Introducing Chloe.
Isn't she a little cutie. This is my Dad's dog who came over for a visit when she was just a puppy.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Photo Hunt - Shoes
All that remained were Sylvester Stallone's shoe imprints.
I can't take credit for taking the picture. Thoses are the tips of my husband's shoes so I hope it is okay to submit this picture.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Photo Hunt - Candy
We don't usually have candy around the house.
It wouldn't last long if we did.
Lucky for me hubby was buying candy for the office.
Yummy chocolate covered werthers.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
May 18/08
BODY WRAP SHOP WRAPPERD
An Edmonton woman has launched a $200,000 lawsuit against Body Wrapture Inc., alleging she was seriously injured when she fell headfirst onto the floor after fainting as a result of becoming weak and dizzy during a French body wrap slimming treatment. In an April 25 statement of claim, Maria Sowinski alleges Body Wrapture did not warn her of the potential dangers of the fat-reducing procedure when she went to the 10517 170 St. studio on April 27, 2006. Sowinski claims she did not feel well after sweating profusely from the $75 treatment, which included wearing special underwear, being wrapped in poly plastic and foil from neck to toe and then being covered with an electric blanket. She alleges she became faint and fell off the bed, injuring her head, face, neck and back.
A COLLAPSING BAR STOOL
A north-side pub is being sued for $415,000 by a city man who alleges he was hurt when he fell down after the bar stool he sat down on collapsed "without warning." In an April 29 statement of claim, John William Roberts alleges he required emergency and ongoing medical care due to the Jan. 22, 2007, incident at Duster's Pub, 6402 118 Ave. Roberts claims his injuries were caused by the pub's negligence in failing to ensure and test the stool's structural integrity and strength and alleges his work, home and leisure activities have been adversely affected.
BUS RIDER TAKES TUMBLE
An Edmonton woman is suing the City of Edmonton, Edmonton Transit and an unidentified bus driver for $50,250 after alleging she suffered six or seven fractured ribs and injured her neck, back and shoulder when she hit the rail on the back of a bus seat and fell down after the driver drove forward and then suddenly stopped before she was seated. In an April 29 statement of claim, Dianne Huether alleges the Feb. 1, 2007, incident happened after she boarded the No. 163 bus at the Jasper Place terminal at the intersection of Stony Plain Road and 157 Street.
Statements of claim contain unproven allegations. Article taken from the Edmonton Sun.
An Edmonton woman has launched a $200,000 lawsuit against Body Wrapture Inc., alleging she was seriously injured when she fell headfirst onto the floor after fainting as a result of becoming weak and dizzy during a French body wrap slimming treatment. In an April 25 statement of claim, Maria Sowinski alleges Body Wrapture did not warn her of the potential dangers of the fat-reducing procedure when she went to the 10517 170 St. studio on April 27, 2006. Sowinski claims she did not feel well after sweating profusely from the $75 treatment, which included wearing special underwear, being wrapped in poly plastic and foil from neck to toe and then being covered with an electric blanket. She alleges she became faint and fell off the bed, injuring her head, face, neck and back.
A COLLAPSING BAR STOOL
A north-side pub is being sued for $415,000 by a city man who alleges he was hurt when he fell down after the bar stool he sat down on collapsed "without warning." In an April 29 statement of claim, John William Roberts alleges he required emergency and ongoing medical care due to the Jan. 22, 2007, incident at Duster's Pub, 6402 118 Ave. Roberts claims his injuries were caused by the pub's negligence in failing to ensure and test the stool's structural integrity and strength and alleges his work, home and leisure activities have been adversely affected.
BUS RIDER TAKES TUMBLE
An Edmonton woman is suing the City of Edmonton, Edmonton Transit and an unidentified bus driver for $50,250 after alleging she suffered six or seven fractured ribs and injured her neck, back and shoulder when she hit the rail on the back of a bus seat and fell down after the driver drove forward and then suddenly stopped before she was seated. In an April 29 statement of claim, Dianne Huether alleges the Feb. 1, 2007, incident happened after she boarded the No. 163 bus at the Jasper Place terminal at the intersection of Stony Plain Road and 157 Street.
Statements of claim contain unproven allegations. Article taken from the Edmonton Sun.
Camera Critters 6
This is a picture of an osprey that I took from a ferry while in British Columbia. It was with my older point and shoot and it did not have a very big zoom range.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Break Free of Facebook - Can it Be Done?
