If you've ever wondered what I do at my job....

...check out one of our recent newsletters, the Red Ball Report. We're currently working on the next issue, which should be out within a month, but this one gives a really good overview of who we are, what we do, and where we work.

Live-blogging the 2009 Oscars

7:11 pm
James Franco, posing for photos with unidentified blonde. My night is already complete.

7:12 pm
SJP calls her dress "barely mint"... Dior haute couture. Ryan Seacrest calls Matthew Broderick's suit "barely black". I call his greasy highlighted hair "disturbing".

7:14 pm
Seth Rogen calls SJP "every girl's worst nightmare". Complimentary or no? He questions whether he should get fat again for his next Hollywood role. As long as he keeps his black square-frame glasses, I don't care how pudgy he gets.

7:15 pm
Anne Hathaway is wearing something silver and sparkling and looks really thin. I am neither amused nor particularly impressed. Bad news.

7:17pm
Switch over to the Barbara Walters Special to see what's -- Omigod. Ohhhh my god. Baba Wawa just said sex... in front of Anne Hathaway. Anne, on the other hand, just justified my love for her by saying she would feel "just fine" if she never got married because she has no complaints about her life. But she does want children.

And then she called Barbara "Baba" to her face. I now love her even more.

Twittering

It's a lazy Saturday and I'm finally getting around to doing things I don't have time to do on weekdays, like making coffee at home, updating various online profiles and linking them all together so that I don't feel like I have seven different online identities. I was beginning to feel like Ellen Page in "The Tracey Fragments".

I added the Twitter widget to this blog because it's easier and faster to update my Twitter status than doing an entire blog entry, so I do it far more often. Case in point: my last blog entry was April 2008. Side-note: is there ANY greater word in the English language than 'widget'? Sub-question: is 'widget' really part of the English language, since it's primarily used in a web context, which presumably transcends oral language? Is there a French word for 'widget'?

For those of you who used to follow this blog back when I was posting mostly news articles or features, I haven't written much in the way of journalism in awhile so I haven't quite decided what to do with this blog yet. It may become a hodge-podge of my actual work, links to interesting things I find on the web, and other passing thoughts. And maybe -- if you're lucky -- the occasional old-school rant, harking back to my glory days of blogging on my now-defunct MSN space, when I would rant about everything related to university life. Possible new topic: why Twitter won't let me upload a new picture, telling me there was "something wrong with your picture. Probably too big." ... except the last one I had up there was the same size. Twitter gods, wtf?

Online media project 2007-08

The fruits of our labour from our online media course are finally here! We spent the fall semester learning about all the ways online media are different from traditional newspapers and broadcast news, how they work and how to use them to your advantage when presenting a piece of work. It was a really interesting course, and we got to practice it by splitting into groups to create several online projects. My group did a series of stories on adoption law in Ontario, which was under fire last fall when the provincial superior court struck down an act that would have given people much more access to past adoption records. It was a really interesting project on the level of the politics and legalities involved, but it was also interesting to see the stories of actual adoptees and adoptive parents. So check out our site and all the other projects from our class!

http://www.fims.uwo.ca/newmedia2008/

Final issue of The Reporter

The much-anticipated Features Edition of The Reporter is here! All of us have been working on our major feature stories for print class for months now, and the last issue of The Reporter is made up of all those stories. Some of them have also been published elsewhere, or may be published sometime soon, but for now you can see my story on the Biotron here.

The Biotron's superhuman capabilities meet human obstacles

Only one more week left of journalism school. It's ridiculous that it's been a whole year already. Time to move on to bigger and better things?? Well, time to move on, at least... to what, who knows.