Old Fixes

I probably haven't been doing as much dictionary maintenance as I should lately. I bet there are still a lot of word groups that I don't have defined the way I write them, but somehow I've stopped looking out for them. I even have a list of stuff to work on that I've just been completely ignoring. Maybe I feel like the mistakes don't go through that often, so it doesn't seem as important anymore. I did fix quite a few a long time ago that I've never had time to mention, though.

I changed -tal to T*AL (257 instances), changed it so words like "influential" could be written like IN/FLAOUNL (198), added /ELZ for words like novels (642), a -VS for words like conclusive = CON/KLAOUVS (416), -AIRBL for -ational, -TAIRBL for -tational (3) and KAIRBL for -casional (306), -lize and -mize as LAO*IZ (349) and MAO*IZ (47), GA*ET for -gate (215), NALT for -nality (78), LIFK for -listic (52), changed -sen to S*EN so it wouldn't conflict with words that started with SEN like sensationalism, and changed li- to L*EU.

I feel like my prefixes and suffixes are still all over the place. I don't have a uniform system for them. Someone told me at one point to put an asterisk in all the suffixes, so I did for a ton of them, and then I didn't like it so I took them out, but now I basically do it again, except only for words that are already words; but I'm discovering that a lot of words start with the same sound, like the sen- and -sen thing, so even though "sen" isn't a word, I should still do an asterisk in -sen just for consistency so I know what to write.

I guess I should work on that. It actually shouldn't take as much time as it used to now that I figured out how to edit dictionaries in Word.

9.22.14

I've been coming up with briefs for some words that I felt like were taking me too long to write:

best practices - BIKTS
capacity - KAIPS
scenario - SAERN
criteria - CRAO*IR
apologize - PAO*LGZ
at the end - T*END (add DA*I for "of the day")
Bahamas - BA*EMZ

I couldn't believe how often people were saying "at the end of the day!" It takes so long to write out.

I have a new practice for when I can't make out much of what's being said, which can be a problem with remote work. Before I would just listen to see if I could catch any entire sentences or thoughts that made sense and write those, and leave out the rest. But now I write every word that I can hear, with a dash for any words I can't. I think it probably does actually help. Even if it doesn't totally express a complete thought, you can still get a sense of what the person's saying.

I still occasionally stroke "dun" when I'm trying to write "done," and I actually got to use "dun" the other day. The news anchor was talking about Facebook posts coming back to haunt you, and she said, "dun-dun-dun." I also correctly spelled tracheostomy, which I was pretty proud of. On the other side of the token, I had been doing a lot of Canadian meetings, and then I was captioning the news and the Pope started saying something in Italian, and I reflexively wrote "[ speaking in French ]". But then they said he was meeting with Rabbi Skorka, who I'd never heard of before, and I correctly guessed/fingerspelled "Skorka."

I love the Eclipse FB group, although as I learn more things it becomes a little bit less useful, since I already know a lot. There is one frustrating thing about it, though. It seems like whenever I come up with a problem, or something that would make my Eclipse experience better, and I'm pretty sure there should be a way to accomplish what I want, I make a post, and the only thing I ever get back is people saying, "Why would you want to do that anyway?" I guess I should be used to it by now, but somehow it's still irksome.

Clean Words

Just in time for my captioning work, Jeremy put up the list of dirty words that you could add to your "words that have been deleted from the spelling dictionary" file. If you don't have a word in your spelling dictionary, the Eclipse AI won't guess it for TM, integrated pre/suf, or anything else. All you had to do was paste the list into your file, and voila. I took an extra step, though; I wanted to text global all the words as {NULL} so they couldn't even possibly be on the screen for captioning.

It would've been a laborious process doing it by hand, but thanks to some playing around that I did for the IE (it's a long story involving importing/exporting dictionaries to use special keyboard layouts, and I don't even think I needed to do it in the first place), I realized that you can export a dictionary, edit it in Word, import it, and make changes that way! So all the times that I've wished I could "find and replace" all instances of something in a dictionary, I actually could have!

I used it to put = {NULL} after all the words, and also to change them to all caps since that's how they're going to look when I'm captioning, and I instantly had dictionary entries for the entire list. And there are some really bad words on that list, so I'm glad I'm protected now.

I also realized that for captioning, you want to have a lowercase "s" with your acronyms; like if they say there were multiple DAs, you don't want that coming out as DAS; it doesn't make any sense. So as I was editing and I noticed letters next to "s," I slowly just defined them with a lock case, but eventually I actually had time to write/define them all. I hadn't missed many, and it turned out to not take that long (I probably should've just done that in the first place, but I thought it would be more time-consuming than it was).

