Directions to Hola!

1. Take highway 101 and get off at Ralston Ave.
2. Take Ralston west until you reach Alameda de las Pulgas.
3. Right before the signal, turn left into the shopping center.

If you miss the first driveway, turn left on Alameda de las Pulgas, and turn left into the next shopping center driveway.

Note: Look for the Carlmont Village Shopping Center‎ because you cannot see the restaurant from the street. Look for the restaurant when you’re in the shopping center. Hola! is at the opposite end from Lunardi’s market.

This month’s meeting requires a RSVP and also costs $18. In order to RSVP, email Daniel or call him at 408-228-1437 by February 21. When you walk in the door at Hola! the night of the meeting, tell the host/hostess that you’re with STC. You will then pay $18, take a numbered menu, and go to the banquet room all the way in back. Your payment covers your choice of entrée and beverage, plus tax and tip.

Program Description

Whether you are distributing a report or giving a presentation, if have a lot of numbers to present and only a few minutes to get your point across, don’t let an amateur presentation bog you down, confuse your audience, and damage your credibility. Instead, learn how to present numerical information effectively—in the same way you learned how to speak or write. In this presentation, you’ll discover how to present numbers clearly and effectively so your ideas and your presentation shine.

Bio

Randall Bolten is a highly experienced Silicon Valley financial executive, who has recently published a book entitled “Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Can Understand You.”

“A Technical Writer’s Trip to Hollywood” is a presentation on things Eliza learned by getting a certificate in screen writing through UCLA Extension, that have improved her technical writing. She was surprised by what she learned and how it relates to information architecture..

She will introduce the following basic screen writing concepts as covered in many screen writing classes:

Scene structure
Story structure
Archetypes
Character development
Parsimony

She will relate the above concepts to the following:

targeting audiences
structuring technical documents
making information easily accessible

She will then demonstrate how all of the above relates to information architecture and the type of topic-centered authoring that is required for DITA.

Bio

The daughter of a Slovak convert pianist and a New England atomic physicist who hired a Dutch babysitter, Elisa sought to decode the culturally diverse surroundings of her childhood by turning to the books left to her family by her grandmother, a brilliant scholar who worked directly with Carl Jung in Zurich. She began writing poetry in kindergarten and hid her journals from the prying eyes of her three siblings for years. Her passion for writing bled through into her professional life. After wondering why writing projects consistently found their way to her desk, she finally surrendered to her primal passion for wordsmithing by adopting the word “writer” in her job title. After over twenty years writing grant proposals, manuals and technical references, Elisa began exploring the creative writing process and got a certificate in screen writing for feature film through UCLA.