I've always had a terrible time writing "equilibrium"; it's defined 30 ways in my dictionary, and it still comes out wrong when I write it. I noticed AB was reminding me one of the ways I have it is BR*UM. It comes up a lot in my leadership class, and I've totally memorized it now. So much easier! Another new one I use a lot is AO*LG for "algorithm." It's surprising how many different contexts that word comes up in.
I recently set my AB to remind/give me briefs for things even if it would only save one stroke. That's probably too sensitive if you're just starting out with AB, but now that I've been using it for a while, I think I'm going to like it. It's giving me lots of helpful things, and there were times before when I wasn't getting anything for words I wanted briefs for. Just today it gave me one for "annotated outline," which really saved me.
Looking that up reminded me that I couldn't figure out how to write "cedar." Luckily I fingerspelled it and got a brief for it (which I used 19 times in an hour). I just checked on what the problem was, and it's the fact that I recently changed -dar from DAR to DA*R. I was having conflicts with Darlene, Darnell, etc., and I figured it should've been DA*R all along. But it's going to take some getting used to writing it - radar is probably the first one I'll learn, although it isn't sticking yet.
A couple other items of note are that I was pleasantly surprised to stroke out "Tiananmen Square" as best I could and have it actually translate, and I successfully fingerspelled "heterogenous." I miss the asterisk in "help" sometimes, and I wind up with "hep," so I'm used to seeing and erasing "hep" quite a bit, but I finally got to actually use it the other day when someone said "hep C."
Showing posts with label auto-brief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label auto-brief. Show all posts
Learn Your Software
I've learned some pretty cool stuff from the Eclipse FB group. I strongly recommend checking it out if you're on Eclipse. I also watched the full 8 hours of Eclipse basic training tutorials (bo-ring!). It was mostly about title pages and auto indexing and stuff I don't use, or stuff I already know how to do, but I did pick up a couple ideas.
I have a stroke that takes me to the bottom of my realtime feed/has me follow it, and it was always bad when I forgot to hit that after I scrolled up to look at something. But I found out about the "follow always" checkbox in the realtime tab, and now that's not a problem anymore.
I learned that you can make conflicts if you want a certain thing to happen after a number. I use P-KT for % and PER/KRENT for percent, but sometimes it's so much easier to hit P-KT, that I just don't get PER/KRENT in there. I think I've got it set up now that I can write "a large P-KT" or something and it will come up "a large percent," so that's cool. I've been trying to see new opportunities for conflicts overall. Sometimes I miss the F in I've (AO*IV) and get "aye," but why not make it a conflict with the first choice being "aye"? Just today I changed YO*U from ewe to \ewe\you're, because I miss that R so often.
The best idea I got from the FB group was about suffixes. I think someone just said something about their suffix rules table, and it reminded me about how I keep getting things like "organizationtion" when I accidentally drag an extra G into ORGS/S, making it ORGS/GS. So I made a rule that when the word ends in -tion, the suffix should delete the -tion and add an -s, and voila! ORGS/GS is organizations now, and I won't get orientationtion or objectiontion or anything like that, either.
I've come up with tons of applications for that now that I've realized I can do it. No more defectiveive if I already tucked the V and forgot about it (DE/F*EFKT/IV), no more passageage if I got confused and did PAJ/AJ, no more strategicically, or longerer if I didn't realize I tucked the R (LORNG/ER). I don't think -tor was in there as a real suffix; it was in my dictionary, but it wasn't in the suffix table, so it didn't have any suffix rules. I kept getting things like compacttor and reacttor because instead of RE/AK/TOR, I'd write RAEKT/TOR.
But I fixed that rule, so it works for -tor and -tors. And I was getting things like "humorral," so I told it if you're going to add -ral and the word already ends in "r," delete the first "r." I feel like someone who does realtime already has all these suffixes in their suffix table and suffix spelling rules, and I must've missed out on them in an update or something. I should ask on depoman or the FB group for someone's tables, but I'm afraid it might mess things up. I don't see how it could, though, really; it would only change the suffixes in English. It wouldn't have anything to do with my steno outlines. I guess I'd just have to make sure all the things I've changed were still in there.
