Via PaleoFuture, in honor of the Pav. Sadly, by 2000 his best years were pretty far behind him, but when he was great, he was great.
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(4)
05:16:41 PM,Thursday 6 September 2007
BY GEOGRAPHY came out BIOLOGY IF I
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(1)
11:11:35 AM,Thursday 6 September 2007
This is so awesome, it almost makes me wish I was in Ohio. Damn, I hope they go on tour.
I'm a little overwhelmed. I've got a lot of work coming in all at once, and I still haven't figured out how to make it all mesh harmoniously. But I just keep telling myself that I'd be way the hell more stressed if I had just quit my job and had nothing but tumbleweeds for supper, so I'm really not complaining.
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06:34:12 PM,Wednesday 5 September 2007
{random Architecture student bounds up, points at my steno machine}
RAS: I don't know what that is, but I love it. I love it!
{bounds away}
Me: A steno machine. Um... thanks?
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(2)
12:59:20 PM,Tuesday 4 September 2007
Today is my last day as a salaried seat slug. This has been a damn good job for me these past two years and change. It's taught me discipline and efficiency, paid my rent, and helped me build my dictionary while honing my realtime technique. But most of all, it's given me thousands of hours of free television that I would never have seen otherwise, and vital real-world knowledge that I'll keep with me for the rest of my life.
ABG RIRELOBQL YVXRF FNYNQ, OHG RIRELBAR YVXRF GUVF FNYNQ.
JR GNXR GJB CNPXNTRF BS ENZRA ABBQYRF,
CHG GURZ VA N ONTTVR,
NAQ FGNEG CBHAQVAT.
JR GNXR N UNYS N FGVPX BS OHGGRE.
JR'ER CHGGVAT ZRYGRQ OHGGRE VA GUR OBGGBZ BS GUR FXVYYRG.
CBHE GUR ABBQYRF VAGB GUR FXVYYRG JVGU GUR OHGGRE VA VG.
GURA JR GNXR NOBHG 1/4 PHC BS NYZBAQF.
NAQ JUNG ERNYYL TVIRF VG GUNG JBAQRESHY SYNVE
NAQ GUR JUBYR NFVNA SRRY VF GUR FRFNZR FRRQF.
NAQ, NTNVA, NOBHG 1/4 PHC BS FRFNZR FRRQF.
ABJ, CHG VG BA GUR FGBIR, FNHGR VG HC.
ARKG GUVAT JR QB VF ZNXR GUR QERFFVAT.
IREL RNFL QERFFVAT:
BYVIR BVY, 1/4 PHC,
N GNOYRFCBBA BS FBL FNHPR.
ERQ JVAR IVARTNE, NAQ JVGU NYY GUR IVARTNEF BHG GURER BA GUR ZNEXRG,
VG'F VZCBEGNAG GB ERZRZORE:
ERQ JVAR IVARTNE VF JUNG LBH ARRQ SBE GUVF.
NTNVA, 1/4 PHC.
NAQ V HFR FHTNE FHOFGVGHGR,
ORPNHFR FHTNE FHOFGVGHGR GNFGRF WHFG NF TBBQ GB ZR.
AB BAR ABGVPRF GUR QVSSRERAPR.
FB JR ARRQ NOBHG 1/2 PHC BS GUVF.
GUNG'F BHE QERFFVAT.
ABJ JR JBHYQ FGNEG PUBCCVAT HC BHE OBX PUBV.
NAQ V NYFB NQQ ANCN PNOONTR SBE PBYBE.
GURER JR TB.
GBFF, GBFF.
JR'ER TBAAN GBFF.
LBH TRG GUR QERFFVAT, TRG NYY GUR FGHSS.
GUR QERFFVAT GUNG LBH'IR WHFG ZNQR LBH PNA GUEBJ VA GURER ABJ.
FRR, JBHYQ LBH XABJ GUNG'F ABG ERNY FHTNE?
JBHYQ LBH XABJ GUNG'F FHTNE FHOFGVGHGR?
GUVF VF ERNYYL QRYVPVBHF.
GUNAX LBH FB ZHPU.
LBH'ER N QRYVTUG.
LBH'ER TBETRBHF.
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(4)
12:54:17 PM,Friday 31 August 2007
One happy bit of luck is that all but one of the six classes I'm doing will be transcribed in all caps. It's a huge relief. I, like most long-time denizens of the internet, have no idea why anyone would voluntarily want to read anything but mixed-case (or cripes, even lowercase) text, but apparently two of my three students prefer it. This is really good for me, because the majority of my dictionary building over the last two years has been in all-caps, since that's the standard format for closed captioning. DigitalCAT, unlike Eclipse, can't make a dictionary entry of a different case than the transcript, so I had to go through a tedious process every few weeks of batch-uncapping each dictionary and then scanning them entry by entry to capitalize the proper nouns. Dreadful. Inevitably I wound up missing plenty that needed capping, and it's been my secret insecurity all along, knowing I would eventually be going back into mixed case. But just one class isn't so bad. It'll buy me some time to spruce the thing up.
