Here it is:
flickr Pro Account Deleted Over Political Comments.

I’ve no idea what the guy said. I don’t care. Because even if he was in the wrong, this is unjustified.

Here’s the thing: accounts are insecure. Sometimes they get hacked. People re-use passwords sometimes. Point one: data used in account resets can be gained easily through basic social mining. Point two: Yahoo forces everyone to sign in under the same username and password. Like what Google eventually got around to doing. One login. Great. So many more places my username can be seen and potentially hacked.

So whatever, flickr. What a shame your staff feels justified to play nanny state and delete someone’s irretrievable photos, judge and jury. No notification, nothing.

There are a lot of other services where you can back up your photos for free. Where you are even allowed to post political comments. Free speech, and whatnot.

And if you use another service you won’t have to worry about looking like a small-minded idiot by association.

Read the whole story from thomashawk.com.

It was a religious site, talking about the importance of giving thanks to God. They’d hotlinked to one of my photographs from the Evansville tornados. No polite notes asking whether they could use it, or whether they could use my bandwidth. And I’m all about the thanks to God, but sometimes you know, it’d be welcome to hear something like,

“Hey great photo! Thanks for paying for round-trip plane tickets to a disaster area, and for taking the time to tour and photograph the aftermath. In fact, thanks for taking care of ALL the details, like it’s really terrific how you picked up the cost for that Canon 20d, and the pretty piece of L glass that’s attached to it. It’s so thoughtful that you’ve traveled around the world and taken photo seminars and really learned how to use that camera, all so that I could just use your image, because it’s so perfectly appropriate for my post about GIVING THANKS.”

Now, I admit, it’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure I remember that God has some pretty specific opinions on that whole topic of taking things without asking. And I’m pretty sure that by allowing Photoshop to be created in the first place, God is basically giving tacit permission to edit your hotlinked pictures that appear without permission or THANKS on other people’s websites.

Especially the ones about giving thanks. I mean, we never even got to PLEASE, here.

I decided to write my own message of thanks. The picture used to read “THANK YOU FOR OUR LIVES” has now been changed:

I even bumped up the contrast, a little.

If you want, you can visit the site and create your own message of thanks. Be sure to tell them I said Hi.

Congratulations, guys – now go home and get some rest!

We really miss you, over here across the pond.

To band a bird, you must first capture a bird, and the way to do this is by stringing up fine nets, called mist nets. They resemble somewhat longer, finer volleyball nets in construction and size. Birds cannot see the nets and become trapped until the banders retrieve them.

Watching the bird banding was lots of things: educational, overwhelming, fasinating and frustrating. I have always adored birds, and it is difficult to witness wild animals caught up in nets, no matter how good the reasons are for doing it.

Here are some photographs from the event:

Welcome back, Noah!