Many years ago when I first bought minchin.ca, I thought it would be neat to put my genealogy online. This stemmed, in part, from the fact that most of the genealogy research I was doing was online. But it’s taken a long time to figure out how to generate the webpages a way I wanted. I wanted a website that I could update without the links changing, and a way to hide the information about living people. Just this last week I found Adam, an online service hosted by Tim Forsythe, that will do that for me. So now my genealogy is up! Check it out at minchin.ca/genealogy/.

Men are loyal. Men are honest. Men respect and honor women. A man goes out and finds one woman, and he vows to protect and love her for the rest of his life. A man would never betray that vow. Even the weakest and most cowardly man — if he is a man at all — would die for the woman he loves….

You don’t have to be “cool” or athletic. You don’t have to play guitar or fix cars. These are all fine things, but they don’t define a man. A man is defined by how he treats women, by how he keeps his promises, and by how he protects and serves the ones he loves. That’s what makes a man a man.

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.