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Another quiet day...
Jan. 18th, 2012 10:05 pmBetween the dog wanting to go out and a painful shoulder, I managed to get very little sleep last night.
The day was another slow one, workwise, although I managed to streamline some procedures for when there is work and add some additional mass to my org files. I am finding the ability to rapidly capture due dates and names pretty impressive.
Then, before going out with Galina for a drive, I managed to introduce myself to Plover, which describes itself as "the world's first free, open source stenography program."
It is my opinion that anyone who wants to make a career that involves stringing words together ought to master not only typing, but stenography. I say this as I've been in too many situations where my amateur jury-rig stenographic efforts have simply not been good enough for the task at hand.
Apropos of typing, I'm not at all sure whether my high-school typing class had any long-term influence on me. To be frank, any "touch" typing I may have mastered by the time the course had ended was used to pass the course, though if memory serves, the grade wasn't really based much on how well one had mastered the classical "touch" system, but on whether one could center a line of text, keep text within margins, and format a business letter.
In fact, I can confidently state that all during college, I most certainly did not "touch type," with the exception of that marvelous assignment—given to me by the Chairman of the Germanic and Slavic Languages Department—to hand-type multiple copies of a fund-raising letter in Russian.
In the course of that job, I became acutely aware that my typing skills in English were of the three-finger variety, grounded on a fairly good knowledge of where letters were and a general laziness of throw all of my fingers into the act. I couldn't do the same thing using a Russian keyboard, because I didn't have the luxury of time to let letter locations soak into my brain as they had while typing in English.
So, I sought the only way out—the proverbial "path of least resistance"—I taught myself to touch type on a Russian keyboard, linking letters with their associated finger movements. After a couple of days of such drill, I actually began to crank out letters at pace that impressed even the Chairman.
Years passed, and it was only when I started writing translations on a freelance basis that I put two and two together and figured out how forcing myself to "touch type" on a standard typewriter would make my work go faster. Between the old manual Remington, the IBM Selectric, and a series of computer keyboards starting with the Osborne-1, I've been touch typing all the way.
And while it's fast, it's just not fast enough, even using AutoHotkey.
A few years ago, a colleague swore that voice recognition (VR) was the way to go, but I've not found that to be the case. Now, it may be that I've just not approached VR the right way, but the frustration I've felt while using, say, Dragon Naturally Speaking or the VR built into Windows, has well and truly turned me away from VR as a prospective input method.
But computer-aided stenography? Now that piques my interest.
Cheers...
The day was another slow one, workwise, although I managed to streamline some procedures for when there is work and add some additional mass to my org files. I am finding the ability to rapidly capture due dates and names pretty impressive.
Then, before going out with Galina for a drive, I managed to introduce myself to Plover, which describes itself as "the world's first free, open source stenography program."
It is my opinion that anyone who wants to make a career that involves stringing words together ought to master not only typing, but stenography. I say this as I've been in too many situations where my amateur jury-rig stenographic efforts have simply not been good enough for the task at hand.
Apropos of typing, I'm not at all sure whether my high-school typing class had any long-term influence on me. To be frank, any "touch" typing I may have mastered by the time the course had ended was used to pass the course, though if memory serves, the grade wasn't really based much on how well one had mastered the classical "touch" system, but on whether one could center a line of text, keep text within margins, and format a business letter.
In fact, I can confidently state that all during college, I most certainly did not "touch type," with the exception of that marvelous assignment—given to me by the Chairman of the Germanic and Slavic Languages Department—to hand-type multiple copies of a fund-raising letter in Russian.
In the course of that job, I became acutely aware that my typing skills in English were of the three-finger variety, grounded on a fairly good knowledge of where letters were and a general laziness of throw all of my fingers into the act. I couldn't do the same thing using a Russian keyboard, because I didn't have the luxury of time to let letter locations soak into my brain as they had while typing in English.
So, I sought the only way out—the proverbial "path of least resistance"—I taught myself to touch type on a Russian keyboard, linking letters with their associated finger movements. After a couple of days of such drill, I actually began to crank out letters at pace that impressed even the Chairman.
Years passed, and it was only when I started writing translations on a freelance basis that I put two and two together and figured out how forcing myself to "touch type" on a standard typewriter would make my work go faster. Between the old manual Remington, the IBM Selectric, and a series of computer keyboards starting with the Osborne-1, I've been touch typing all the way.
And while it's fast, it's just not fast enough, even using AutoHotkey.
A few years ago, a colleague swore that voice recognition (VR) was the way to go, but I've not found that to be the case. Now, it may be that I've just not approached VR the right way, but the frustration I've felt while using, say, Dragon Naturally Speaking or the VR built into Windows, has well and truly turned me away from VR as a prospective input method.
But computer-aided stenography? Now that piques my interest.
Cheers...
