It’s like a full body mouse.

Personally, i like the Indian version much better!

National Geographic is known for its amazing wildlife photography. Last November they had a special on Leopard Seals and the pictures blew me away. Check these out:

Wow. Who knew Leopard Seals could be so fierce. Caption from the photo:

In a death shake, the large female shreds a penguin chick by whipping it from side to side. It took 1/2000 of a second to freeze the action; at the time all I saw was a splash and storm petrels and gulls gathering for scraps. This efficient killing machine prizes above all else penguin stomachs stuffed with krill.

Check out the rest of the gallery ->

Bet you’ve never seen one of these before.

Leroy was there…

This past weekend a gang of friends and I partook on a weekend getaway to Ocean City, Maryland. The last time I visited the beach was a month ago for the 4th of July but there was still plenty of adventure to be had the second time around.

Ahh! I don’t want to read all of this…

Friday, August 3rd
I got home from work an hour earlier than usual. This left some time for a quick nap before the 3 hour trek to Ocean City. Kristina and I left around 8pm stopping only for a bite to eat at Hardee’s. We made it to the shore by 11pm. Our friends Matt, Pammy, Mike, and Tim traveled in a separate car and met up with us 30 minutes later.

Matt said we could spend the night at a friend of a friend’s place but when we got to Ocean City we were told there wasn’t enough room. Being without a place to stay at the beach on a late Friday night in the beginning of August is a miserable experience. Cruising down Coastal Highway, looking for hotels with signs reading “vacancy”, was frustrating at best. When we did stumble upon the rare vacant hotel the rates were sky high, causing us to continue searching. Apparently the weekend of our trip was not a good time to look for a hotel at the last minute as there was a car show at the convention center and the worlds largest billfish tournament taking place in town. Our best bet to find a place to stay was to head out of Ocean City via route 50.

We eventually stumbled upon a motel just outside of town that had a vacant room and a price that everyone could agree on. The downside is we could only get one room and the motel policy stated no visitors were allowed. That didn’t stop us from piling six people into a tiny two person room. There was just enough room for three people to sleep horizontally on the “queen” size bed and the other three to curl up on the floor. The air smelled of mold like from inside a locker room and the water had a pungent odor. At least we had air conditioning and a mini refrigerator, though only one could be plugged in at a time. It was nearly 2:00am and we didn’t care about the grungy condition of our sleeping quarters. All we cared about was getting to the beach the next day.
Read the rest of this entry »

What is BarCamp?
BarCamp DC is an ad-hoc unconference and is part of the larger BarCamp movement. While there are topics suggested for discussion, there is no set agenda until everyone gathers. Attendees are required to participate to some degree: either by giving a presentation, demo, etc. or by facilitating a group discussion. Topics are flexible, as well.

When is BarCamp?
The first DC area BarCamp will be on Saturday, August 11th, starting at 9:30am and ending whenever people get sick of being there. There is an opening party on Friday, August 10th, at 8pm.

Where is BarCamp?
Fleishman Hillard Inc.
1615 L St NW, 20036
Recommended Metro Stops: Farragut North (red), Farragut West (blue/orange), McPherson Square (blue/orange)
Buses: S1, S2, S4, Circulator, 80, D1, D3, D5, D6, L2, 38B, N2, N4, N6, 42, 52, 53, 54, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36

What can I learn at Barcamp?
You can learn about the following from your peers:

• WCAG 2.0 Will Make Your Life Easier by JustinThorp
• Microformats as APIs by JasonGarber
• Open Rails Session by Bill Kocik
• The Live-Coding Intro to Rails by KevinLawver
• Rails Scaling and Performance by KevinLawver
• Community Building in Drupal by Michael Haggerty
• CRM Systems Integration in Drupal by Michael Haggerty
• Blog design by Jesse Thomas
• Ethics and Word of Mouth Marketing in the 2.0 World by Holly Samee
• Irregular intervals: grid systems fifty years on by David Ramos
• Open Democracy by Matt Bradley, Jeremy Carbaugh (Sunlight Foundation)
• Using Firebug: Web Development Inside the Browser by Russell Heimlich
• Trace-Driven Design: How an Architecture Practice Makes Web Application Design Better by John Athayde
• Widget distribution and analytics by Will Meyer
• Ruby: A Crash Course (“Hello World” to Metaprogramming) by Nikolas Coukouma
• Fantastic Web Typography For Everyone by Nathan Herald
• DOM Scripting (how can I be amazing, fast?) with the new Dojo by Matt Bowen
• Accessible Forms by John F Croston III
• User Experience Design: a discussion on why the hell designers do what they do by Samantha Warren
• Alternative Web App Structures by Brock Wilcox
• Failing the Joel Test by Matt Lester
• Developing on the Facebook Platform by Zvi Band
• Let’s design a dream set-top box for Miro by Ross Karchner
• Stump the Chump: CSS Edition (bring real-world CSS problems / screenshots of troublesome layouts / etc. and we’ll solve them {or die trying}) by Charlie Park
• Web Application Security (and why it matters to YOU!) by Doug Wilson and Mark Bristow

That’s right, you can look forward to a presentation by yours truly about Firebug.

Is there more information?

• BarCamp DC Wiki Page (Where everything gets organized)
• Official BarCamp DC Site
• Upcoming.org Event Info
• BarCamp DC Flickr Group
• BarCamp DC Twitter Account

Now for the rest of this week I need to prepare for my little presentation. I will be blogging from the event but if you happen to be there feel free to drop by and say hi.

barcampwashingtondc

I didn’t play but those who did went through a lot of beer.

Why? Because it is Friday and we all could use a good laugh.

Cat Fighting A Blow Dryer

A Cat Spa Machine

Drunk Kitty

Sleepy Kitty Making Biscuts

Spinning Cat

… and asks if they have 7 pairs of shoes for sale! That’s right, this lamb was born with 7 legs; 1 short of a spider. Unfortunately, it was also born with a partial bowel and would have to be destroyed. I suppose it would be inhumane to let the thing live anyways.

Feel free to leave all of your “leg of lamb” jokes in the comments section.