Six years of progress

Here’s a fun fact for all of you computer enthusiasts:

I’ve been using the same MacBook Air for everything since late high school. A MacBook Air that I inherited from my Dad.

That he got in 2010.

Yikes

Needless to say I’ve been in the market for an upgrade. That laptop may have served me well, but it was getting long in the tooth. Slow processing to the point of freezing, difficulty running complex programs and video games… You name it.

When I graduated, my parents asked what kind of gift they could get me to celebrate. I asked if I could get a new laptop, something to benefit my workflow as I transition out of academia.

Dad managed to snag this 2016 MacBook Air that was coming out of circulation at work:

2016 may seem outdated for a lot of you that prefer to keep on the razor’s edge of technology, but for me it’s a ridiculous leap forward.

Writing and uploading the photos for this blog post has been the smoothest process in three years, for instance.

The background image changes depending on the time of day.

That appeases me in a deep-rooted, giggly kind of way. Like jangling keys in front of a baby.

And I have at least five times the storage space on this machine:

I don’t know how I’ll ever fill 500 Gigabytes.

While I’ve only been using the new laptop for about eight hours or so, it has more than justified itself. Which is good considering how much of a pain it was to set the damn thing up.

Dad and I tried to directly transfer all of the information from my old machine to the new one, that way I wouldn’t lose files or progress on anything going on.

We started up the transfer when I went to work with him yesterday, as I would be joining him later that night for poker at his friend Don’s house.

You can see my whole Twitter thread on that experience here because…

My Dad invited me to a poker night with one of his best friends in Burbank and as soon as I get here

P I G pic.twitter.com/eLHcwtCsvn

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) June 8, 2019

It was special.

There were a good six or so hours spent at his office in Beverly Hills before we went to poker, and we set up the computers early hoping to finish before leaving.

Nothing really panned out the way we expected.

Some combination of not cleaning the old machine’s data enough, the hubris of assuming we could have both laptops connect to my iPhone’s wifi hotspot or who knows what else led to an extended transfer time.

We spent a whole lot of time watching the time estimate fluctuate between 20 minutes and 37 hours.

As a result I wasn’t able to spend any of the time at Fandango doing things on my computer, such as work on my novel. Plus my phone was less useful than usual because I couldn’t wear headphones when we plugged it in.

Luckily I brought my 3DS (because I’m still playing Sacred Stones), but that eventually ran out of battery.

The transfer wound up taking so long that we carried both computers out of the building while they were still open, and I looked like a nut during our drive with two laptops open while I played on my phone.

I only had to moonlight as a technophile hacker for a bit of the drive before the process finished, luckily enough.

Because of poker I couldn’t play around with the machine until this morning.

But now that I have, I think it’s time to use the improved processing power to finally make good on returning to a few things from my youth.

Starting with a little browser-based game called:

Hopefully tomorrow, assuming I don’t get too caught up playing this game I just bought with my friend Sam.

Well, guess I'll never see you guys again. Its been real. pic.twitter.com/byoKisk9ME

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) June 9, 2019

But that too will be a story for another day.

November 30, 2016 Article Published

Two articles in two days?  Fairly unprecedented, but certainly not a bad thing I’d say.

While yesterday’s story was my profile for the Features page, this story is quite a bit more entertaining.  I wrote a review for the Arts & Entertainment page for my buddy Kaleb, our A&E editor.  As a hardcore newsy person, it’s been pretty nice to let my skills expand a bit this semester, I have to say.  Because of my news-oriented background, I’m sure you all must be asking just what I wrote a review on exactly?

Well, Pokémon Sun and Moon of course.  What else would I write on, I’m pretty much an expert in almost all things Pokémon and have nearly 90 hours sunk into the game. Plus, I almost never get to mix my passions for video games and writing on this kind of scale, so how could I pass up the opportunity to vomit all my thoughts on a page for mass consumption?

Also, when I say vomit all my thoughts, I pretty much mean it literally.  I hit a weird place with this article to be honest.  On the one hand, I know so much about the series and about Sun and Moon that it was simple to run through the list of everything I enjoy and everything I find less than stellar about the games.  However, on the other hand I had to make sure not to get too in depth and nerdy with my writing because I was writing for an audience that probably won’t be as much of an expert in the subject as I am.

Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people that see the article have never even touched Pokémon in their lives – as hard to imagine as that can be for someone like me.

Because of how much I had to say, I wound up writing a fairly long piece about the games, one that I expected to get cut down for spacing concerns.  There wound up being far more room available than we expected in the end however, so the 1000+ word review ended up getting printed just about in its entirety.

