The great thing about Flickr are the photo tags. Not only do these tags describe photos, but you can “subscribe” to an RSS or Atom feed of a tag. When someone uploads a new photo to Flickr using the subscribed tag, then it will show up in your feed reader. In my case, I subscribe to the “golden retriever” tag using bloglines.

If you flip through the “golden retriever” tag, you’ll eventually see photos of Fry.

You can subscribe to all kinds of tags, like “Prince Rupert” — just replace the last part of the URL.

You know you’ve been in Prince Rupert too long when you go to Alberta and all you can do is look at the sky.

New Windows XP theme: Royale. Clean. Uncluttered. Nice. Well, nicer.

A new theme, potentially destined for Windows XP, has leaked out of Microsoft and onto the web. The theme appears to have come out of a beta version of Media Center 2005, currently in testing.

The theme is not a substantially different incarnation of the existing of Luna, the current default theme for Windows XP. You can see the main changes in the screenshots below; one could describe it as being a ‘glass mod’ of Luna.

Download it, unzip and install.

From Microsoft New Zealand’s site (where you can find nice wallpapers too).

Karl Wells reviews DeVito’s restaurant. I’m the chef. Seriously.

Telus has decided that censorship is in the best interests of its customers. It appears that they are blocking access to www.voices-for-change.com and www.telusscabs.ca. These are union-related websites, and Telus would prefer that, in light of their current labour dispute, its customers not be able to access these sites.

Who knows? Perhaps people who visited this site could see that the workers have been without a contract for 5 years, or maybe Telus’s customers would be able to see both sides of the labour dispute.

The question I have, though, is why are we not able to view these sites in Prince Rupert? Is Telus censoring Citytel’s internet access?

Links to more information on the “Voices for change” site (which you won’t be able to view if you’re using Citytel or Telus):

http://www.voices-for-change.com/news/news_comments.asp?NewsID=53

Story on Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/24/phone_company_blocks.html

This is what a traceroute from outside of Citytel/Telus to www.voices-for-change.com looks like:

Pretty normal. Works fine. In this case, it was from within PLnet, which is part of the BC Government network.

Here’s another traceroute from Sympatico Internet Service (in Vancouver):

Again, pretty normal, it works fine.

But here’s the same traceroute from my home computer, which is connected to a Citytel ADSL line:

Notice where the connection breaks?

What’s going on here?

Here’s what Citytel’s Prince Rupert customers would see if they weren’t censored:

Update: Discussion forum on HTMF — local Prince Rupert web forum.

Anybody recognize this Ford truck (BC Plate 6105-JB, I think…):

Well, today at Rona, the guy backed into this car:

A bit of damage, certainly not on purpose. So the guy stops the truck, gets out and inspects the damage on the car. He notices that we are watching, and then he hops back into his truck and drives away. No note, no apology, no insurance info. Nothing. Wow…

From Mad TV: One of those classic video clips — Jesus and the Terminator (Windows Media, 3.3 MB). Bonus: Portuguese subtitles!

War of the Worlds: How vulnerable would space aliens be to terrestrial germs? Cecil says: yeah, aliens smart enough to travel to Earth and kill us all, but not smart enough to know about contamination?

Cringley continues his speculation that the Apple-Intel deal is tied in with the new Apple iVideo service. Video ipods? Will Apple and Intel do for video what iTunes did for music?

Mary Lynn Young argues that Prince Rupert’s container port may be dead in the water in her July 21, 2005 Globe and Mail editorial. Discussion on HTMF’s forums.