Mechanical Developments

It's been four months since my last update. That's only half as long as it took me to post last time, so there's that. Somehow, though, I've got way more to talk about. So much, in fact, that I'm going to have to break this up into parts.

I gave up on the Report-It quite a while ago, although I think I forgot to mention it in my last update. Recently, I've started writing with my theory book under the steno machine. I think raising it up is helping a bit. I still go through periods where I feel like I can't "reach" or "find" the keys, but I seem to be able to work it out after about 15 minutes of writing the news, if nothing else.

I think I was holding my left arm funny, because it was starting to go numb while I was writing, so I've been trying to focus on making it a bit more comfortable and remembering to stop tensing it up and let it relax. I ditched the BackJoy when my arm started going numb, too, and I don't miss it.

I finally sent my LS in to have the loose USB port fixed. They decided to put in a "new" battery while they were at it. I have no idea why; there was nothing wrong with the old battery. Now, the "new" battery doesn't hold a charge. It's kind of frustrating, really. But I don't want to be without the LS for a week again to send it back. My service contract expires at the end of the month, too. The only reason I renewed it last time was because I thought I would want to upgrade to the LSX, and Stenovations has a nifty trade-in policy.

But now the LSX isn't really in the works anymore. I think the LS v2 looks interesting, but if I get one, I'll want to have it as a backup writer, so I won't be interested in a trade-in. It just doesn't make sense to pay $300 a year for nothing. I don't think anything's going to go wrong with the LS; they seem pretty foolproof. It's a bummer that mine effectively doesn't have a battery anymore, but I've been leaning more toward captioning/remote CART than onsite CART, anyway, so it probably won't matter.

I have the silicone Stenovations keypads on the LS now, and I really like them. They are maybe a bit too slippery, so I'm not going to say I can't imagine using anything else, but they're better than the Depobook leather ones.

7.24

     I made it through three sections of the VITAC book in one day.  One was about homephones, which I pretty much had worked out already from StenEd.  The next was prefixes and suffixes, and luckily there aren’t that many in the VITAC book.    I did skip a few, and there are a few I still need to learn.  I spent most of the time in that section on the "medical and technical" ones.  The last section was 25 pages of words that might create conflicts.  Going through that wasn’t any fun at all.

     I think I might have found a good position for the BackJoy and the Report-It and everything.  It’s not perfect, so I’m still tweaking it, but maybe someday soon I won’t feel like I’m fighting to hit the right keys anymore.  I got my last minute on Wednesday, and I got that one and the one before it together yesterday at 96.5% accuracy.  The new minute doesn’t seem too hard, and it’s at 230 wpm.

7.17

     I started going through my dictionary and trying to change all the initial "z"s from S* to STK.  The VITAC book says I should, and I’ve had some problems with the S*, so I decided I might as well.  As I was painstakingly updating 200 entries, I started to wonder how much I really needed words like "marbelization" in my dictionary.  I got through all of those, and then I decided to just look at all instances of "z" so I could catch everything that I needed to change, and I decided I should probably wait and make sure that change is going to "stick" before I spend all that time changing my dictionary.

     When I first started incorporating StenoMaster, I loved the idea of doing "–ss" as -S and "sses"/"ces" as -SZ.  But I eventually realized that my fingers aren't that accurate, and I have trouble writing SZ quickly, so I should probably just save that for special things I already learned it for, like "less" vs. "–less" and "miss" vs. "mis-". I just now went through and deleted all 194 entries that needed to be changed back.

     I decided a while ago that SWR- was a cool way to write "shr-" instead of SH/R, but of course I never did anything about it, so when that came up in the VITAC book, I went through and fixed all 94 entries of that.  The StenEd dictionary came with all of those words defined twice with the same outline, one with an asterisk and one without.  I have no idea why.

     I also decided to adopt the method of distinguishing between words like "cash" and "carb" by writing "carb" as CAURB a while ago.  Luckily there aren’t many words like that and I had fixed most of them already, but I went through and double-checked that list, too.

     The VITAC book doesn’t like the idea of writing words like "bask" in two strokes, which StenoMaster taught me to stop doing anyway, but I went through and made sure that all 74 words like that were now correct in my dictionary.  Most of them were, thanks to having come up in the "–sk" exercise in the Phoenix drill book.

     The VITAC book also introduced me to the idea of writing words like "drank" as DRAFRNG.  I’d probably noticed that on depoman before, but it just seemed weird.  I write it now as DRA*NG, but when I saw it in the book, I tried it out, and I realized it’s the same thing, you just don’t have to move your index finger over as far.  I guess it’s a better idea, because I always had a hard time with "-nk" words, anyway.  I decided not to change those entries yet though, since it’s another one that’s going to be a big project

     The book also says you should distinguish between "comp" and "ex", because StenEd says to use KP for both, which does create some conflicts.  I think I’ve got that mostly under control though, since I learned which ones to watch out for in theory class, so I’m just going to leave it.  The book says to use –GT for –TH so you can have *T open for proper nouns, but -GT would really mess up my words like "netting", so I’m not doing that, either.

     It says to use –FT for –ST for the same reason, but I think that would be too much of a change for me to worry about right now when it hasn’t been a problem yet anyway.  It also says to do –FRB for –V, but that’s really hard for me to stroke, so I’m not doing that, either.  And of course, the biggest  suggestion I’m ignoring is to not incorporate any endings.  I don’t see any reason to give that up.

     So I sort of finished another section of the book, by just about skipping half of the ideas and saving the other half for later.  I also discovered that "snooze" wasn’t in my dictionary.

     I got this BackJoy thing, and I kind of like it, and I think I’m going to keep it, but it changes my posture, so now I have to figure out all over again where to put the Report-It, and I’m not having much success yet, which means I’m not making much progress on this minute, which is also super fast.  I did get up to 250 wpm at the end of it today, though.