ASJA PACIFIC NORTHWEST NEWSLETTER
For ASJA members in
Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington
February 2025
https://asjapnw.org
In This Issue
From the Prez, Small Wins…and Big Ones, M. Carolyn Miller, ASJA PNW President
How I Got Started Writing, Fred Gebhart
Digital Tidbits, Bruce Miller
Ports Galore, Bruce Miller
Member News and Announcements
Our February chapter meeting at 11 am:
M. Carolyn Miller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Time: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87898612924
Meeting ID: 878 9861 2924
This newsletter publishes the first day of each month and welcomes article submissions and photos. Please email the ASJA PNW Newsletter Editor, Maxine Cass, at maxinecass@gmail.com .
From the President
by M. Carolyn Miller
ASJA PNW Chapter President
Small Wins…and Big Ones
It has finally happened. After nearly five years and a few personal detours, I have completed a nonfiction book proposal. It is 50 pages and took as much blood, sweat and sleepless nights as my graduate school thesis.
Its focus is not the book I planned on writing. I wanted to write what author and New York Times columnist Melissa Febos called “The Very Important Book” most new writers have in mind. In my case, that book was to be a work of literary fiction.
But alas, I needed to make a living and business writing, including as a simulation game writer, was how. I didn’t plan on that. I didn’t even know that type of job existed. I merely made a cold call on a training company one day when I was desperate. That one small step turned into a career.
In writing the book proposal, I decided to make its marketing plan more than pie-in-the-sky. Instead, I outlined what I could realistically accomplish to market the book and more so, the board game and online experience I want to develop after it.
In tandem with that, I sent out a few nibbles for two of my marketing goals: to write national essays and write more association publication articles.
Glory be, just as that one cold call years ago bore fruit, so did those nibbles. Two different editors whom I reached out to months ago but failed to follow up with contacted me recently. They both offered assignments, one for an essay in a national publication and one for a leadership article for an association publication (thanks to an ASJA intro).
The moral of this story? Marketing steps, however small, can result in Small Wins…and Big Ones.
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, spent her career designing narrative- and game-based learning. Today, she consults and writes about narrative in our lives and world, the inextricable link between the two, and the critical role of self-awareness in transforming both. www.cultureshape.com
by Fred Gebhart
How I Got Started Writing
I started writing as a lark.
It was September, 1969 and I was a few days into my freshman year at UC Santa Barbara. A sign popped up offering free tours of KCSB-FM, the UCSB student-run radio station, and asking for new volunteer DJs. Be on the radio? Oh yeah!
Walter Conkrite and the San Francisco Chronicle were fine for news and local laughs, but life was music. And music was KSAN, the FM radio station that pioneered free-form rock with attitude. When you couldn’t listen to Grace Slick, Janice Joplin, Cream, Jimmie Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead in person, you heard them on the radio.
I went for the music and got hooked on news. It started innocently enough, rip copy off the UPI teletype, pick the most interesting stories, walk into the studio at 7 a.m. and read for 15 minutes. Then politics happened.
A Black professor’s take on Chicano rights sparked La Raza demonstrations. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, fired Angela Davis. Vietnam war protests became a staple. The “campus by the sea” erupted with marches on the Chancellor’s office, sit-ins, building blockades, and campus police trying to disperse crowds with little success.
When protests spread to the adjacent student community of Isla Vista and a Bank of America branch was torched, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department sent in riot squads and dropped tear gas from helicopters. The Los Angeles Police Department showed up, followed by California Highway Patrol and National Guard troops.
And it all needed reporting: on-air reporting as it happened and daily wrap-ups for the evening newscast. That’s where the writing sneaked in.
Live reports were easy enough: beg or borrow a phone in somebody’s office or apartment, call the station and hack the telephone handset to play a recorded interview if you had one. Intro, play tape, wrap up, and you were done in 120 seconds.
But two minutes needed writing, even if it was nothing more than scribbles on a scrap of paper as the control room counted down to go live. And the evening news reader needed copy that sounded as clean as the international and national stories ripped from the teletype.
None of us had heard of the ABCs of journalism: accuracy, brevity, clarity, or the inverse pyramid writing style. But we saw, we copied, and we improved as we learned to read stories out loud before typing that final -30-. Fifty-plus years later, I still read my writing out loud before it goes out.
