2. Blog

Free Hosting for Static Websites

In addition to my blog, I have a couple of static webpages that I host at Minchin.ca. Sadly, they’ve been a little neglected of late, but I’ve enjoyed being able to put a few pages and play around with HTML. Since I don’t run any ads on them, or run a business from them, I’ve trying to avoid having to pay for hosting. In the almost 5 years they’ve been online, I’ve managed to find a place to host them for free: first at Google Pages, and then at Microsoft Office Small Business. Google closed Pages in 2009 and Microsoft’s offering will start charging for hosting the end of next month. So I’ve been looking for a new place to host them. Today I completed the move to GitHub!

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Low Cost Index Investing

One of the exciting parts about having a regular job is having a regular paycheck which means I can create a regular savings plan. Retirement is the biggest goal, but in reality, I think the goal is really about creating enough passive income that I don’t have to work anymore. Retirement (i.e. 65) just adds the time component to that goal, but I would be fine if I could hit that goal by 55 or even 35 (dream big, right?). So now that I have $100-200 per month to invest, what do I do with it? This isn’t really something they cover in school…

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The Wonder of Coastlines

The Wonder of Coastlines
A year ago, I travelled to southern France with my honey and some friends. As we visited Marseilles, a port town on the Mediterranean with a history stretching back some 2,600 years, we came to a plaque that commemorated the start of that history. Along the old harbour, the bronze reads “Here, in 600 BC, Greek sailors from Phocaea, a Greek city in Asia Minor, landed. They founded Marseilles, to serve as a beacon of civilization to the west.”

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Wagon Driver — Photo 88 — Project 365

Wagon Driver — Photo 88 — Project 365
The parade provided lots of interesting sights. I got his photo of one of the wagon drivers in the parade. I thought the outfit was rather timeless and I liked the look on his face.

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Boy in the Yellow Shirt — Photo 87 — Project 365

Boy in the Yellow Shirt — Photo 87 — Project 365
This summer while I was waiting for a parade to start, so I started taking pictures of some of the other people waiting around me. I ended up with this neat picture of this boy. There’s just something about the look on his face…

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Ethnic Canadians

Ethnic Canadians
I recently stumbled across this map of “Leading Ethnicity by Census Division,” based on the 2006 Canadian census (original on Wikipedia). Maps fascinate me and I thought this one was pretty cool. I thought I’d share a few thoughts, but first the map itself:

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Parking Meter — Photo 85 — Project 365

Parking Meter — Photo 85 — Project 365
So I found this parking meter one day exploring in France. Having studied a little about parking I was fascinated. One of the goals of parking meters is to encourage turnover to allow lots of people to visit the area. In France, you sometimes run into timed parking (limited to 1 to 4 hours) with a similar goal. The “old-school” way of doing that was to have a little disk you would put on your dash, showing when you showed up (and by extension, when you could park there till). It took me a while to figure out the system (they paint the lines green for those spots) and then once I had it figured out, I never had a disk with me. So when I spotted these machines, I thought they were genius! They tell you right away how long you can park in the spot and how much time you have left. As a “bonus,” it makes if far easier for the Meter Maid to see in a hurry who has overstayed their welcome.

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We Will Remember Them — Photo 84 — Project 365

We Will Remember Them — Photo 84 — Project 365

For Remembrance Day — Lest We Forget

They shall grow not old,
as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning
We will remember them.
We will remember them.

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3D Printing and Model Trains

3D Printing and Model Trains
While in France, the combination of being somewhere near ‘church mouse poor’ and living in a small (32 square metres / 350 sq ft) 1 bedroom apartment, I looked for hobbies that took up little space and so settled on photography (i.e. my Project 365 here) and dabbling in computer programming and to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence (my WmDOT for OpenTTD). It was quite enjoyable, but on my return to North America, I found myself with a lot more space and more geographically stable. I wanted to make things that were a little more physical and so with the encouragement of my Honey, I started into Model Railroading, a childhood dream. One of my shocks was the cost of models! A regular-ish building, measuring maybe 2x3x3 inches would cost $60! There had to be a better way…

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