This is the FN2000 Bullpup, and it’s Civilian-legal. So, Halo fanboys.. stop screaming “AR n00b!!!” into your headset, pick up some MJOLNIR armor, grab your FN2000, and kill some covenant.

Yesterday, I happened upon the twitter feed of one Tony Chester. Tony Chester works for OnWired, a web design agency based in Cary, NC.

Today, the abductor(s) tweeted from the “ihazurchimp” twitter account links to photos of the MailChimp in front of a rest area in South Carolina. To state the obvious, this is proof the abducter was driving north, either to or through South Carolina from Atlanta, GA. My interest was piqued. I personally know most (if not all) people from South Carolina who were at the conference, and was able to rule them out through elimination. With South Carolina being ruled out in my mind, I remembered Tony Chester from North Carolina. Recalling that he works for OnWired, and they are located in Cary, NC I quickly checked google maps to estimate the driving distance. Six hours and twenty one minutes. Definitely drivable.

Who is OnWired? As described on their website:

“By day, we’re a small, vibrant web design studio located near Raleigh, North Carolina. By night: a band of highly–trained, elite special operations web mercenaries on the lam from the law.”

Curious, no? I began dissecting the clues within the abductor’s flickr stream and twitter feed. Earlier in the day, ihazurchimp tweeted that he was going to Whole Foods to get some bananas for the MailChimp. After visiting OnWired’s contact info I made a google maps search for Whole Foods Markets near their office. Interestingly enough, Whole Foods is only 2.4 miles from OnWired’s office, down Kildaire Farm Rd.

Whole Foods’ proximity was interesting, but I had to find more. I read more about OnWired’s Team. Alongside Tony Chester, Jon Norris sits as Director of Design and Marketing. On OnWired’s home page I found a blog entry Jon Norris wrote about the Webmaster Jam Session. Within, he mentions that he attended the “Design for Email 101″ presentation which was led by Ben Chestnut of MailChimp. Jon also mentioned he used to work for one of MailChimp’s competitors.

“This session is being led by Ben Chestnut of MailChimp fame. I personally wanted to sit through this one because I used to work for one of his competitors.”

What an interesting revelation. To clear things up, I wanted to find out who Jon worked for. I went to linkedin for the answer. Two years ago he worked for Bronto, an email marketing software provider.

It’s not hard evidence, but the clues sure do point toward OnWired having the MailChimp. I’ll even venture to say they will be handing it off to Bronto software, who happens to be based in Greenville, NC only 22.8 miles from OnWired’s office.

What do you say, OnWired? Do you know anything about the MailChimp’s location? As we know, the MailChimp left Atlanta Saturday afternoon (the 4th). This would mean the abductor would not have been at the Saturday night Blue Flavor after party. OnWired went to the conference as a team, as evidenced by this flickr photo taken Thursday night (the 2nd). Until they can provide photo evidence of the entire team’s appearance at the Blue Flavor party, I think they’re prime suspects. Just sayin’.

Update!

In response to some of the comments, I’ll admit this is certainly all circumstance based. As such, I’ll point out another circumstance. The abductors posted a photo of the MailChimp having a snack of peanuts in front of a brown sofa. It’s a funny circumstance that a very similar sofa can be seen in OnWired’s flickr photostream, here and here. Should this not be enough circumstance for you, take a look at the shadows cast by the circus peanuts in the MailChimp photo. Now, take a look at the light source in the OnWired’s office. What a coincidence! The photographer obviously set the MailChimp up against the sofa where he’d have the sunlight over his right shoulder. The sofas are eerily similar, there are hardwood floors in both places, and the light source is in the same direction. Those poor OnWired fellas certainly have some coincidences stacking up against them. The photos are posted below for you to compare..

Between my excitement to be off, and my excitement to be riding.. and my excitement to be riding downhill.. I get a little too excited sometimes. Yesterday was one of those days. MacbookPro on back, clipped into my pedals, I braved the hill. Screaming down Lady street was I.

“Oh, there’s a bump in the road?” I thought to myself.

“No problem, I’ll ease back over my rear wheel and let the bump bring up my front wheel. Then, I’ll ride it out.”

