Yesterday began with a Southwest flight from Sacramento to Ontario. From there a 25-minute van ride to Riverside and the Mission Inn. Check-in was a breeze and I quickly unpacked and took a few shots from a second story balcony.


Mission Inn, Riverside, CA

As soon as I could, I made it to the Spanish Art Gallery where I would be presenting all 6 presentations.

Here's the view from the audience:

And here's my view from the front of the room:

There was a lot of prep time spent getting an Internet connection. Finally with the assistance of a second technician we realized the wireless router was not connected to the Internet itself. So although I could connect to the router's signal, it went nowhere.

The first workshop was Video Production, a huge topic to present in less than 2 hours. This normally would be a 1 or 2-day training and the same goes for the second workshop, Photography. We began with shopping for a camera and looking at the specifications--what's useful, what isn't. Realizing I did not have a Firewire card, I could not transfer video from the camcorder to the laptop. So I made do with video I had in the laptop, which wasn't much since I try to remove large files often. I did a quick edit then produced an FLV and uploaded that into a Site Builder file library and placed it on the page. That worked well.

The second workshop was Digital Photography and Photoshop. First we covered Composition, and then the Basics of Photography. Finally, with not much time left, I opened up Abobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and show some basic processing (shadow/highlight and cropping) steps.

There was a social hour afterwards at which time I took this group photo:

I actually took a couple more photos of folks that should have been in the shot, but weren't, and those I will Photoshop into the back row.

Dinner was in a large room and consisted of a green salad, pasta with tomato and cheeze, and dessert.

Just after we had eaten, tickets were drawn and some gift baskets donated by various counties were handed out.

One "gift" was a huge sack of onions. It was actually claimed.

 Alex Valdez, the first comedian with a disability to gain national recognition and winner of the Norman Lear Comedy competition was the keynote speaker at dinner. His message was that someone can be disabled physically (he happens to be blind) but the real disability can be in attitude with or without a physical difference.

Tomorrow I'm presenting on the ANR Portal tools, Blogs and Podcasting.

Mike