Poor and confused (Not really)

August 31, 2006 – 2:38 pm

First, the stats: two tests to go and new semester begins September 15th. Sacco, teacher of great fame and skill, has departed NYCI. Replaced by another teacher. (No comment. Yet.) Got a new writer. Starting over.

Not really “starting over,” but this new writer requires a school of its own. Can a tool be too useful? Maybe. And my own too-useful tool is the élan Mira A3. That’s one small step for a woman, one giant leap for her career. And another giant leap in learning.

elan Mira A3, the billion dollar version

Yep, paperless. I guess I love trees.

élan Mira A3 Pros:

Though paperless, it essentially has three failsafes in place to assure that things get saved: its RAM, a backup SD card, and a the regular SD card. The display is great. The audiosynch feature is off the hook. Seriously. It’s light. It writes nicely. It’s got some shadowing features. It works terrific with my caseCAT4 software.

élan Mira A3 Cons:

It costs a billion dollars. And then it costs a billion dollars. And finally, it costs at least a billion dollars. Tax and shipping were roughly a billion dollars.

Ah, yes. And I tried to read through the manual, but it’s as though the people who wrote the manual (a) invented the microchip and had only spoken with other microchip scientists and didn’t know how to communicate with anyone who didn’t at least understand how to build, let’s say, a microchip, (b) thought it would be funny to sell a machine to me for US$1,000,000,000 and then give a 90-page booklet.

However, this machine is good. Very good. Apparently, it will even brew my coffee in the morning. I just have to figure out all the features and how to use them and I’ll be in good shape.

Except I have to get used to not having paper. When I realize that is the direction I took myself, it’s like a knee-jerk reaction and I want to poke myself in the eye with something sharp. I spent roughly a billion dollars on something that doesn’t even include paper. It’s like I paid them to take away a feature.

But is paper really a feature? I say, nay! ’tis not. Yes, it was good when I was learning (Headline: I am no longer learning and now know everything), but now I need to play with the big kids and eat at the adult table.

Khrushchev (shoe not pictured)

Paper! . . . (bangs shoe on table) I will bury you!

And I don’t know who this guy is, except he works for JM Steno in Arizona, but I promise I wasn’t the person who called him about her élan Mira A3. Promise. Interesting blog, though.

By Binita Shrestha | Posted in Court Reporting Tools, Writers | Tagged , , , , | Comments (6)

Volunteering at the NCRA convention

August 6, 2006 – 6:10 pm

A litte more than a month ago, folks at our school asked if anyone would be interested in volunteering for the 2006 NCRA Annual Convention. I was interested in volunteering and signed up with some other students to volunteer all three days.

About two weeks before the conference, all the students from my school who were volunteering were called aside and briefed on what we’d be doing as volunteers. Basically, for half the sessions each day, we’d be stamping people’s cards and checking for admission to the sessions. Simple enough.

We were happy because I was volunteering every-other session (never mind that my name was spelled so incorrectly even I had a hard time recognizing it), which meant, logically, that for the interim time we’d be able to sit in (at the back) of the other sessions. The folks at our school confirmed this, but added that we would have to confirm this when we checked it.

So we went, got our punches, and got into position. For the first break we asked one of the people working at the conference, who was apparently managing the volunteers and giving us our materials and directing us where to go. We asked if we could sit in on the sessions during our down time. “No,” was the answer.

Confused, because it seemed entirely unreasonable to insist that we simply sit in the lobby, waiting for the session to end and the next to begin, we decided to engage her in a debate of logic and reasoning, with poor results. In the end, the woman informed us,

No, you can’t go [to the sessions]. You’re volunteers. You volunteer. You get nothing in return.

The “You get nothing in return,” though, kept rattling around my head. Lovely. Thank you for letting us know where we stand. Here’s your hole punch. Here’s your badge. Thank you and goodbye. And so we left.

Some of the others had actually come into the city and were staying at the hotel just in order to volunteer, so, because what else were they going to do, they decided to pay the $100-ish student fee and attend the two-thirds of the conference remaining.

I wasn’t angry or upset, and afterwards I was actually contacted by the NCRA who voiced concern over what happened.

Turns out that that woman probably had nothing to do with NCRA. I hope next year students from NYCI will go back to volunteer again, because if things had worked out, it would have really been a neat opportunity.

By Binita Shrestha | Posted in Career, Humor | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Mastering jargon

July 10, 2006 – 9:06 am

So far in my internship I’ve had an easy time. I’ve sat in on mostly car-accident depositions, which were as simple as pie for the court reporters I was there with. Some of the court reporters were 10-year veterans and others were in their first year of work. Still, none had any difficulties.

Then during one deposition, a lawyer told about a time when he was with a client for a deposition in a medical malpractice case. Lots of jargon involved. About halfway through the deposition, the court reporter stood, declared she couldn’t continue, and left the room. The end.

