Barrel Racing — Photo 90 — Project 365
More rodeo photos! Barrel racing is amazing to watch — a combination speed and finesse.
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Trick Riding — Photo 89 — Project 365
The rodeo provided a number of opportunities to take some great photos, so I
have a couple more to come after this. This one was of some of the trick riding.
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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
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
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
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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Temperature — Photo 86 — Project 365
I like how the background has faded away, and how the photo seems to make the
‘ordinary’ thermometer seem special.
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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
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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