I love using my MacBook Pro while working outdoors, but its underside does get hot sometimes, especially when the outside temperature peaks. As such, I have to always make sure to keep it raised up a bit, in order to keep it cool.

Normally, I use Rain Design’s wonderful iLap at my desk, which features an angled anodized aluminum base to support a laptop computer and keep it cool. However, while this ($45 to $63) base sure is stylish, I find it a little too bulky to fit into my laptop bag at times, so it usually just stays on my desk.

Recently, I came up with a more cost effective and pretty ingenious (I think) solution to keep my laptop cool when I found myself without a much-needed cooling base while traveling.

I simply purchased a cooling rack – the kind used to cool off cookies, pies, and cakes – and set my laptop on that.

While this three dollar purchase gets me a number of odd looks when I first take it out of my laptop bag – it’s thin enough to fit behind my laptop and add extra support to it – people around me quickly see the “clever logic” behind it, and often ask me for the “name of the specialty store” where I found this “chrome device”, so they can buy one.

They’re usually even more surprised when I tell them they can find a number of sizes wherever kitchen gadgets and baking equipment is sold, or buy a pair at Amazon for about six bucks. Plus, you can use it to make cookies.

Among the courses I took at UCLA to earn my TV writing certificate, I completed a ten-week long Podcasting for Writers class. The course not only covered the basics of developing and marketing a podcast, but went into great detail about the scary technical stuff that might otherwise make one think twice about podcasting.

I highly recommend it. Podcasting is another (overlooked?) medium writers can use to not only promote themselves or their websites, but create fresh and original content for: interview and variety shows, sketch comedy, radio dramas, etc.

As part of the course, I had to put together a podcast, too, and created a companion piece for this website. You can listen to my final project, SopHok - The Podcast, by clicking here. Please note that the content might seem a little dated, as it was produced back in December.

Welcome to Sophisticated Hokum.

Aside from acting as a showcase for my work, think of this website and blog as a virtual notebook where I will record anything interesting or useful that I encounter.

If you are new to writing and are looking for information about breaking into journalism or magazine writing, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I am more than happy to share my professional experience in this area with you, and may even post your answer for other wannabe writers to see.

For those who know me personally, check out my ballyhoo category to see what I’m up to and where I’ve recently been published. If you don’t know me personally, don’t be shy and introduce yourself.

And in case you were wondering, Sophisticated Hokum stems from the critique a story analyst at Warner Bros. gave to an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s back in 1940. The analyst described it as an “excellent melodrama” and “sophisticated hokum”, and suggested the studio purchase it at once. That play became the basis for Casablanca, one of the best movies ever written.