Tag: review

EchoTheSavage Reviews Stenonymous Songs

Have you ever wondered what somebody might say about the Stenographers Song?

EchoTheSavage reviews Stenographers Song

Personally, my favorite facial expression in this video was…

Stenonymous’s favorite EchoTheSavage expression during the Stenographers Song review.

EchoTheSavage was pretty close in the beginning part there. He says the lyrics were written by me and performed by somebody else, but Anonymous actually wrote and created the song, which really impressed me when I first commissioned it. All I gave was creative direction. The crazy thing is toward the end of the review, he mentions how everybody’s voice can be tinkered with via AI. So he knows exactly what we’re trying to get out there when we talk about voice cloning being dangerous for legal proceedings without knowing a damn thing about us.

Now, I get pretty deep and political here, so if you just want a light read, stop here, close me out, go enjoy your day. Otherwise, keep reading.

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If you follow my politics, you’ve probably figured out that I’m against corporatism. I think it threatens American capitalism. I think there’s a strong corporatist streak in both major American parties, and that the failure of government to enforce the laws equally is due largely to the fake media circus that Congress uses to distract Americans from the fact that they’re not doing their job and writing laws that would make Americans’ lives better and siphon more of the economy to working people. If they’d budget more money for things that are meant to keep markets fair, like the Federal Trade Commission, we’d see a fantastic shift in the state of the country and an explosive expansion of the middle and upper middle class. You think it’s not that easy? Look how tech went from AI Winter to being this omnipresent thing in our lives. What happened? Investors dumped money on it. When we dump money — no, when we invest in the people that keep this country running, from the cleaning people, to the cops and firefighters, to the doctors and lawyers, what do you think happens?

Why do you think the people in power rely so much on the “money is not the solution” line of thinking? Say something enough and it becomes truth. I have learned the media game and how left and right leaning people are being divided through the behavior of our leaders. I suspect it’s related to the Milgram experiment, where we learned that people are willing to put other people in danger if an authority figure tells them to. Authority figures have more or less directed us to fight amongst ourselves over things that really aren’t important while corporations continue to consolidate and more wealth flows into fewer hands. After the Citizens United ruling, unlimited money came into politics, and politics became a game of who had the most funding for their campaign. Who had the most money to give politicians? So now those fewer hands get to write our laws.

If you’ve ever had a pair of thieves steal from you, it’s a very similar scheme. One comes up to you and chats you up while the other one grabs your money or valuables out of your backpack. This is the rich man’s version of that. “Hey everyone, fight about nothing while the richest organizations in the country rob you blind.” It doesn’t have to be this way. We can unify. We can make a change. I feel so strongly about this I had a song commissioned a song called Patriots Against Corporatism.

EchoTheSavage reviewed that too.

EchoTheSavage reviews the Patriots Against Corporatism song.

I liken it to court reporting. People have told me nobody’ll read my work and that I won’t make a difference. We can argue about degrees of success, but they were wrong. And if people so sure of themselves could be wrong, and most of us are within the same range of human intelligence, then perhaps the people that think they rule the world are wrong too. And maybe the people who think that their voice doesn’t matter will realize that they might be wrong too.

And for as long as you’re alive, no matter how wrong you are, you have a chance to make a change.

Review: A Court Reporter’s Guide to Leadership and Team Building, by Colin Yorke

Got to sit down with a copy of A Court Reporter’s Guide to Leadership and Team Building. Purchased it just last week. It is a short read aimed at all court reporters, but I feel it especially helpful for newcomers to the field who may not have had time to think about the bigger picture. I also see it as something that aspiring managers should be required to read. It discusses the very important traits of bearing, courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance, enthusiasm, integrity, justice, knowledge, loyalty, tact, and unselfishness.

Mr. Yorke’s a former court reporting supervisor and Marine veteran. His work on this book neatly summarizes a lot of the broader aspects of the work that many of us in the field had to learn through attrition, observation, or failure. For example, let’s take bearing. Bearing homes in on how you conduct yourself and reiterates how that could impact upon other areas of your work or how people perceive you.

Admittedly, many of us who have had to learn these lessons the hard way or had a mentor helping us along the way may regard this book as common sense — but then I find that common sense ends up being very uncommon unless we share it and make it ubiquitous. So let me share this: If you want some fantastic insights from a former court reporting manger that get right to the point, this book is for you!

Not long ago, I had written a blog post about tips for students, and the very first thing I wrote about was respecting perspectives. I respect Colin Yorke’s perspective. I believe students should hear, see, and read these things early in their career or education, and the cost of the book, at only 10 to 13 dollars, is obtainable.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am likely to be receiving a free copy in addition to the copy I purchased, which allows me to give my purchased copy away to a stenography student. To this end, I tried to come up with a suitable method for deciding who it would go to, and I think simple lottery is fairest. If you would like to be entered into the lottery, please send your name and email to ChristopherDay227@gmail.com before 11:59 p.m. on July 19, 2019. I will write a computer program to randomly select someone and then ask the winner via email for a mailing address. The free copy will be mailed by July 27.

July 16, 2019 update:

After I posted this, Colin Yorke generously donated some more copies of his book to this lottery, so there will be more than one winner. Good luck to all entrants!