Bits and Bobs

I've been covering a lot of techy stuff. People are always talking about Drupal, Java, Linux, servlets, HTML, RSS feeds, you name it. I feel like the fact that I know a tiny bit of HTML and tech-type stuff has helped me out. I'm always proud of myself when I get something like JSON right and think, "I bet some other CART providers wouldn't know what that is." The more teleconferences I listen to, the more wonky words I can get in there like syslog, nav, dev, etc.

Alan Peacock had a great article in the JCR about getting things like @ and # in your dictionary. I have @ in there, so that's not a problem, but I don't have anything for # yet. It never comes up in CART, but when I start captioning, it's going to be important.

I've been doing my speaker IDs as GL-[first initial of name] forever, and it was really becoming a problem when I had to do 5-30 new speaker IDs for every event, because each meeting has different speakers. The main problem was not only did I define all the IDs, I also had to define all the misstrokes for them. I thought there might be something I could do with the speaker ID table, but I wasn't really sure.

Then someone on the Eclipse FB group posted something about inflected endings and slop strokes, which was totally unrelated, but it reminded me: slop strokes! So I put all the misstrokes in as slop strokes, and now they physically *can't* come out wrong. All I have to do is define each misstroke for each initial once, and that's it! They're all set for every meeting I write after that. I'm still adding initials as they come up, but I have 36 so far.

A professor rattled off "Minneapolis, Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and even Moscow" the other day, and I was pretty relieved when they all came out perfectly. I have a great brief for Minneapolis (MIPS, which goes with IPS for Indianapolis), but the rest were just in there. I stroked out "heteronormative" the way I thought it should be and that came out perfectly, too.

I've been doing a lot of stroking things out the long way and hoping that helps them translate better. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Lots of times I think the short way was in there, but whatever crazy way I decided to do the long way didn't work. I did have to put "youse" in my dictionary the other day because it wasn't in there at all.

I turned my TM slider up to about 50%, but it was being too aggressive, so I dialed it back down to 29% based on some things I didn't want it to mess with. It does pretty well. I don't like it when it takes a word like "overly," which is just over + -ly and decides that was an untran because it wasn't in my dictionary. But that's not really a big deal.

As I go through transcripts, I still pick out words that I shouldn't have gotten wrong and add them to my practice list. It only has 12 words on it, but I'm at least that many transcripts behind on editing. I'm working on hitting "logical" with an asterisk for words like methodological and genealogical. It's really tough fingering for me, but there's got to be a distinction between "methodological" and "was the method logical."

I like to do my Phoenix speed drills every day, too. It's not even a "have to" at this point; I just like to do it. It keeps me grounded. And it's a little bit like a game. It's one way I can really see progress, and it helps me work on stuff I have problems with. I've even gotten a couple drills maxed out at 220 wpm, which is as fast as the free metronome program I use goes. I'm up to 185 wpm or higher on all the drills, and my average right now is 191 wpm.