I also changed my background color from white to gray. Someone on the FB group said it's easier on the eyes. I've heard stuff like that before, but I never really thought about actually changing it until I saw it there. I really do like it better.
I have a ton of different settings files I use for different companies, so it's a pain to change suffix tables or whatever in all of them. I asked about it on FB, and Dave Stanley said that I could just have a global.set that all settings would use for certain things. It seemed like a great idea, except that it overwrites your realtime settings if you let it change your translation settings. It also overwrites your job dictionaries no matter what you do, which is a drag.
I learned how to finally get TM to stop messing with my stroke for "a," which is awesome. I told it to stop pulling "an" and "everyone" into other words, too. I actually turned TM up a bit. The new sliders are kind of confusing, but I understand them now. My main problem was that TM wasn't being aggressive enough; there were tons of words it just left alone. So I unchecked "require an untran," and I bumped it up from whatever it was at (it might've been as low as 1%) to 30%, and I think it's doing better now.
I found out there's a dictionary entry you can use to reject the last AB suggestion and get a new one all at once, and I also found a macro for requesting a brief for the last word, which I think will come in handy.
I have a stroke that takes me to the bottom of my realtime feed/has me follow it, and it was always bad when I forgot to hit that after I scrolled up to look at something. But I found out about the "follow always" checkbox in the realtime tab, and now that's not a problem anymore.
I learned that you can make conflicts if you want a certain thing to happen after a number. I use P-KT for % and PER/KRENT for percent, but sometimes it's so much easier to hit P-KT, that I just don't get PER/KRENT in there. I think I've got it set up now that I can write "a large P-KT" or something and it will come up "a large percent," so that's cool. I've been trying to see new opportunities for conflicts overall. Sometimes I miss the F in I've (AO*IV) and get "aye," but why not make it a conflict with the first choice being "aye"? Just today I changed YO*U from ewe to \ewe\you're, because I miss that R so often.
The best idea I got from the FB group was about suffixes. I think someone just said something about their suffix rules table, and it reminded me about how I keep getting things like "organizationtion" when I accidentally drag an extra G into ORGS/S, making it ORGS/GS. So I made a rule that when the word ends in -tion, the suffix should delete the -tion and add an -s, and voila! ORGS/GS is organizations now, and I won't get orientationtion or objectiontion or anything like that, either.
I've come up with tons of applications for that now that I've realized I can do it. No more defectiveive if I already tucked the V and forgot about it (DE/F*EFKT/IV), no more passageage if I got confused and did PAJ/AJ, no more strategicically, or longerer if I didn't realize I tucked the R (LORNG/ER). I don't think -tor was in there as a real suffix; it was in my dictionary, but it wasn't in the suffix table, so it didn't have any suffix rules. I kept getting things like compacttor and reacttor because instead of RE/AK/TOR, I'd write RAEKT/TOR.
But I fixed that rule, so it works for -tor and -tors. And I was getting things like "humorral," so I told it if you're going to add -ral and the word already ends in "r," delete the first "r." I feel like someone who does realtime already has all these suffixes in their suffix table and suffix spelling rules, and I must've missed out on them in an update or something. I should ask on depoman or the FB group for someone's tables, but I'm afraid it might mess things up. I don't see how it could, though, really; it would only change the suffixes in English. It wouldn't have anything to do with my steno outlines. I guess I'd just have to make sure all the things I've changed were still in there.
I also changed my background color from white to gray. Someone on the FB group said it's easier on the eyes. I've heard stuff like that before, but I never really thought about actually changing it until I saw it there. I really do like it better.
