If you’ve got a camera, and you’ve got the time, and you want to hang out with a gaggle of other photographers capturing images from the heart of the heart of Silicon Valley, then you have to participate in the Worldwide Photo Walk in San Jose. I know I’m posting a little bit early for an event scheduled for July 18, but space is running out and you need to sign up soon to participate. And what a better way to go all image-geek than to start and end your walk at Adobe HQ in downtown San Jose.

It’s free to participate, but walks close after 50 members join. See the FAQ more info.

Oh yeah, and there are some very nice prizes involved, too.

Scott Kelby is the digital photography guru that launched the event that now has 912 locations around the world participating. This is the second annual event, and last year’s best-of photos were crazy good:

Suhaimi Abdullah, Singapore

Can you do better?

The rules of the festival: Admission should be free, the musicians should perform for free, amateurs must be just as welcomed as professionals, and there should be a diverse range of genres represented. By every measure I can find, San Jose’s participation will do exactly this.

It’s happening at Santana Row, where headliners include Tété, who is being called the “French Ben Harper,” and Eric John Kaiser, who calls himself “Portland’s French Troubadour.” The rest of the crazily diverse lineup can be found at the San Jose Jazz website. And when I say diverse, I mean there’s hip-hop, jazz, rock, folk, classical, funk, gospel, blues, pop, indie and swing on the lineup. Crazy diverse.

For more info, check out the international home page (in English). The Merc also does a writeup here.

What: Fête de la Musique
Where: Santana Row, at Winchester and Stevens Creek boulevards, San Jose. Free parking. (Directions)
When: Saturday, June 20, 2009, 1 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Contact: 408.551.4611.

The second annual SubZERO Festival is landing in downtown San Jose and running straight through to midnight. According to their website, it’s a “DIY, artistically bent, hi/lo-techno-mashup where street meets geek.” Expect lots of live entertainment, music, 100 artists, street performers and all sorts of right-brained revelry. Check out the artists’ descriptions and see for yourself: it’s like a smaller scale, tragically hip version of Maker Faire. 

The event coincides with SoFA district’s regular South First Fridays, which has free admission for several little art galleries on the first Friday of every month. Ride the rickshaws from gallery to gallery and practice your art snob grimace just in case someone catches you actually enjoying yourself.

These are the things I’m looking forward to specifically:

• 24-hour Open Mic at MACLA, from 6 p.m. Friday to 6 p.m. Saturday. Local artists will be at the gallery, and international artists will perform via Skype.
• The Metro’s new photo exhibit/experiment. Every month a theme will appear in the Metro paper, and photographers of all skill levels are invited to submit their work. They’ll be shown during the First Fridays art walk, and the public can then vote on which ones get inside the publication.
• Live opera at the newish Caffe Trieste. Just checked this coffee shop out a few weeks ago and fell in love. I’m also a classical music geek deep down, so I can’t wait for Opera San Jose soloists to give a performance for significantly less than $50 a ticket.
• SLG Publishing’s ROBOTS! – Featuring robotic sculptures made from common household objects. (I’ve been a fan of SLG Comics for years. Hooray JTHM!)
• All these fellow SJSU students participating.

Not only can the man leap like a frog on steroids, but can squat 635 pounds and can dead lift 655 pounds. It took three of his teammates together to do the same. 

NFL.com says Jarron should be thanking his father, former New Orleans Saints offensive tackle Daren Gilbert, for his athletic genes. Maybe, among other things, he should be thanking YouTube.

Captain Planet at SJSU (TwitPic credit: @tnisatard)

Confession: I’ve actually been too tied up with homework today to participate in SJSU’s Earth Day celebration, but I did want to procrastinate for a bit and point out a few notable things about today’s occasion on campus:

1. According to SJSUAlumni.com, the founder of Earth Day is an SJSU alumnus. Gaylord Nelson graduated in 1939 and began Earth Day in 1970 while serving as a U.S. senator. There’s a book on his life here, which has a quote from Al Gore saying that Nelson is “widely regarded as one of the leading environmentalists in American history.” That’s saying something.
2. Did you know you can recycle a dead cow? For those of you who live in Santa Clara County, the Recycle Stuff Web site will tell you exactly what you can and can’t recycle. (The Center for the Development of Recycling, which maintains the site, is an SJSU-based project.)
3. To see what the SJSU campus itself is doing nowadays for the Earth, and not just for Earth Day, check out the Environmental Resource Center at SJSU and the Environmental Club (outdated Web site but from what I understand an active club). Also check out the Environmental Studies department.
4. I also dug up this document published in 2008 that outlines the campus strategy to be more environmentally sustainable. Highlights: Looking into installing solar panels for select buildings, increasing use of recycled water in the MLK Library, using recyclable and compostable packaging in food and dining areas, and using locally grown produce. (Document from here.) How much of it is feasible? How much is already implemented in the year since this document is released? What’s been tabled? I’ll have to do some more digging and calling. But instead, since I really do have to get back to my schoolwork …
5. Captain Planet was on campus. That is all.

