Pat Martael from CBC Radio PEI did a quick interview with me today for the morning show tommorrow (Tuesday, Sept 9). I’m not sure what time it will be on – probably between 6AM and 8AM – before I get up.

We spoke about how weblogs are being used, or could be used, by polititians. I understand the story will focus on the unusually personal weblog of Jean Tingley, who is running in District 18 on Prince Edward Island for the Liberal party (warning: website plays stupid music).

If, by some chance, I’m awake – I will try to record and post the segment.

After resisting for months, I finally gave into peer-pressure at work and bought a digital camera. I couldn’t justify spending the better part of $1,000 (Canadian, that is) since I really just use the camera as a toy. I opted for a refurbished 2-megapixel Canon Digital Elph PowerShot S330 from a shop called Carman’s Foto Source via eBay.ca.

The price was right and I’m quite happy with the camera. Now, thanks for my friends at silverorange, I have a photo gallery. This new found photo publishing power has brought up some interesting questions about permission and privacy.

When I take photos with close friends and family, there is implicit permission for me to post the photos online for anyone to see. They all know I have the gallery and generally trust in my discretion as to what gets posted online and what stays private.

This gets a little more complicated when the circle of those photographed expands beyond this close group. If I go to a party (which I may, someday) and snap some group photos, with friends and friends of friends (aka, strangers), may I post these photos online? Must I ask permission of all those photographed?

I don’t link prominently to many photos, but security by obscurity just doesn’t work in the age of Google. Even if you prevent search engines from indexing your photos, a link from another site (by a human being) can put a photo of an unsuspecting friend at the top of Google when you search for their name. After posting about a set of photos from a recent para-sailing excusion, I got an email from man England wondering where I got my leather shoes – as he was in the market for a pair and liked what he saw (they were from Payless). Apparently, people are looking at these photos.

So far, the tack I have taken is to use my own judgement and discretion. If I think a person might have a problem with a particular photo being online, I either don’t post it, or I ask explicit permission (explaining the implications).

This is really just an extension of the dilemma many webloggers face when writing about personal issues or other people in their lives. This hasn’t been an issue for me on Acts of Volition as most of my writing does not focus directly on personal issues or other people in my life. Having a digital camera, though, has brought the issue to my attention, as many of my photos are of friends and family.

I’m curious to how others are dealing with this issue. Do you always ask permission? Do you avoid posting any photos online for these reasons? Do you have a story about photos posted online showing up in awkward ways?

Daniel Burka’s first annual silverorange Frisbee Golf Tournament for Charity was a great success. Over 50 people on 9 teams played 18 “holes” (poles?) of Frisbee golf and raised over $1,000 for Habitat for Humany on Prince Edward Island.

Daniel did a fine job of organizing, and I was pleased to see that his requests for sponsorship or donations were answered quite positively. He was able to secure enough volunteerism and donations that the registration fee ($20) went entirely and directory to Habitat for Humanity.

I’ve posted my photos from the tournament in my gallery.

My brother’s bachelor party gave me the opportunity to go para-sailing. I had thought of it as some kind of extreme sport. It is neither a sport, nor is it extreme. That said, if you ever get the chance, try it.

We floated 500 feet above the water on the end of 1,000 feet of cord. It was surprisingly quiet and peaceful. The view of the New London bay around was wonderful.

In keeping with my mission of a world in which each person has one, and only one, pair of shoes, I wore my stylish leathers up into the sky – oh, and I took my camera up too.

UPDATE: I’ve writen a more complete and up-to-date review of the Toyota Echo Hatchback after having owned it for seven months. Read the full review: silverorange stuff review of the 2004 Toyota Echo Hatchback

I’m as much a conspiracy theorist as the next guy. However, I tend to think the slow adoption of electric vehicles has more to do with consumers (like myself) being cheap/lazy/stupid/greedy than it does with an evil oil oligarchy propping up the traditional auto industry.

That said, let’s take a look at hybrid cars. I consider myself a lazy/opportunistic environmentalist. That is, I’ll make the better environmental choice if it is easy and obvious. I’ll even spend a bit of extra cash, but it doesn’t go much further than that.

I had looked at the latest round of hybrid gas/electric cars and was generally disappointed. First of all, they are mostly absurdly designed (they look stupid, with the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius roughly equal in their ugliness). This is improving. The next model of the Prius (2004) is much better looking (though still odd), and Honda made the seemingly obvious, but oddly unique, move of making their Civic Hybrid look exactly like a normal Civic.