I had 1st defined as "first," which was really annoying. I don't know how that happened, but I definitely fixed it. I've also been defining common phrases like "10 or 15," "10 to 15," and "10 and 15" with the 10 as a numeral, because otherwise it comes out as "ten or 15," and I don't think about it fast enough to use my numeral trigger before the "ten."

According to my list of things I wanted to write about, I also spent some time paying attention to getting things like YA*RD and WI*CK in my dictionary as ^yard and ^wick, but I don't remember about that anymore. Probably a good thing to do anytime I'm writing something with an asterisk, expecting it to stick, and it doesn't. Maybe I'm not seeing them anymore because I get the delete space in there instead now.

I got into the suffix spelling rules and fixed it so I can't get things like "creativetivity," "establishmentment," and "streghtenenned" anymore, too. Really you would think the AI would be smart enough not to do those in the first place. I guess I don't have those things defined properly in the pre/suf table.

Good Ideas

I've been leaning in a new direction with my speaker IDs. I started out thinking the fewer keys I used the better, so I would do the first letter of the person's name, or the last if the first letter was already being used. But now I've found that it's better to do a predominant sound in the name, because I'm probably going to have a lot of names. It's especially good for captioning when you have to get the whole news team in there, but I actually had a CART meeting where I was given 40 speakers the other day.

Some good ones I use are AUL for Paula or Paula, AIV for Dave, O*B for Bob or Rob, O*N for John, IS for Chris, AIS for Jason; the list goes on, and it's particularly helpful if I can use the same one across jobs. Chris is one that I can pretty much guarantee is always going to be IS; and for anyone who's not familiar with my speaker IDs, it's actually GLAUL, GLAIV, etc.

There was a really inspiring thread on depoman about writing verbatim or not. A lot of people are in the camp that they don't write repeated words if they don't change the meaning of the sentence, so if the person says
"I went -- I went to the store," they only put in one "I went." Someone said they've even had attorneys comment on how nice their transcripts look because of it. I don't know why I had previously been such a stickler about getting all those repeated words in if I had time, but I realized it does look much better without them, and they don't add anything, so now I don't put them in! It saves me strokes and time, and it looks better!

I also got on a little macro-making kick for a while. Brenda on the Eclipse FB group was talking about some real time-savers she came up with for actions she does often, and I thought, "Why am I even hitting Ctrl+Shift+Pg Up and then Esc to get to the top of the document?" The first command highlights your way up there, and then I had to unhighlight. I go to the top multiple times every time I review a transcript for fixes, so I just changed my keyboard map so that "V" takes me right to the top! I have E for the end.

I also check each transcript for any time I fingerspelled A and E to check for words I might've fingerspelled that I need to get in my dictionarly, so now I just hit S and W respectively to find the next instance of those. And when I'm done checking in Eclipse, I paste the file into Word and spellcheck it. Captioning files are always in all caps, so I had to navigate to the proper settings tab to uncheck that, but now I just hit Ctrl+Space bar and it automatically does it all! It's so much easier. There are so many key combinations, there's no reason to be using the mouse or pressing multiple keys for actions you do often.

Including the Final P

I have two things I'm focusing on with my writing right now: -P and commas. I'm still working on that "stacking SKP" business, but I got it nailed down once classes started. I put SKP in as a conflict - with "and" as both choices - just so it would show up in green every time I stroked it to remind me to stop stroking it.

For some reason it didn't help much when I was mainly doing captioning, but almost the first day I switched to more CART, I got myself doing SKP-P at least 90% of the time. Maybe it's because I don't have much time to think during captioning, and even having just a few times during CART where I got to really think about it before I wrote it allowed it to become reflexive.

I completed my project of entering conflicts for "words that typically have commas after them." I had a list of 35, and I experimented with one a day until I had gone through the whole list. Some worked with two, three, or four options, and some I could tell weren't even going to work with two. Now the problem is that I never remember they're in there, and I just write the comma anyway. They come up in green, though, which reminds me that I'm supposed to be not putting the comma in.

I actually had myself pretty well trained with "so" and "okay," until I came into a bunch of instances where the AI wasn't picking correctly and I had to delete them. I'm doing the best with "well" and "all right"; I'm pretty sure none of the others have stuck at all. I seem to write "therefore," "however," and "in other words" the most, though.

Speaking of conflicts, I have an awesome one that works great: day to day versus day-to-day. The software is really good at knowing which is which, probably since one is just some words and the other is an adjective. I bet there are other things I could do that with (once-in-a-lifetime maybe?), but for now I'm just happy with "day to day."

