Conjunctions Are a Go

I decided not to wear my wrist supports anymore. It seemed like they were making my hands hurt more. My hands aren't pain-free, but they're kind of "medium" at this point. I'm pretty comfortable using the ReportIt, but I still have a lot of pain in my arms when I write. I think the ReportIt is the way to go, though. It just makes sense that having your arms supported would be better.

I'm still waiting for the Gen O IE. Upgrading cost about half as much as the machine I just bought in May, so I hope it's better somehow. Originally, they hoped to ship them in November, but they haven't even hardened the mold on the pods yet, so who knows when they'll be out.

There was a discussion on depoman about whether you can start a sentence with a conjuction, like "and" or "but" in order to break up ridiculously long sentences. Someone said that we're taught all of these grammar rules that apply to good writing, but we're not writing - we're taking down what someone has said, and you can't always force that to conform to what would be proper writing style. I would occasionally let a sentence start with "and" or "but," but more often than not I would even go so far as to delete a period I had already stroked and add a comma and the conjunction, leading to some truly long sentences.

So, with ease of readability for the consumer in mind, I took that advice into consideration. Now when the speaker seems to have ended their sentence and the next word is a conjuction, I let the period stand. I think it does help with readability, and it even allows me to break things into paragraphs more often. It's good to have discussions about things. It seems like I work in a vacuum a lot of the time, but I can't improve my style if I don't know what other people are doing.

Thumb Problems

I feel like I don't have much to report (that would be a pun if I were a court reporter), but I'll probably surprise myself. I'm still soldiering on with the Report-It; it might have caused more problems than it's solved, but for some reason I seem to like using it still. I don't think it hurts any less to write with it, though.

I've developed a weird problem where my right thumb hurts a lot when I stroke the U, like it's having to bend back too far. I had a similar problem with the left thumb, but somehow that fixed itself. Previously if I felt like that with the right thumb I'd just try to straighten the pod out so it was parallel to my body, but that's not working at all anymore. About the time it started, Jason (the owner of The Neutrino Group, which makes the Infinity) suggested I lower the depth of my keys since I mentioned I was having pain in general.

It was an interesting experiment, and after a couple of days, I didn't really mind the depth, but I thought it might be contributing to the thumb problem, so I ratcheted the keys up to an even shorter stroke than I had before. I feel like I have to press down on them too hard to get them to register, which is why I had it set a little deeper than I wanted initially. I had to adjust a ton of key sensitivities, but I'm leaving it where it is for now.

I hope to get the newest version of the IE in November (I got in on the pre-order, so it's just a matter of when it's made and shipped), and I got it with one step lighter springs than the one I have now (it will be 6 grams instead of 8), so hopefully that will decrease the resistance, and maybe I can do an even shorter stroke.

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.

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.

10.16

     I'm trying out something new with the Report-It: focusing on my wrists. Trying to make them straight instead of tilted down. So far I can either get into a position where my shoulders/arms are comfortable, or I can get into one where I can actually stroke the keys, but not both at the same time. Someday.

     I got all of my drill speeds up to 120, and my average drill speed is now 140. I also spent about two and a half hours going through my dictionary and deleting all the briefs for phrases that I didn't even know were in there, because I never learned them. They just came pre-loaded on the StenEd dictionary. I wound up deleting 2400 (or actually, moving them out of my dictionary into their own dictionary, since I'm trying to remember not to actually "delete" anything anymore).

     While I was doing that, I discovered some more things that could have been word boundary problems. I found some phrases like "bill folded" that made me wonder if BIL/FOELD was defined as "billfold," and, in fact, it was. I wound up fixing issues with -fold, -rest, -watch, and -end. I also realized I was using the same stroke for fer- and -fer, and in fixing that I also fixed -vent and -tile. I'm trying to remember to asterisk any word ending that's also a word on its own.

     My next big project is to go through all the entries in my dictionary that have B and/or P in them and add inflected endings to the verbs. Eclipse 5 has the awsome feature of automatically translating your integral prefixes and stuffixes, which is great except in the case of N. NG and ND cause way too many conflicts, so I don't want them to be automatically translated, which means I can't have BG/BD or PG/PD in the table, either, and I'll have to manually enter all of those.

