I left work late tonight and ran into a group of college kids that must have been going to a cheesey 80’s party. The guys even grew out child-molester ’staches. Totally diferent crowd compared to rush hour.

Sorry for the grim title but I just discovered this great infographic featuring statistics of how men in the United States will die in 2008. There are various causes covered including suicide, heatstroke, and electrocutions. The data was collected from the CDC’s WONDER Database. WONDER stands for Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research which is a collection of data that’s available to public health professionals and the public at large, boasting a wide array of public health information.

Thanks to this it looks I don’t have to worry about shark attacks (1), foreign objects left behind during surgery (2), or fireworks accidents (5).

Picking session topics at SocialDevCamp East

The DC area is exploding with meetups and unconferences. First it was BarCamp DC in August, then PodCampDC at the end of April, and just this past weekend was SocialDevCamp East which took place in Baltimore. The latest unconference had an emphasis on the future of the web and many of the sessions were theory-heavy about topics that are the very bleeding edge of the next-generation Internet.

Mike Subelsky talked about Amazon’s EC2 web service.

The first session I went to was about Amazon’s web services specifically the EC2 service. The discussion, which was led by Mike Subelsky, revealed the possibilities for new products and services thanks to Amazon taking a lot of the cost and hassle of running server hardware out of the equation with their on-demand virtual server solution. System administration is foreign to me but I could see the benefit of Amazon’s web services.

Dr. Harry Chen discusses the Semantic web.

The Social Media and Semantic Web panel was a real thinker. This was the first time really diving into the nitty-gritty of the Semantic web, which will make the future Internet smarter and easier to manage with data being in a well structured, meaningful format. Dr. Harry Chen led the discussion (see his slides) with some valuable contributions from the crowd about where this web trend was heading. This gave me ideas about how U.S.News & World Report could add Semantic data to it’s upcoming data projects.

Bear, from Seesmic, adding to the Semantic web discussion.

Lunch was provided at SocialDevCamp East and consisted of a make-your-own sandwich buffet. It was probably one of the best spreads at any unconference I’ve been to. During lunch I chatted with Patti, the founder of a Baltimore area start-up called 600block.com. The site aims to help you and your friends find interesting local things, starting with Baltimore and eventually branching out to other areas. I also met Bear who is an infrastructure developer at Seesmic. He mentioned Seesmic is embracing the Semantic web by building FOAF and SPARQL into their API’s. They hope to make everything they can as open as possible which is really encouraging for the future of web video communication. He also gave me a Seesmic t-shirt. Nice!

Shashi knows the benefit of social media to companies.

After lunch I went to see what Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions had to say about Selling the Value of Social Web to Management. Shashi is a very web social guy who I first met at PodCampDC. He cited how lots of companies are opening up direct communications with customers like Comcast with their ComcastCares twitter account. His main point was blogs/Facebook/Twitter are not another marketing avenue for companies to fill, but rather a way to expose the personality behind the company.

The final session was an intimate discussion about the popular JavaScript libraries that are out there. In attendance was Amy Hoy who is engaged to Thomas Fuchs the creator of script.aculo.us. Clearly she had a bias to Prototype but everyone else seemed to be into jQuery.

I had to duck out after the actual conference part was over so I missed the after party. I met a lot of interesting people who share the same passion for technology as me. Each time I go to one of these unconferences I come out with a bunch of ideas and new perspectives. I can’t wait until the next one which will probably be BarCampDC 2 sometime in the summer. And if you missed this one don’t fret as their are plans for another SocialDevCamp East in the fall.

Other SocialDevCamp East Recaps:

• Dave Troy
• Keith Casey
• Shashi Bellamkonda
• Mike Subelsky
• East Cost Blogging
• Flickr Photos

There are many web services and tools that can be used with Twitter. Such oddball web service/Twitter mashups include TrackThis which sends you a twitter message every time the status of a package you are tracking changes, and Timer which helps act like an alarm for things you need a reminder about. But I just stumbled across Fuelfrog which is one of the more useful collaborations.

