Prince Edward Island’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry has photographed every inch of the Island from about 9000 feet. The provincial government website has combined these photos with their powerful mapping plugin to make for an amazing way to view the Island.

You’ll need to download the Autodesk MapGuide plugin and the browsing can be slow (it’s always “requesting dynamic map layers”) and the images are large (between 150Kb and 200Kb each) but it is worth it.

See the photos »
Note: You have to double click on the photo dots to open the images.

Big ups to Peter at Reinvented for this.

Home sick yesterday, the big boss man passed on a call from CBC Radio. The good Mitch Courmier, keeper of charlottetown.cbc.ca was doing a story on Human Portals (blogs) for the local morning show.

Mitch and I had a great chat about the state of web logs. He was inspired by Human Portals, the Brill’s Content article about Matt Haughey from MetaFilter.

Kevin O’Brien, Peter Rukavina, and Don from IslandEdition (R.I.P.) all got props. The definite highlight for me was that the story Mitch choose as an example from aov was that of my father, the city councilor, cleaning up the garbage on the streets with his wife and son. Too humble to tell anyone about it, but his big mouth son gets the story across the whole province. Happy Father’s Day, dad. 😉

Listen to CBC Radio’s Human Portals (RealAudio).

aov has been host to some interesting discussion of television and some less interesting rants by myself on the topic. I was pointed to a great Northern Exposure website where a fellow fan spoke nicely on my behalf.

The whole site is great. They have 1-megabyte windows help file with everything you could ever possibly want to know about the show. It’s pretty too.

There once was a man from Chicoutimi
Who was kind enough to lend his canoe to me
But when I fell in
I couldn’t swim
Because canoeing was new to me

While summer doesn’t officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I’ll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).

Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:

• Kirby Ferguson, formerly of IslandEdition.com fame has a new site brewing at KirbyFerguson.com
• Signal vs. Noise links to an astounding satellite photo gallery
• Slashdot links to SPACE BLIMPS! Didn’t they lose one of these on Mars?
• One of the coolest websites in the world (explodingdog.com) linked to us when their Red Robot showed up on our site.
• The same guys who did the satellite photos did this very cool MegaPenny Project (click all the way through, it’s worth it).

A friend of mine recently cast off his American birthright to become a Canadian citizen (actually, he just became a dual citizen, but casting off birthright sounds very cool). He was given the choice of either swearing or affirming the oath of citizenship. He was told that “you are encouraged to bring the holy book of your choice”.

He put it nicely: So politically correct, it offends everyone. Does this not seem a little odd? Mind you, I don’t have any better suggestions. It’s just interesting to see that we have no universal standard to hold each other too.

In the same super-politically-correct, you have to pledge allegiance to the Queen of England!? It is just plain bizarre. I was born in Canada and have apparently tacitly agreed to all of these things.

Swear to your god. If you do not have a god, just promise.

Behold a visual history of Hard Drive icons in the parallel worlds of Windows and Mac. Notice how they get more and more realistic without becoming more meaningful. Personally I prefer the balance between abstraction and a tactile feel found in the Win9x/W2k and MacOS 9 versions.

The old Mac (v6 and before, I think) icon is pretty impressive and to someone who hasn’t opened up their computer, just as meaningful as any of the other icons.

Photorealism is the dumbest idea of all. So that’s what a hard drive looks like.

UPDATE:
Here’s the equivalent chart of folder icons. Very similar parallels, problems, and progression to the hard drive icons.

A reminder that we are not marching towards a blissful and peaceful future: The U.S. executed Timothy McVeigh today.

What do you think of that?