I tried not to spoil any plot details or get too in depth with some of the deeper mechanics and things I enjoy about the games, but I still think I put together a really solid little review.  I’ve talked about them more than enough on this site here, so I won’t reiterate much, but it’s a nice summary of a lot of things in a (somewhat) succinct package.  So, check if out if you’ve got the chance, because I’m pretty proud of it!

If you want to see the review in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

Oh, and just FYI, there may or may not be some extra multimedia content on the horizon to go along with this.  But I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

November 29, 2016 Article Published

This story has been in the making for a while.

Two of the articles that I’ve written over the Fall 2016 semester have been for my Communications 201 class: My TSU Annual Art Show article (A campus event story) and my Project Rebound article (A campus/community issue story).  This is the third and final one for that class, a campus profile story that I wrote about Anakaren Cárdenas Ureño.

Anakaren is a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton studying Public Relations, specifically crisis communications.  She did her undergraduate studies at the campus as well.

While still completing her graduate program, Anakaren was hired onto the CSUF College of Communication’s staff in September to be the college’s Digital Communications Specialist.  Essentially, she runs all the social media for the college to try and bolster a sense of community among students at a commuter campus.

“That’s one of my biggest things: making sure we’re putting out information that students care about,” she said.

Ankara is also a first-generation student: the first person in her family to go to graduate school.  A few teachers she has had at CSUF reflected on not only on how much of a smart and capable student and employee she is, but also how her background and age makes her a perfect candidate for the job she has been hired to do at a diverse university such as this one.

“She asks very good questions, and when I throw a discussion topic out, she’s thoughtful and articulate,” said Dean Kazoleas, Ph.D., communications professor and director of the Maxwell Center for International Communications. “She’s a very intelligent woman.”

I’ve had this article for quite some time, the problem with it mainly involved getting access to sources.

Even before Thanksgiving Break many of the people I tried to talk to were busy, so  although I was able to set things up before our week off, the story still wasn’t able to be published until now.

Between Anakaren, her two teachers and the director of online and social media engagement at CSUF, I had some pretty interesting sources, and got a pretty nice breadth of knowledge and opinions on how important social media can be for engagement with a college.

As someone who isn’t a hugely social media-oriented person, it was pretty eye-opening.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

The 2016 AAJA Trivia Bowl

Had an absolutely wonderful time tonight yesterday at the Asian American Journalists Association Los Angeles Branch‘s 21st annual Trivia Bowl representing the Daily Titan and Cal State Fullerton.

The event was held at the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Downtown Los Angeles, and though we didn’t get to explore much of the grounds it was still a beautiful venue to be at.  Plus, being just about right in the middle of the city, there was a nice view all around when we were there!

Admittedly, getting to the event just reminded me of how wonderful it can be to live around Los Angeles… Two and a half hours or so to get to the temple, while the same drive took about 25 minutes to get back home. Thanks Dodgers.  That endless drive didn’t take away from the experience of being there however, as I had a great time with my coworkers, the Daily Titan’s Managing Editor, Copy Editor, Copy Assistant and Arts & Entertainment Assistant.

From left to right: Me, A&E Assistant Kyle Bender, Managing Editor Brandon Ross and Copy Editor Aaron Valdez.  Our Copy Assistant, Sule Recinos, left early.

Because half of the newsroom is off at a conference in Washington DC, we only had five people compared to the average number, 10 or so, but even with that handicap we did pretty well, I’d say.  We tied with USC as the third best college team that was there at the end!

Now, for context, the Trivia Bowl had four rounds, each with 20 questions asked.  The categories for the rounds included Current Events and History; Geography, Literature and Science; Pop Culture and Sports and California.  So… While we only got 17 points out of 80, it should also be showing that the winning team, one of the representative groups from the LA Times, only got about 39.  They were pretty hard questions.

This is the second year I’ve gone to the Trivia Bowl, as I went to the one held at the DreamWorks Animation studio in Glendale, CA last year.  Both times I’ve gone have been really fun, and I’m looking forward to getting to go with my fellow Titans in the future!

October 19, 2016 Article Published

When this article was published yesterday, I was a little bit distracted by other things to be able to talk about it.  Half of the newsroom is currently off in Washington DC for a conference, and my co-editor has been a bit under the weather as of late, so the rest of us who were still around had to work extra hard to get our issue with special third presidential debate coverage out for today.

However, with our last issue of the week out, giving me a bit of a break before our big weeklong political special issue production on Sunday, figure now is as good a time as ever to update my blog here with this new article.