Fuelfrog provides a simple service allowing you to track your cars mileage per gallon as well as the average price you pay at the pump. Using their website you enter 3 things: the miles you traveled since your last fill up, the price you paid per gallon, and the total number of gallons you bought. Fuelfrog will then tally your findings and provide you with some handy specifics over time. I only started using the tool today but the site will tell you the frequency you are filling up, the average MPG your car gets and the average price per gallon you are paying. In the future they hope to let you compare your performance to other vehicles to see how you are doing.

This simple tool comes in handy for tracking the performance of your car. My parents used to do this manually by writing down the mileage from the trip odometer onto the gas receipt and do the number crunching later at home. But thanks to Twitter integration I can ditch the pen and paper and simply tweet my gas stats straight to Fuelfrog. After providing my twitter username (kingkool68) I can now send a tweet from my phone to @fuelfrog with the miles, price per gallon, and total purchase amount in that order. A handy nemonic is MPG - Miles, Price, Gallons. There is also a Windows Mobile app if you want to be lazy about it.

I’m going to be using this over the next couple of weeks to see if I notice any patterns about my fueling habits. At the very least I can look back and remember when gas used to only be $3.71 a gallon!

(via DownloadSquad)

The skin on my sunburnt arms is starting to itch and flake. Time to get some lotion for this dry skin.

The metro is stop and go today. Mostly it has been stopped. I decided I should take a picture of my face.

The metro is stop and go today. Mostly it has been stopped. I decided I should take a picture of my face.

… 10 years ago today!

That’s right today is the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the iMac. Check out Steve Jobs sporting a suit instead of his trademark jeans and a black turtleneck. This also marks the 10th anniversary of that god-awful hockey puck mouse which solidifies the fact that Apple can’t make a good mouse.

Take a look at that “screaming” 233mhz iMac that comes with a whopping 32MB of RAM. Watching old keynote speeches sure is amusing as technology just keeps on progressing.

(via Crunchgear)

The Filipino Cultural Association, which Kristina is a part of (and therefore me too), had their annual end-of-year picnic this past Sunday. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day as there were no clouds in sight and the sun was out in full force. Maybe the sun was a little too forceful as I forgot to put sunblock on my arms and face which were burnt to a crisp.

Everyone met at Centennial Park, Maryland, for food and games. There were plenty of burgers, hot dogs, and hungry college students but our poor chef Casper couldn’t cook them fast enough on the tiny charcoal park grill.

A life size hot dog with ketchup makes you feel like you were actually there.

Kristina put together a series of games dividing everyone up into 5 color “families”. The events included:

• Balloon Toss - Passing a water balloon back and forth with a partner until there was only one team left. After each successful toss the teams would take a step back.
• The Three Legged Race
• Pie Eating Contest
• Balloon Stomp - Where each team member had a balloon tied around their ankle as they tried to pop other peoples balloons.
• An Obstacle Course/Race - Consisting of spinning around a bat 10 times, a human wheelbarrow race, and a mad dash carrying an egg on a spoon.

Paolo prepares to catch a water-filled balloon.

Bits and pieces on his glasses were all that was left of Daryl’s Apple pie.

Jen races to the finish line carrying an egg on a spoon.

An FCA picnic wouldn’t be complete without a tug-of-war match between the upper classmen and the lower classmen. It is tradition for the upper classmen to win and immediately tie an underclassmen to a nearby tree. This year sure didn’t disappoint, all in good fun of course!

Upperclassmen vs. lowerclassmen in tug-o-war.

They say it’s an honor to be tied to the tree.

At the end of the games everyone was too tired to care who won (it was the red team if you must know). Everyone had a good day out in the sun, laughing, having fun, and eating picnic food. This is Kristina’s last year in college so we probably won’t be back next year. Atleast we have these memories and the 495 pictures I took of the day, which was more fun for me than getting worked up over picnic games.

See more pictures from the day.

Román Cortés managed to create a dead-on recreation of Homer Simpson using nothing but HTML/CSS. To boot it is essentially a vector image that will scale if you increase the text size of your browser. Go to the page and press the control and the ‘+’ key at the same time to see what I mean.

The source code isn’t too pretty but for this spectacle it is certainly understandable. It just makes a good case that open technologies like SVG, which will make it easier to construct vector graphics out of XML code, need to be adopted much faster.