Early this morning, a woman in San Jose sent this tweet to Demi Moore:

Immediately Demi Moore retweeted it on her own profile, adding “Hope you are joking.” There was every indication that she was not. 

The woman’s profile indicated only that she was located in the Silicon Valley, so mere seconds after Demi reposted the tweet, the San Jose Police Department fielded phone calls from near, far, and everywhere in between. SJPD reported that they found the woman and she is safe and under evaluation.

I’m not directly linking to the woman’s Twitter profile to respect her need for privacy in the aftermath of a very public plea for help, but it’s out there if you want to find it. I’m also not going to be posting on whether Demi saved someone’s life, if Demi herself should have called 911, what Twitter’s role is in all of this, blah blah blah.

Instead, if you ever come across a similar situation with an imminent threat of suicide, call 911 immediately. If you know someone locally dealing with suicidal thoughts, read this first, then encourage them to call the Santa Clara County Mental Health, Suicide & Crisis Service:

• San Jose (408) 279-3312
• North County (650) 494-8420
• South County (408) 683-2482

If they’re outside the county, have them call 1-800-SUICIDE.

I’ve also been trying to look up an online anonymous 24/7 instant messaging service that helps those in distress. The only things I’ve been able to find are MyTherapyNet,  this service from the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network and some social networking sites linked to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline. 

If you know of any, please leave links in the comments.

Having dealt with friends with suicidal thoughts in the past, I do not take these stories lightly, and neither should you. I just hope this bit of information can help someone, somewhere.

Nick Dovedot snaps a photograph at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Credit: Derek Sijder

As reported on CNN and the San Jose Mercury News, a group of San Jose State journalism students took a 10-day road trip through the South to visit several landmarks of the civil rights movement before finishing at the inauguration on January 20.

These are some of my friends, and I saw them as they came back to school utterly exhausted and simultaneously excited. Their stories have been bubbling out of their mouths long after their official storytelling projects were finished.

They’ve been maintaining an excellent blog of their journeys, where these amazing photographs came from, and the professor has been keeping tabs on the students’ appearances in the media here.

The Spartan Daily also published the students’ video here.

SJSU student Justin Allegri gets a kiss goodbye from CNN anchorwoman Kyra Phillips. Credit: Carlos Moreno

But for those of you who do, try this: Type in your zip code, your address, the name of your neighborhood, whatever, into EveryBlock in San Jose. It will tell you all the crime reported in your area, the real estate for sale, the news items posted recently about your neighborhood, restaurant inspections, recent Yelp! reviews… and it’ll even have detailed maps to spell it all out for you. Sheesh. That’s a lot of information. Scary, scary information.

But… oddly… helpful.

You can decide whether you want to be creeped out by the number of burglaries by your house by signing up for email or RSS notifications, constantly reminding you what life would have been like if you were only richer.

The best way to use the site is just to enter where you live, but you can still see some city-wide statistics, categorized into zip code or neighborhood. Some of the highlights of what you can dig up:

• The charts for police calls for service pit neighborhoods against each other. As of today, downtown has the most, but Willow Glen comes fourth. Go figure.
• Check out the city council agendas and see if there’s any items hidden in them with an address near you.
• Get all your building and housing information here. What property is for sale? Any foreclosures? What about building permits nearby?
• Have a lot of restaurants around your block? See if anyone’s been messing with the food inspectors here or are planning to change their liquor licenses here. Or just check out what your neighbors are saying about them here.
• Seeing your zip code repeatedly in the Merc is never good. So find out what the news is saying about where you live here. (Plug: if San Jose Metblogs posts about an address in your area, it’ll show up there too. Don’t make us mad.)
• Sometimes geotagged photos pulled from Flickr and Panoramio may be more telling than any visit for prospective homebuyers.
• Zip codes may not accurately break down your neighborhood, so browse through this list and see if that works any better. Or if you’re more daring, browse by street.

That includes the full database collections, which provide a wealth of in-depth information from periodicals, newspapers, research papers and academic journals, for those instances when Google just doesn’t cut it. (Databases for library patrons can be found here. For SJSU students, go here.)

For more information on the King Library’s Wi-Fi (and directions on how to log on), click here. For info about other library branches, click here. Or just call (408) 808-2000.

You remember how to use a phone, right?