Aaron Paul Vogel

It's been five days that I've been here, and two on the job, but so far my major area of concern with the town of Sacramento isn't the complete lack of terrain or the oppressive sun - that I swear is two stops brighter here than anywhere else I've been - but rather what am I going to eat? Thus far I've found a bar/coffee house /restaurant called Capital Garage that not only has free wifi, coffee and a decent bar menu, but serves up New Belgium brews and apparently has a wicked Sunday brunch that includes all you can drink mimosas! AND it's about a ten minute walk from work!

At the moment I'm writing at my latest find while carving my way through a crepe stuffed with spinach, tomato, avocado and sour creme. Crepe Village has a wide selection of both lunch and dessert crepes, though a woefully small number of beers on tap. I shall, however, be retuning for the California, as my current meal is called, despite a nearly unpalatable side of what they're calling potatoes.

As for the real reason I'm here, work is going well so far. I've spent the last few days getting to know the place, taking care of administrative details and meeting people. I've already helped Allen LaGuardia at the capital bureau capture and edit a couple of clips and tomorrow I've be video taping an interview one of the sports reporters is conducting for a long term project she's been working on doe over a year. My editor, Manny should be back either tomorrow or Thursday, so that should bring in a slew of new projects for the week. After that is anyone's guess.

I'm really enjoying the newsroom environment so far, but then I haven't really been IN it yet. Ask me in two weeks. Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

I overheard an Apple Genius Bar employee (I'm not gonna call him an Apple Genius, 'cause he wasn't exactly adept at explaining the problem to this particular customer, but I guess that doesn't relate to being an Apple Genius... still not gonna give him the title) say that to a rather frustrated and clearly confused customer when trying to explain why apple would replace his under-warranty hard drive, but that recovering the data could cost hundreds of dollars. The man was probably in his early 50's or late 40's, and clearly a huge Muggle when it comes to computers. I'd gone in because of the exact same problem - my laptop's hard drive had stopped functioning a couple days ago - but only to see if the geniuses had some fancy diagnostics they could run that I didn't have (they didn't, they ran Disk Utility just like I had and came to the same conclusion: it's fried). However, I had already been to Fry's, picked up a new hard drive and got back in touch with my critical data. This guy, clearly, was gonna have to wait, perhaps forever, before he saw any of his precious photos, documents, emails, calendars, et al again. Why was I in and out of there while he was still trying to come to terms with his disaster? Why was he in a state of shock while I was simply shocked at how sad the Genius Bars' capabilities are? I'll tell you...

So, my first video work at my new internship was posted yesterday on The Sacramento Bee's entertainment section website, SacTicket. The video was a companion piece to an article written by staff art critic Edward Ortiz. Edward is a really nice guy to work with and I had fun listening to the work of the four composers he profiled.

So far, two weeks into it, I'm having a great time. It is a little odd having a management structure that I have to work through instead of just deciding for myself what pieces I do and do not want to do. This is one that I probably wouldn't have even known about if Manny hadn't been on top of it. The next months I'm here I'll be trying to get more in touch with the reports so that I know what's possible before the articles are written.

The Bee is still getting their program going, but Manny and all the other staff are terrifically enthusiastic about the prospects. There's clearly the will to make their website and particularly their multimedia much greater than it is currently.Hopefully that will will find a way.

Here's a link to the story:
http://www.sacbee.com/music/story/294244.html
And here's the video I produced: