I was invited to an event through work.

My boss is on the board for the Boys and Girls Club of Indianapolis and they had a charity event the department heads were all invited to.

I agreed without knowing much about it.

Then I got an email earlier this week with the details.

1. It was at the pavilion at Jim Irsay’s compound.
2. It was a casino night.

If you aren’t familiar with Jim Irsay, he’s the guy who owns the Colts.

He’s sort of a big deal in these parts.

So I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with the WISH management team playing blackjack for the kids.

When the night was over, you turned your chips in for raffle tickets that went into some drawings for various prizes.

I more than tripled my fake money buy in but sadly didn’t win anything in the drawing.

It was a lot of fun and very cool to do something on Irsay’s property.  The event raised more than $55,000 for The Boys and Girls Club of Indianapolis.

I receive a message from former ABC 4 colleague Chris Vanocur recently.

Chris is an incredibly talented political reporter who recently started his own website, appropriately titled ChrisVanocur.com.

Chris and I coordinated a lot of web coverage on big stories he broke when I was running the web department in Utah and was a fellow Mad Men fan.

So we got along pretty well.

Chris had some questions about how to track some of the international traffic he was seeing on his new site and ended up writing a blog about what he learned from his “internet Yoda.”

Give it a read and send Chris some much deserved traffic.

If you aren’t familiar with Chris, here’s a video he produced describing why he decided to make the jump onto the ‘net.

Monday afternoon the station had a brief tour at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The tour was for people who have never been to the media center or the station room at the track so everyone could get the layout.

I’ve been to the track a few times but I’ve strangely never covered it.

I’m really looking forward to race day.

I’ll be at the track in the media center working on the website throughout race day and will also be walking around taking pictures.

More to come on my first 500 weekend in Indy!

I had a tough assignment earlier this week to cover the Colts Cheerleader auditions.

I put together a pretty nice size photo gallery on WISHTV.com for our viewers.

If cheerleaders can’t get page views, I don’t know what can.

It was a nice little project for me and gave me another chance to test my still photography skills.

I look forward to seeing the ladies representing the Colts organization over the next year.

For the first time ever, the Oscar is hitting the road.

Well, an Oscar is hitting the road.

The Academy is letting a real Oscar statue travel the country to drum up publicity for the award show that will air later this month.

I asked the security guy who travels with the award if it is a backup and he told me it’s the real thing and will be given away in the next few years.

I was able to get my picture taken with the award.

I even struck a pose but I was told it was the wrong trophy for that.

Since my return to Indiana, basketball has once again become a big part of my life.

ESPN College Gameday came to Butler’s historic Hinkle Fieldhouse in January.  I grabbed my new toy, a Canon 60D, and made the trip down Meridan to shoot some stills for WISHTV.com.

The crowd was pretty fired up and it was fun to be around that type of hoops energy.

Outside of getting screamed at by a Butler Police Department officer for no real reason, it was a great trip back behind the lens.

You can check out the slideshow I put together on ESPN College Gameday’s visit to Butler here.

I also had a chance to catch a Pacers game with John Duong at the end of January.

They took down the Detroit Pistons pretty handily.  I haven’t been to Banker’s Life Fieldhouse since it was Conseco Fieldhouse and Reggie Miller was still playing for Indy.

I can see Pacers season tickets in my future some day.

I was checking out the competition websites when I stumbled upon the headline ”

Man allegedly behind Manti Te’o hoax tells talk show host he was in love with quarterback” on Fox59.com.

Quarterback?

So now it’s Everett Golson’s fault?

Although Fox59 isn’t being very specific.  Maybe Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was in love with Tommy Rees or Dayne Crist?

Clearly they didn’t mean to post this headline.  It was probably a rush copy and paste job and the person responsible just mixed up the player positions.

It happens.

Hopefully this post won’t ruin my web publishing karma.

Starting my new job at WISH has given me an opportunity to start over with my digital life.

I’ve spent the last week getting passwords and usernames to a host of new work accounts.

I have decided to use a cloud-based password system and make the jump to Google Chrome, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Every big account I have is getting a new, unique and very strong password.  I have activated two-step verification for both my Yahoo and Google accounts.

The story of Mat Honan last year scared me.  While taking these steps in no way makes me invincible to attacks, it at least makes it a little more difficult to take over everything.

I have been seeing too many stories in the last few years of databases being hacked and passwords compromised.

I urge you to take steps to compartmentalize and secure your online footprint.

You should at least do the following:

• Use unique strong passwords on every site, use a password manager if needed
• Activate two-step verification on your big accounts

I caught an excerpt from a new book on the TV show Lost on Grantland.com and was immediately fascinated.  The passage was from the book “The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever” by Alan Sepinwall who writes for Hitfix.com.

The book’s thesis was that we are currently in a golden age of TV dramas that started back in the 90′s.  HBO’s success started with Oz and The Sopranos and eventually branched out to other cable networks like FX and AMC while simultaneously raising the bar for network shows.

I’ve watched nearly every show the book covered and have planned on watching the few I’ve skipped so far.

The book has some great insight into the environment that shaped how a number of these shows were born.

The only thing that’s disappointing is that obviously the chapters on Mad Men and Breaking Bad are “incomplete” since we haven’t seen the end of these shows. I hope Sepinwall revisits this book again with a new edition to update these chapters once these shows can be logged into the history books.

It’s one of the first times I’ve written an author to share my enjoyment with their work.  He took the time out to write back and say thanks for the compliments.

I think I’m going to get in the habit of writing people more often.  The rash of negativity from the public I experience at work makes me think this world is a little too harsh.  I know I always appreciate the rare nice message and I want to pass along that same gratitude to the people I respect.

Anyway, if you are a quality TV fan like I am, this is a great book.  I highly recommend it.

I was trying to head back to my apartment for a quick lunch when I-80 came to a screeching halt.

Some how this truck managed to jackknife and end up on top of the concrete barrier.

Eventually the police had all the cars turn around and drive the wrong way down the highway until we got to the next exit.

Being a good journalist, I took some pictures and called the desk so they could get a crew out to cover the accident.  The eastbound lanes were completely shutdown for almost four hours while they cleaned up the mess.