Avenue A. Internet Cafe

The best thing about upstate NY in the summer time is the lakes! The weather is perfect for being outdoors and being on the water. Temps are usually in the 80′s. Holiday weekends, like 4Th of July are always a blast. There’s tons of great restaurants and bars to go to during summer. If your boating, you would probably go to the more casual ones instead of the nicer, more fine-dining places.

Boats N’ Goats was an event last weekend that went down IN the bay. And no there weren’t any goats. Kind of a weird name, I know… I still don’t really get it? There is an area of the bay known as the cove, which is a smaller, harbour-like area with tiny islands and shallow water. Bands performed all day on a water stage as boaters continued to pile in. It was definitely for the younger, party-goer crowd. Everyone brought food and of course, endless booze. There was probably about 500 people there, just a eyeball guess.

The only downfall of the mass of people was the pollution and glass that ended up at the bottom of the cove. I even got a few cuts on my feet.
Check out my Flickr set for more pics!

Here are some musts if your boating in upstate NY:

1. Don’t be shy to dock up! Everyone is super friendly… for the most part

2. Water sports- wakeboard, jetski, waterski, and tube! I promise you won’t get hurt or regret it. The water in any bay is usually as smooth as glass. It your daring enough, wonder into the lake for some bigger waves.

3. Go Fish! If your looking for something more relaxing, there are tons of small ponds off the lake.

4. Beach bars- The best tropical drinks around and usually pretty cheap. Many places like Pelicans, Nolas, and Marges in Rochester have bands every weekend. Sunset and Mickey Rats in Buffalo bring in big name DJs for holiday weekends and have volleyball too.

5. Yum Yum FOOD! The restaurants on the water are amazing. Bring a date or stop in with you suit on. The Port of Rochester has restaraunts with burgers, seafood, sushi, and ice cream! There’s lakeside restaurants you can pull your boat right up to all along the shore.

6. And don’t forget to relax…

My blog theme is one of the pre-designed options provided by WordPress. I chose this one because I think it represents me the best out of the ones provided. It allows me to change the photos at the top which I love because I get bored with the same old, same old very quickly.

The layout looks perfect to me. I like how the photos are at the top under the title, one with the header on the top left and a slide show of photos on the top right. Although I can change them, I decided to keep the ones that came with the theme because they are relaxing and aesthetically pleasing. The color scheme goes well with the photos. The theme separates the top of the page with a sleek, black background from the rest with the basic, white background. It’s well balanced. There’s a good amount of white space on the sides to lead the viewer to the content of the blog as the focal point instead of overwhelming them with text.

The typography is small and sophisticated, and legible. The blog titles have serifs and are in all CAPS which normally gives the impression of yelling, but are a lighter shade of brown which tones it down. The earth-tones of the headers and titles makes it more warm and welcoming than just black and white with photos.

Traditionally, I’ve noticed sidebars on the left, but my blog has two sidebars on the right. I like this better since the viewer can see the content of the blog as the read left to right before the extra details. Having two sidebars, side by side, also allows for shorter boxes so they don’t run lower than a top of page view. The viewer won’t have to scroll just to see the rest of the side bars. The pages are still on the left within the picture towards the top which makes them easy to see and navigate. There are a few things I would like to change about the sidebars… I want them to be narrower and the font size to be smaller, so they aren’t distracting. The two combined take up almost half of the page, where I’d like them to take up about one-third or less together.

Hope you like my blog theme too!

Lollypop Farm’s Le BARC benefit, held on Saturday May 21st at the Memorial Art Gallery Ballroom in Rochester, NY, turned out to be a Moulin Rouge-inspired hit with over 300 animal lovers in attendance. The Bohemian Arts Revival Cabaret, or BARC, featured mesmerizing aerialist, and other entertainers, along with fabulous cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. More than $88,000 was raised for homeless and abused animals through tickets sales and mainly silent and live auction items.

Andrew Sloane was the event designer from Philipson Group, who set the reminiscent mood for the evening and  ensured everything went smoothly. Local news stations covered the event, also speaking with Mr. Sloane, after the great turn out. After telling us about Le BARC, he gives us an inside peak at what he does and his next big event. Check out the interview on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEy2P9GP18Y

Photo from Lollypop Farm's site

Lollypop Farm, the Humane Society of Greater Rochester, is a popular shelter and outreach center for stay or abused animals. Animal lovers from all over Western New York come to visit and see the endless animals that end up at the farm. They shelter cats, dogs, farm animals, small animals, and much more. Programs for pet owners, adoption programs and a variety of information is available to be learned and are all provided there. And, you can even bring your pet along! It’s close to impossible to visit Lollypop and leave without a new companion!

Tweet Tweet

Twitter is an awesome tool for journalists. It may have the potential, coinciding with other social networks, to replace traditional journalism all together! Or maybe not.

Either way, it can be used to find information, follow trends, and gain followers, readers or an audience. One significant aspect of Twitter is being able to use it as a research tool. Journalist can track everything and anything on Twitter. Journalism requires the write to know their audience. On Twitter, they can find out what their audience likes, dislikes, wants to know about, their daily schedule and interactions, and even what they eat on a daily basis. 

A tool that journalists can use to track down information on Twitter is to “browse interests” to find people, companies, and sites with Twitters that provide up to date information on what’s going on. Another way is to follow them. This will provide information in a timeline on your newsfeed automatically. Can it get any easier for journalists? Twitter users can retweet topics, add links, mentions, and mark a trend or keywords in a Tweet with a hashtag. The hashtag (#) catagorizes the keyword and by clicking it, you can see all other Tweets in that catagory. So, yes it just got easier.

 Journalists can also directly use Twitter to promote themselves. They can connect on a more personal level to aduience members, or even just friends and family, and Tweet their views, journals and work, even though everyone might not be intriuged by . On Twitter someone can discover that they’re interested in topics or issues they would have never thought about. And even better, Twitter can provide videos, pictures and news, and then literally connect you to where you want to go next. Journalists simply tweeting about their content’s topics can go distances for them because of this. The number of potential followers is countless, much more than the potential audience of a traditional print journalist. That’s why Twitterism can take over journalism.

Who’s to say what the world reads and who can write it?

In traditional media, it’s the gatekeeper. Today, the decision is up to anyone. Having digital journalistic techniques under your belt is an increasing trait and will soon be a skill of the majority. So, what happens to those who don’t have them? Well, if they want to be heard, they learn them, and that is the goal of journalists, right?

Many who work in print or broadcast think blogging or social media is a waist of time for them and doesn’t fit their job description. They may not be entirely wrong. Journalism can be an art and requires talent and practice. After mastering the writing skill and techniques that reporters and columnists acquire, they are now asked to join a pool of millions of bloggers who may still be in high school, and probably don’t have the talent and experience they do. On top of that, the topics or news they are asked to blog are most likely already out there in the lightening fast Internet world.

Image courtesy of flickr.com

On the other hand, bloggers have experiences and news to share as well. And who’s to say that they can’t share them, especially if people want to hear and read about it. Today, everyone is online in some shape or form. Even if someone doesn’t have an email or even a computer, their records can be found online. Their bank uses computers. Technology today forces everyone to become computer savvy because of these features. This is why modern journalist should learn and use digital journalistic techniques and why journalists should start a blog.

Just because journalists stories may already be covered by YouTube videos or web logs, there are always those who want to know more and want the facts and credibility of journalists. Some say they can reach more when publishing in their newspaper, which may be true at a point in time, but once they establish a following online, the audience they can reach is countless.