Another thing I'm working on is waiting until the new sentence starts to put punctuation for the last one, so I can avoid when I think they're done, and I put a period, but then the next thing they say isn't a sentence on its own. It's hard to wait, though. Lots of times I can delete the period that turns out not to belong, but also lots of times I don't have time.

I also had to change my outline for a question mark. I think the S- key is stiff on this IE. It won't matter since I'm getting a new one, but I was almost never hitting the S- in STPH* for my question mark, and it kept coming out as N. I had the probablem occasionally with the LS, but it started to get really bad with the IE. I initially made a conflict, but the software wasn't choosing correctly often enough, and I would erase the N and re-write it three times and still get N, so I had to do something. It was getting bad! I wound up just making my question mark STPH*P, and I was so relieved to have a way to actually get a question mark to come out that I picked it up almost instantly.

The strange thing is that I drag the S in weird places on the IE, too, probably because I have the sensitivity set low since the key is stiff. Maybe it's not so strange, after all. The worst is when I think I've written "he," but it actually came out "she," and I don't notice it until it's too late. I keep getting "snot" for "not," too. I hope it's all better on the new machine!

Standards

Somehow I seem to have more time now that the semester has started, even though I'm working the same or slightly more hours than during the summer. I think it's because during the summer I was taking 3-5 events a day, whereas now I typically have 2-4. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but it is. I have to sit down at least 15 minutes early for every event, or 20 for captioning.

I set a rate for myself that I don't want to go below, at least during the semester when there's so much work. It's really hard turning down work for less, but I'll never have 100% work at what I'm worth if I keep taking jobs for less.

I feel like my skills are pretty good at this point. My tran rate is usually 99.97%, although it's frequently higher (and I have to admit, sometimes lower, but not by much). I almost hardly ever see any mistakes going out. It's really hard to write with the pain and how I keep changing the machine position around; I'm always trying to find my footing. But I think the quality of my work is good. One of my students told me I'm "one of the best," so that was nice to hear.

That's for CART; captioning is another story. I still feel like I'm drowning sometimes when I'm captioning. My average wpm is consistently at 200-215, though (it actually hit 314 one time, and it wasn't lagging, and I wasn't doing speaker IDs or anything that would erroneously count as a lot of "entries"; and it reaches 270 at least once a broadcast), and I've even gotten up to 3700 words on a 35-minute broadcast, so at least in terms of speed and "not dropping" I'm doing well.

I see more mistakes go out than I'd like, but I know it still looks good. I'm always pretty confident about the weather, if nothing else. It's tough making it past that first 10 minutes of actual news stories, though. Depending on the station, they like to speed through a ton of different stories as fast as they can during that time.

Already Waiting for Summer

I did a lot of captioning over the summer. About the middle of July, I realized that if I didn't make any changes, I was going to have the same amount of CART work for fall semester as I did for spring semester, and I didn't like the idea of that at all. So I started sending out my resume to some companies, slowly at first, and then doing more as I wasn't finding any with rates that I wanted.

I wound up applying at 35 places, which, in hindsight, may have been a bit much, but I wasn't getting any confirmations on fall classes being available, so I felt like I had to keep going. I actually wound up getting more offers for classes than I could even take from my main company; it seems like they have more work now than they did in the spring.

So right now I've got 13 hours a week in classes from them, plus this month I did 3 hours a week of captioning (trying to take it down to 2 for next month), and then I'm pretty sure I could fill in the rest with non-class hours from the main company. But if I were only with them, I'd have to do captioning during the summer, which isn't really where I want to be. The company I'm with now pays considerably less than CART, but I could always look for another company.

But, if I can cobble together enough CART companies with work over the summer, I may not need to do captioning at all. So I'm trying to balance about ten companies right now, hoping that they'll have summer work, too. Two of them have a lot of government meetings, though, and I guess those aren't going to carry over into the summer, so it might not actually be helpful at all. It's tough balancing all of it and I wish I could just drop the captioning hours now, but I feel like I need to wait and see what happens during the summer before I do that. Summer is so far away, though!

Goldilocks and the Three Keytoppers

I tried some different key tabs on the IE. First I tried it "naked." I liked it at first, being able to freely slide around, but it was a little hard on my fingers. Actually, the reason I put my old leather tabs on it (Stenovations sent them back to me when they took them off the LS to calibrate it, and put the silicone ones on it) was because Jason wasn't responding to me about getting my asterisk closer to my FR, so I thought, "Why don't I just put key tabs on it, and put the tabs on the asterisk closer to the FR?"

