2. My Projects

My Projects

Lots of the Stuff I’ve Done.

Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of projects, both online & off. This is meant to link to some of the more exciting ones, particularly those found online.

Highway Planning

My highway and transportation projects have largely consisted of Functional Planning Studies (FPS’s) and Traffic Impact Analyses (TIAs). A Functional Planning Study will look at a section of highway and image how it might be used into the future. A common time horizon for these studies is 50 years out. A Traffic Impact Analysis is usually smaller in both geography and time, many times looking at an intersection 5 to 20 years into the future. A TIA will often be done to determine what road system improvements should be made as a result of a adjacent, proposed land development project.

My highway planning is all done offline, but I’ll provide links where I can.

Proposed Roundabout on Highway 642 in Morinville
  • East Vistas Outline Plan TIA — 2024, Leduc County, Alberta — For an urban residential node between Beaumont and Nisku. Part of me wishes that Highway 625 (that runs along the south side of both the development and Beaumont) would have been designated a “future freeway” (aka Edmonton Ring Road #2) a long time ago…. — Traffic generation, traffic distribution, capacity analysis
  • Burma Road Gravel Pit TIA — 2024, Calgary, Alberta — Intersection (Synchro) modelling, intersection treatment warrant
  • McTel/Douglasdale TIA — 2023, Calgary, Alberta — A large residential complex to be built at a station of the under-construction Green Line LRT in Calgary. — Traffic generation, intersection (Synchro) modelling, multi-use internal site capture, right of way review, parking (vehicle, bicycle, and loading stalls) review, transit review
  • Hughes Gravel Pit Access Review — 2023, County of Rocky View, Alberta — Intersection treatment warrant
  • Highway 512 & Range Road 210A Transportation Review — 2023, Lethbridge, Alberta — Intersection treatment warrant
  • Star Building Supplies TIA — 2023, Balzac, Alberta — Parking review, trip generation, access management
  • Highway 642 Functional Planning Study (FPS) — 2012-13, Morinville, Alberta — Very enjoyable project that involved working very closely with the planners as they developed the Area Structure Plan (ASP) for “downtown” Morinville at the same time. We ultimately proposed a series of roundabouts, in part to minimize the additional right of way required to maintian a functional “main street”. — Traffic forecasting and modeling, prepared proposed corridor treatment, public open houses (historical capture of final report)
  • Mildred Lake TIA — 2012-13, RM Wood Buffalo, Alberta — This was fun as the crossing vehicles at the intersection where oversided mine trucks! — Analysing traffic counts, traffic modeling, traffic projections, and intersection treatment warrants
  • Avenir / Cassidy Lands / St Albert Sports City — 2012, St Albert, Alberta — traffic modelling and intersection analysis
  • Bellamy Hill TIA — 2012, Edmonton, Alberta — Site traffic generation and site access requirements
  • Grove Drive & Pioneer Road — 2012, Spruce Grove, Alberta — Preliminary roundabout design and analysis
  • Grove Drive & Spruce Village Way — 2012, Spruce Grove, Alberta — Intersection level of service analysis and pedestrian crossing control warrant analysis
  • Grove Drive & Spruce Ridge Road — 2012, Spruce Grove, Alberta — Intersection level of service analysis
  • Queen Street & Jespersen Avenue, Queen Street & Church Road — 2012, Spruce Grove, Alberta — Intersection level of service analysis
  • Highway 16 & Campsite Road Interchange — 2012, Spruce Grove, Alberta — traffic volume forecasts
  • Highway 14 Passing Lanes — 2012, Strathcona County, Alberta / Alberta Transportation — These have since been built. By volume alone, the highway here could probably warrant being twinned, but hasn’t been done because of higher political priorities, so this is being used as a stop-gap for the present time. — Public open house
  • Meadow Hawk Estates — 2012, Strathcona County, Alberta — Traffic modelling and intersection treatment warrants
  • Ardrossan Lands — 2012, Strathcona County, Alberta — Traffic modelling and intersection treatment warrants
  • Highway 2 Functional Planning Study (North of Morinville to North of Clyde) — 2012, Alberta Transportation — Access management and cost estimate
  • Taylor Drive — 2011-12, Red Deer, Alberta — Traffic forecasting and Synchro modeling for proposed geometric improvements
  • Highway 11 (East of Rocky Mountain House to West of Sylvan Lake) — 2011, Alberta Transportation — This involved walking most of the highway length between Slyvan Lake and Rocky Mountain House. The highway has been a highway for a long time, and so some of the culverts were wooden! (and probably close to 100 years old!) Eventually, this highway will be twinned, but that project will likely prove messy as Highway 11 runs down a correction line, which means that the intersections on the north and south sides of the highway don’t line up, and many of the historical farm houses were built very close to the highway. — Preliminary geometric assessment, field work for report preparation
  • Highways 13 & 21 Roundabout — 2011, Camrose, Alberta / Alberta Transportation — This roundabout has since been built, and is able to handle a combine! Part of the reason for building this was that gravel trucks were running the existing stop light! — Synchro modeling of the roundabout, AutoTURN modelling, Public open house
  • Tomlinson Acreage TIA — 2011, Strathcona County, Alberta
  • Provo Towne Centre Site Redevelopment — 2010, Provo, Utah — Traffic Impact Analysis for proposed mixed use redevelopment
  • US-6 & US-89 Junction — 2010, Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah — Drafting and design of proposed alignment for highway twinning
  • Highway 1 FPS (East of Calgary) — 2008, Alberta Transportation — Traffic forecasting and alternative routings developed
  • Highway 28A — 2008, CFB Namao, Alberta — Traffic counting
  • Highways 2A & 616 — 2008, Kaynaugh, Alberta — Traffic counting
  • Highways 2 & 3 Urban Bypass — 2008, Fort MacLeod, Alberta — Looking at how to build a highway bypass for Fort MacLeod; the highway currently is “Main Street” — Traffic forecasting and modeling (Open House slides)

Web Design

I have maintained my own personal website since 2007, and have done some web design for others as well.