Usually, this goes without incident, mind you. Yesterday however, things were different. Perhaps I wasn’t used to the added weight of the Macbook on my back, causing my case to swing like a pendulum behind me.. pulling me farther and farther back, all while causing me to simultaneously lose balance. It was then that the park bench came into view. I was fighting to gain back control of the bike, but I couldn’t maneuver its front wheel back to the ground. Gravity had taken over. My bike slammed into the bench, throwing me sideways. Clipped in tight, my bike came up and over with me. The Macbook? It raced in an arc over my head, strap in hand, my eyes on the prize. In an effort to save the Macbook from certain death, I allowed my hip to slam into the top of the far side of the bench. Thousands of traffic laden eyes watched in entertainment as I picked myself off the ground and untangled my handle bars. Like a kid with a trophy, I smiled ear to ear. Epic, truly epic. 

There’s a nice pic of my bruise below. Good stuff, indeed.

Team Final Boss, the Halo 2 Champions won the first event of the 2008 MLG Halo 3 circuit in the Meadowlands. Final Boss fought back from the losers bracket after being defeated by Team Instinct, who eventually placed third overall. The Championship game came down to Final Boss vs. team Classic who had gone undefeated throughout the tournament, including a decisive victory against pro team Carbon. Since the tournament was double elimnation, Final Boss had to defeat Classic in two best out of five series’. This proved to be easy work for Final Boss, who paved over Classic on the main stage at MLG Meadowlands.

Here’s an example using the following url:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?markers=29.204019,- 81.049919&zoom=12&size=512×512&maptype=roadmap&key =MAPS_API_KEY

In the example URL above I’ve bolded all of the parameters. There are numerous available parameters, of which I used five; markers, zoom, size, maptype, and key.

You’ll see that I used the markers parameter to define where I wanted the marker placed. In this case it’s at Daytona Beach (Bike Week starts this weekend, after all). If you don’t want a marker, and just a clean map of an area you would use the center parameter rather than the markers parameter. Those numbers that come after the markers parameter are the latitude and longitude. How did I come up with these values? I visited google.com/maps and brought up the location I wished to mark. Then I clicked the “link to this page” button at the top right of the map. The url it spit out contained the latitude and longitude I needed.

The next parameter used was zoom. This value can be set anywhere in the range of 0-19 with 0 being a view of the entire earth. The next two parameters I could have left out, as the values I selected for size and maptype are the default values anyway. But, it is nice to have the option to select a size, horizontal pixels by vertical pixels as well as the option to select a mobile map type using the maptype parameter. The last parameter I used was key. This is required as this is where you place your specific API key. You can obtain this key for free.

This is just a very brief example of what you can do with the Google Static Maps API. For more information check out Google’s documentation.

AdobeCards.com

Mentioned in the video is the idea that we’ll see consumer cars with this capability within about ten years. TEN YEARS! How awesome is that? Now, of course this would raise all kinds of concerns. First, you wouldn’t want your car’s trunk to be full of servers and you wouldn’t want a dozen antennas and orb like projectiles sticking out from every angle.

So, first and foremost the technology that makes it happen would have to be seamlessly integrated. I don’t see that being too big a deal. What I do see as a big deal is, how good will it really be? Will we be able to actually sit back and relax enough to trust our car to drive us around? At first, I think it would be quite terrifying. But, where I see this being particularly applicable is on Interstates. Perhaps auto-pilot.. err auto-drive wouldn’t be able to engage unless you were on an interstate. In which case a new option would appear on your touch screen HUD dashboard reading, “Auto-Drive” for example.

Then, of course, the question of how comfortable are you allowed to get will come in to play. Once Auto-Drive is enabled can the driver rider fall asleep, swivel his/her chair around to partake in the entertainment facilities of the back of the vehicle? I think that will all be figured out in time.

But, to help limit incidents I imagine in the initial stages it would be limited to interstate only use (which makes perfect sense and is probably the only situation I’d want to use it in anyway) and the driver would be able to take over control at any point by simply grabbing the steering wheel, or hitting the brake or accelerator. I wonder what effect this would have (coupled with a hybrid or electric power plant) on the airline industry. Anyway, I won’t be getting a car anytime soon but now ten years from now is looking like a good purchase time.

Couldn’t resist checking out Mt. Katahdin.. Good times. Now go put it to use!

We walked in, stood in line, and took a look at the value meals. I took one glance up at the meals and corresponding numbers, and realized they’d number fucked screwed upset me. They threw a curve ball, a dagger, they’d stabbed be in my proverbial left-to-right, sequential number-reading ass back! Take a look at BK’s incredibly useful Value Meal Menu:

1, 2, 7?.. oh, i have to go down.. 3, 4, 9?.. damnit! Stop making me think, BK!