I have a ton of different settings files I use for different companies, so it's a pain to change suffix tables or whatever in all of them. I asked about it on FB, and Dave Stanley said that I could just have a global.set that all settings would use for certain things. It seemed like a great idea, except that it overwrites your realtime settings if you let it change your translation settings. It also overwrites your job dictionaries no matter what you do, which is a drag.
I learned how to finally get TM to stop messing with my stroke for "a," which is awesome. I told it to stop pulling "an" and "everyone" into other words, too. I actually turned TM up a bit. The new sliders are kind of confusing, but I understand them now. My main problem was that TM wasn't being aggressive enough; there were tons of words it just left alone. So I unchecked "require an untran," and I bumped it up from whatever it was at (it might've been as low as 1%) to 30%, and I think it's doing better now.
I found out there's a dictionary entry you can use to reject the last AB suggestion and get a new one all at once, and I also found a macro for requesting a brief for the last word, which I think will come in handy.
First Quarter
I've been doing a lot more business CART now that I'm working for a new company. I get to cover lots of meetings, mostly about the status of various projects. It's really tough, because I never know what anyone's talking about. Every job is about a different topic with different speakers, and sometimes the meeting only lasts for 15 minutes, so I barely have time to get into any sort of rhythm.
One of my classes is cultural anthropology. The teacher uses a lot of what I like to call "$10 words"; one that sticks out is "tutelage." There's all kinds of weird terms, like patrilineal, matrilateral, Ju'/hoansi, ethnography, you name it. The teacher only talks at about 160 wpm, but it's tough keeping up with all the weird stuff that's not in my dictionary, or at least not in there the way I want to write it. It's kind of fun though to fingerspell something and then look over at the Auto-brief window and see if it was already in my dictionary or not. AB shows me a suggestion for the word in one place if it's already in there as something, and in a different place if it's not.
I don't have to edit the transcripts at all for this company (most of the time I don't even have to send one in), which is pretty cool. I still go through them for myself and identify problems/add words to my dictionary, though. I also run them through a Microsoft Word spellcheck when I'm all done fixing things, and I usually catch one or two more things I can change in my dictionary that way.
I was concerned that when I need to fingerspell something, I don't necessarily remember after the event is over that I had to fingerspell it, so it will never get in my dictionary. I couldn't find anything that would really help me search a tript for fingerspelling, so I came up with my own way of doing it. I go through the whole tript and find every instance of the stroke A* (which is my &A), and check for words I need to enter. Then I go through again and check for E* (which is &E). I figure most words probably had an A and/or an E in them, and call it good. I find a lot of first/last names that way.
I was actually getting backed up on transcripts that I needed to go back and look at for a couple weeks. If I had a repeat job for the same class/person, I would edit the transcript before that repeat job, but so many of them were just one-offs that I never had time to edit. I finally got them all cleared out today, though. It seemed like an impossible dream, but somehow it happened!
I'm kind of interested to get into captioning and hopefully have some commercial breaks. CART ends early a lot of the time (never during my anthropology class, unfortunately), but it can be non-stop writing for hours. It's really tough on my arm when I have to do that. If I could get in a few commercial breaks, I think it would help a lot with the pain.
One of my classes is cultural anthropology. The teacher uses a lot of what I like to call "$10 words"; one that sticks out is "tutelage." There's all kinds of weird terms, like patrilineal, matrilateral, Ju'/hoansi, ethnography, you name it. The teacher only talks at about 160 wpm, but it's tough keeping up with all the weird stuff that's not in my dictionary, or at least not in there the way I want to write it. It's kind of fun though to fingerspell something and then look over at the Auto-brief window and see if it was already in my dictionary or not. AB shows me a suggestion for the word in one place if it's already in there as something, and in a different place if it's not.
I don't have to edit the transcripts at all for this company (most of the time I don't even have to send one in), which is pretty cool. I still go through them for myself and identify problems/add words to my dictionary, though. I also run them through a Microsoft Word spellcheck when I'm all done fixing things, and I usually catch one or two more things I can change in my dictionary that way.