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook.com? Just Try Breaking Free
By Maria Aspan
Are you a member of Facebook? You may have a lifetime contract.
Screengrab of the Facebook group "How to permanently delete your facebook account" founded by Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.
In response to difficulties faced by ex-Facebook members, a cottage industry of unofficial help pages devoted to escaping Facebook has sprung up online — both outside and inside the network.
“I thought it was kind of strange that they save your information without telling you in a really clear way,” said Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm who founded a Facebook group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account.” The group has almost 4,300 members and is steadily growing.
The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”
But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”
Its privacy policy says that after someone deactivates an account, “removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.”
Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.
Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.
“Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,” Ms. Sezak said in her message. “Users can then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.”
But even users who try to delete every piece of information they have ever written, sent or received via the network have found their efforts to permanently leave stymied. Other social networking sites like My Space and Friendster, as well as online dating sites like eHarmony.com, may require departing users to confirm their wishes several times — but in the end they offer a delete option.
“Most sites, even online dating sites, will give you an option to wipe your slate clean,” Mr. Das said. Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were also on the site. “I work in a small office,” he said. “The last thing I want is people going on there and checking out my private life.”
“I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to manage saw my stuff,” he added.
Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.
That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including more than 50,000 Facebook users’ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option on the program.
Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook’s users, who the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated 110 million monthly active users).
The network is still trying to find a way to monetize its popularity, mostly by allowing marketers access to its wealth of demographic and behavioral information. The retention of old accounts on Facebook’s servers seems like another effort to hold onto — and provide its ad partners with — as much demographic information as possible.
“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network that has certified Facebook.
Mr. Burlison’s complaint spurred the Information Commissioner’s Office, a privacy watchdog organization, to investigate Facebook’s data-protection practices, the BBC reported last month. In response, Facebook issued a statement saying that its policy was in “full compliance with U.K. data protection law.”
A spokeswoman for TRUSTe, which is based in San Francisco, said its account deletion process was “inconvenient,” but that Facebook was “being responsive to us and they currently meet our requirements.”
“I kept getting the same answer and really felt that I was being given the runaround,” Mr. Burlison said of Facebook’s customer service representatives. “It was quite obvious that no amount of prodding from me on a personal level was going to make a difference.”
Only after he sent a link to the video of his interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News to the customer service representatives — and Facebook executives — was his account finally deleted.
Steven Mansour, 28, a Canadian online community developer, spent two weeks in July trying to fully delete his account from Facebook. He later wrote a blog entry — including e-mail messages, diagrams and many exclamations of frustration — in a post entitled “2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account” (http://www.stevenmansour.com/).
Mr. Mansour, who said he is “really skeptical of social networking sites,” decided to leave after a few months on Facebook. “I was getting tired of always getting alerts and e-mails,” he said. “I found it very invasive.”
“It’s part of a much bigger picture of social networking sites on the Internet harvesting private data, whether for marketing or for more sinister purposes,” he said. His post, which wound up on the link-aggregator Digg.com, has been viewed more than 87,000 times, Mr. Mansour said, adding that the traffic was so high it crashed his server.
And his post became the touchstone for Mr. Wallin, who was inspired to create his group, “How to permanently delete your Facebook account,” after joining, leaving and then rejoining Facebook, only to find that all of his information from his first account was still available.
“I wanted the information to be available inside Facebook for all the users who wanted to leave, and quite a few people have found it just by using internal search,” said Mr. Wallin. Facebook has never contacted Mr. Wallin about the group.
Mr. Wallin said he has heard through members that some people have successfully used his steps to leave Facebook. But he is not yet ready to leave himself.
“I don’t want to leave yet; I actually find it really convenient,” he said. “But someday when I want to leave, I want it to be simple.”
By Maria Aspan
Are you a member of Facebook? You may have a lifetime contract.
Screengrab of the Facebook group "How to permanently delete your facebook account" founded by Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.
“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.
In response to difficulties faced by ex-Facebook members, a cottage industry of unofficial help pages devoted to escaping Facebook has sprung up online — both outside and inside the network.
“I thought it was kind of strange that they save your information without telling you in a really clear way,” said Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm who founded a Facebook group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account.” The group has almost 4,300 members and is steadily growing.
The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”
But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”
Its privacy policy says that after someone deactivates an account, “removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.”
Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.
Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.
“Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,” Ms. Sezak said in her message. “Users can then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.”
