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Exotic Photo of the Day: Incredible Selfie With a Bear

One  man, his camera, and a grizzly: these are the bear necessities for the ultimate selfie. The best part is that the female grizzly looks poised and ready for the snapshot taken by nature photographer Paul Souders, in Katmai National Park and Preserve.

Paul Souders snaps a selfie with a female grizzly. (Image Via Imgur. Click to view full size.)

The 4 million acre national park of Southern Alaska is famous for its brown bears. The reserve is home to some 2,200 bears, making it the largest population of protected brown bears in the world.

Souders visited the geographically and ecologically diverse area to photograph the bears in their natural habitat—from catching wild salmon in famous Brooks Falls, grazing the plains, and apparently, posing for selfies with new friends.

Go to full article: Interesting Photo of the Day: Incredible Selfie With a Bear 

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8 Reasons You're Still Weak or Fat

Here's what you need to know...

•  If after several years of training you're still weak, there's a good chance you need to rethink your ideas about squats and deadlifts; that you've got no love for the upper body squat; that steroids misled you about a basic training principle; and that you work muscles instead of movements.

•  If after several years of training you're still fat, there's a good chance you need to rethink your ideas about eating 6 meals a day and doing fasted cardio.

•  If you're still skinny, there's a good chance your ideas about post-workout nutrition are 10 years old and your definition of recovery days needs an adjustment.

Go to full article: 8 Reasons You're Still Weak or Fat

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Read the light with a marble

Light is the essence of photography. And being able to capture the light to our benefit is what sets a great photographer apart from the rest. But sometimes finding the precise direction of light can be a little tricky. Professional photographer Frank Donnino shows us how to use a marble to pinpoint the light source:

A simple 25 millimeter black marble is all it takes to help locate the direction of light, particularly in wide-open bright space. Like the reflection on an eye, look for the catch light on the marble. By twisting your wrist around and moving the marble side to side the change in light and shadows will help to localize the source.  Donnino continues,

“Wherever I see the catch light at 2 o’clock or 10 o’clock …that’s the optimum lighting that I want.”

With the 10 and 2 o’clock theory in mind, Donnino also suggests using your thumb knuckle to mimic the ‘nose’ of your subject. This will help in positioning your subject in order to obtain the best lighting possible.

A marble is an effective and low cost tool that can easily be added to any kit. Just remember to find a source that will sell a single marble, otherwise you’ll be left with a full bag of marbles just waiting to be lost.

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TechEd is Dead. Long Live…

The announcement is now live (the first of many) so I can talk a bit more freely about what I've known for a while about this latest newsworthy account from Microsoft.

In 2013 Microsoft decided to end the Microsoft Management Summit, the go-to event for System Center lovers. The community was up in arms about it, but Microsoft promised a successful and seamless integration into its long-standing IT generalist event, TechEd. To those in the upper echelon of the TechEd management teams, it was a success. But, to those who actually attended TechEd 2014 in Houston, it was a broken promise. Still, many believed this was a first effort, and Microsoft could use subsequent years to do better.

Fast forward to today, Microsoft is once again talking integration. Today the company has announced that they are ending ALL IT related events and rolling them up into a single, massively crowded conference in May 2015 in Chicago. Dubbed the Unified Technology Event for Enterprises (which is an interim name, thank God!), Microsoft will bring together all IT walks-of-life into a marketing extravaganza. And, as a bit of clarification, the only Microsoft-owned events left will be WPC, BUILD, and this new one. All other conferences will be rolled up into this new entity.

In the Channel 9 post, Denise Begley says:

You talked, we listened...

(I'm scratching my head trying to figure out who was actually doing the talking. It wasn’t me, and it definitely wasn’t anyone I know, i.e., anyone who derives value from events like MMS and TechEd.)

I'll have more to share on this as the week progresses, but let me leave you with something. As Microsoft continues cutting significant and valuable resources for IT Pros (TechNet subscriptions, TechEd, MMS, others) in an effort to consolidate messaging, it should be getting even clearer for you just how important 3rd party events like IT/Dev Connections really is becoming. IT/Dev Connections is a "right-sized" (to coin a Microsoft layoff term) conference that provides deep technical learning and education. These types of events are becoming more and more important to your career because they focus on you and your job now. For Microsoft to be successful in the IT Pro ranks, the company will need to invest support in these smaller, better targeted events – and that may be happening already. Later this week we'll announce Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft, as the keynote speaker at IT/Dev Connections 2014.

If you truly want to hear the Microsoft roadmap, I'd highly suggest attending UTEE (is that the new acronym?). I'll be there, for sure.

Courtesy: http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/teched-dead-long-live

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A Dutch cyclist has revealed how he twice cheated death after changing his plans to fly on both the Malaysia Airlines passenger jets involved in international aviation disasters over the past four months.

Dutch cyclist Maarten de Jonge cheats death twice after changing flights from both Malaysia Airlines MH17 and MH370

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