Reluctant promotion

Posted on September 26, 2007 by cindylu

The first time I met X, he told me I looked familiar. I’d never seen him before. I would have remembered. But he insisted that he had met me. For a brief moment, I wondered if he “knew” me via the internets. Did he lurk on my blog? Had he come across my photos on Flickr? MySpace? Facebook?

Nope. Our paths had crossed in a much more simple way, at school.

A couple weeks later, X introduced me to some of his friends at the Los Lobos concert and I heard the same comment from his friend.

“That’s what I told her when we first met,” X said.

“Yeah, but it was a pick up line,” retorted M, another one of his friends.

“No, it wasn’t,” he defended himself. “She really did look familiar.”

Once again, I froze. Why was I familiar to this girl I’d never seen before? I really hoped it wasn’t my blog. But it was much easier. She had billed me for an ad in La Gente de Aztlan, a student-run magazine at UCLA.

And what if X and his friend did know me from my blog? Would that be weird? Yeah. I suddenly quiet down whenever my blog comes up in “real life.” I mumble an affirmative response whenever a new acquaintance asks, “so [insert mutual friend] tells me you have a blog. He says you’re a blogger.”

Ugh, yeah.

I’m no good at self promotion, shameless or otherwise.

I really need to get over this. I’m proud of the words I write here and I like the fact that someone reads them… even if that person knows me in “real life.”

Look mom, I’m in Tu Ciudad!

Posted on February 23, 2007 by cindylu

Tu Ciudad Magazine, which focuses on Latino Los Angeles, quoted me in an article on Latinos in blogging in this month’s issue. I think it’s kinda cool and hope that what they say about the increase in Latinos blogging is right. I feel it’s important for us to be speaking for ourselves, even if it is through the self-published medium of blogging.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve found a lot more people doing similar things and it’s created an interesting and supportive community, Blogotitlán (by the way, I didn’t coin that, but I can’t remember where I read it first). When I started contributing to blogging.la I searched for Latino bloggers based in LA, I couldn’t find too many. I’m glad there’s a lot more now.

[I don't have a scanner, so I just took a picture. Click the image to see the large version. Sorry if it looks crappy.]

Delurking week follow up

Posted on January 18, 2007 by cindylu

Dear Lurkers,

Thanks for speaking up!

I know we all have reasons why we might not want to participate in the more interactive aspect of blogs, but I’m glad some of you broke it out of it for a day.

I learned some interesting things. I had no idea anyone in Australia was reading, or that some of you really enjoy the stories about my cool cousins and siblings, and that a few of you have blogs of your own.

If you want to keep commenting, great. If you don’t, that’s cool too. I’ll just try my best to keep writing and doing whatever it was that got you to come back after that initial chance encounter.

Peace,
Cindylu

Doing vs. teaching

Posted on January 5, 2007 by cindylu

The past few nights, I’ve been having long telephone conversations with Ralph. Rather than spend time talking about our exciting day, I try to give him instructions on how to set up his blog over at Ollinkoatl.net and customize it to his liking. I keep getting frustrated and just telling him I’ll do it for him… because I can. I know how to modify a theme enough to make it look like something that didn’t just come out of the WordPress install box. Finding the right directory to upload an image isn’t tough. The process may give me a bit of a headache (modifying the Puro Pedo Magazine blog wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be), but I know I can do it.

I do the same thing when it comes to my family. Rather than patiently teach family members young and old how to make sense of their gadgets, I just do it myself. Not a good look… ’cause then I get stuck always looking for the tia Consuelo’s phone number in Papa Chepe’s cell phone, making all the party invitations, and adding music to my brother’s iPod. Somehow, I’d rather have the extra responsibility as opposed to challenging myself enough to teach someone who might just need a little push.

Anyway, as Ralph sets up his blog, I’ll try to help just enough… and as my sister Lori gets her beautiful new MacBook up and running I’ll do the same. After all, they’re intelligent people and if I can figure it out (after lots of trial and error), I’m sure they can too.

Venting 1.0

Posted on November 6, 2006 by cindylu

Written sometime in October 2006.