     I've got 45k entries with B in them, and I only knocked out 4500 in my first go at it today, so I'm not going to be moving on anytime soon.

9.18

     I finally finished the VITAC book..sort of, anyway. I still have a few things in my dictionary I need to clean up, but I decided they weren't the most important things to get done right now. It only took me about 11 hours, which isn't bad at all, except for the fact that it took me about 3 months to get through those 11 hours of work.

     I got up to acceptable accuracy on that ridiculously difficult minute a week ago, and I'm still working on the first two minutes of that piece together. I hit 324 today, which was pretty exciting. I'm feeling even better about the Report-It, quite possibly the best I've ever felt, in fact. I got there by consciously forcing myself to get into proper position every time I started to write. Now though, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just going for what feels right/easiest and letting my shoulders tense up, so I think I need to examine that next time I write.

     I've gotten all of my drills up to 110 or better, and my average speed on them is now 134 wpm. In dictionary maintenance, I decided all words like "forum" should be written with *UM to avoid conflicting with the word "um," so I changed all 133 instances of that. I'm not so sure about it now since it contradicts my plan to add asterisks to words and keep them out of final word parts, but it always seemed wrong to me to use UM, so I guess I'll just give it a try.

     The next thing on my to-do list is to go through the NJCaptions conflict-finding sentences. I started doing it before I got the VITAC book, and now I want to start again from the beginning. I made it all the way through the first page in one sitting. I discovered that in StenEd, TOR- and -TOR are both TOR, which doesn't work at all, so today I spent half an hour going through all 700 -TOR entries and changing them to TO*R. I only had 53 TOR- entries, but I'm trying to write all of my initial word parts without asterisks, since that's how I learned most of them.

9.6

     Not much to report today, at least in terms of improvement. I feel like I might finally be getting somewhere with the Report-It, but I'm not there yet. The minute I'm working on is so ridiculously difficult. I can't believe it's only at 230 wpm. I routinely write it at 214 or 250, and I regularly hit 300 at the end, too. I've never had 300 come up with any sort of regularity before, so I must be doing something right.

     A couple times, I've managed to write "poultry was raping-free." I guess I should take raping out of the dictionary; no one wants to see that come up the next time someone says "range." I'm about to spend a week training myself to use the STK- for Z rather than S*, and I've apparently written the word "zoom" 508 times.

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.

6.20

     I’ve made things difficult for myself with the Report-It again. I realized that in the new position, I was focusing on keeping my shoulders down so I wouldn’t have tension in them. But that was a kind of tension, too, and I wasn’t completely relaxed in that position, either. So I needed to find a place to put the Report-It where my shoulders would be completely relaxed, and now that’s been driving me crazy again.

     You know how sometimes, your machine just isn’t quite in the right spot, and you have to slightly adjust your own positioning to account for it, and really fight to get down every word, because you can’t stop to move the machine? I’ve been writing every word like that for the past month. It’s going to be good when I get it right though, I know it is.

     I finally got something right today. It was a horrible day for practice. I spent the first 2 hours messing with the Report-It. I didn’t record how long I spent on the drill book, but it was a long time. I finally made it all the way through yesterday, and I also went back and re-did an exercise for the first time. Each day I’m going to do the two that I have the slowest currently recorded speeds for. My worst speed, which was only on one exercise thankfully (the FR one), was 50 wpm.

     Unfortunately, I couldn’t best that speed yesterday. But today, I doubled it! I got the words at 100 wpm. I decided that if I have a misstroke already defined in my dictionary, and I write the word that way, it counts as being correct. It doesn’t matter if I’m training myself to write it incorrectly as long as it translates and doesn’t conflict with anything. That took a long time though, writing all 65 words enough times to double the speed, and then I had to do my next-slowest exercise. SKW, 55 wpm. I couldn’t even do it at 55 though. I had to drop it down to 50.