I was concerned that when I need to fingerspell something, I don't necessarily remember after the event is over that I had to fingerspell it, so it will never get in my dictionary. I couldn't find anything that would really help me search a tript for fingerspelling, so I came up with my own way of doing it. I go through the whole tript and find every instance of the stroke A* (which is my &A), and check for words I need to enter. Then I go through again and check for E* (which is &E). I figure most words probably had an A and/or an E in them, and call it good. I find a lot of first/last names that way.
I was actually getting backed up on transcripts that I needed to go back and look at for a couple weeks. If I had a repeat job for the same class/person, I would edit the transcript before that repeat job, but so many of them were just one-offs that I never had time to edit. I finally got them all cleared out today, though. It seemed like an impossible dream, but somehow it happened!
I'm kind of interested to get into captioning and hopefully have some commercial breaks. CART ends early a lot of the time (never during my anthropology class, unfortunately), but it can be non-stop writing for hours. It's really tough on my arm when I have to do that. If I could get in a few commercial breaks, I think it would help a lot with the pain.
12.7.13
I was feeling pretty confident about things after the CCP/CBC exam, and I decided I couldn't wait around anymore for my arm to feel better. I applied to about 15 CART companies trying to drum up some real work. I got promising responses from a few. It's three weeks later now, and I've only actually done any work for one, and that's only been a couple of hours. I'm hopeful about getting some classes from another next semester, but I'm not sure it'll be a full schedule.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
I'm starting to have serious doubts about my ability to make a career out of CART. I don't like having downtime. I'd rather be working. Like it or not, I'm about to have an entire month off. I may actually have to invest in captioning. The good thing about that is I can start any time; it's not dependent on semester schedules.
I've been having a problem where I keep writng -fy as FAOI, even though that's "fie" and -fy should be FEU. I had SUR as Sur for some reason instead of sur-, which caused a problem somewhere, so I fixed that. I wrote that Frozen was a "prison success movie," which was just weird. I guess it's good that it translated that way, but I certainly didn't remember that I'm supposed to write "princess" as PRIN/S*ES. Maybe I should change prison to PR*IN.
Jill posted a brilliant idea on depoman. Instead of just having "-ville" and "-borough" and whatnot just attach, she has them defined to cap the previous word *and* attach to it! I updated a few pertinent entries of my own to do that, and it's totally awesome.
I also joined the Eclipse group on FB, where I've learned some great tricks. You can use ALT + S/ALT + A to add a single word to your spelling dictionary instead of having to run a spellcheck which pushes you down to the next misspelled word whether you wanted to go anywhere or not, which is a lifesaver. There's a command to bring up your steno notes if they're not showing up on a transcript.
The most important thing I saw was a reminder to upgrade to Version 6.0.0.12. I was on .9, and I don't even think I knew there was another update. If I did, I didn't know it was a stable one. I upgraded, and it turns out they fixed the auto-brief window so it works in keyboard macro output! They fixed it around the start of the semester. I *so* wish I had known that! It would've been amazing. I've got it going now, but there's only one week left in the semester.
I haven't had time for dictionary maintenence for a while, but there was a period where I was making good progress on it. I decided it made more sense for ya'll to be YAL and -ial to be Y*AL, so I changed 961 entries. I was really used to doing -ial as YAL, though, and it's not going over so well in my writing yet. -cade needed to be KA*ID to avoid conflicting with Cade, but there weren't many of those. Similarly, -tate (141 entries) got updated to TA*IT to avoid conflicting with Tate.
-gate (162) had to be GA*ET, for obvious reasons. I was writing -ality as ALT and it wasn't translating, so I did 434 of those. Latin was defined as LANT, which made sense. I'm not sure I actually even write it that way, but I updated 86 -lant entries to be LA*NT. -rate words (465) weren't working as RA*T, although I thought I fixed that already. I went ahead and did 84 -fied words as FAOID and FID, so that should work no matter which way I do it.
