Thursday, June 11

I am starting this post on my phone in bed because an interesting article about choosing a future-proof career came up in 'The Conversation' this morning (http://theconversation.com/how-to-guard-your-career-against-rapid-technological-change-42304). Here are the criteria it gave:

1. The delivery of a service in real-time
2. Being physically present at the point of service delivery
3. The need for a high degree of skill, training and experience, and
4. There is likely to be a sustained need for your service.

How does steno stack up against this list? Point 3 is clearly applicable, and point 1 is the way that I'm training. It's points 2 and 4 that may let me down. In the short term, while my children are young, I will probably look for home-based work if I can't find Adelaide work in the courts or for Hansard. In the longer term, I'd love to market my services to the hard-of-hearing community for onsite realtime transcription, and that would satisfy point 2. It's point 4 - the likelihood for a sustained need for our service - that the steno community seems to have been talking about for decades. As my husband (a computer programmer) keeps pointing out, the algorithms that endeavour to understand human speech will keep improving until they are able to replace us. I've known this the whole time and yet I've happily devoted hours to this study. My thinking is that even if, for me, this were to become nothing but a hobby, I would have gained the sort of pleasure that musicians do from their practice. And immersing myself in our beautiful, convoluted, eclectic language will benefit me no matter what the outcome.

... (big break - my son is home sick today)...

Today's TypeRacer fingerspelling speed: 19wpm

New vocab: coronavirus (reading about the MERS outbreak in South Korea)

I also have great news:  I have the Phoenix Fast-Track to Realtime Writing book now :-). I have started working through it and come up with a few examples of words that we pronounce differently here in Australia: fertile, cretin, Sharon, barren. Trying them with the dictionary here, though, shows me that they translate fine when I write them the Australian way :-).

Now for a go at the first Phoenix list:

a caboose, a cafe, a canal, a canoe, a carafe, a caress, a cocoon, a collapse, a complaint, a complete, a concise, a consent, a constraint, a control, a corral, a cravat, a crevasse, a harangue, a giraffe, a kaleidoscope, a lagoon, a lanai, a lapel, a latrine, a lumbar, a machine, a marine, a mature, a meringue, a metronome, a mosquito, an abode, an account, an acute, an address, an affair, an affray, an alarm, an amount, an appeal, an approach, an array, an attack

Time to see how my boy's going. See you tomorrow!