On top of being ugly, they are very expensive. If you’re Mr. Moneybanks and want to save your soul from 20-years of driving a giant Cadillac, the price of a novelty hybrid may not bother you much. However, the hybrids so far are compact cars. The base price (MRSP) of a Honda Civic is $16,000.00 (Canadian funds) while the Civic Hybrid weights in at a hefty $28,500.00. This isn’t a totally fair comparison (the hybrid has a fancy transmission and other features not available in the ordinary Civic) – but still, and extra $12,500? I could buy a Kia for that much.

Enter the 2004 Toyota Echo Hatchback. It is not a hybrid – but it is very good on a gas. This table shows how the Echo hatchback stacks up against some of the hybrids:

IMPORANT NOTE:

When originally posted, I listed the Echo Hatchback milage as 42/54 mpg (city/highway). I got this info from the Toyota.ca website. However, it was misleading and innacurate as I posted it in comparison with the other figures. The Toyota.ca figure was using imperial gallons while all of the other model figures were using US gallons. An astute reader corrected me in the replies to this post. I have updated the figures to to US gallons so the comparison to the other models is accurate. While these more accurate figures show that the Echo Hatchback is less fuel efficient than I had originally though, I think it is close enough to the hybrids that my original point stands. Sorry for the confusion.

The fuel economy of this generation of hybrids is not yet worth (to me) the premium.

So, for now, I’ve leased a silver, four-door, 2004 Echo Hatchback. See some photos, and a 360° QTVR. I’m also pleased to report that it has a CD/MP3 player that is not ridiculously designed, as most are (photo).

Scripting.com points the BBC’s own story on their plans to open up their archives of BBC radio and television programming on the Internet. This is fantastic. As long as the cost is reasonable, this just makes sense.

I can only hope that our own CBC will take a cue from the BBC. Does anyone in our fine readership know if there are any plans to this end?

One main question comes to mind: how current will the archive be? Will all new content be continuously added? If so, this is a great step for bridging the traditional and digital media. If implemented well, this could effectively give all radio and TV bits a permalink.

A related post from earlier in the year worth revisiting: Brester Kahle talks about Universal Access to All Human Knowledge.

Our man Daniel Burka is organizing the first ever silverorange frisbee golf tournament. The tournament will take place on Saturday, September 6th at Strathgartney Provincial Park (Prince Edward Island, Canada, that is – come visit us).

Get your team together now and register as soon as possible. The tournament works with teams of six, but if you don’t have a full team, sign up and we’ll put you on one.

The money goes to Habitat for Humanity. Sign up soon.

There is a new acronym floating around that has at least two things going for it, it sounds cool, and it has a cool logo. FOAF stands for Friend of a Friend and is a file format intended to express identity and relationships. Basically, it’s a computer-readable file that identifies you and the people you know (by pointing to their FOAF files). A computer can then go grab their files, and so on.

The practical applications haven’t really been figured out yet – but people seem to be in agreement that having this type of info available could make for some interesting applications. The TypePad service is the first major weblogging platform to create FOAF files by default – this should spread adoption beyond XML-nerds.

Right now my FOAF file says I know three other FOAF-enabled friends (Dan James, Peter Rukavina, and Ben Wright are the lucky trio). If you follow Peter’s FOAF trail, he “knows” 14 people, most of whom I also know, some of whom I don’t. If you were to follow the trail a step further, I would likely know fewer.

Overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances form a web. The further someone is away from you on the web, the less you are able to trust them solely based on relationships. I trust my friends. I would trust a friend of a friend. I would trust a friend of a friend of a friend, but less so.

So what can we do with all of these social connections? Block spam. I propose a FOAF-powered super-whitelist.

The usual “whitelist” in an email program is basically a list of people that you have explicitly told the program are not spammers. You can usually do this manually, or by a few other semi-automatic means (anyone in your contact list or anyone you reply to, can be added).

The whitelist works well, but it’s not a very good way to make new friends. What if I want to send a legitimate email to someone I’ve never emailed before?

What if your “FOAF-knows“ list was your email whitelist – and people further away from you on the web of FOAF could have something along the lines of “whitelist” points according to their distance from you on the chain.

For example, anyone on my FOAF-knows list gets on my email whitelist (call them Group A). Anyone on the FOAF-knows list of anyone in Group A gets on my email whitelist (call this pack Group B). Anyone on the FOAF-knows list of Group B could be given some level of “whitelist point”, and so on.

Make any sense? Wanna implement it? Please do.