BER is ber-, so I updated -ber (208) as B*ER. "-zation" words (273) weren't coming out properly. I think I decided they should be fine as STKAIGS, but I defined them all as STKA*IGS for some reason. I wanted my para- prefix (232) to be PA*R, but it wasn't defined. -cate (238) wasn't working as K*AT. YOR is yore, so -ior (84) had to be Y*OR. I'd probably write yore as YOER, though, so I'm not sure I really needed to do that one.
I'm down to only 13 more problems to fix, so maybe I can get them done over winter break.
Headway
I'm finally starting to feel good about my realtime. Out of the last three news broadcasts I've practiced, my lowest accuracy was 98.83%. I'm starting to not get freaked out when I make a mistake, and be aware of what's being said while I fix mistakes. I still haven't gotten any work from the company I signed a contract with, though. I'd really like to get my feet wet and see where I stand on some actual CART work.
I'm feeling so confident that I even sent out "applications" to five CART/captioning companies, but I haven't heard anything back. It's frustrating because I've been working so long to be "ready," and now that I've put myself out there, no one seems interested in taking me on.
I'm intimidated by the captioning aspect, too. I live in an apartment, and we don't have a single landline, let alone the three or four I might need for captioning. We only have basic cable, and if I started captioning the traditional way, I'd have to buy a TV, modem, coupler, and amplifier, at least, plus AccuCap, which would be $3k alone. I have enough saved up for all of those things, but I'd much rather not have to get them.
In less stressful news, I finally hit an average of 180 wpm on all of my speed drills! I've been gunning for that goal for a while. I'm also doing a lot better making my corrections make sense when I practice realtime; making sure I have a dash before and after the correction word, if it doesn't come right after the error. I was having a problem with dashing before and using a comma after, but that's only happening rarely now.
I finally finished all my -NAIR corrections, and I've moved on to -ia, which I now write as KWRA*. Nothing in that group of 744 words seems to be defined the way I write it now, so that's my next project.
I made some changes to auto-brief; namely, I learned that you can tell it not to suggest certain letter combinations, which is really helpful. I don't ever write -TD or -SZ (or at least, not on purpose), and now I won't get suggestions with them. I also noticed sometimes it would suggest a brief with -TZ in it, which was just crazy (for me, anyway). For some reason after I did that, I lost my pop-up window. It was really weird, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back, until a few days later, it magically reappeared on its own!
I'm feeling so confident that I even sent out "applications" to five CART/captioning companies, but I haven't heard anything back. It's frustrating because I've been working so long to be "ready," and now that I've put myself out there, no one seems interested in taking me on.
I'm intimidated by the captioning aspect, too. I live in an apartment, and we don't have a single landline, let alone the three or four I might need for captioning. We only have basic cable, and if I started captioning the traditional way, I'd have to buy a TV, modem, coupler, and amplifier, at least, plus AccuCap, which would be $3k alone. I have enough saved up for all of those things, but I'd much rather not have to get them.
In less stressful news, I finally hit an average of 180 wpm on all of my speed drills! I've been gunning for that goal for a while. I'm also doing a lot better making my corrections make sense when I practice realtime; making sure I have a dash before and after the correction word, if it doesn't come right after the error. I was having a problem with dashing before and using a comma after, but that's only happening rarely now.
I finally finished all my -NAIR corrections, and I've moved on to -ia, which I now write as KWRA*. Nothing in that group of 744 words seems to be defined the way I write it now, so that's my next project.
I made some changes to auto-brief; namely, I learned that you can tell it not to suggest certain letter combinations, which is really helpful. I don't ever write -TD or -SZ (or at least, not on purpose), and now I won't get suggestions with them. I also noticed sometimes it would suggest a brief with -TZ in it, which was just crazy (for me, anyway). For some reason after I did that, I lost my pop-up window. It was really weird, and I couldn't figure out how to get it back, until a few days later, it magically reappeared on its own!
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