Project Rebound is a program out of San Francisco State University that recently received a $500,000 grant from The Opportunity Institute, allowing it to spread out and open branches in seven CSU campuses – including Fullerton, naturally.  The program sets out to help previously incarcerated individuals who are looking to get a college degree, at the same time attempting to lower the prison recidivism rate in California (at 44.6 percent or so in the 2010 to 2011 fiscal year according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations) and beyond.

I found out about it from my professor, Dr. Jason Sexton, who also happens to be the editor of Boom magazine.  He’s an advisor for the program’s new branch, as I’m sure the push to do a California prison-themed issue of Boom helped bring some attention. The advisors for the program are there to help convey what resources are around that Rebound staff can point students to, though currently there are only two primary staff members on board.

Brady Heiner, Ph.D, is an assistant professor of Philosophy at CSUF and the Director of Rebound there.  Meanwhile, Romarilyn Ralston is the recently hired program coordinator for Rebound, and happens to be a previously incarcerated individual who sought out and college degrees herself.  In her own words, “An office like Project Rebound and staff that has prior incarceration histories who has walked the walk and accomplished what Rebound sets up to help their students achieve will be very helpful and supportive.”

The story honestly wound up being a behemoth at 1,600 words, since I couldn’t really figure out where to stop writing.  There was a heck of a lot of information to convey, and both Heiner and Ralston gave me tons of good quotes to incorporate.

Luckily we have an awesome Layout editor who was able to help set up the paper to fill that kind of extensive content.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

October 4, 2016 Article Published

This particular article came a bit out of nowhere, but to be honest that’s part of the joy of working on a newspaper.  News can come from anywhere and everywhere at all times of the day.

Yesterday, there was smoke coming from the center divide of the CA-57 freeway on the bridge overpass above Nutwood Avenue.  Nutwood Avenue, for those that don’t know, is one of the streets running alongside Cal State Fullerton, and that particular bridge is very close to the school.  So close, it’s actually where the on-ramp is that I use to start my drive home everyday.

Multiple different groups came together to help investigate the fire and re-route traffic around both the segment of the freeway and the bridge underneath, including the Fullerton Police Department, Fullerton Fire Department, CSUF Campus Police and California Highway Patrol.

The whole area was pretty much closed off and had heavy traffic concerns until sometime after 10 P.M., when I checked it last alongside our Managing Editor Brandon Ross, who helped me do a lot of the reporting since everything happened so late last night.  The first reports of the smoke came in around 6:01 P.M. according to a Fullerton Fire Department dispatch supervisor, so it really was last minute breaking news.

When the story was done and sent to the printer, the investigation was still underway to find the source of the fire and smoke.

Really, besides the fact that it was a good bonding experience for Brandon and I, writing up this article was fun just in the thrill of doing breaking news.  As an editor for the paper, I don’t have nearly as much time to actually write for our publication, since most of my time is spent editing stories, putting pages together and helping my writers.  Getting the chance to do some hard news on a tight deadline, especially for a story where I was able to get a lot of sources in a short amount of time, felt pretty amazing.

Helped me prove that I’m not just hanging around the newsroom by the merit of my good looks, at the very least.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

September 20, 2016 Article Published

This is a few days late, but I’ve had the link to this article up on WordPress for a little while now, so I figure I should still make a post.

For the issue of the Daily Titan published on Tuesday, I wrote an article about the Titan Student Union (TSU) Annual Student Art Show that opened Monday with an artists reception.  At a word count just around 1,000, it’s a real doozy of a story.  However, if you ask me, it’s a good article worthy of that kind of extended word count.

Though a chunk of the story focuses specifically on the reception itself, most of it actually covers things surrounding the show, such as the process of putting it together and the process of purchasing artwork by the Titan Student Center (TSC) Governing Board.  I talked to the TSU Gallery Coordinator and the Chair of the TSC Governing Board to try and get as much info on everything related to the show as possible.

Really, the Governing Board aspect was what made the story especially interesting to me.  Already the event was cool because of how it engages the student body with great art, whether they be artists or not, but then I learned it has a much larger significance.  The annual art show has been held for more than two decades, and each year the pieces are examined by the TSC Art Acquisition committee (now absorbed into the Programs & Services committee).  The best pieces are actually bought out by the Board and then put up all around the school.  There’s student artwork from this particular show up in the TSU, the Student Recreation Center and at the Irvine campus.

I also talked to a couple of CSUF students that had their pieces up in the show as well, giving things an interesting balance of artistic intent, event planning and bureaucratic processes.

