Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of photographing a fashion show hosted by the Filipino Cultural Association, Chinese Culture Club/Chinese Student Association, and the Korean Student Association at the University of Maryland. My Sigma 70-200mm came in handy as their was very little light (even though there was a bright spot light on the models) forcing me to shoot at 800 ISO to get shutter speeds fast enough to freeze the action. There were three other DSLR shooters there that night, and they all had external flashes.

Equipment aside I was happy with the photos I captured from a seat in the front row at the corner of the runway. I snapped 540 pictures filling up my two compact flash cards for a total of 1.5 gigabytes. Next weekend I’m going to be shooting flag football games all day Sunday. I think we’re going to need a bigger boat card.

You can see the keepers on Facebook (1,2,3) but here are some of my top picks:

Washington DC had it’s first Startup Weekend event two weeks ago drawing a crowd of about 70 techies. The idea behind startup weekend is for a group of people to get together, conceive, build, and launch an Internet business in under 72 hours. The only thing more stressful than executing a new idea in such a short period of time is managing such a large group of random people. I didn’t have the pleasure of attending but I did follow along via the official blog and twitter posts from friends that attended.

The group settled on an idea about a social network for communities, later dubbed HolaNeighbor.com. The site is meant to help people plan events, share important information, meet the neighbors, and generally be a better member of the local community. It has been more than a week since the site launched and it is still far from even a proof of concept.

So far Helo Neighbor is a Google Maps mashup. You can search for communities by zip code which displays the location on a Google map with an exclamation point as a marker. Clicking on the marker lets you check out the community which only includes a list of members and three crude options: name of founder, public or private, and invite or open. There is also the capability to upload photos though there is nothing taking advantage of this feature yet.

The idea is half baked at best. I imagine there must have been way more ideas during the pitch of this business proposition to keep the team excited about this. I don’t see any advantage of launching HelloNeighbor as a standalone site. In hindsight it would have made much more sense to build on top of an existing social network like Facebook. By making this product a Facebook app the team could spend more time working on the features instead of building up the basic infrastructure like the sign up process and user management. As the site stands now, users are better off creating a group on Facebook to keep in touch with local events.

I hope the gang had fun, because the end result certainly falls flat.

Tomorrow is the annual company potluck at work and rather than take the easy way out and buying a dish, I decided to actually cook something. Cooking is certainly not my forte as my regular dinners consist of Health Choice microwaveable dinners. A tantalizing Mediterranean Spinach and Rice dish from the Sun-Maid Raisins recipe site seemed like a good challenge. It helped that I assisted Kristina in making this one time, so I was pretty familiar with the process

Everything was smooth sailing for me except for one thing. I thought a clove was a whole garlic bulb not the little pieces that break apart when you peel off the skin. Oops! The recipe called for “4 cloves of finely chopped garlic.” I was hacking away for a good 20 minutes when my roommate walked into the kitchen and exclaimed at the large amount of garlic I was preparing. We salvaged most of the left overs in a small Tupperware container which he will most likely use later. I am happy the dish turned out just fine but I do not look forward to cooking for a while. Those microwave dinners at $2.89 a piece are well worth bypassing the hassles of preparing, storing, and cooking other foods. Here are two photos of my culinary masterpiece:

With Halloween just around the corner Kristina, her friends, and I made a trek out to western Maryland to experience the Markoff haunted trail. To get there we had to drive down a winding, curvy road in the dark. That was scary enough for me, but the night became more frightening when we got there.

After you pay the $25 fee to get in, you wait in an area with several bonfires before they call your group number. Actors in full creepy-costume interacted with us to pass the time. One was dressed in a suit and walked around like a possessed zombie droning about brains while chasing our group members around. When they called us enter the trail, we were bubbling with anticipation to see what was behind the doors.

We entered the first chamber which was full with hanging skeletons. I let Kristina go ahead of me as we entered the next part which led through a tunnel. As we ducked down to go through, Kristina got scared and thrusted her elbow back right into my nose. It hurt like hell but I stumbled on in the darkness anyway. After I was outside I started to feel a wetness on my hands. Using a nearby light I saw that my hands were covered in blood and my nose was dripping thick, dark-red fluid. It was evident that I needed to head back for some medical attention but how would I get there?

Luckily there was an actor dressed like Jack the Ripper directly behind this. When I tried to explain that I was bleeding and needed to leave, they acted like I was part of the show. With no help from the actor, Kristina helped me back the way we came where there was a guy dressed as a skeleton in the room full of dangling skeletons. He guided us out but on the way a girl saw the blood on me and started shrieking, “You can’t make me go, look at that boy’s face! What if that happens to me?” It was definitely a bonus freaking out waiting patrons.

I ended up at a dressing trailer where a lady dressed in a weird cat costume helped me wash up and stop the bleeding with paper towels. In 15 minutes I was good as new and Kristina and I headed back to the haunted trail. We ended up with a group of strangers, not our friends, but we had a good time anyways.

The trail was rough and hard to navigate in the dark which probably explains why we had to sign a waiver before entering. Actors would jump out of random places and Kristina would shriek. There was a girl ahead of us who was so jumpy she would scream when a tree branch touched her. At the end there were guys with chainsaws (chains removed of course) that chase people around. Kristina totally lost it and started sprinting away from them as fast as she could. I’m surprised she didn’t pass out from the sheer terror of the moment.

In the end it was a fun night. Even though I got a bloody nose, I left with a great story to tell which made it even better than I had expected. The trail is open through the 31st of October from dusk until 9pm. If you are in the area, it is definitely worth checking out.