  • Minchin.ca — Bootstrap Edition — 2014-present — in the 7 years before this since I originally designed the site, one of the biggest changes is that so much of the web in now accessed through smart phones. So this redesign was in large part abour making the site look good on my phone. The theme has now been repackaged as Seafoam, a standalone theme for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python and what is used to generate this site.
  • Metro Financial Planning — 2011-12 — A professional project. This is a wordpress driven site for a local financial planner. I set up the site and maintain it, and set up his email.
  • Matthew Bissett for PC MLA — Sherwood Park — 2011 — A wordpress driven site for a friend running for nomination for the PC party in his riding. I set up the site and he provided the photos and copy.
  • Minchin.ca — Kwick Edition — 2010 — This just went live for the main page of Minchin.ca. I realize that it may not be obvious where the links are or what they do at first glance, but I love the effect.
  • Minchin.ca — Rounders Edition — 2007 — This version of Minchin.ca was the first to go live. It was based on the Blogger template I was using at the time, but includes a picture I took in Hawaii as the header background.

Programming

Programming is something I have enjoyed for many years. Between 2010 and 2013, by focus was largely on writing AI’s for OpenTTD (see WmDOT below). Since 2013, my focus has been solving problems of personal interest using Python. Some of my projects are listed below.

I also maintain a profile at GitHub and post the code there for most of these projects and several others as well.

  • jrnl — 2013-23 — A simple command line journal application that stores your journal in a plain text file, written in Python. I ended up forking the project to maintain functionality that I used daily that had been removed by the (new) maintainers. This was the first open source projects I significantly contributed to. I provided Pull Requests to add an ‘export to Pelican’ feature (see PR 347), expanding documentation (see PR 124), maintained DayOne (“classic”) support (see PR 742, PR 773, PR 785, PR 786, PR 928, and PR 990) and to fix numerous bugs (see PR 110, PR 349, PR 397, PR 416, PR 707, and PR 909).
  • Colourettu — 2014-17 — An open-source Python library. Colourettu is a small collection of colour functions that can be used to determine the (relative) luminosity of a colour and the contrast between two colours. There is also the palette class for dealing with a ‘list’ of colours. In addition to the code, it has been packaged (and is available on PyPI), documentation is online, and automated testing (continuous integration) is in place.
  • topydo — 2015-16 — A powerful todo list application for the console, written in Python. I provided several Pull Requests, including to provide colour support on Windows CMD (see PR 49), code style improvements to bring the code base in better compliance with PEP8 (see PR 55), remove platform specific hacks to creating temporary files (see commit), added the ability to print a “screen-ful” of top todo items (see PR 118), and added a filter to selectively hide todo items (see PR 131).
  • green — 2016 — A clean, colorful, fast Python test runner. I provided a Pull Request to resolve issues when outputting colour to Windows CMD.
  • releases — 2016 — A powerful Sphinx changelog-generating extension. (Sphinx in a documentation generator for Python source code.) I provided a Pull Request to allow specifing multiple changelog files, and another Pull Request to supply the version number to Sphinx.
WmDOT in action
  • WmDOT — 2010-14 — An AI for OpenTTD, an open source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. My AI is written in Squirrel (somewhat similar to C++) and serves to build out the road network for you. (code; release thread). As of Feb. 2017, this has been downloaded over 260,000 times!
  • MinchinWeb’s MetaLibrary (MWML) — 2010-15 — A library for programming AIs for OpenTTD that started as an offshoot of WmDOT. (code; documentation; release thread). As of Feb. 2017, this has been downloaded over 599,000 times!
  • MTS (Minchin Timesheet System) — 2010 — Written in VBA in Excel, this is designed to keep track of your time spent on various projects. I’ve made use of it myself when working on professional web design projects. (release post; direct download)
  • Transportation Research Board (TRB) Bibliography style for Microsoft Word — 2010 — I did this while working on my Master’s thesis. It is an XML files that creates a new bibliography style for use in Word. (release post; direct download)

Articles

I have kept a blog at blog.minchin.ca since 2006. Almost all of my online writing first appear here.

Photography

  • Project 365 — 2010-12 — It started with the goal to take a photo a day for a year. I got sidetracked for a while, but I keep pushing forward. Some of the most popular photos include:
  • Flickr — 2008-09 — some of my best shots, although it hasn’t but updated in a while.

Videos

  • LEGO Dreams — 2011 — I thought it would be fun to make a stop-motion video with LEGO. Four hours later, I had this 15 seconds of film…
  • Bretona Corner — 2010 — This was prepared for a class presentation while working on my Master’s. I was pulling a really long night and so decided to just record my presentation for the next day. I think it turned out pretty cool. Made using Microsoft PhotoStory and Microsoft Movie Maker. (blog post introduction)
  • Printemp a Paris — 2009 — This was a time lapse film I put together of a crazy night we spent trying to put up a huge picture of the Eiffel Tower in our front room. (blog post introduction)
  • Time Lapse - Proof of Concept — 2008 — a time lapse of my backyard, most to prove that it could be done. I rigged a graphing calculator to send the signal to take the photos. (blog post introduction)