The Deets

St. Paul’s High Bridge Power Plant, owned by Xcel Energy, is going to be converted from coal to natural gas burning. If the plant doesn’t immediately ring a bell, this photo should do the trick:

The photo comes from a great new local photo blog, ViewFromTheTundra.com.

Switching to gas from coal is a good thing because coal’s not exactly clean burning, which is one of the reasons for that tall smoke stack. That’s probably tall enough to turn St Paul’s pollution into Wisconsin’s problem.

The gas burning plant doesn’t require that smoke stack, so it’s on the demolition list. However, not everyone thinks that’s a good idea, including the Twin Cities’ top real estate blogger, Teresa Boardman, who’s campaigning to have the smokestack preserved:

I understand why people don’t get all excited about saving a smokestack but I think we should consider it. Once the plant is removed the land will be green space. No one would dream of demolishing the vacant Island station plant just up river.

I think Teresa has a good point. We should maintain examples of structures that help tell the story of our cities. What better example of how St. Paul has powered it’s businesses and resident’s homes than this landmark smoke stack?

It’s particularly good today.

If you’re an RSS Reader user, consider adding this one to your list.

Picture 631, originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.

I’ve been receiving numerous requests for more photos of Jeremy Elfering. While not all photos of Jeremy are suitable for public consumption, there are probably more photos of Jeremy online than most people realize.

For example, I went through photos posted on Flickr from the CES show and found Jeremy in a bunch of them. I added his name to the photo’s tags, so they’re now available when searching for his name.

BTW, if you see yourself of someone else you know if any of my photos and want to add them as a tag, just become my Flickr friend. That gives you the power to add additional tags.

Here’s a guide that could help you with your Volumetrics Diet Plan. Unfortunately, they don’t include Candy Foam on the list.
What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

“Some foods have significantly more calories than others but what does the difference actually look like. Each of the photographs below represents 200 calories of the particular type of food; the images are sorted from low to high calorie density.”

If you use Flickr and publish public photos, there a very good chance people you don’t know could do things with them. They can look at them, email them, and they can also blog about them.

This led to an interesting encounter on The Deets yesterday and was the motivation behind a post on Technology Evangelist today.

Everyone has a slightly different public/private photo comfort level. Flickr offers users the tools they need to address this.

Flying Dallin, originally uploaded by zelph.

One of my favorite photo pools on Flickr is the WOW! pool where only photos with a WOW! factor are supposed to be contributed. While that’s a fairly subjective thing (cats? please), there really are some gems. Some of the most impressive photos to me come from places I’ve never seen before, such as exotic beaches, hiking trails, and small cities around the world.

You can subscribe to a pool’s photos by adding the RSS feed URL found at the bottom of each pool’s page.

Cute kid photos are a really questionable submission, but flying kids have serious WOW! factor.

Another interesting feed is photos tagged with the term Minneapolis. Photos of cool stuff going on around town come directly to me in Bloglines through this feed. Cool stuff.