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Good morning.
I like that quote Ron ended with.
I kind of had one, too, that I wanted to share.
I heard somebody say technology is a little bit like heaven.
It's where we all want to go, just not yet.
[ laughter ]
I'm going to start with the "Be Prepared" slides.
There's nothing worse, as a realtime reporter,
especially in the freelance area,
as getting to a job 15 minutes ahead
when you're supposed to be realtime,
and you've got to be there early.
If you have a problem and you want to troubleshoot something,
you don't want to troubleshoot it while they're sitting around,
you know, beating their thumbs on the table.
So you do have to be early.
And be redundant.
I have abandoned the cables.
I don't even carry any cables.
I have some at home just to help other people with.
But I bought my first StenoCast X7
I think probably a month after it came out.
I'm still using that.
I also bought a Red just to be redundant
in case it ever fails.
That Red is still in the package.
I'm still waiting on the 14 connections.
If I get the 14 connections, it's coming out of the package.
But so far my 6 have been fine.
But I'm still using the original X7,
and it has never one time, in all the realtime I do,
never failed.
So it works for me.
If you're using cords,
you have to be really careful about your cords.
There's crossover cords, there's regular cords.
And I don't want you to glaze over while we talk about this,
but one way to make sure that you have the right cords
is, you know, most of them are black.
Get a silver Sharpie
and write on that cord what it is.
And then you'll know.
If it gets separated from the little ends,
you know what that cord is.
The next thing is you've got to be prepared.
Carry, as I said, the backup cables.
You can even have them in your car.
They don't necessarily have to go in your bag.
Just keep some in your trunk.
Throw them in the trunk of your car
in some kind of a bag.
And then just knowing that you're prepared,
just breathe easy.
You can have fun with realtime.
You've got to learn to laugh at yourself
as they're laughing at you.
I've had a few situations, and I'll tell you about them.
I was doing a deposition of a health department inspector,
and the question, and it was realtime,
and the question asked of him was,
"What was your area of responsibility
when you first began working for the county?"
And his answer was, "Tick control."
However, I drug the K, and it wasn't pretty.
And everybody's laughing, and I look down in horror.
And then later on a break, one of the attorneys came over to me
who knew this inspector, he was an older guy,
and he said, "All I could think of
was Howard standing at somebody's door saying,
'I'm from the county, and I'm here to inspect your...'"
Okay? So they laugh with us.
It can actually provide some light moments.
I had -- Ron mentioned
they don't anymore sit and stare at your screen.
I had fun with a guy who was sitting second chair
and he was fairly new.
And we had been on this case for several years,
very big environmental case.
And he, too, he was new, so he's staring at the screen
as I'm writing.
So every time the witness would say a one-word answer
of yes or no, I'd write the opposite.
And then real quickly,
as I would see him kind of get nervous,
I would hit a stroke and change it.
And eventually he looked up and he looked at me kind of funny,
and I knew the participants pretty well,
and he went...
And I just smiled like that, you know.
So you can have fun with your realtime.
One thing, too, I always tell reporters,
good reporters write
so they can make no steno come out in their files.
That's the goal as a good reporter.
But you know what?
The really seasoned good reporter
that's already gotten there does the opposite.
They write to make steno come up.
So if I have time and the word "malacologist" comes up
and it's not in my dictionary,
I might strike it three different ways.
I know it's going to come up in steno once.
I'm going to strike it three times if there's time.
Because I want to define it any way I might possibly write it.
So, you know, think about getting those things
into your dictionary.
Troubleshooting "The Usual Suspects."
I don't want to spend too much time on the technical part
because we are going to have a lot of videos.
Some of them are already up.
The manual, the RSA manual is great.
But what if, just what if in your state you have a mentor?
It isn't always easy to get a hold of somebody
at your CAT vendor, or when you need them,
if you're on the east coast and it's 9 o'clock in the morning
and your CAT vendor's on the west coast.