So that's what I did, and it worked! I only have a little bit of a problem with them not being close enough now. The number key above the asterisk is still way too far to the left, but key tabs aren't going to be able to solve that. The leather still wasn't soft enough for me, though, so I ordered velcro toppers. I thought those would be really soft. They were, but they kind of gave me "rug burn." I guess I slide my fingers around too much.

The Neutrino Group (the company that makes the IEs) sells "soft rubber" key toppers. I thought maybe they would be like squishy silicone, so I ordered them, but it turns out they're foam. They also sell thick and thin; for some reason I got the thick ones, and they add a crazy amount of height to the keys. I have a problem with not being able to lower the IE enough because it runs into my legs, so having it artificially raised didn't help at all. I also felt too much friction on the foam, so those were out.

I had two sets of the leather Depoman keys, and I felt like my old set wasn't as "grippy" as it could be, so I put the new ones on the left and the old ones on the right. It turns out the new ones aren't any more "grippy," or really any different from the old ones that had already been used for at least a year, so I just left it the way it is. No hope for a softer keyboard for me, I guess. I could take the silicone ones off the LS, but I don't think they'd be any better. They were getting really worn and slippery already, anyway.

Ergonomic Specialist: Part 3

The specialist also suggested that maybe I find a couple of positions for the machine that don't hurt to much, instead of just one, and switch between them, maybe one in the morning and the other at night, so my body doesn't have a chance to start hurting in the same position. It's an interesting idea, but I haven't really tried it yet. She said I could even switch between the IE and the LS. The LS was so painful to write on, though, I don't even want to try it again.

Supposedly Stenovations is coming out with a QWERTY keyboard that's touch like the LS. That will be really cool. I am interested in one of those to make regular typing less painful. They're coming out with a new more ergonomic/more sensitive LS, too. I'd love to get one, but I think the IE's going to be a better bet for me until they can put the LS on split pods like the IE is. 

I certainly didn't get the answers I was hoping for out of the ergonomic specialist visit (and "maybe you just can't be a captioner" is the one I liked the least), but I did get inspired to try a few things. It's always good to get someone else's perspective.

I was really hoping I could tell her, "my hand feels kinked, I have to do this a lot" or, "look, I have to bend my hand weird here" and she would tell me what to do to fix it. Or I was hoping she would say, "try your machine lower, try tilting it this way," etc. But she recognized that I had pretty much already tried everything, and basically she just went with "if you tried it already and it isn't comfortable, don't do it."

She did say she wished she had some better answers for me. She said it looked like my posture was good already, with everything lined up just right. It's frustrating to hear that you're doing everything right and it still hurts, because then there's no solution.

Ergonomic Specialist: Part 2

The specialist also suggested I could use voice recognition software to do my job and/or general computing. I'm definitely not open to switching to be a voice writer. I like writing on the machine. My throat always gets sore when I try to talk for extended periods of time, too. I think voice writers can only write for short periods of time because of that. I don't want to learn a whole new thing. Maybe someday if I get really desperate, but I'm not even thinking about it right now.

I don't know how much functionality it has for general computing. I don't like the idea of having to talk to it, like for right now even typing this. Talking and typing are totally different things. And in terms of voice recognition instead of mousing, I doubt that works very well.

It actually wasn't something the specialist said that made me want to try the Report-It again. I was hoping that she wouldn't just give me one of those sheets with the diagrams for proper ergonomic desk setup, but she did. Interestingly, though, it had a suggestion for resting your arms on the arms of the chair, and it said the arms shouldn't touch your elbows or your wrists. The person in the drawing looked really comfortable, and that's what inspired me to try the Report-It again. I'm not sure if it's helping or not.

Now that I've been doing it for about 6 weeks, it seems like it would be impossible to write without it, although I don't really think it's helped in any way. It feels super restrictive when I use it. If I write for even a short period of time without it, I feel so free, but at the same time, like it would very quickly become too painful to write that way. Maybe that's just because of where I have the machine positioned, though.

I think the IE in general has given me pain in my right arm, not so much the Report-It. I definitely feel a deeper, sharper pain in my left arm with the Report-It. It's really bad, but luckily I don't write for extended periods of time; usually an hour and a half at the most. It's hard to hold on for that long, though. It's all a work in progress, and I feel like if I just keep trying I'll eventually find something that doesn't hurt so much.

Soma Problems

The specialist was really sympathetic towards me wanting to work with the chair I have, and she tried to lean more towards that than even adding cushions or things to it. She said I looked tilted back a little instead of straight or forward, and I told her that I did think the chair broke and was doing that, so she suggested I look into having it fixed, which I did. I called the company and their technician was very helpful, and made some suggestions, and I think I fixed it, although it's hard to tell. Unfortunately, the forward tilt made my back hurt a lot, so I wound up just going back to the backward tilt.

She also made me really think about getting a new seat and backrest for the chair. She found a Soma supplier called Keeney's, about 45 minutes away from here. They had a Soma chair, so I went and checked it out. I was also able to sit in a *lot* of other chairs. I figured out that the seat on this Soma chair is ridiculously hard compared to some of the other ones. The Soma chair at Keeney's had an adjustable lumbar, and I think that would be better than the fixed one that I have.

I stopped in at Relax the Back since it was in the same area. They had fewer chairs than the last time I was there, and nothing that really seemed better than what I think I'll be able to do with the Soma. I didn't like the chairs with taller backs much, so I think the height of my backrest is probably where I want it.

I've been working for the past month to try to get Soma to send me out a new backrest and seat. They said they would look into it, but they're moving super slowly on it. The only person you can communicate with is the CEO. He's understandably busy, but it's kind of annoying how unresponsive he is. He's going to be in the area about a month from now, and he said he'll try to work something out then.

My backrest has some kind of a defect where the adhesive is leeching through, so if nothing else I think they should replace that, since it's under warranty, and I might as well get a backrest I'll like better since I'm getting a new one, anyway. I might be able to look into getting some kind of a more comfortable pad to put on the seat if he won't replace it, but it's already taller than I want when it's lowered all the way, so an additional cushion would only make that worse.

I currently have a foam block wedged in the chair between the seat and the backrest; they don't meet, and there's a gap there. I've heard some people are more comfortable in chairs without a gap, and the physical therapist suggested putting a cylinder of foam along my spine to see if that helped with back pain, so it would make sense that the gap wouldn't work for me. My back pain might be getting slightly worse, but in general I think it's staying about the same.

Ergonomic Specialist: Part 1

So I skipped a month, which is actually not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I have the typical reason - super slammed with work. I haven't made much progress on the pain front. The touchpad didn't help with my right hand pain/numbness at all, but I had an ergonomic specialist come check out my steup, and she suggested "mousing" (weird word, but it makes sense once you get used to it) with my left hand. I actually had both a wired and wireless mouse (and the touchpad) hooked up to my computer when she was here, and she said, "does that mouse work?", referring to the wired one.

So I put the wired one on the left, and kept using the wireless on the right. At first I thought I would need to switch the function of the buttons (right and left click), and I was really disappointed when I couldn't figure out how to set the functions for each mouse individually - if I changed one, it changed both - but now I'm pretty used to just using the buttons the way they are with my left hand. I use the left mouse at least half the time, and it really has helped with my right hand. Mostly it's nice not to have to push through the pain when I use the right mouse; if it's painful, I just switch.

Unfortunately, I have an exciting new problem with my right hand. I saw that a few people write with their machine pods vertical instead of horizontal. I had tried it out when I first got the IE and it didn't seem good at all, but since the ergo specialist was here I've been using the Report-It, so I thought maybe it would be different now. I gave it a good try for about an hour and a half. It was surprisingly not that hard to write that way, but it just wasn't going to be comfortable.

After that I had to put everything back in "normal" position (since the specialist was here I've been trying it with the pods separated all the way), and ever since then there's been something wrong with the right pod, at least for my hand. I can't reach the U without pain, and my right wrist hurts. I've had that problem with the A and the U before, where it kinks up my thumb for some reason, and then eventually after moving it around a bunch for other reasons, I get it in a spot that doesn't hurt my thumb.

My left hand is that way now - I have minimal pain with the A. But the right hand is awful. Previously I've been able to fix it by just trying to line the pod up "straight", like parallel to me, but it's not working this time. I've tried raising/lowering, titling up/down and left/right, physically moving the machine left/right, and nothing seems to fix it. I'm really at a loss. I guess I could try to "reset" everything and start from scratch, but since the left side isn't any worse than usual I'm hesitant to mess with it.

I also got a suggestion from the owner of the IE company, Jason Pardikes. He said maybe I should make my stroke deeper, to about 4-5mm. It was already at 3mm, which I felt like was pretty deep, but I gave it a shot. It's pretty crazy; like writing in quicksand. I'm sort of getting used to it, but I think I changed it while I was already having problems with the right hand, and I'm not sure if it's making it worse or not. I haven't resorted to putting it back to 3mm to see if that fixes it yet, but I probably should.

I ordered one of the new "Gen O" IEs, so we'll see how that goes, hopefully in November, although that's just an early estimate. Supposedly you don't have to use the software to calibrate it after you make physical changes on the machine anymore, so that will remove one barrier to experimenting with different depths.