     It was well past my normal homework time by the time I started speedbuilding in earnest (8 hours past, in fact) and I wasn’t expecting much out of it since I never really got the Report-It where I wanted it. But then, I wrote my piece (or at least the last two minutes, which is all I’m counting for accuracy) all the way through, and it was at 95% accuracy! After writing the same 4 minutes over and over for the past month, I finally get to move on to..the last minute on this piece!

     I know what you’re thinking: if you could write 2 minutes individually at 95% accuracy, and it took you a month to be able to write them together at 95% (with 2 minutes in front of them), maybe that speed is too high. But I maintain that it would’ve happened a lot faster if I hadn’t been struggling with the Report-It the entire time.

     StenEd teaches that "any" is NI and "-ny" is N*I. That’s a little weird, though. None of the other –y suffixes have asterisks, so why not just make "any" N*I or something? I was just going to leave it, even though the VITAC book says “-ny” should be NI, but I decided I’d rather go for consistency, so I changed all 176 dictionary entries that had the N*I. Now I have to learn to write "any" as NE. That’s what the book suggested, and I liked the idea of leaving N*I open for other things. I also found a few dozen entries that started with "OR," which I can’t have because that’s my stroke for the word "or," so I fixed those.

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.

6.8

     I have not given up on the Report-It.  I spent a couple of days not using it, just because it was driving me crazy and I felt like I had to get some actual practice in. I still felt like I could benefit from it after that, though, so I had a friend walk me through the process outlined in the manual and make sure I was doing everything at the proper angles.  I tried to use it that way, I really did, but it just wasn’t comfortable.  Then I realized that I always write with my shoulders rasied up.  So, I tried really hard to force them down and hold them there and put the Report-It in a position that would be comfortable like that.  It’s only one spacer lower than where it was before, actually.  I haven’t gotten the kinks worked out of that yet, either, but for the first time my right arm doesn’t hurt.

     My right arm was always the one that hurt no matter what, and now my left arm hurts instead.  I ordered some leather key tabs from Depobook on April 24^th, and for various reasons, they didn’t arrive until yesterday.  I put some on the right lower bank to test it out, and I realized I was going to have to put them on the upper bank, too.  They’re pretty cool.  At first I thought they felt weird, but then today I did all of my practice with them on, just on the right side, and I could really tell a difference.  The keys on the left all of a sudden felt very hard and painful, and the key tabs were nice and soft.  It seems to help with knowing where the keys are, too.
     For some reason I don’t feel like I have to press as hard on those keys.  I guess because as soon as I feel the tabs, I know I’ve touched key and it’s going to register.  I also noticed that if I put the tab a little bit beyond where the key actually is, the space between the banks doesn’t bother me as much.  For some reason, ever since I got the LS, it seemed like the spaces between the banks were too big and it bothered me, even though I think they’re supposed to be exactly the same as on any other machine.  If I hang the tab a little bit over into that space, it still registers as pressing both keys, which is awesome.  I have to experiment with how much space I want to have there now.  I just put tabs on the left side, and I didn’t leave any space at all.  I figured I know by now where the keys are so that shouldn’t bother me, but I think I am getting some instances of both keys registering when I only meant to stroke one.

     The great thing about these tabs is that they're so easy to remove that you don’t have to do anything besides just pull them right off, and then you can re-attach them.  That's one of the reasons I got this kind of key tab, although I didn’t know they would be that easy to take off.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that I won’t have to adjust the sensitivity of my keys at all.  I thought that might be a problem, but as far as I can tell, everything still registers just fine.

     Of course, I haven’t made any progress on my piece at all, which is depressing, but I hit 260 at the end of it today, which hasn’t happened in quite a while. I found out the other day that the word "rind" wasn’t in my dictionary, which I thought was weird.

6.1

     I am still making adjustments to the placement of the Report-It (closer, farther, straighter, more angled, narrower, wider; the only thing I don’t have to adjust anymore is the height), which means I’m still making adjustments to the position of the machine, and writing feels like an epic struggle.  I’m determined to get it to work.  Last night I actually had some spare time to do some dictionary maintenance.  I went through my dictionary and deleted all of the entries for words that end in R, N, or L that I added an -ed to.  There were 144, 136, and 300, respectively.

