A few days ago I talked to my friends Alex and Justine and we decided it would be fun to do a day trip to Toronto, visit the Royal Ontario Museum and take some photos while at it.

And so it was! We drove over, spent some two hours in the ROM, then got some photos of Alex and Justine on the way to the car, grabbed a coffee (of course) at Starbucks and shot some more photos!


Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

I love taking pictures at sunset!



A random empty glass on a side-street near the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario

The inside of a church on Bloor street, Toronto

A panorama of a church on Bloor Street will follow too!

Then yesterday (Saturday) I spent a few hours with Steve downtown Kitchener. He came down from Toronto where he’s working on his masters at U of T. We spent some time at Matter of Taste Caffe enjoying a cappuccino when dad calls my cell phone telling me to seek shelter because apparently a storm was up in Waterloo and about to hit Kitchener soon. I told him that we are indoors and hung up. No more than 10 seconds after I hung up, there was a loud sound, the sky turned black and the construction fence along King street was laying on the ground along with the bike tied to it. If we lived further south I would have thought this is a tornado, but luckily we don’t =P

About an hour later we made our way back to Steve’s place. On our way I shot some portraits of Steve at one of my favourite spots in Kitchener, by the old Electrohome factory on Shanley Street. Overcast lighting sure has a magic about it that makes it quite fun to edit photos.

I am quite excited to write this entry. Yesterday I received an email from RedBubble, a web site white I post some of my artistic photography, letting me know that someone purchased a 16inch x 20inch print and that the profit that I’ve earned would be transfered into my PayPal account shortly!

The picture that made the sale:

The idea behind me writing about this, is not just me sharing with the world (showing off) the fact that I managed to sell some of my artwork, but to mention the awesome phenomenon that exists out there, these web sites that allow you, and may I add, for no cost, to post artwork and to present it to potential customers, to sell it, and to have it printed for the customer without any extra involvement by you, while as a result you end up with an amount of profit transferred into your wallet!

One of these sites is RedBubble: Buy art

RedBubble allows me to set up an account, upload artwork that is viewable by anyone on the internet, set my artwork up in a gallery and then:

The allow me to advertise my gallery all over my other sites, blogs and so on using:
Banners:

Buy my art

One-picture animates slideshows:

Or a more elaborate slideshow-in-an-embedded-window format:

Another web site that offers similar services is Lulu.com!
This web site is targeting photographers and writers who would like to publish their work in book form. The website offers anyone the opportunity to put together a book with photography or just text or both for no cost, then post it along with the price they would like for it on the lulu.com marker place. The web site of course adds their little extra there for manufacturing and shipping, et voila, anyone can get published now, on-demand!

Check out the Demo!

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As stated in an article on Discovery News Online, recently the USA supreme court has come to a conclusion:

“that greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare”

Original link: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/17/co2-health-epa.html

EPA Deems CO2 a Health Risk

AFP

April 17, 2009 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shifted course and deemed carbon dioxide a health risk on Friday, in a turnabout important to global warming-related regulation.

“After a thorough scientific review ordered in 2007 by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed finding … that greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare,” an EPA statement posted on the agency website read.

“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President (Barack) Obama’s call for a low carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation,” Administrator Lisa Jackson said.

“This pollution problem has a solution — one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.

“As the proposed endangerment finding states, ‘In both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem. The greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare within the meaning of the Clean Air Act,'” she added.

Five out of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled in April 2007 that carbon dioxide was a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

They ordered the EPA to decide if the greenhouse gas endangered public health and welfare and said that if a so-called endangerment finding was made, the agency must draft rules to reduce vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide.

In December 2007, the EPA sent a draft finding to the Bush White House, presenting evidence that CO2 did endanger public welfare.

But the administration of president George W. Bush failed to acknowledge the report and spent the remainder of its tenure resisting the Supreme Court decision.

Many environmental groups have been appalled that the Bush administration refused for eight years to take action over the crisis and in their view manipulated or ignored science to pursue inaction, at any cost.

John Walke, a senior attorney at the National Resources Defense Council, said last month that such an EPA shift would “make findings that greenhouse gas emissions not only endanger public welfare — ecosystems, the environment and the planet at large — but also make the important link between global warming emissions and how they will affect smog pollution, malaria and other public health problems.”

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