Cathy's Blog

Last month the Northeastern Seattle Alumni Chapter was launched and it gave us a chance to connect with the Associate Director of Alumni Relations (Colleen Webb) and our fellow alumni from the area. As of today, there are 968 alumni in the state of Washington. Amazing! Our launch event, which we held at Buckley’s in Belltown brought well over 30 of us together to kick off the chapter.

Tomorrow (11/17) at 12:30PM (PST), we’ll be holding our first conference call to exchange ideas, talk about future events, and drive the direction of our chapter. I’ll be heading up our chapter as the Chapter Leader and I certainly can’t do all the work. So I encourage you to join in the call or email me if you can’t attend to share your ideas and potentially volunteer to lead an effort or two.

I’ll be tweeting about upcoming events and news in the chapter using this hash (#NUSeattleAlum). So follow along!

I love sharing most things, especially my photos (as you can see on my Flickr). I’m also the friend who either says:

1. Let’s use my camera to take group photos.
2. “Oh can you take one with my camera as well?”

It’s plain and simple, I am the only one who actually shares. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends. But they don’t share. With that said, I have tried to make it easy for us to share our photos. Right now, we use Live Mesh which allows us to share and manage files (not just photos) in the web UI or with the desktop explorer client. So far this has proved to be successful. Now if only we had more hours in the day. I am sure that is the only reason why people don’t share. It takes time to download pictures from a camera, save them to your PC, then share them with friends.

As I think about the trials and tribulations of sharing between my friends and I, I begin to wonder how I’ll ask the guests of our wedding to share their photos. I think our photographer will do an amazing job, but I also want those candid photos that I know will be hilarious. Recently, my parents attended a wedding at our church (family friends) and they decided to use Picasa (a G**gle product) for their sharing. That’s cool, but I would never advertise the use of a non-Microsoft product at my wedding. So what’s next? Here’s my thoughts:

1. I won’t use a non-Microsoft product like I said.
2. FTP is most certainly out of the question.
3. Live Mesh is a bit advanced in my opinion. I honestly think it would scare some of my family members/friends.
4. Live Photos maybe? …with a dedicated username and password to share out?

Either way, I’ll keep on bugging my friends. Someday. If you have any suggestions for our wedding, let me or Kevin know!

On the cable car

Originally uploaded by swenton

A couple weekends ago, I traveled down to San Francisco with my Seattle girls and my best friends from college and Kevin’s sister also joined us from the east coast. We spent the long weekend exploring the wines and wineries of Napa on our own private tour and eating our way through the city.

I also brought my new Panasonic DMC-ZS1 digital camera which I took this amazing photo with. I had always been a Canon PowerShot girl until our 3 year old Canon SD300 just wasn’t cutting it any more. My Dad bought the same Panasonic camera (a model older) a year ago for my mom and her pictures have always just been amazing to look at. I decided the ZS1 would be perfect because it fulfilled the 2 most important must haves of mine:

1. Amazing zoom
2. Easy to travel with

And after this trip, I have proved both to be true. I’d definitely recommend this camera to anyone who is looking for those things. Anyway, thanks to everyone who came out to San Francisco and made the weekend so much fun and memorable! I’m glad I could capture the moments with my new camera!

It’s funny. All you East coasters think it rains all the time here in Seattle. This includes my mom, whom after 3 years of me living here also still thinks it rains all the time. Well here’s my proof. It seems you guys are experiencing some rain today. Oh look though! It’s 79 degrees here now and not a cloud in the sky. I won’t lie either, it’s been this nice out since about the end of May. At one point, we even experienced 29 straight beautiful days without rain. So the next time someone tells you, “why would you want to move to/visit Seattle? Doesn’t it rain all the time there?”…tell them Seattle is the West Coast’s little secret!

I recently compiled a list of restaurants, breweries, brewpubs, and good beer reads that I follow on Twitter.
http://cathy.swenton.com/wa-beer-tweets/

You can also find a list of my favorite breweries and brewpubs that I’ve reviewed on Yelp. One of them might even have been featured in the Yelp Weekly newsletter for Seattle (just throwing that out there)!

Best WA Breweries/Brewpubs
Where to find the best beer in Washington (in my opinion)!
http://www.yelp.com/list/best-wa-breweries-brewpubs-seattle

Fantastic Seattle Beer Bars
If you love your beer, these places are a MUST visit! They may not brew their own beer, but they sure know how to keep the best beer on tap!
http://www.yelp.com/list/fantastic-seattle-beer-bars-seattle

WABL Favorites
Collect ‘em all (the stamps that is)…the best Washington Association of Beer Lover’s destinations!
http://www.yelp.com/list/wabl-favorites-seattle