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.

Finessing

The only major problem I'm having with my writing right now seems to be stacking "and." I stack it with everything. People really advise against writing APBD,  so I decided to change it to SKP-P. It's super easy to stroke, but the problem is I never do it, and I stack like three things with "and" on every single job. It's really annoying. Whenever I notice myself stack it, though, I'm trying to erase the mistake and force myself to write SKP-P instead. It doesn't seem to be working yet, but I remember when I felt like it was going to be absolutely impossible to write punctuation with both hands, so I guess I'll make it happen eventually.

I also randomly stroke the initial S sometimes, or maybe it's the initial and final Ss. I'm hoping that will stop with the new machine, though. And a lot of time, I'll accidentally stroke initial T when I mean to stroke S, and then I try to erase it but I stack the S and the asterisk, so I wind up with "it S."  I haven't even trade to think of a plan for fixing that one. The obvious answer would be to change the definition for S*, but then I'd have to change the entire alphabet, and it seems to work all right for the most part, so I don't really want to do that. I have used things like S-PG for that alphabet before, but I seemed to get tripped up. I also get tripped up a lot with the asterisk alphabet, so maybe it doesn't matter which one I use. It is a lot easier to fingerspell when you're captioning and you don't have to worry about upper and lower case. 

I'm pretty much guaranteed to stack "can you" at the beginning of a sentence, too. I haven't been able to train myself to be cognizant of that and stop doing it yet.

I found a huge issue with my awesome "speaker IDs in slop strokes" strategy. I wound up getting words like "bliss" coming up as crazy words because I had PWHREUS as a possible misstroke for TKPWHREUS. Of course, if it's something like TKPWHR-D, which could be misstroked as PWHR-D (BL-D), then it's not a problem, because I don't want that to be a word, anyway. At first I thought I would just deal with the words as they popped up, but then they started getting embarrassing. I was on air trying to write about a "fly ball," and the only way to keep it from coming out as "glioball" was to fingerspell it. Every time I wrote TPHRAOEU, it got auto-corrected to TKPWHRAOEU, which is apparently my prefix for glio-, not that I ever use it.

So I looked at the possible misstrokes, and identified anything like fl-, bl-, gr-, etc. that could actually combine with things to form a word, and then I looked at all my final bank combinations with those, and got rid of any words like fleck, Greg, etc. Then I bolded those initial combinations in my master list, and now whenever I add a secondary bank combination to the slop strokes, I check first to make sure it's not a word and get rid of it if it is. I'd rather have "fly" come out when I was going for the speaker ID for "Brian" than not be able to write fly at all.

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.

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.

6.10

     It’s really nice not to have to spend half of my practice time playing with the Report-It.  In all of the terrible positions I had it in, I couldn’t even write for 4 minutes without feeling horribly fatigued, and now at least from a fatigue standpoint, I’m completely back to normal.  I haven’t gotten used to the position yet, but I’m working on it.

       Today I measured the speed of my piece when I write it for control, at the end of my practice session. I’m almost completely comfortable writing it at that speed, and I don’t think I would want to go much faster.  It turns out that it’s only 180 wpm.  That seems awfully disappointing. I was also able to figure out how many words were in the 4 minutes that I write at the normal speed.  I know it starts out at 230 and finishes at 215.  According to RTC, it’s supposed to be 220, and actually, if you average all 4 minutes, it is 222.

     The other day I had time for some dictionary maintenance, so I finished fixing every thing I wanted to in terms of integrated endings.  I deleted 333 LG words, 122 NG words, and 46 RG words.  I also fixed anything where I had BG as in ribbing, because that conflicts with things like Rick, and anything were I had RBG, for things like crashing, because that conflicts with things like cracker.  Remembering not to write all of those is going to be a different story. 

     I deleted some entries with the long A sound and D, like swayed, which interferes with suede.  Carol says you shouldn’t attach D to any vowel sounds, but I think I’ve accounted for any problems aside from the long A. I also finally added my attaching alphabet, that attaches lowercase letters to the last word.