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.