reinforcing the wrong thing. I always write the the right way, too, though, just to make sure it's in there that way as well. Hopefully just by writing all those words at least some way will stick and there won't be any hestitation the next time I write them.

I'm probably supposed to do -ice words as consonant + IS, but I wrote 253 of those as IS just in case. -cept works fine as SEPT, but sometimes I do it as SE*PT, so 27 of those work now. Dis- is just DIS, but some words sound like DIZ, so I fixed about 5 of those to work that way. -ling should be L*ING, but that's hard to write and something I think I just came up with myself, so it's not ingrained at all, and lots of times I wind up stroking LG. I have that defined as -ing for misstrokes, but I fixed it so 532 of those should work as -ling now. And -ious is typically YOUS, but I fixed 670 words so that YUS works, too.

I never seem to make any progress on my dictionary maintenance list. I cross things off, but then I add more things, so it never gets any shorter. I have 19 problems to address right now. I don't always spend a lot of time working on it, though. Starting next week I have to start practicing for the CCP/CBC, so I probably won't do much with it until after the exam.

I'm still having problems where I try to put asterisks on all of my ending word parts whether they need them or not. I wish I had just left my dictionary that way after I changed it to be like that. I guess hindsight is 20/20, though. And maybe there are a lot of endings that I didn't catch and hadn't changed, so I'm not as bad off as I think I am. For now, I'm still just trying to remember which ones need asterisks and which ones don't.

I'm trying to be a little less strict with the realtime rules. I have a lot of trouble trying to remember to write devastate as DEV/STA*IT. DEV is delve, so you can't write DEV/STATE or it would be "delve state." But who's ever going to say "delve state?" Someone sometime maybe, I guess. But "delve stating," is even less likely, so I finally broke down and just defined DEV/STA*IT/G as devastating. I've been trying to think about that kind of thing more often. It goes against all the rules of realtime, so I guess I'll find out sooner or later whether it hurts or helps.