In our community, we have a relatively new geek/designer meet-up called Refresh BCS.  The organizers of the same put on a Barcamp
 this past weekend, but I didn't attend.  Here's why...

 (more to come... stubbed for my friend Google in the meantime ;) )

On my lunch break, I looked up at just the right time to notice a really cool-looking stick caught in a tree. What was interesting to me was the way that it appeared to flex and warp spontaneously when the wind blew.

I tried to capture it to share with the world (see attached video), but hardly caught the full effect for you.

What greatly disappointed me about the whole sighting, however, was when I shared it with a coworker, who typically is interested in the more unobvious things in life, he came, saw, was unamazed, and maliciously removed the stick from its natural chance landing, completely preventing anyone else from happening across the phenomenon.  Why?  I just don't understand...

ok, I mistitled my url on purpose.. But I thought either way it's clever that based on my browser, they knew to toss up an alert tailored to me and my preferred web browser suggesting tips on how to speed up my gmail session. See screenshot:

 

Upon closer inspection, they actually sniffed out my use of Firebug plugin always running.  They recommend disabling Firebug for gmail. I suppose it would be a good practice, in general, to just enable firebug for specific sites I'm working with-- what a novel idea..

My office is full of antics.. Today, a coworker's hand santizer dispenser turned up in a jello mold. He couldn't have been happier to have been so ingeniously (and effortfully) pranked..

Check out the video of this mess of a mass expressing its kenetic energy.

I was stuck with the dilemma of printing out an entire website for complete overview review, but I didn't want to waste a Lot of paper (only a little). A coworker found a helpful blogpost to get me part of the way, and a comment within gave me the real answer: Web PrintSmart 2.0: HP IE plugin to print an entire or select snippets of an entire website (or web browsing session) in a single print job. In effect, it allows you to queue up small screen shot clips and then print only the ones you choose all from one convenient interface!

In an interesting use of Internet 2, Philadelphia Orchestra broadcastst live via Internet 2 to select remote sites.  Fortunately for me, I was invited to watch/listen at KAMU's studio at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas this afternoon. The studio did a fine job setting up the experimental show, but being the brother of an audiophile and maker of high quality recording equipment, I have to admit a hair of snooty disappointment in that there wasn't surround sound and a completely closed chamber immersion-style venue... But hey, it was a first run, and it was pretty darn cool for what did happen! 

I was browsing my flickr photostream and came across an old favorite image I had uploaded long ago:

It's a collage I call Out of Differences showing the elements of fish and bird representing their inability to coexist, overturned to demonstrate a strong "this ain't right" effect and a solitary individual leaving a crowd through that difference into an unknown. Hmm.. an expansion on this collage could be to simply extend the whitespace of the path before this departing individual...

Fyi, rthml not rhtml is.  Because I burned a day troubleshooting and researching, among other things, my version numbers, mod_proxy_html, and relative_path plugin in rails to see why I am getting the message:

No rhtml, rxml, rjs or delegate template found for fleet/app/views 

, I thought it would be appropriate to share the solution.  My render method (render_to_string, actually) is using a :partial call "fleet_import_format" which does properly translate to /app/views/fleet/_fleet_import_format.rhtml, however, my fingers called the file by the wrong extension: _fleet_import_format.rthml.  I accidentally swapped the t and the h, and it made all the world of a difference.  :(

well.. so this didn't turn out quite as I had expected.. I was hoping for a relieving gasssssp of air as the air hole in the 5 gallon water jug was opened. At the very least, I'd have liked to have heard some Glub-glubs at the start of the movie before the air hole was opened. No dice on either.

Play the movie

I will have to repeat this film experiment when the water jug is full again.