Similarly I found the following post by a IT person in Australia. Except this time the court reporter didn’t get up and walk out. So the question is, is it better to do your best and produce an error-ridden transcript? Or simply abandon ship?

The Computer-Illiterate Stenographer

A few months ago at very short notice we had to pull in a temporary stenographer to record an important meeting that discussed the technical issues of replacing a legacy Datapoint system with a networked Unix system of some sort.

Unfortunately our temporary stenographer had some difficulty with the buzzwords and terms used in that discussion. Here are a few gems extracted from the transcript:

Selection criteria: High availability systems such as right technology, redundant systems and fork tolerance.

Base on the scale ability we nailed it down to either an HP 9000 or a Sun Micro Systems Sports Centre 2000.

The Sports Centre is based on the Texas instruments Super Sports 40 mega hertz chip.

Today we’ve got Romans sitting here and in the future environment we’re going to swing over to Terminal Servers. We are not going to EX.25 initially.

A little bit later on we’ll swing over to the EX.25 network and these terminal servers can compound at that point in time as long as we understand that as competent.

Once we go to EX.25 we go direct into the Unix box in Lagret mode rather than through the Yot Misser . . . above and through the Unix Motorola box into the east of our curve.

Now if this confirms a bottleneck at any point, we do have the ability to use a black box interface to the interdatum.

Question: Between the Motorola box and the Ethen that hog is the connection between lures likely to be a log jam?

Question: What’s the physical means of transferring?

Answer: I think you had better talk to Peter about that. It’s subject to walls which will ruffle if the ISO fall?

The trouble is the current machine writes the exercise in a particular format, which is why I’m saying why can’t this thing have multiple exabyte feeding?

Can we talk a little bit about the current configuration? Don’t we have some capacity on the Sports selectors?

It may have the ability to have or connect onto the X.25 crowd. The concepts that we’re going to use today . . . into your remote locations we’ll probably leave that as a dial in. Is it connected to your X.25 clowns?

Looking at the current system architecture for a minute! This is the Motorola machine, the production machine coming into the arc of, and then you’ve got your Crowd processors around here. Then the brown processors, your ear plugs and over here where your transactions are coming through the 8600 vaults. I believe that this is the tester.

Okay, I think that gives us the most cost effective solution in today’s environment. Sam, why don’t you talk about the frozen cams?

We think we know what a “fork tolerant” computer is and we speculate that an “Ethen that hog” is actually an Ethernet hub, but the Romans, ear plugs, lures, and frozen cams have us well and truly stumped.

What I’d really like to know though is what the stenographer thought we’re all planning to do with our “crowd processors” and “X.25 clowns.”

I think whatever option keeps me from being ridiculed on the Web is the best choice.

By Binita Shrestha | Posted in Career, Humor | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Let the games begin!

June 22, 2006 – 12:49 am

I’m so behind on posting to my blog, so let me explain as briefly as I may. First of all, I’m past 200 and now facing the ominous 225 series of tests. This also means that I’ve begun my internship. So far, so good.

Almost . . . there . . . light at . . . end . . . of tunnel . . .

A few observations after a dozen or so hours of interning with freelancers here in New York:

  1. Shoes are optional.
    Yes, indeed, it seems to be a trend. Begin recording=take of shoes. Fine with me, really.
  2. After a while, you will know what the lawyer will say before he/she says it
    One experienced and intelligent reporter I interned with was blazing through the deposition—finishing sentences before they were finished. Once a ways ahead of the proceedings, the reporter stopped and made a grocery list.
  3. Job will not be a problem
    I sometimes worry that in reality I won’t get a job. Uhm, doesn’t seem that this will actually be an issue (wink, wink).

Interning continues, though soon I’ll complete my 25 hours of freelance work and move to doing some work in the courts here.

I’ve pretty much decided that freelance is what I want to do after school, so I’m grudgingly going along to the courts. Should be interesting. And let me just tell you, more observations are definitely on their way.

By Binita Shrestha | Posted in Career, Stenography | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Our day in practice court

June 21, 2006 – 6:37 pm

It’s now old news, but a couple months back some students and I had the opportunity to go to the New York Supreme Court for something of an orientation, something of a mock trial. We would be shown around the court, sit in on a trial, and then get to have our own trial. Well, a mock trial that is.

The Judge

The Judge

The Jury

The Jury

The Prosecution

The Prosecution

And the witness

The Star Witness

It was a really interesting day because (a) we got to see a court reporter in action. And I mean a real court reporter, who was actually really helpful and told us about life in the courts—from the reporter’s perspective, of course. And (b) it’s where the film Law and Order. Those are the steps! It’s really unfortunate that Jack McCoy didn’t burst into the court room, but, well, otherwise it was a success.

By Binita Shrestha | Posted in Court Reporting, Studies | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off