Aja Lapus

Tag: seminar

  • WordCamp Breakaway Sessions

    Building a Blogging Community

    I’m still live blogging here in WordCamp Philippines 2008, and I’ve seen Matt already! I still haven’t had the chance to make him sign my excuse letter, though. 😀

    These are the breakaway sessions I’ve attended with Lexie and Dre.

    First Session: Creating WordPress Themes and CSS Power by Gail Villanueva

    Gail discussed the basics of creating WordPress themes especially The Loop, the separate theme files, and widgetizing themes. I was hoping for a more advanced discussion, though.

    Second Session: Building a Blogging Community by Blogie Robillo

    I actually liked having attended this session, it really gave me an idea how to start/continue forming the Web Standards Philippines group with Shari and Lexie.

    Blogging and Journalism

    Third Session: Blogging and Journalism by Danilo Arao

    I couldn’t actually explain much about this session, but I’ve learned a lot about opinion, position and views about blogging and journalism—the laws, government policies around the world, personal opinions, and much more.

    Photos with Matt on a later post. 😀

  • Capturing Moments

    Being one who has interest in photography but never actually learned from another on how to do it, I just take whatever photo my simple digital point-and-shoot camera could take; copying the manner of how other photos were taken, and not taking into account the features my camera possesses. [Raindrop photo taken during the seminar] In fairness to me, some [non-photography inclined] people say that I, most of the time, take good pictures—well, on automatic.

    Having the chance to attend the Basic Digital Photography Seminar of the Engineering Student Council, I then learned a lot about the insides of a camera. Representatives from Canon taught us how aperture, shutter speed, exposure, flash and all other things work together [or separately] to produce a certain quality of photograph.

    Photo exhibiting a macro focus on the flower foreground.

    The seminar was just a short one, as most of the time was spent printing them. [For free!] But the Documentation Committee who managed the seminar took my [four] prints to be placed on a future exhibit. I still have the digital copies of course. Take a look at my Flickr set.

    By the way, my nose bled when they were setting up their equipment. They displayed three Canon Digital SLRs with one having almost the same price as a used car! They also had a two printers with them. One of which prints borderless postcards directly from the camera. *holding onto my nose now*

  • 3-day Seminar at Cardona, Rizal

    School has obviously been busy—I haven’t posted anything in a while. Managing time for school, work, friends and family have been really challenging. And, during this past weekend, I didn’t actually have any weekend at all. We went to the Leadership Training Seminar of the Engineering Student Council in Kuhala Bay Resort where most officers of different organizations from the Faculty of Engineering, including us ESC committee heads and assistant heads, have been invited.

    The first day was somehow more talk and less play, and our team, the yellow orange group, wasn’t winning anything significant from the games. Then came the 2nd day where the whole afternoon was spent on the Amazing Race which lasted until dark. After eating dinner that night, all nine groups plus the hosts (ESC Executive Board) performed in the Cultural Night for some entertainment. The Cultural Night was where every team should perform anything entertaining may it be singing, acting or dancing. Our team was picked to be the last one to perform and that was already 1 am. We expected everyone to be bored since the activities prior to that one really made us tired and sleepy. We even thought what we planned was corny but we still pushed through to the performing it. Ate Joyce sang, while three others danced and all others did a skit after Kuya Dennis introduced us. To our surprise, while we were performing, everyone was laughing hard and one judge even commented that they have, saved the best for last. We won 200 points for that, which placed our team in third overall during the third day awarding ceremonies.

    I could really say that the place was great except of course when the rain accumulated in the roof of the building where we stayed and soaked the roof with water then dripped everywhere, which flooded our room. Good thing I placed my bag and things on the bed and not on the floor saving me of my clothing.

    I can’t find my infrared adapter for my desktop [maybe Ate Lei took it] thus I still could not transfer my photos from my phone—I will as soon as I could get it.

    As for the things I’ve learned during the 3-day seminar: I’ve learned that I could be a good comedy actor having a role of someone who is sleepy like the one I’ve portrayed during the Cultural Night. I’ve been commended a lot of times as Bitoy—and I haven’t got any problem about that. 😛