Every single time I check my blog, it looks different. Sometimes it is completely blank, other times it looks like it should, and ohter times it’s somewhere in between.

This is frustrating. I miss being able to publish to my colorful and personalized blog. Even without the technical difficulty, I know I had slowed down a lot. I hardly ever post over at blogging.la. I miss the sense of community of blogging, the tongue in cheek comments, the battle of wits from the Chicano corner, making fun of HP in “public” (I do it over IM all the time), and the words of wisdom from folks like Frances.

That’s all the venting for now. I really need to get back to being a student and reading Pierre Bordieu’s Distinction. It is time’s like these when I both love/hate the fact that the difficult part of my “job” as a full-time student means reading sociology classics translated from French. I’m lucky that hard is reading long sentences (what I’d call paragraphs) from a guy who loves commas and hates periods.

My blog has issues

Posted on October 9, 2006 by cindylu

For some strange reasons, my blog is broken and it’s not my fault, at least I don’t think so. I don’t know what could have changed in the last week or so. HP thinks it might be someone who doesn’t like my ideas trying to hack in to my site. His other theory is that the increased traffic from Ask a Mexican might have done something too.

I’ve had issues since Friday. I’ve submitted a request for assistance with the tech support for my host (siteflip), and checked the status of my SQL database in cPanelx. I’ve backed everything up, but am still worried I could lose more than a year’s worth of writing. Yikes.

So, for the time being, I won’t be blogging much until I get my tech issues worked out. It’s probably a good thing, I have a lot of work to do for school, work and GSA.

Don’t miss me too much. If you do, there’s always flickr.

Give me something to write about

Posted on July 6, 2006 by cindylu

I want to write more regularly. I find that everytime I open up notepad or begin to write in wordpress I stop because I don’t have a topic. I also have about 11 posts in draft form. Maybe I’ll post those.

So yeah… give me topics, questions, something to just think about… whatever.

In the mean time, go read El Chavo at his blog Chanfles! He’s one of those rare Los Angeles Latino blogeros and he’s actually brave enough to try huevos rancheros in a cone.

Lotería Chicana at the ¡Lotería! Grill

Posted on June 30, 2006 by cindylu

Did you know that I write for blogging.la? Well, sort of. I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks mainly because it is hard for me to come up with a topic at times.

However, if you want to keep track of what I write there, you can subscribe to posts I write with this RSS feed.

Also, for those of you who are in LA, perhaps you have time to come out tonight to the 3rd Annual LA Bloggers (and blog readers) get together thingy.

Details
Place: The Farmers Market (on 3rd and Fairfax). Blogging.la folks will be near the southwest corner by the ¡Lotería! Grill, a lemonade stand and Starbucks.
Time: 6 pm ’til closing

Why? I’ll be there! Plus blogging.la will be buying beer and lemonade for folks, if you get there earlier. If you’re interested in going and want to meet up comment or send me an email. Maybe I’ll find my cell phone by then. (Gee, this is not a good week for me and technology, huh?)

Mil palabras: I miss my LifeBook

Posted on June 28, 2006 by cindylu

My Fujitsu LifeBook is gone.

This weekend while I was in Davis, something happened to input jack for the AC adapter. Even if the adapter was plugged in to the computer and in to a socket, my computer didn’t recognize that it was there. To make matters worse, my battery has a very short life and dies in about 45 minutes.

I took my laptop back to Fry’s for service. I got all chillona and stressed because the guys told me they would have to send it back to the manufacturer for service. This could take anywhere from 5 to 12 weeks. They also couldn’t just add a new battery from a LifeBook in the store because they no longer carry my model. Oh and did I mention that there are several things on my hard drive — like a lot of music, hundreds of photos and lots of school work — that I haven’t backed up in a while?

This made me stressed, and it made me feel dumb for putting off buying an external hard drive to backup everything. When I get stressed and I feel stupid, I cry. And that’s what I did at the Fry’s service counter.