But even users who try to delete every piece of information they have ever written, sent or received via the network have found their efforts to permanently leave stymied. Other social networking sites like My Space and Friendster, as well as online dating sites like eHarmony.com, may require departing users to confirm their wishes several times — but in the end they offer a delete option.
“Most sites, even online dating sites, will give you an option to wipe your slate clean,” Mr. Das said. Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were also on the site. “I work in a small office,” he said. “The last thing I want is people going on there and checking out my private life.”
“I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to manage saw my stuff,” he added.
Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.
That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including more than 50,000 Facebook users’ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option on the program.
Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook’s users, who the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated 110 million monthly active users).
The network is still trying to find a way to monetize its popularity, mostly by allowing marketers access to its wealth of demographic and behavioral information. The retention of old accounts on Facebook’s servers seems like another effort to hold onto — and provide its ad partners with — as much demographic information as possible.
“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network that has certified Facebook.
Mr. Burlison’s complaint spurred the Information Commissioner’s Office, a privacy watchdog organization, to investigate Facebook’s data-protection practices, the BBC reported last month. In response, Facebook issued a statement saying that its policy was in “full compliance with U.K. data protection law.”
A spokeswoman for TRUSTe, which is based in San Francisco, said its account deletion process was “inconvenient,” but that Facebook was “being responsive to us and they currently meet our requirements.”
“I kept getting the same answer and really felt that I was being given the runaround,” Mr. Burlison said of Facebook’s customer service representatives. “It was quite obvious that no amount of prodding from me on a personal level was going to make a difference.”
Only after he sent a link to the video of his interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News to the customer service representatives — and Facebook executives — was his account finally deleted.
Steven Mansour, 28, a Canadian online community developer, spent two weeks in July trying to fully delete his account from Facebook. He later wrote a blog entry — including e-mail messages, diagrams and many exclamations of frustration — in a post entitled “2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account” (http://www.stevenmansour.com/).
Mr. Mansour, who said he is “really skeptical of social networking sites,” decided to leave after a few months on Facebook. “I was getting tired of always getting alerts and e-mails,” he said. “I found it very invasive.”
“It’s part of a much bigger picture of social networking sites on the Internet harvesting private data, whether for marketing or for more sinister purposes,” he said. His post, which wound up on the link-aggregator Digg.com, has been viewed more than 87,000 times, Mr. Mansour said, adding that the traffic was so high it crashed his server.
And his post became the touchstone for Mr. Wallin, who was inspired to create his group, “How to permanently delete your Facebook account,” after joining, leaving and then rejoining Facebook, only to find that all of his information from his first account was still available.
“I wanted the information to be available inside Facebook for all the users who wanted to leave, and quite a few people have found it just by using internal search,” said Mr. Wallin. Facebook has never contacted Mr. Wallin about the group.
Mr. Wallin said he has heard through members that some people have successfully used his steps to leave Facebook. But he is not yet ready to leave himself.
“I don’t want to leave yet; I actually find it really convenient,” he said. “But someday when I want to leave, I want it to be simple.”
Sunday, May 11, 2008
What's In A Name
Greeks from isle of Lesbos sue gay rights group to defend Lesbian identity
Nicholas Paphitis / Associated Press
ATHENS, Greece -- A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between gay women and the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos. Three islanders from Lesbos -- home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women -- have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name. One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, "insults the identity" of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.
"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.
The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using "lesbian" in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.
A spokeswoman for the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece said the action was "a joke in bad taste that borders on discrimination."
"I don't see how the word can be an insult," Evangelia Vlami said. "We don't think doubt can be cast on dictionaries ... even the United Nations refer to us as Lesbians."
Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island, particularly the lyric poet's reputed home town of Eressos, is a favored holiday destination for gay women.
"This is not an aggressive act against gay women," Lambrou said. "Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title."
He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10.
Sappho lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century B.C. and is considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity. Many of her poems, written in the first person and intended to be accompanied by music, contain passionate references to love for other women.
Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. "But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.
Vlami, the gay group spokeswoman, said any misunderstanding can easily be resolved through linguistics.
"Most people from Lesbos prefer to use the word Mytilene, which is the more ancient version and because some people may be afraid of being misunderstood," she said. "I don't see what the problem is ... Can't a woman just say: I am from the island of Lesbos?"
Very little is known of Sappho's life. According to some ancient accounts, she was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had a daughter with him. One tradition says that she killed herself by jumping off a cliff over an unhappy love affair.
Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. "But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent -- including women -- be considered homosexual?"
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