Columbia application complete

Well, that’s it. The financial aid form is complete and submitted. I’ve done all that I can, and will find out in April what the answer will be.

If it bleeds, it leads

Memo to self: When talking to middle schoolers about journalism, lead with gore next time around.

Left of Boom

I’m not quite done writing about the late Sgt. James Healy, and as a result, my father sent me a link to a Washington Post mini-site about IEDs. It’s probably the most complete write-up about them that I’ve ever seen.

HesperiaStar.com 2.5

The semi-new HesperiaStar.com is scheduled to go live Wednesday morning. I say “semi-new” because it’s primarily a cosmetic change on the internal pages and a new front page, matching the new standard Freedom Communications print publications look. The Daily Press has an early version of the template, but not one that’s identical to what the Star will look like. It’s still the same site under the hood — and no, no upgraded forum software yet, we asked.

The process has been pretty painless, with a lot of good communication back and forth and the fortuitous assignment of subcategories to a lot of our existing stories in the system, even if those subcategories haven’t been obvious to the public yet.

In April, once the new look has been rolled out throughout the change, there will likely be a few more cosmetic changes, including tweaking the colors to more accurately match the Hesperia Star’s colors and a few other changes. Think of that as being HesperiaStar.com 2.5.1.

Columbia writing test

Yesterday, I went and took my writing test at Riverside Community College – Norco. It was a good thing that I’ve been feverishly reviewing the 2004/practice test, since there were a number of questions descended from that test on the 2008 edition, although they were invariably harder.

I did pretty well, I think, on the news writing segment (Jenn, who saw a copy of the story I wrote, was so drawn in by it, she demanded to know what happened in the case), the news editing segment was pretty routine after editing interns’ work for several years and the essay portion went well, I think.

If any part trips me up, it’ll be some of the general knowledge questions. I did pretty well on the international stuff, due in large part to reviewing that practice test over and over, but I know I blew it on some of the domestic questions.

As the old saying goes, you don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the guy running next to you. Hopefully there’s a few folks with untied shoes running alongside me this year.