Tyler Ingram has an intriguing post up about whether or not Facebook technically owns your photos. If you’ve got hundreds of photos up on your Facebook profile right now, I think you should be a little concerned. Read Tyler’s post here: Does Facebook Own Your Photos?

Basically in plainspeak the Facebook terms and conditions are saying “As long as your photos are on Facebook, you’re agreeing to give us the right to do anything we want with any of your photos for any reason. Once you take your photos off, we might still have a copy but we won’t use it. However, rest assured we don’t claim to own your photos so we won’t sue you for using your own photos, just so you know.”

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has launched the National Do Not Call List today, and the rush of Canadians trying to get their numbers exempted from telemarketers’ calls has been so large that the site has gone down a few times throughout the day. According to this CP article, “CRTC spokesperson Denis Carmel said as of 1:30 p.m., more than 223,000 people had register via online and telephone.”

I’m wondering if they’re counting people or telephone numbers. I’m assuming numbers, in which case I can understand because as soon as I visited the site, I registered the home and cell phones of each member of my family (which totals 9 telephone numbers). However, there are a lot of exemptions to the list. Some of them are understandable, such as the exemption for Canadian charities. However some are annoying, such as the exemption for political parties or businesses with which I’ve had any “relationship” in the last 18 months. So if I bought a pack of gum at Wal-[evil]-Mart in June, 2007, and somehow they have my number, I suppose they and their subsidiaries can still get in touch with me.

Get yourself on the list by visiting http://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca or by calling 1-866-580-3625

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Pic Source: Wikipedia

Good afternoon :)

Unfortunately today I missed out on an important meditation event with some friends this morning, as well as BarCamp Vancouver 2008. BarCamp had a WordPress (WordCamp) component as well, organized by Duane Storey and Rebecca Bollwitt and that was the main part of the event I was looking forward to attending. In any case, If you also happened to miss out, you can probably catch some updates on their blogs, and more details on the BarCamp Vancouver webpage. I’m looking forward to hearing about what people discussed and what new ideas people have with regards to Buddypress and WordPress as a CMS.

Pic Source: Ianiv & Areanna

Next weekend will be the Vancouver Premiere of a documentary film created by an American Sikh woman about the widows of men killed in the 1984 Delhi (India) pogroms.

As you may know, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31st, 1984, corrupt officials in the Delhi government, army and police collaborated with hired criminals to massacre thousands of Sikhs. In total, 4000 Sikh men were killed while many thousands of women were raped or beaten.

Currently many of these women, who have received little support and no justice from the government or authorities in the past 24 years, are living in a small development in Delhi locally known as “The Widow Colony” which is an area with poor living conditions and poor prospects for the children growing up there.

The women try to earn what they can by working at a local centre built by a charity organization. The film, also called “The Widow Colony,” showcases their struggles and raises awareness of the obstacles the children are facing as they have grown up without their father or grandfather or brother.

The film producer and director are husband and wife and they are working together on a lot of issues to help the impoverished and oppressed people of India. An active group of local youth are working to help them as much as possible while they’re here in Vancouver to make sure the film showings are sold out, and more importantly that a lot of awareness is created about the issues and how to help those suffering people.

Please check out the film website at The Widow Colony.com, and you can purchase tickets for the film by calling 778.840.4289 or 778.319.1699. They’re $10 and a portion of the proceeds will go to Sach Productions to help them produce more awareness of the issues faced by the oppressed and/or impoverished people in India.

The Windsor Star reports today that the Vancouver Olympic Committee has plagiarized our Canadian national anthem and proclaimed the slogan of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, “With Glowing Hearts.”

We all know that the Olympics are causing further degradation of the natural environment and the standard of life for Vancouver’s homeless and poor. However now they will have also disrespected our national anthem and shown it to be susceptible to corporate interests. I think our national anthem should be protected from such attempts by corporations, political groups or even the government to use any part of the national anthem for any reason other than to recite it. It’s an anthem afterall, not some campaign theme that a politican can steal from another politican.

Followup (Sept. 26)
This is also covered in today’s Vancouver Province. Hopefully the movement against it gathers steam. Our national anthem shouldn’t be open for trademarking.

Followup 2
As is inevitable for everything important in life, someone has started a Facebook group. It’s called “VANOC, keep your hands off our anthem!” Please join and invite friends.

1) RTM Tag Cloud

When you log into RTM, you’ll see a tag cloud on the right. This shows the size of different categories of tasks based on how many tasks are in that category. I think it helps somewhat, to give you a reality check of what your life is currently focused on and perhaps what you’re ignoring. However, I think what would be even better is (I’m giving away a secret here) an idea that I had for an application: you type in all your tasks, give them an urgency and importance (borrowing from First Things First), and then the tag cloud automatically arranges all your tasks right there in front of you. The largest ones have the greatest value of urgency + importance. When you finish a task, you can click “x” to delete it and the other tasks automatically adjust in proportion. Anybody out there willing to make this and give it to me as a birthday gift? :)

2) RTM & Gmail

You can connect your RTM to Gmail. For those of you who use Gmail regularly, and people like me who are almost constantly logged into Gmail, RTM can be displayed as a right-sidebar in your Inbox folder. You will see all of your tasks there and you can also type in tasks on the fly. It is synched with your RTM account.

3) RTM & Twitter

You can have RTM send you reminders on Twitter, and you can send tweets to the RTM Twitter account which will be sent directly to your RTM account (and then could also show up in your Gmail sidebar if you’ve got it installed).

4) RTM & SMS

You can have your RTM tasks sent to your Google Calendar, which can send you an SMS reminder for each task, or have RTM directly send you an SMS.

5) RTM & Browser

RTM also has browser extensions which can always keep you on top of your tasks. You can add a “Add to RTM” link on your browser which can send tasks to your RTM account.

You can find all this and more in the RTM help section.