Hey, guess what?  That last blog post was post #1500 on this blog.  Wow.

That means there has been a post every 2-3 days on average.  This blog has now been around for 3498 days, or over 113 months, just over 9.5 years.

If you’d like to check out some posts from the past, visit the Best of Finding direction page, which includes posts from 2002 to 2011.

The all-time most popular post on the blog is the resource post linking to Spanish Bible versions.

Thanks for visiting, thanks for the hundreds of comments you’ve left – you’re welcome to come back and visit anytime!

Back in 2005 I wrote about the strange ways people have found our website.  What search words do they enter in order to get here?

There were many surprises – words like zooplay, pictures of earthships, and maroon color were on the list.

So I was curious to find out – how have things changed?  I’m happy to say that, several years later, it seems that search engines have improved and people are finding us using things like our names (what a concept!) and words and phrases that actually relate.

Here are a few of the words and phrases that people have punched into search engines over the years – and have thus discovered our site:

• class schedule:  No, sorry – I don’t have your class schedule.  Try calling the school.
• amy:  Seriously?  We’ve come up in search engines for the word amy?  I mean, we love Shari’s sister, and she is pretty important…
• swine flue:  I didn’t spell it like that – really I didn’t!
• whipping:  Yes, I have a post about whipping…
• common house bugs pictures:  Well, we did used to have a lotta bugs in Cuernavaca…
• keep calm and pray:  Good advice!
• noisy bugs:  Gotta love ‘em.
• farmacia de dios:  Translation, pharmacy of God.  Yes, I believe I did mention it once…
• butterfly homework:  Yes, butterflies can come here for help with their homework!
• jim’s wish list:  Hurrah!  Oh, wait – which Jim were you looking for?? (How many could there be?)

Over the holidays I tried to organize my books a little – that is, paper books, audio books, Kindle books, other types… books I’ve started, books I’d like to read, and so on and so on.

Well, I finished one of those books that I had already started – audio, in this case – The Next Story by Tim Challies.

The Next Story is a book about technology.  And I would highly recommend it to anyone who uses technology.  Even if you only send the occasional email, or do a search online once in a while.  In fact, if you’re familiar with most of these words, this book is for you:  Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Hotmail, Email, Internet, Blog.

You don’t even have to agree with the author – the point is to take a little time to think about these things that we or our family members use.  Don’t you think it’s worth a little thought?

But Tim Challies doesn’t just make you stop and think – he makes you think biblically.  Have you ever thought about how the Gospel relates to Twitter?  What the Bible has to say about email?  You might be surprised.

As an added bonus, Challies is Canadian.  ’Nuff said.

You can get The Next Story in a variety of formats at amazon.com.  As a matter of fact, the Kindle version is only US$1.99 at the moment (90% off sale!) (oops – looks like that deal is over!), and the audio version free with a 14 day trial of amazon’s Audible service.  Surely you can afford a little time to think about technology and how you’ll use it in 2012…

Some of you have kids who are just starting to use Facebook (ours aren’t there yet).  As in every area of life, it’s important to train them to use this for God’s glory – right?

Here are some thoughts on just that, taken from a longer video entitled God’s Technology:

Incidentally, I just heard a sermon by David Murray that also focused on technology, and the "noise" that we so easily let into our lives.  If you’re interested, you can listen to that right here:  Be Still

For our Bible study, Where did the Bible come from?, we talked about many different Bible versions in Spanish (the good, the bad, and the ugly!).  I wanted to give people access to some of the versions out there, so I’ve created this list of some of the versions that are currently available online.  Note: some versions I intentionally left off the list for various reasons, others are not currently available free online to my knowledge.

Here’s the list, with the name of the version, the date (of the linked version, not necessarily the first edition), and a handy URL to use to find it…

Bibles of historic interest

La Biblia del Oso (The Bear Bible) was the first full Bible to be printed in Spanish.  La Biblia Mexicana de Vence (The Vence Mexican Bible) was the first Mexican translation.  It was in 25 volumes – a parallel Bible in Spanish and Latin, but I’ve included just 4 volumes as samples.