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(4)
03:37:01 PM,Wednesday 29 August 2007
Wow. So it looks like I'm working at NYU as well as Pratt. I am no longer worried about how I'm gonna pay the bills. I am now worried about how the hell I'm gonna be able to transcribe graduate-level classes in corporate, international, and urban planning law. I guess I'm glad I took that legal terminology class at NYCI after all. Gulp.
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06:13:40 PM,Tuesday 28 August 2007
Blogging from the Pratt Library. Well, that's one class down. If only all professors had such mellow, measured voices. I didn't get any prep material for this one, so there was an egregious number of untranslates, but in terms of the stuff I actually had in my dictionary I think I got it down pretty well. Also, all the lecture material is going to be online, and as soon as I get access to the site I'll be able to dive in headfirst and Bozzy it all to pieces. I think I can actually do this. The two graduate classes are tomorrow and Thursday, and that's scarier-- but so far, so good.
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(2)
01:30:26 PM,Tuesday 28 August 2007
I realized what it was about Vim that gets me babbling like a yeti whenever I think about it: sitting down and using it to convert, say, a theater script into a open captioning script (or an editing transcript into a closed captioning transcript) feels like it did when I got my first computer and discovered the fascinations of MS Paint. I've never been able to draw, but now suddenly here I was making perfect circles and inverting colors at a stroke, as many times as I wanted, without leaving smudges or tearing the paper. I wasn't ever able to make any real art, but once I drew a picture of myself as the man in the moon, with a pencil stuck behind my ear and wearing a beret, which served as my online avatar for years before any of us had digital cameras or scanners. It felt miraculous compared to the squiggly dreck I'd always been left with, pre-computron.
I remember in middle school piecing together some old corrupted version of The Jargon File in Word, entry by entry, so that I could have my own clean copy on my own hard drive. And all that time I was too lazy or ignorant or timorous to actually learn the tricks of those guys I idolized, and was stuck with all the tedium of a user-friendly word processor, cumbersome as crayon on construction paper. Now I can erase the chaff of these files with one regular expression instead of manually, page by page, and I can save myself thousands of keystrokes even in the stuff that has to be vetted. Of course I realize that my prowess in Vim right now is as laughable as the difference between MS Paint and the GIMP, but it won't stay that way. After I got as much as I was gonna get out of Paint, I abandoned it and went back to playing with words, which are what I'm actually good at; I've got a reason to stick around this time.
The feeling's the same: glee and omnipotence on a wee pixely scale, but no less dizzying for that. Today it's mostly just text-twiddling, but I'm already using it to write webpage copy, and then it'll be stories, and then if I get a chance I'll dip my toe into programming again. But Vim has been the best addition to my toolbox since steno.
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(4)
12:49:22 PM,Monday 27 August 2007
Her: Would you want to be nuzzled by zombie Marlene Dietrich?
Me: ...
Her: Zey call me Zombie Lola, ze deadest gal in town...
Me: And tell zem I sighed, and tell zem I cried, and tell zem I died for ze brains!
Her: Falling to bits again, never vanted to, vat am I to do? I can't help it.
Her: You viz your brains across ze table technique...
Me: {dreamy sigh}
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11:14:18 AM,Saturday 25 August 2007
There was an old man of St. Bees
who was terribly stung by a wasp.
When asked, "Does it hurt?"
he replied, "No, it doesn't.
It's a good job it wasn't a hornet."
via W.S. Gilbert via Stephen Fry via K.
(and, as I just discovered, previously via Moss via Half-Bakery.)
Likewise via K.
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(4)
11:22:44 AM,Wednesday 22 August 2007
I've cheated, and I don't feel a lick of remorse. I've been horrendously negligent in adding words to my dictionary this summer, but happily Eclipse came with a complimentary copy of the official StenEd dictionary, whose theory is all but identical to the proprietary NYCI theory (really just a Frankenstein assemblage of old pre-computer theories and some of the early CAT-compatible ones, of which StenEd was a pioneer) that I learned. A few tweaks and snips and my 54,896-word dictionary is now 97,945 words. If I had tried merging a brief-heavy theory like Stenomaster, the additional entries would be all but useless to me, since I'd have no idea how to stroke them, but happily StenEd is a relatively stroke-heavy theory, which means that if I'm pretty sure a word isn't among my own old 54,896, I can write it out phonetically and it might just translate. So hey.
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10:55:36 AM,Wednesday 22 August 2007
My little sweet darling, my comfort and joy,
(Sing lullaby, lulla!)