The first ever DC area BarCamp took place on Saturday, August 11th. A throng of area tech enthusiasts made their way to Fleishman-Hillard Inc. headquarters to partake in an unconference run entirely by it’s participants. There were so many interested attendees that many had to be turned away at the door. Wow! I guess the DC tech community has been secretly yearning for a BarCamp to pop up in the area. One of the attendees brought his son who has to be the youngest BarCamper ever.

The session sign up process was intense as everyone shimmied around the largest conference room in the building trying to cast their vote for the topics that were of the most interest to them. The room for my presentation on Firebug was even packed which made me feel good to have people interested in what I had to say. Though I prepared slides in advance, I didn’t use them. Instead I just walked through the various features of the free Firefox extension and the group had an open discussion about tricks to using the tool. Many developers never realized all of the CSS powers Firebug has and vice versa for CSS designers about script debugging capabilities. Many people later gave me praise for my session. I’m glad people could actually walk away from the conference with something they could use.

My favorite session that I attended was The Facebook Platform given by Nick O’Neill. Here, Nick ran down all the numbers of Facebook application popularity and came to the conclusion that Facebook apps are the next big thing. It was crazy hearing about some of the more popular apps having 1 million+ users. He runs a blog called AllFacebook.com discussing anything and everything related to Facebook and Facebook applications.

The rest of the sessions were documented fairly thoroughly on the BarCamp.org wiki as well as on Flickr. One thing I noticed was 95% of the attendees had Mac laptops and Canon digital cameras. This was also the largest gathering of iPhones outside of an Apple store and for the first time I got to play with one. On an unrelated note: it turns out my fingers are too big to type on the little tiny keyboard. I’m glad I skipped out on the whole iPhone craze.

After the conference everyone headed over to Cafe Asia for the BaCamp after party. I sat with Jared Goralnick from SetConsulting.com, Spencer Holleman, and Charlie Park. We discussed everything from podcasting to holding bunnies for ransom. It was good to meet some other tech related friends in the area.

I had a blast at BarCamp DC and can’t wait until they hold another one (I think I heard the next one would be in January), hopefully in a bigger space. I already know what my next topic will be. Another cool feature would be a group-wide chat channel so other BarCamp DC attendees could find others at the conference with the same specific interests. Hey, some of us are a little bashful in face-to-face settings. A big thanks goes out to the organizers for putting the event together.

• Justin Thorp
• Jason Garber
• M. Jackson Wilkinson
• Rodney Degracia
• Martin Ringlein
• Peter Corbett
• Nick O’Neill
• Justin Stockton

barcampwashingtondc

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

See all this money? It’s $207 million in cash and was hidden in the walls of a luxurious, Mexico City home belonging to Zhenli Ye Gon. Gon ran a pharmaceuticals company that allegedly was a front to provide Mexican drug cartels with lots of chemicals to make methamphetamine. His house was busted in March but Gon had fled.

This past Monday, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents apprehended Zhenli at the mall just down the street from my apartment.

At P.J. Rice Bistro, where he and a female acquaintance ordered codfish and baby carrots, DEA agents showed up before dinner was served. “The police came to the table and asked him to go pretty fast,” a bistro employee recalled yesterday. “They didn’t stay in the restaurant too long.”

Apparently Wheaton, Maryland, is a great place to lay low. It is a fairly diverse place. Check out the map.

(via WashingtonPost)

Unlike the rain-soaked DC Filipino Festival that took place last weekend, the Towson Filipino Festival was bright and sunny. Because of the weather the turnout was far greater than the DC one which provided a lot of great opportunities for photos.

My girlfriend and the University of Maryland Filipino Cultural Association performing a dance.

A tiny Filipino girl in authentic Filipino wear.

Lots of Filipino food around.

The youth even get in on performing.


Street scene from the festival.

Such a large turn out.

While still a small festival, the Towson Filipino Festival was a lot of fun. We were there for only a short amount of time but look forward to going again next year.

See more pictures from the festival.

Photo Info
Camera: Canon Digital Rebel
Lenses: 70-300mm Sigma & 50mm Canon
All shots hand held.

This weekend was full of good parties and fun. On Saturday, June 2nd, I went to the graduation party of my long-time childhood friend Pammy Smith. She offered hot dogs and hamburgers as well as a decadent dessert tray. I must have had about 10 homemade chocolate chip cookies which were my down fall of the entire weekend. There was also a volleyball net and, get this, she rented a moon bounce!

Moon bounces are a lot harder as an adult then when you were a kid. For one thing, I quickly found my self out of breath and jumping around seemed a lot harder than it used to be. Part of this may be due to my lack of physical activity in recent years but also the general rule of thumb that little kids have more energy than adults. Besides my reality-check with moon bounces I learned how much fun volleyball is. I can’t wait to play it on the beach in Ocean City this coming July.

After Pammy’s party, Kristina and I made our way to her roommate’s 20th Birthday party. There was no moon bounce at this one but there was karaoke. I’m not much of a singer so I just watched others make fools out of themselves though Kristina’s roommate is quite a good singer.

Sunday I spent most of the morning and afternoon standing in the rain at the Washington, D.C., Philippines Festival in support of the Filipino Cultural Association of University of Maryland, College Park. Kristina was part of a group who performed a dance on stage as well as taking part in a parade. I was hoping to take pictures but it was just too soggy and wet out for me to risk my precious camera. Coming home soaking wet wasn’t in vain as the event was for a good cause, so it was well worth the soggy jeans and damp poncho.