While the story was really fun for me to write, it was also a bit of an overwhelming one in combination with other things that were going on at the time.  A thousand word story on top of running the news desk for the Titan is already a struggle, but add in more things to juggle like homework in my four classes this semester… It gets busy pretty fast.  Not that being busy is necessarily bad, as I’m in the camp that being busy is better than being bored, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a stressful couple of days.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

September 12, 2016 Article Published

Alright so the title of this post might be a little misleading.  Technically, I did have another article published for the Arts & Entertainment section of the Daily Titan this issue.  It was just published solely online, not actually in print.

This article was also a movie review rather than a look into an art exhibit on campus.  After getting to see the film early through Alt-101, a College of Communication’s program on campus, I wrote a review for Kevin Smith’s “Yoga Hosers”.

Probably the hardest part about writing this piece for me was that, ironically, I had to inject my own specific opinions into my writing.  As someone who writes hard news almost exclusively, I’m much more used to sticking to the facts and not letting my personal biases slip through.  For a review, however, it was almost entirely my personal feelings about Smith’s movie on display – even if I had to write everything in third person either way.

As a fan of some of Smith’s other flicks, including “Clerks” and “Dogma”, as well as his podcast “Hollywood Babble-On”, I was pretty much predisposed to enjoy this movie walking in.  However, as I try to articulate in the review, the same probably couldn’t be said for everyone.  It’s full of crude humor and referential jokes that only devoted fans will probably pick up on, and  I would argue that most people wouldn’t like the movie even if I did – something that Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me on.

If you want to see the review in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

September 7, 2016 Article Published

Today I published my first Arts & Entertainment article of the Fall 2016 semester – if not one of the first A&E articles I’ve ever written, to be honest.

As someone who focuses almost solely on hard news, it’s rare to find me jumping around to other sections.  I do occasionally when there’s an interesting topic elsewhere, but even then I’m not usually super confident with it just because it isn’t my area of expertise.

For this story about the Tim Brooke’s “Endangered Alphabets” exhibit currently residing in the CSUF Pollak Library, however, the content was close enough to being news that I had a pretty easy time covering it.  On top of that, the exhibit is genuinely nice to visit and makes for an awesome place to sit around and relax.  As someone who enjoys having nice, quiet places to relax in, it’s a pretty great added bonus.

In fact, I’d argue that the hardest part of getting this article done was the deadline night surrounding it.  We had a huge enterprise story on the News page regarding theft on campus that’s well written but took a lot of time to finish, so we were there until at least 1:30 A.M.  Not quite as bad as four in the morning, but it’s still rough.  At least my first class of the day got cancelled due to my professor being at a conference, so there’s always a bright side somewhere.

The exhibit consists of a series of wooden slabs that have characters of languages rarely heard and even on the way to going extinct carved into them.  The carvings are split up into three sections in the gallery that each carry their own meaning.  The first “Writing as Art” section shows a series of single characters that represent a progressive change in the development of language from simple ideas to full phrases.  The second “Article One Collection” has the first article from the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights carved out in various endangered languages.  The third “Sacred Spaces Installation” features four larger wooden panels that have a poem carved out on the wood set up in a circle, creating a space or “grove” that you can enter and experience the languages around you.

“Endangered Alphabets” will be running in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery until September 23 if you happen to be in the area and want to check out the beautiful carvings before the exhibit is cycled out.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

August 22, 2016 Article Published

The fall 2016 semester has officially begun, and therefore my responsibilities as an editor have kicked off as well.  For the very first issue of this semester’s run of the paper, I wrote an article updating some information on two different buildings both on and around campus.

First, the Cal State Fullerton Titan Student Union (TSU) expansion project that began in July 2015 will be completed soon.  While the original advertised plan was that the expansion would be opening in spring 2017 due to El Niño rains and other potential delays, the project is well ahead of schedule and should be finishing up by this September instead.  The official grand opening ceremony is being planned for October 20th, even if the expansion itself is open to the public before then.

Also, we were able to get a sneak peek of the construction thanks to the generosity of Carol McDoniel, the ASI Director of Administrations.  So, if you check out the full story you can see some of the work being done on one of the main staircases within the three floor atrium.

Second, the story addresses the Western State College of Law building that Cal State Fullerton’s Auxiliary Services Corporation (ASC) purchased in 2012.  While space in the paper didn’t facilitate too much coverage of this development, I still get the chance to address what groups are moving into the library part of the campus that came with the purchase, as well as what groups are moving into the four-story building that came with the purchase.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!