In beauty surpassing the princes of Troy,
(Sing lullaby, lulla!)
Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother's sweet boy,
(Sing lullaby, lulla!)
The gods bless and keep thee from cruel annoy.
(Sing lullaby, lulla!)
Sweet baby, lulla, lulla, lulla, lulla!
Listening to James Bowman (who has a marvelously low and sultry speaking voice, incidentally) sing this while re-reading An Arrow's Flight: peculiarly apt.
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(3)
02:54:33 PM,Tuesday 21 August 2007
Oh, something substantive. Well, that CART job I talked about earlier wasn't all that dramatic. I CARTed my Dad's 80th birthday party in May, but that was family so it didn't count. Then I realtimed for a bit at a conference for aspiring CART providers last month, but they were all stenogs there, so that didn't count. This time wasn't for pay, so maybe it's not officially official, but it was in front of people I didn't know who actually required my services. I did the second half of a support group session for people with Neurofibromatosis II.
It all went fairly well, though I had to stop the proceedings once or twice when I fell behind, and I couldn't understand the speech of some of the participants, which led to hazy guessing. The worst was when one person was talking about the Rusk Institute. I knew I didn't have the name in my dictionary, but I was fingerspelling like the wendigo until I noticed that none of the fingerspelled letters were coming up on the LED sign (though they were clear as consomme there on my screen). See, I had spent the day tediously entering my entire fingerspelling alphabet into my realtime command dictionary so I could define untranslated words right from my steno machine instead of having to reach over and do it on the qwerty keyboard. I didn't realize that this meant I wouldn't actually be able to spell out words letter by letter when not actually defining them. So anyway, that was lame. Still not sure how to fix the problem, but I've been playing around with it.
Eclipse is really quite good. Much more customizable, efficient, and flexible than DigitalCAT. Admittedly, it obliterated an entire file yesterday and I had to retranslate it from the notes, which was jaw-grinding, but I was using the Dev version, because it has shiny features the stable release doesn't. I'll probably play with the new version until I have to go to work (distressingly soon, though I'm still in limbo as to how much I'll actually be working. I supposedly have between one and three -- or possibly four or five or zero -- students, but I can't count on anything 'til it's settled.)
But it's good at guessing at what I meant when I screw up, and it's good at doing what I tell it. DigitalCAT does have one significant advantage over it, though: the "Use -D, -S, -Z, -G rule before theory" option. I started out with a 30,000-word dictionary with practically no integral inflections. That is, it contained the word "brain", but not "brained", "brains", or "braining". I could make them all by adding -D, -S (or -Z), and -G in a second stroke after writing them, and that's what I did almost all through school. However, with that option ticked in DigitalCAT, I could add any of those letters in with the word, on the same stroke, and it would translate properly without my having to specifically define them. As a result, I started doing it a lot, nearly unconsciously and without any overt effort, and I think it helped to pep my writing up quite a bit. Adding those suffix strokes is like playing grace notes. Proponents of ultra-short writing systems (who often have 200,000-word dictionaries composed of largely redundant word inflections) complain that someone writing a word in two strokes rather than one is going to be twice as slow and suffer twice the risk of repetitive stress injuries.
I don't think that's strictly true; the motion is more of a reflexive flick than a concerted stroke, and I still use it in certain cases to prevent conflicts (though sometimes I also make up third options. RUN is run and RUNG is rung, so rather than RUN/G for running, I use RUN*G. Alternately, since STUNG is stung and STUN*G is stunk, rather than using STUN/G for stunning, I use STAOUNG). But I've gotten used to it, and I don't really want to give up the option. I also don't want to bloat my dictionary by adding in tons of plurals, gerunds, and past tense verbs. I put in a feature request to the Eclipse people, and we'll see what happens.
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10:47:48 AM,Thursday 16 August 2007
via Brass Goggles.
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(2)
04:18:34 PM,Wednesday 15 August 2007
I did my first public CART job on Tuesday. Details forthcoming, when I've got a little time to spare.
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(1)
03:43:34 PM,Thursday 9 August 2007
Two American guys who barely speak Chinese pretending to be two Chinese guys who barely speak English pretending to be a Jewish guy pretending to be a black guy.
Whut?
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09:05:26 AM,Thursday 9 August 2007
Happy.
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04:23:07 PM,Friday 3 August 2007
August 11th is Melville Day in New York City. I'll be in Great Barrington.
August 18th is Oscar Brand's concert in Great Barrington. I'll be in New York City.
You just can't win.
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(1)
04:01:44 PM,Thursday 2 August 2007
Fabulous cartoon for my second-favorite gastrocetaceous pop song.
Via Frontalot.
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12:54:38 PM,Thursday 2 August 2007
