A congratulations goes out to Minneapolis's own advertising company Colle + McVoy for winning the People's Voice Webby award for Interactive Advertising - Viral Marketing for their website Yearbook Yourself. 

Yearbook Yourself - Link
The Webby Awards 2009 - Link
Colle + McVoy - Link

This weekend was the second annual Sierra Bravo F1 Overnight Website Challenge where approximately 130 web developers and designers donated 24 hours of their time to create free websites for 13 deserving non-profits.  

Our own BlogCadre pal, Jason Striegel, and his team of 8 other talented web pros, team Praxis, pulled off the win and developed a kick-butt website for their non-profit, District 202.

After 24 hours of hard work, no sleep and too much caffeine, the 2009 Website Challenge teams and non-profits can now sleep soundly.

Related links:
Needy meets nerdy as non-profits get an economic boost - kare11.com
Teams of computer programmers give free Web site makeovers to 12 nonprofit agences - TwinCities.com
Sierra Bravo offers nonprofits a chance to spiff up Web presence - Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
Sierra Bravo's F1 Overnight Website Challenge - link

13-year-old Sameer Mishra of West Lafayette, Indiana, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling the word "guerdon."  Sameer beat out first time spelling bee competitor Sidharth Chand. 

Sameer was definitely the funny one of the bunch almost mistaking "numnah" for "numbnut."    Hopefully someone will have that footage up on YouTube soon.

Update: Break.con posted the "numb nut" incident.  Link to video.

Scripps website - official results
'Guerdon' wins spelling bee for Sameer Mishra - CNN article

Previously:
Last year's Scripps Spelling Bee winner (LwL)

A man fell off a two-storey balcony when he thrusted too far forward in trying to outspit his 12-year-old son in a spitting contest.  He was taken to the hospital and is in critical condition.  Link.

Morgan Pozgar, a thirteen-year-old from Pennsylvania, won $25,000 at the LG National Texting competition by typing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" in 15 seconds.  [Link]

Last year, a short e-mail forwarded by a school teacher placed me into an interesting situation. An invitation to sign up for the national computer programming competition. I never really considered entering it, until one of my friends asked me to.

Two weeks later, we had won our division, come third overall, and won a nice amount of money from it (it wasn't a bad return for two hours work).

I've never looked back.

Photo from the SEARCC Programming Competition in India in 2004.