I guess the middle aged man and his 20 something supervisor (who was cute and looked like he belonged in the band Inspector) felt sorry for me, especially when it was clear that I was a student and needed things on my laptop. Rather than charge me about $70 to backup my data, they did it free of charge. I also have a loaner Sony Vaio. I’m not sure I like it, mainly because of the size and because I find the keys funny.

I miss my little LifeBook. And all my music… there’s only so much you can fit on a DVD that holds 4.7 gigs.

Spreading the good news

Posted on May 30, 2006 by cindylu

On Saturday, I attended a bit of the 13th annual MEChA de UCLA Raza Youth Conference. I’m used to spending some of my Memorial Day Weekend on campus due to RYC and the UCLA JazzReggae Festival on Sunday and Monday. As I mentioned earlier, I presented a workshop entitled Blogotitlán: Using the Internet for more than MySpace.

The workshop went better than expected. Frankly, I was quite unprepared to talk about Blogotitlán and found myself in a dim room of the Math Sciences building hurriedly eating my cold pollo bowl (a tradition when it comes to RYC) and working on a quick outline for the workshop. I went out Friday night and slept in Saturday morning. Still, you think that I would have worked on a handout or something for the high school and middle school kids in time for my 3 pm workshop. Wrong. All I had was an idea in my head and a laptop.

I scribbled out an outline in the copy of the program I was given when I checked in and then wrote it up on the chalk board.

It looked something like this.

Introductions

Students: name, school, and grade
Me: educational background, experience as a blogger

What is Blogotitlán?
- Explanation of the term; weblog; “tlán”
- How is Blogotitlán different than the Blogosphere?
- Issues important to us; community; bilingual; similar politics (most of the time)
Why blog?
- Youth need to offer alternative voice about what they really think on issues important to us, rather than let so-called experts speak (e.g. walkouts, immigration, exit exam)
- You don’t have to wait for corporate-owned media to cover something you find important, do it yourself
- It’s a great way to improve your writing skills
How to get started

Choose a free blogging service; advantages and disadvantage
Content: what will you write about? What interests you?
Posting photos; free photo hosting sites
Podcasts

Privacy

What to share (email address)
What not to share (phone number, full name, address, etc)
Blogging under a pseudonym
Unless your blog is password protected, anything you write is public

Publicizing

Link to blogs you are genuinely interested in
Leave comments on blogs you like
Write frequently

Looking back at the outline, it doesn’t look so bad. In fact, it looks pretty good. However, I didn’t expect a few things. First, I didn’t think ahead and tried to get a projector nor did I make a presentation and make handouts. However, I thought the workshop would be rather small and I could just show students the websites I was talking about on my own laptop. Wrong. Despite the Math Sciences Building have wi-fi, I wasn’t able to connect.

Second, there were more kids than I expected… and they were not all fluent English speakers. I had a group of about 18 or so students. About a third of those were in middle school and looked so small! Another third were ESL students and preferred for me to give the workshop in Spanish. The last clique was too cool for the workshop. Even though I had more students than expected, I was glad to have that problem.

Third, the fact that many RYC attendees are ESL students never entered my mind. I gave the workshop in English and Spanish because the most interested students preferred Spanish. I’m extremely self conscious when I speak in Spanish and kept forgetting simple words. Luckily, a teacher sat in on the workshop and translated some of the more technical terms I couldn’t remember.

Fourth, I didn’t realize that students who do not pay attention can be so distracting. I had about 4 high school students who preferred to listen to their iPods. Truthfully, it didn’t bug me, but they kept talking to their friends who were more engaged in the workshop. I knew I couldn’t send them out because the students must attend a workshop. However, the teacher backed me up and asked them to be quiet.

Finally, I didn’t think I’d have students who knew my friends. Two students claimed that my good friend, Jonathan, was their adopted dad. Of course, they were joking, but it was cool that they knew Mr. M.

At the end of the workshop, I was asked if they could see my blog. I wrote up the URL on the board. If anyone is checking this out after RYC, welcome.

All in all, I was satisfied. The workshop helped me to think about my own intentions on keeping up this blog and really using the voice I’ve quieted lately. Como El Gran Silencio canta, “la voz también es un arma.”