Wow! There were so many interesting seminars and people to meet at the Deposition Reporters Association Convention, it might take me more than one blog post to get everything mentioned.
I will start with some of the things that made sense to me, and I hope will help my fellow reporters be better than ever!
This blog post will be principally about technology and websites. A lot of the information I received was from Mike Miller aka www.depoman.com
Paula Pyburn and Mike Miller talked about www.yousendit.com. It is a free site wherein you can send, receive and track large important files such as wav files to your scopist.
Mike Miller also mentioned www.getdropbox.com. This is a perfect solution for sharing files with someone. It syncs your files online and across computers. For example, if you had a large case with lots of appearances, and the appearances were constantly changing with new associates showing up, you could share your appearance pages with other reporters working on a case, and their appearance pages would be up-to-date with each new appearance you got.
www.synctoy.com is a free product from Microsoft that allows free file synchronization, backup, and data replication. This is another one of Mike Miller’s suggestions.
Free drivers: If you are using Stenocast, please know that you will need a driver for attorneys using XP and a different driver for attorneys on Vista. You can download both drivers at www.stenocast.com.
Please send me any comments or questions. rosalie@kramm.com
Mentors – Ms. Garcia
I believe having mentors in one’s life is invaluable. I have been blessed with people stepping into my life with encouragement, wisdom, and guidance from a very early age. I went to Helix High School and graduated in 1988. In my sophomore year I took typing and Gregg Shorthand. Typing had always been something I thought was kind of fun. To me it like a sport, the more I practiced, the faster I got. I took Gregg shorthand to have business skills to fall back on after graduation. Luckily, Ms. Garcia was my teacher. She was a vibrant woman with red hair, thick glasses, and always dressed like a formal secretary with suits, full make-up, and her hair always done in a bouffant style.
Ms. Garcia took me under her wing. My favorite classes were typing and shorthand. It was my P.E. class in my mind – pure competition. Could I be the fastest and best in the class? By the end of the semester, I was typing at 117 words a minute and was writing Gregg at 160. Ms. Garcia pulled me aside and said, “This is your talent. You should be a court reporter.” When she said that to me, I thought, “I am not going to be a court reporter. I want to be a businesswoman. I plan on getting a business degree at SDSU.”
The idea was planted in my brain. Upon further investigation, I learned what a great career court reporting is. I did go to SDSU for two semesters and then went to court reporting school that summer just to try it out. I have never looked back. Court reporting is the most perfect career for me, and if it weren’t for Ms. Garcia caring about a student and stepping in, I might never have known how great life can be.
rosalie@kramm.com
