Not something you see everyday on your way to work.

On my way home from work where I come to find a horde of angry commuters waiting for the red line train at Metro Center. Aparently there is a system wide signaling problem. Argh! Atleast I have a bunch of podcasts to listen to while I wait.
It gets better. The first train was way too packed for me to get on. The second train was only going to Silver Spring which doesn’t help me who is trying to get to the end of the line in Glenmont. I got on the third train and after 10 minutes of repeatedly opening and closing the doors, the train was put out of service and everyone had to unload. The forth train was another Silver Spring train. I finally made it onto the fifth train after arriving at Metro Center.

Man do I feel ignorant. I have been living in Glenmont for a year and half and it wasn’t until this past Sunday that I discovered one of the best gardens in Maryland is located right down the street from me. Kristina and I visited Brookside Gardens to scope out a possible wedding location. Brookside Gardens is Montgomery County’s incomparable, award-winning 50-acre public display garden situated within Wheaton Regional Park and a mere mile and a half from my apartment. We spent the afternoon wandering around the mile-long trail and looking at flowers and wildlife.

The geese were particularly friendly allowing us to walk right up to them to take pictures. I was worried they would flip out at any second and start chasing Kristina and I but they kept their cool although on high alert when we were around.

The Japanese Tea House provided a great view for a swarm of turtles swimming in the pond. There must have been at least 25 of the shelled- amphibians clustered around.

Kristina even got a shot of the turtles soaking up the sun.

Kristina and I also found a great new home. How roomy.

Inside the visitor center was this statue of a frog reading. I gave him a few tips.

In the end we found Brookside Gardens didn’t quite meet our needs for a wedding venue but we had a wonderful day anyways. In the future, when the weather get cooler, I hope to take my macro lens out to photograph the bugs and flowers. The pictures in this post were taken by Kristina with her Sony T300.

Kristina and I dropped off two trash bags of clothes at the Salvation Army today. We were busy moving her from College Park to my apartment in Glenmont. Since we were at the Salvation Army, the fiance and I looked around and found this ugly $35 chair.

.Com, .net, .org. These are the website suffixes most people are familiar with. Today Go Daddy, and a slew of other registars, began offering .Me names in hopes of reinvigorating the domain squatter market. And boy did Go Daddy rile up a stampede of people. At 11 am eastern when the landrush began Go Daddy’s servers took a hit. The site was sluggish and searching for an available new cyber-property became grueling.

I was just poking around looking for something slightly amusing. I think I managed to buy beam.me but as of now it hasn’t shown up in my domain queue on my Go Daddy control panel. Other people are reporting failure notices after they think they have registered a domain which I have not received. A co-worker was trying to grab lemonli.me and treadon.me so he could create dont.treadon.me. As for me (pun intended), the possibilities of my geeky beam.me include a funny Star Trek reference at beam.me/up or something else. On the train ride home I was thinking I could partner with an uber Star Trek geek who would blog on my domain while I managed and ran the technical stuff. I would even be willing to split the ad revenue 50/50.

But this is most likely only speculation for now. If I don’t get it, no big deal. These secondary extensions will soon be just as worthless as .info, .ws, and the dreadful .biz. But this will be nothing compared to when ICANN roles out custom top-level domains in 2009.

Lots of people have added the Graffiti application on Facebook allowing friends to draw a picture on their wall. Most Graffiti drawings look like they were drawn by a gifted and talented ardvark but sometimes real gems emerge. Like this one below:

Not only is it well done technically but conceptually it is brilliant! It was drawn by Bing Han on my friend Todd Rickert’s wall. Todd Rickert? Why does that name sound familiar? Oh yea, he was the Man in Hot Dog Suit with Cash.

Who would think to strap a MIDI controller to a skateboard? Apparently new media artist Simon Morris did with his project Musique Concrete which aims to “explore sound and the urban landscape through the movements on a skateboard.”

This is how it works according to the site:

Mounted underneath the skateboard is an interface which transmits data wirelessly to a laptop computer. Physical actions are detected using three sensors connected to the interface. Acceleration, turns and vibration are monitored by a photoresistor, a flex sensor and piezo sensor respectively. Using the MIDI protocol, a software program enables the skateboarder to control and modify real-time sounds directly from the skateboard.

There are a couple of videos showing the set-up in action but the results aren’t really music, more like a cross between a machine gun and a jack-hammer. It is still a cool idea nonetheless.

I have no idea if these portable cardboard toilets are serious products or some sick joke but I got a kick out of the page design. Featured in Smashing Magazine’s Texture and Patterns Design Showcase, TheBrownCorporation.com lured me in with their simple, to-the-point layout and Little Jack, the quirky mascot.

At any rate, working at The Brown Corporation must be the shit!

We had a party last night to celebrate my roommate’s 26th birthday. Things got a little out of control when a stuffed baby Shrek doll was sacrificed in our living room. Good times.

When I was in elementary and middle school I would walk to and from school. And everyday I would pass this unusual, dome-shaped house hidden away in a drove a trees. Apparently it is up for sale.

Besides the odd shape, all of the windows are triangular making it a nightmare for buying curtains and blinds. The ceiling also appears to have fuzzy carpeting on it.

If I owned it I would paint it orange like a pumpkin with a green chimney for a stalk. But considering how small it seems, the asking price is $475,000 ($45,000 less than the original asking price.) You can see all the details on the Redfin listing or the slideshow.