The retailing business continues to grow, up 10 sites to a total of 138. I scaled back my previous online marketing campgin, as it wasn’t turning into sales, and launched a replacement. For my first 10 kW tranche of generation, my loan has fallen apart, and in one of the most frustrating ways possible.
The retailing business is growing slightly more quickly, up 17 sites to a total of 128. I ve expanded co-marketting efforts, which have born fruit, and I m pretty excited to see what they will bring in over the summer and onward. I ve worked to get my own online marketing campaign, but it has yet to show any sales. This is super frustrating; I ve reached out to an advisor to improve this.
A year ago, I wrote my thoughts about the in-progress Alberta Passenger Rail Master Plan. I was expecting the final report to have come out at Christmas time, but it finally appeared about two weeks ago, and just the executive summary. This is my summary after reviewing the available executive summary.
The retailing business is growing slightly more quickly, up 18 sites to a total of 110. Part of this is we pushed a fundraiser with one of our fundraising partners, and part of this is personal sales. I ve also finally got the website update live. A big part of that was I gave up on a complete rebuild, as the existing framework does everything I need it to do today.
Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. But I m discovering that many of those projects will have much poorer returns than I d initially hoped for due to high (only now confirmed) installation costs.
Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. It is a frustratingly long process, with far too much paperwork.
One Saturday morning at three, A cheese monger's shop in Paree. Collapsed to the ground, With a thunderous sound, Leaving only a pile of de brie.
I m aiming to build a new electricity and gas retailer here, but this isn t my first rodeo. In fact, I ve built and sold a company like this twice before! But this is the first time I m doing it solo. Previously, I focused on the business processes and backend management and let my partners guide the marketing and sales efforts; this time, I get to manage it all. As part of our new Backend…
I am building a boutique energy retailer to provide a human touch to our electricity and natural gas bills, and to make sure that that money get reinvested back into our community. This matters because many of the established players are huge multinationals, with call centers on one continent and their head office in yet another, both far from Alberta. But it doesn’t have to be like that: the…
Locally, I run a Pi-Hole to provide ad blocking on the local network 1 but I also run a Docker server to which I want to forward various subdomains (which are then routed to containers using Træfik ). I had this set up, but my upgrade from v5 to v6 of Pi-Hole blew this away (as I needed a new SD card for the Raspberry Pi it was running on) (see also the v6 release notes ).
My server running Docker seems forever to be low on space. So I finally got annoyed at it enough to figure out what was going on and try and fix it.
After over a dozen years, I m releasing an update to WmDOT (to v15). This update brings lots of bug fixers 1 , improved ship selection 2 , and introduces basic streetcar operations 3 (although off by default). I m also releasing an update to my related MetaLibrary (to v11) at the same time.
Spurred by another superficial review of Paris push for bicycle lanes 1 , I decided to write out why I think so many of these takes are overly superficial, and thus fail to provide useful lessons when applied to other cities. First, by way of background, I feel like I have rather unique vantage point of being trained in Transportation Planning (in Civil Engineering), paired with having lived and…
From an art show this weekend:
Perhaps in an era when everything is found on your blog via (Google) Search anyway, the disconnected nature of a digital garden doesn't loose as much against polished (and complete) blog posts as first glance would suggest.
I recently returned from a trip to France I thought I could write some observations on the contrast between French 1 and Canadian 2 urban forms.
This is the collection of my thoughts about the proposed/in-progress Alberta Passenger Rail Master Plan.
Meditation is a sort of barbell strategy for life. Staring at your computer screen trying to decide what to do next is a waste. Either be in quiet contemplation, or taking decisive action.
Cool "spaceman" graffiti on a CN railcar! https://blog.minchin.ca/images/2025/IMG_4295-cropped.JPG
Spring is in the air...or at least the chlorine is in the (spring) water
I recently had a roadtrip 1 that allowed me to listen to Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. Overall, it was a delightful, light read. The audiobook came in at just under 6 hours.
Flâneur is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male stroller , stereotypically of Paris. What a delightful word!
Microblogging v1.3.0 for Pelican released! Posts should now sort as expected. Thanks @ashwinvis . on PyPI #Microblogging #Pelican Plugins #Releases #Python
Summary plugin for Pelican v1.3.0 released! Now keeps internal link indicators (like {filename} ) from leaking into summaries. on PyPI #Summary (Pelican) #Pelican Plugins #Releases #Python
CommonMark Pelican reader v2.0.1! Should stop complaining about intra-document links (e.g. #target ) on PyPI #CommonMark Reader #Pelican Plugins #Releases #Python
New level of "business casual" unlocked: the bank teller today was wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap!
