Tag Archives: AAJA-LA

Christmas comes early

I could swear that we just had the 2008 Christmas party, but here we are again at David’s house for Christmas. This year, there were slightly more celebrities and slightly fewer journalists (there was a snafu with the invitation senders), but it was a wash because I got to meet Julia Ling, who plays Anna Wu on “Chuck.” I am pretty sure I played it cool at the time, but got all squealy/fangirlish when I got home. Then, as I read her IMDB bio, I was promptly intimidated. Girl is accomplished.

So, here are a few photos, but they’re really super fuzzy, which is my bad. I’m not entirely sure what I did, but it could something to do with the tweaking I did to take photos of the champorado the other day. Oh well.

Trivia Bowl XV, come and gone

My blogs have been severely neglected, I know. I had a good reason. Basically, as soon as I got back from Hawaii and got moved in to our new place, it was Trivia Bowl planning overdrive. I don’t know about anyone else, but doing volunteer work for a non-profit is not easy. In fact, I liken it to the phrase “herding cats.” Because you get a whole bunch of people who have their own jobs spending a lot of time organizing an event that takes almost as much time as that day job for no pay and very little payoff — except, of course, the satisfaction and joy you get from raising money to help student and professional journalists further their careers. Although…I’m not sure how you balance all that work out with the headaches, frustration and spurts of angrily-typed (more like pounded) emails. Yeah, I’m not kind to my keyboards when I’m mad.

But, its over. And you’d think the hard part was getting the volunteers organized, but that was the easiest part of what I had to do this year.

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2 WordPress workshops wrapped up

Since the blogging All-Stars panel last year, I’d been planning to put together a WordPress-for-journalists workshop. Most of the planning credit goes to my coworker and co-board member Leezel, who scouted out computer rooms at Cerritos College and Santa Monica College. The beginner’s workshop went very, very well — it was a packed room, with a good mix of professionals and students (although I think students still outnumbered the professionals). Despite the lack of WiFi, the existing Mac set up made it easy to get plugged in from my laptop. Since I was basically teaching WordPress.com, it was easy to teach from my prepared outline.

The advanced workshop…not as easy. The real headache was being unable to get on the campus WiFi (even though it was labeled “open”), so I had to type in all the addresses of the bookmarks I’d saved. Also, out of 20 people, only four of whom were professionals, just nine showed up. And even 3 pages of outline was not enough preparation for a workshop that covered domain names, hosts, connecting nameservers, installing WordPress through a host, setting up a database, explaining FTP, SEO, Adsense and text link ads. Sigh.

However, the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive and I’ve got these two workshops under my belt. I guess, if anyone wants an encore, just let me know.

Been MIA

My apologies for being preoccupied the last week or so. I’ve obviously been reading stuff still, but haven’t had a chance to post lately. Let’s see…I was busy moving my Wedding Decorator blog to its own host (good bye, Blogger!). I’ve been looking around for a new cell phone (do I want to stick with a regular phone? Do I want a smartphone? Do I want to hold out for an iPhone?) I was also busy getting nominated to co-president of AAJA’s Los Angeles chapter. My bad.

I’m still not sure how to feel about the whole co-prez thing. Thank God I didn’t have to actually run for election. I’ve heard those things can get kind of negative.

I’ll try to not be so bad at keeping up the blog. I’ll also let you know how the cell phone thing works out. As much as my life is online, I really am resistant to changing my habits. I don’t even Twitter. For shame!

We came, we saw, we trivia-ized

Don’t get me wrong — we didn’t trivialize, we trivia-ized. Yes. I’m making up words now.

I didn’t do nearly as much as you might think for Trivia Bowl, but I sure am tired. It took me till noon to make my first pot of coffee! But as usual, the event was fun, a little nerve-wracking, but I’m glad its all over.

It was good to see our first team of bloggers (W00t! Metroblogging LA!), who even scored a point higher than my own team, CBS 2/KCAL 9 Team I. Hey. At least we didn’t go home with the ramen, which was split by two teams who tied for the lowest-scorers. Woo!

Speaking of which, this year’s questions seemed massively hard. I mean, the highest score was 69, and scored by lawyers, again!