This NASA moving image, recorded by satellite over a full year as part of their Blue Marble Project, shows the ebb and flow of the seasons and vegetation.

A reminder that the odds are so stacked against you, you probably should just plead the fifth (i.e. stay silent) every time you have to talk to the cops. It’s a combination of more crimes than the (US) Federal government can count (and thus the very real possibility you’re committed a crime unknowingly), plus the ability of cops to take your statements out of context and spin them against you. Plus, you avoid the possibility of a providing a false confession — confessing to a crime you didn’t commit, sometimes just to get the cops to leave you alone.

Recently, American Edward Snowden exposed a ton of information about what information the US government, via the NSA, is collecting off the internet. The NSA, naturally, had given anything but a straight answer. It seems the NSA program exists in some form, but many details remain murky. No matter, Edward said he wanted to have a discussion about surveillance, and perhaps privacy, and that is what this post is really about.

Alberta is amazing for its landscapes. Much of it is flat, and combined with roads surveyed before anyone lived there on even mile spacing, you can get roads that seem to go on forever. This picture was take in October (Thanksgiving weekend, actually) and so the grass was basically dead but the snow had yet to come, leaving this beautiful palette of yellows.

So the scenario is thus: There is a project that I want to contribute to that is a Mercurial (Hg) repository (or ‘repo’ for short). I’ve taken a liking to Git; GitHub in particular with their new and beautiful Windows frontend. So how do I take a remote Hg repo and push it to GitHub. As follows (the following assumes you have a Ubuntu box available to play with, although I imagine many Linux machines would work the same way):

This is one of those pictures you have to take right away or the subject will be gone! I also like to take pictures like this where I can play with the depth of field and what is and isn’t in focus.

Still in the National Parks between Banff and Jasper, I found this waterfall. The effect I was going for here was one of fluid motion - by setting a (relatively) long shutter speed (a tenth of a second, in this case), the motion of the water is captured. At the other extreme, with an extremely fast shutter speed, you can freeze a waterfall, making it look almost as if it had turned to ice in an instant.

The wild rose is Alberta’s provincial flower, picked by the schoolchildren not long after the province’s creation in 1905. The flower is beautiful, but I rarely see it in the city. I was extra excited to find one of this size and open like this.

Bridges are usually seen when standing on them or sometimes beside them, but rarely straight down like this. This is taken along the Icefields Parkway, about halfway between Jasper and Banff, looking down from a roadside lookout.

As summer comes upon us, I found these daisies growing in the front yard. There are bonuses to having the lawn mover break!