Horses

     I have been trying to use the Report-It.  I think it is probably the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life, even worse than getting used to the LS, which took about three months, and which I had just barely accomplished when I got the Report-It.  I really just want to throw it out the window, and then go outside and attack it.  I have tried so many positions of the Report-It and the writer and my arms and everything.  I can never tell what I need to do to fix it, and I’m using all of my practice time on adjusting it instead of practicing, so I’m losing major time on that front.  Every time I leave it in the best position I could figure out, and then the next day I come back to it and it’s totally wrong and I have to start all over again.

     Today I had someone help me so I could make sure my elbows were at a right angle, so at least I have that figured out now.  I’m not giving up, though.  I have to make it work, because now that I’ve been using it, it hurts more not to use it, although I can’t write hardly at all while using it.  I have the arm position down I guess, I just need to get the machine in the right spot for where my arms are, but I’m not used to writing like this at all.

     I think I’ve officially given up my dream of taking the Caption Masters class in July.  I didn’t realize how horrible my writing had become.  It’s kind of ironic that if I hadn’t done what the instructor suggested, I would probably be fast enough for the class by now.  But since I added the asterisks, I can’t write anything anymore, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to.  Originally, I was planning to be done with school by August at the latest.  I wonder if I would be fast enough if I hadn’t changed so many things?  After I didn’t make it into the Caption Masters class in January, I figured I’d be at 180 for sure in a couple of months, and I’d get into the class for July, and finish it in November, and be ready to work then. 

     But now that’s not going to happen, so I guess I just don’t have a timeline at all, and the best I can hope for is that it doesn’t take me seven years like it does most people.  The average time to become is court reporter is five years, and then people usually spend at least a couple years doing that before they can caption.  It’s so hard going through and trying to learn to do everything perfectly.  Sometimes I just wish I could quit and find something to work towards where I could see actual progress, and have a timeline, and know that I was on the right track to getting done by a certain date.

     I’ve been trying to sound things out when I fingerspell them, so hopefully that’s a good strategy, because I’m getting better at it.  I made it halfway through the drill book, well, more than halfway by now because I’m on exercise 70, but that’s just depressing because all I seem to be doing is discovering all the finger positions I never quite mastered and am going to have problems with.

Report-It Fail

     No real progress to report on the speedbuilding, although I was writing at 260 at one point yesterday.  My accuracy has also been pretty good so far; I just wish I could write the minute without any drops with that accuracy, and then I’d be set.  I realized that I hadn’t finished setting up my capital typing alphabet, so I did that today, and I also edited my integral prefix and suffix table.  Trying to incorporate endings in words that end in R, N, or L causes way too many conflicts, so I’ve decided it’s better not to do it at all, and I fixed my table to stop suggesting -ing and -ed for those.  I’ll have to go back sometime and delete all the entries I’ve already made that include endings for those, too. I also need to go back and add an alphabet that attaches single letters to the last word.

     One thing that’s kind of frustrating about the Phoenix drill book is all the words that are mixed in to help with transitions.   I think that’s a great idea, and an important thing to work on, but it seems like those are the words that always throw me off, because they’re words that I have trouble with to begin with. "Merge" and "starve" are in with the words that end in -rt.  I don’t really have a problem with -rt, but then I have to record a low speed because something like merge or starve tripped me up.  Doing the drills is good for focus, though.  It’s so hard to pay attention to them and not let my mind drift, especially to think about how I just got a word, or how I barely just got a word.  Of course, that’s the kind of thing you have to be constantly trying not to do in regular writing, too.

     I had no idea I would have such a hard time writing mammogram.  I have 17 entries for it in my dictionary because I misstroke it so many different ways.
     I ordered a Report-It a while ago, and it came today.  I just spent about an hour and a half messing with it.  I tried the method outlined in the manual first, which is to position yourself properly for posture and align the Report-It and your machine accordingly.  That didn't work, so I tried sitting like I usually do and getting the Report-It under my arms, and that didn't feel good, either.  I just felt really restricted, and I couldn't get in a spot where my arms were comfortable and I could reach the keys at the same time.
     So, now I have the option of either keeping the thing for $160, or sending it back for $40.