Society For The Technological Advancement Of Court Reporting 

Hi everyone.  I am back home after attending the STAR convention in Las Vegas.  Lou Ann Hammes, Mary Ring, and myself attended from Brown & Jones.  We had a lot of fun.  Vegas is full of great restaurants, entertainment, shopping, and did I mention the casinos?  Between the three of us, we managed to hit all of these sectors.  Oh, yeah, that’s right.  The STAR convention!  Yes, we did attend the STAR convention.  A lot of our old friends were there, as well as new ones.  It was especially fun having Brown & Jones’ Court Reporter Mary Ring join us and seeing her experience STAR through fresh eyes, coming as a new STAR member. 

One of the great things about STAR is the chance to learn about new technology.  There is always something new to learn.  I’d like to pass on a few things that I picked up:

1. This has been mentioned by me in the past, but it bears repeating.  The three types of computers recommended by Stenograph are Toshiba Tecra, Acer Travel Mate, and the Sony Vio.  Warning:  Do not let your family play around on your work computer.  Some reporters seemed to have a phobia about going on the internet on their work computers.  It is totally acceptable to go on the internet, but you do need good virus protection.  AVG was mentioned as a good one.

2.  USB ports.   Turn on your computer first.  Once it is fully loaded and ready to go, then plug things into your USB ports.

3.  I am a little embarrassed to say that I am still running XP on my computer.  If you are still on XP, you should update to Windows 7.  When you update, make sure you pick the update feature.  That way, you will go from XP to Windows 7, without losing all of your work.  Of course, it’s always a good idea to back up important data.  Why is XP bad?  Apparently, you are not protected as well against viruses and, also, XP has a habit of jumping from one wifi to another (which has happened to me, many times.)

4.    Case CATalyst support.  If you want to learn about some of the great features of Case CATalyst, go to the Manage Jobs Screen of CC, then go to Help and click on Integrated Video Training.  This is where you will find all of the Cat Clips.  You can study up on whatever you are interested in.  You can also go to Stenograph.com and click on You Tube.  There are at least a hundred uploaded videos there, with a ton of info, all for your benefit.

That’s it for now.  Hope there is something in this blog that you didn’t know about.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, as to the knowledge I gained attending the STAR convention.  Hope to see some of you in New Orleans!  Have a great day!

Jane M. Jones, 
Registered Merit Reporter
Certified Realtime Reporter 

Tags: court reporters, STAR, technology seminar

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