So make sure that you have some mentors.
In Ohio, we've been really fortunate.
We have -- I don't know, Bruce, do you know how many people,
10, 15 people that have said,
"Yeah, I'll give you my cell phone number."
And, you know, one person might be in a depo,
but you've got somebody else to fall back on.
If you have an agency in the TRAIN program,
we're asking everybody to help.
Not just individuals, not just the state.
Agencies can play a big part in helping us make this happen.
How can an agency help?
An agency can have some of these
little small-group training programs.
And don't just include your agency.
Include any reporters in the area
that might want to get some help in the small groups.
A group of friends.
You know, pick a topic and let somebody speak on that topic,
anything having to do with realtime.
Bulletproof your troubleshooting.
Start with just one netbook.
I know I'm the last speaker here,
so a lot of what I was going to say has already been said.
But start with the one netbook.
And I tell reporters, you know what,
just do it for yourself for a month.
Don't offer it to anybody.
But promise me this, that you'll go back to square one.
If you do it for three days in a row and it works perfect,
and on the fourth day something happens
and you freeze up
and you just decide to close it and put it away,
you've got to start your month over.
You need to do it for one month and hook up,
and it works every day,
then you are ready to provide it.
You are confident,
it'll give you the confidence you need.
It'll also allow you to work out the things that can happen,
like your power management settings not being correct, etc.
It's not going to happen when you're providing it to a judge
or a realtime who's looked into it.
All those issues will get worked out in that month or so
that you're doing it for yourself.
Agencies.
I'd love to see an agency purchase
maybe two or three laptops for your agency --
I mean, they're a couple hundred bucks now --
and loan them to your reporters.
Tell your reporters, you know what, if you'll do it,
we'll loan you this for a month
until you can make sure that you can do it
and feel like you want to do it.
And then they might be willing to purchase their own.
I'm not saying give it to them, but have them available
for them to play with and troubleshoot.
And people from my state can tell you,
I have probably -- I can't even count how many netbooks I have
because they're always loaned out to somebody.
I have about -- I know at least 15.
And we've taken them when we have state issues
and we've gone to some -- I've loaned them.
They always come back just fine.
Agencies could do the same.
If you know that there's some issue going on
in one of your counties or areas,
loan them some netbooks or some loaners
so that they can go in -- your state can go in
and help provide the realtime in a setting where you walk in
and just wow them with 14 netbooks set up.
The RSA manual is a great place to start.
And if you're serious about realtiming,
you're going to need it, so buy it now.
You know, do you need it immediately?
No, but why not?
Because eventually you're going to need it.
And we have a great bit of news.
Robin, this is for you, that asked the question earlier.
They're offering us a 10% discount on it
if you buy it before March 1st.
You don't have to put in a code or anything.
It's already built into the software,
and so it'll automatically give you that 10%.
And by the way, Robin, I'm going to donate one
for our Clark State.
And I challenge Bruce and Sarah to donate one to the schools
in the northern part of Ohio.
So you will get your manual.
Hopefully the people up in the north will get them, too.
MAN: Oh, all right.
[ laughter ]
WOMAN: We'll talk.
Okay, realtime writer advice.
Learn how your software works. That is so important.
You do definitely have a cleaner record
when you're doing realtime.
And preparing before the assignment.
You know, there's so many places you can prep.
We have -- there's a site called Glossarist.com.
It's a wonderful site that if you know
that you're going to be doing a nuclear scientist tomorrow,
you can go on there and type in "nuclear,"
or just about anytime.
I found it the first time
because I was doing a maritime job,
and I'd never done any maritime work.
And so I went to this site and I typed in "maritime,"
and it popped up tons of glossaries for me.
I was able to just sit in that glossary
and go right down through and do my prep,
and it made all the difference in the world.
The second time I used it,
I went from one extreme to the other.
I had one on pig farming, so I did pig farming.
And there was actually a glossary for swine.
So, um...