I ve been intrigued by the term métis for some time. At the root, the word is French for mixed , as in mixed race . About twenty years ago, I was in France and actually overhead the word used in the wild in this sense in a conversation on the bus; the reference was to an arab teenager who had a black girlfriend. In the Canadian context though, the word (especially when capitalized) has acquired a…
The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.
It s been 6 years, but my genealogy website has finally been updated!
Socks possess the mysterious power, like cats, of vanishing; unlike cats, they don’t get hungry and come back.
I would love to know what the actual blocker to immediate global rollout [of robot cars] is. Matt Webb In a word, snow . I can t help but feel it telling that all of the self-driving car trials take place in sunny places like LA and Phoenix. Snow, as I see it, creates two large obstacles for self-driving cars: the snow can physically obscure the road, and the snow (and ice) will differentially…
Walking to church, listening to church bells 🔔, add a special delight to this Sunday morning!
Merry Christmas, from California! https://blog.minchin.ca/images/2023/PXL_20231226_194840979.jpg
I recently completed the four books of the Mortal Engines series ( Mortal Engines , Predator s Gold , Infernal Devices , and A Darkling Plain ). I was drawn in by the premise that whole cities have gone mobile, something like giant tanks, and have taken to eating each other but it was the depth of the love stories that drew me to finish it.
I recently re-read The Heart of Darkness , by Joseph Conrad (the last time was in high school, for English class). I was pleasantly surprised by how short it was (~90 pages) and delighted by the prose: so much of the modern texts I read are either soulless corporate speak, that say very little, particularly about the things that actually matter, or flowery advertising speak, that serves more to…
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.
Today, the lastest update of minchin.jrnl was released! This release add custom exporters and importers!
Today, I do something that I should have done 5 years ago, and something that I ve been putting off for the last 2 years 1 : I m releasing a personal fork of jrnl 2 ! I ve given this release the codename Phoenix , after the mythical bird of rebirth, that springs forth renewed from the ashes of the past.
Winter is coming... the butter in the kitchen cupboards in no longer soft!
minchin.releaser v0.9.0 released with support for pyproject.toml configured projects (that lack a setup.py file). on PyPI #minchin.releaser #Releases #Python
This release of Autoloader is to fix a crashing bug when no plugins in the minchin.​pelican.​readers namespace are loaded. I also updated a number of other plugins to blacklist v1.2.0 to avoid these crashes.
Seafoam v2.9.1 released with even better support for microblogging ! pypi.org/project/seafoam/2.9.1 #Seafoam #Releases #Python
Seafoam v2.9.0 released with support for microblogging ! pypi.org/project/seafoam/2.9.0 #Seafoam #Releases #Python
I'm microblogging with Pelican! #Python #Microblogging
Microblogging is a plugin for Pelican , a static site generator written in Python. Microblogging is a plugin to allow you to have micro (or µ or small) posts, similarly (at least outwardly) to Twitter, Mastodon, or Threads.
AutoLoader is a plugin for Pelican , a static site generator written in Python. AutoLoader is a meta plugin in that it doesn t directly affect your Pelican site, but rather works to make your other plugins better. Previously, the plugin was set to autoload plugins in my minchin.​pelican.​plugins namespace, and thus will extend that to my…
Towards the end of 2011 2021 (in the depths of Covid ), I started thinking about adding a code of conduct to my open source software projects. Github recommends adding one, somewhat similiar to how they recommend including a software license. In trying to pick a code of conduct (for my projects), it seems helpful to remember the community , as such, is often basically me, short (in length) is…
This is a thought experiment, and perhaps a glimpse into the future. The question I start with is, What happens if self-driving cars become a reality? I note that first order effects (like, Now I can eat breakfast in the car because I don t have to hold the steering wheel anymore) are the easiest to see, and with each step out (Does my breakfast change? How does that effect egg farmers?), the…
This release, version 1.2.0, makes a few fixes to allow the plugin to support Pelican 4 and also supports my autoloader .
This post actually covers three releases: v3.0.0 adds support for Pillow v9. No changes were made that would make the plugin incompatible with earlier versions of Pillow, other than the test output images are slightly different between Pillow 8 and 9. This version also removed (official) support for Python 3.6, which isn t supported by Pillow 9. v3.0.1 fixes function calls that will be deprcated…