Fred Gebhart has wandered from live radio news to written coverage of medical meetings with more relaxed deadlines of two to four hours.
by Bruce Miller
Digital Tidbits
Do you want free digital books? Check out The Online Books Page here:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html
How do old books in the public domain become digital books? By being scanned and a league of proofreaders, who are organized and explained here:
If you want to buy a digital book and support a local bookstore, bookshop.org has recently added this ability:
https://www.wired.com/story/bookshop-now-sells-ebooks
If you are doing research that includes photos, then this site might be of interest:
An introductory video can be found on YouTube here:
A free, robust, online photo editor is gaining popularity as an alternative to Adobe’s expensive options. Check it out:
Watch an interesting discussion on C-Span from a 1999 ASJA conference session on the “Anatomy of a Best Seller”:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?122971-1/anatomy-bestseller
Seattle resident Bruce Miller likes the digital world and is completing a fun project to create a mosaic of YouTube streams on one screen and has successfully tested 36 simultaneous streams on one screen.
by Bruce Miller
Ports Galore
Need more ports for your computer? There’s no lack of device options to expand your computer into connection central. Search for “docking station” or “multiport hub” or “USB hub” on Amazon or Newegg or AliExpress and you can spend an entire day sorting through the options. Needing something while traveling? Add “travel” into the keywords for portable devices.
Focusing on what you really need will probably require several search variations using different search engines. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an online service that allows you to list your port needs and give you a simple answer.
For more modern ports, vendor sites like Amazon, Newegg, and AliExpress will return lots of options for various search terms. Sometimes more specialty stores — like B&H Photo Video —can help you home in on the right product.
For older technologies, Google Search is your friend, which may lead you to eBay. eBay is an excellent place to find older technologies that work.
For example, if you are looking for a docking bay with a FireWire port, eBay is more likely to have something than Amazon.
Getting devices with older technologies connected into a modern computer will probably require some sort of an adapter. For example, if you need to connect a FireWire device to your computer you can find FireWire to USB adapters.
An often-overlooked adapter option for new and older technologies is empty, unused slots on the computer’s motherboard. The older FireWire ports are easily added to a computer if there is an empty PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) slot. The best way to determine if there are any empty slots is to remove enough of the case to see the top side of the motherboard. There are various sizes of PCIe slots, which means you need to order one that matches the slot size. There are many introductory guides to PCIe. Here are a few:
Installing a PCIe board is straightforward. Get a card that matches the slot and gently push it into the slot.
External hubs and docking stations come in various sizes. Their placement and size might depend on the location. For smaller devices desk space can be eliminated by mounting the devices on the side of a computer.
In the picture below I’ve mounted a multi-card reader and four-port USB hub (with an on/off switch for each port) on the side of the computer with double-sided Alien Tape. On one of the front USB ports, I’ve inserted a simple USB expander for devices that always need to be on, such as the wireless mouse dongle.
Another option is using an empty 3.5″ drive bay to insert a multi-card reader. An example of this can be found in this YouTube video:
Often the best way to add a variety of ports is to think past the existing USB ports. Use an empty PCIe port. Use an empty drive bay.
The prices of these various devices range from cheap to more expensive. In general, the more ports on the device, the more it will cost. The best way to judge quality is to look at ratings and reviews on Amazon and any other site that has ratings and reviews. The higher the rating combined with a large number of reviews that provided the rating is typically a good sign.
Seattle resident Bruce Miller has expanded many of his computers with PCIe cards for NVME SSD storage and extra USB ports, external hard drives and USB ports.
Winter mushrooms in the Oregon White Oak/Garry Oak (Quercus garryana) woodland, Gold Hill, Oregon. © Maxine Cass
Member News and Announcements
Editor’s note: This is a stunning, horrifying and superbly-written must-read:
Haley Shapley‘s long-form essay “What It’s Like to Date a Serial Cheater” was published by Seattle Met in December and quickly became the most popular story on the site. It made the list of most-read long-form articles for all of 2024, despite only being posted for a week before the list was compiled. It will also run in the spring print edition.
Randy Stapilus‘ commentary, “Greater Idaho movement running out of options” appeared in the Oregon Capitol Chronicle on December 19. Here’s the link: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/12/19/greater-idaho-movement-running-out-of-options/
Joanna Nesbit (joannanesbit@comcast.net) is seeking ideas and contacts for future ASJA PNW meeting speakers.
“AP style guidance on Gulf of Mexico, Mount McKinley,” an announcement by Amanda Barrett, vice president of standards and inclusion, The Associated Press, on January 23, 2025, covers the AP standard for these geographical names, now incorporated into the latest AP Style Guide.
NEWSLETTER PRODUCED BY
EDITOR: Maxine Cass
PROOFREADER: Catherine Kolonko
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE: Bruce Miller
*All stories are copyright by their respective writers.
*All photographs and illustrations are copyright by their creative makers.
*All rights are reserved to each of them for their own material.