A present
A trip to Narnia… er, Calgary
Went out to Calgary for our annual trip to Becky’s company Christmas party, which her company thoughtfully pays for, and found that a winter storm followed by minus 15 Celsius had turned the city into Narnia.
Every inch of every branch on the leafless deciduous trees was outlined in frost, and all of the snow that had fallen was frozen in place. It was quite beautiful. Made me miss the place, even though it was frigid.
Continue reading “A trip to Narnia… er, Calgary”Quinn goes to swim class
Quinn had fun at swim class with her other grampa, who volunteered to go into the pool with her while we watched from the visitors’ area
Quinn and Halloween
Quinn gets excited for Halloween, where she is going dressed as one of her favourite things: An excavator!
Fall
Fall mist
A great photo that our youngest, Zoe, got while driving home from Thanksgiving at the cottage — mist rising off the road
Thanksgiving at Golden Lake 2024
We had Thanksgiving at the lake, as we often do, and it was pretty warm compared to some other Thanksgivings, so we ate at two long tables pushed together out in the screened-in porch, which was nice (prior to screening it in a couple of years ago, we had to bring the picnic table into the kitchen to seat everyone).
In this photo I’m pretty sure Ophelia just said something funny
Unfortunately Caitlin and Wade and Quinn couldn’t make it, because they went to Wade’s cottage. But we had a pretty good time anyway — we did our usual Thanksgiving hike up a trail through the woods nearby to a lookout where you can see most of the big part of the lake.
A perfect night for Northern Lights
I’ve seen the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis a number of times before — once a long time ago in northern Saskwatchewan, and not long after that on a drive through northern Ontario, and then a couple of times during the intervening forty years or so, but not more than half a dozen. They have always been amazing to watch, but I can safely say that I have never seen a display like we saw at our cottage in the Ottawa Valley just before Thanksgiving. We were told by friends that the ** index — a measure of sunspot electrical activity, which is what creates the Aurora Borealis — was high, so we went out to the local cemetery to try to get a good look at the northern sky, and we were gobsmacked.
Feeding the sheep and lambs
Easter weekend with Quinn
Sunset from Venice beach
That time I used Google to cure myself of something
In most cases, people will tell you (as they have definitely told me) not to Google symptoms or use “Doctor Google” to try to diagnose or treat something, the implication being that whatever you are likely to find will be misleading and/or completely wrong, and possibly even wrong in a dangerous way. All of which is often true! But not always, as I found out a number of years ago, when I was hit with a medical issue very suddenly, and the internet was my only hope in terms of figuring out what I should do about it.
So what was the issue? In a word, vertigo. Repeated and paralyzing vertigo, which started when I woke up one morning and turned my head to look at the clock. Immediately, my head started spinning as though I had just gotten off the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the fair. After about 30 seconds it went away, but when I sat up, the same thing happened — swirling, head spinning, a feeling of being nauseated. I should mention here that I suffer from motion sickness quite badly, and always have — according to my family, I used to throw up on pretty much every car ride.
Even as an adult, I found I couldn’t go on any amusement park ride that went around in circles — even ones designed for small children. Going up and down was fine, but around and around was death. When our youngest daughter was little she begged me to go on the spinning tea-cup ride, where you sit in a giant tea cup and then the cup goes around and the thing it’s attached to also goes around. After what seemed like hours of agony (it was probably about three minutes) I had to go lie down on a bench, and didn’t feel right for hours.
Continue reading “That time I used Google to cure myself of something”On getting around media paywalls, archiving content, copyright, and journalistic ethics
My editor’s note on yesterday’s version of the When The Going Gets Weird newsletter (which is here or at newsletter.mathewingram.com) got so long, and triggered so many conversations on Mastodon and elsewhere that I thought I would create a separate post about it for anyone who is interested. If debates about the technical and/or ethical challenges involved in getting around paywalls doesn’t interest you, please feel free to move on 🙂
Update: I got into a private debate about this with a prominent author and journalist on Mastodon, and I’ve included some of that below
In a nutshell, I’ve been including workarounds for paywalled articles for a little while now in the newsletter. When I first started it, I just included links and if there was a paywall then I figured people would either ignore it, or try an incognito browser or use some other workaround of their own. But the more I thought about it, the more that approach seeemed thoughtless and inconsiderate, so I started using two tools to produce links that got through paywalls.
One of them is called 12ft.io, and its motto is (or used to be) “Show me a ten-foot paywall, I’ll show you a 12-foot ladder.” But that tool stopped working for me recently — there’s just an error message from something called Vercel. As it turns out, Vercel is a hosting provider, and they shut off 12ft.io’s access to the site because of an alleged breach of their Terms of Service. I found this out because someone pointed me to a post on Twitter from the founder, Tom Millar, which says that he had no notice of the shutdown.
Continue reading “On getting around media paywalls, archiving content, copyright, and journalistic ethics”