La Biblia del Oso (1569) — http://tinyurl.com/labibliadeloso
La Biblia Mexicana de Vence (1831) 1 — http://tinyurl.com/vence1831-1
La Biblia Mexicana de Vence (1831) 4 — http://tinyurl.com/vence1831-4
La Biblia Mexicana de Vence (1831) 5 — http://tinyurl.com/vence1831-5
La Biblia Mexicana de Vence (1831) 7 — http://tinyurl.com/vence1831-7

Bibles in common use today

As far as I know these are all still in print today.  The most common Bible in Spanish is probably the Reina-Valera 1960 (a descendant of La Biblia del Oso), likely followed by a Roman Catholic version, La Biblia de Jerusalén (based on a French translation).  The four in bold are ones I focused more on in the study, because they give a good spectrum of different types of translation.

Reina-Valera Antigua (1865) — http://tinyurl.com/rva1865
Reina-Valera (1909) — http://tinyurl.com/rv1909
Reina-Valera (1960) — http://tinyurl.com/rv1960
Reina-Valera (1995) — http://tinyurl.com/rv1995
Dios Habla Hoy (1996) — http://tinyurl.com/dhh1996
La Biblia de las Americas (1997) — http://tinyurl.com/lbla1997
Nueva Versión Internacional (1999) — http://tinyurl.com/nvi1999
Nueva Biblia Latinoamericana de Hoy (2005) — http://tinyurl.com/nblh2005

Audio Bibles

Reina-Valera (2000) listen online only —
Psalms and Proverbs:  http://tinyurl.com/rv2000-sp
New Testament:  http://tinyurl.com/rv2000-nt

Reina-Valera (1960) (MP3) — http://tinyurl.com/mp3-rv1960

The New Testament in Reina-Valera (1995), Dios Habla Hoy or Nueva Versión Internacional — http://tinyurl.com/audio-nt3

The New Testament in La Biblia las Américas or Nueva Versión Internacional (online only) — http://tinyurl.com/lbla-nvi

I typed a phrase into Google translate, and it asked me if I wanted to change it…

No, I didn’t mean that!  Thank God, I didn’t mean that!

All right, so of course I want you to actually really visit us in person.  But last month I made an amazing discovery – Google Street View has come to Ixtapaluca!

If you’ve never tried Street View, it works like this.  You can go on to a map, then you can actually go down to street level and see what you would see if you were driving down the street.  You can look around, up, down – all around.  You can go back the other way, forward – the ability to move yourself and look around really does make you almost feel like you’re there.

What you’re seeing are a collection of special photos taken by Google employees.  So they’re not right up to date, but it looks like the ones of Ixtapaluca right now were taken sometime this past summer.

So you can see the places we drive and walk every day, see the shops, the cars, the bicycle taxis – even people about their business.  You can even zoom in and get a closer look of things.  Amazing!

An image of Ixtapaluca from Street View.
I spy a bicycle taxi, combi taxis, election signs…

And surprisingly, you can – now, don’t tell anyone – but you can actually see our house.  Now I won’t tell you where it is here in public, but if you call or send me a note (and if I know you!) I might just spill the beans.

Meanwhile, go here to see Ixtapaluca.  Take the little orange-ish man on the left side, and drag him on to one of the main streets.  Give it a moment, and it will show with a blue outline all the streets with Street View.  Drop the man down in the place you want to start exploring.  More details on using Street View can be seen in the video below.

I’ll give you one clue – the street named Cuauhtémoc is what we drive down each day to take our kids to school.

I just tried it.  I found a mailman on a motorcycle – cool.   Hey, there’s a store we shop at all the time!  Oops… looks like that guy is having car trouble.

Oh, sorry – I’ll let you go explore for yourself!  Use full screen – looks great.

Every once in a while it’s good to remind ourselves about some of the realities of the modern world. Much of what’s in this video you may have heard before, but it’s a great collection of information (and we all need more information!).

There’s an obvious orientation toward viewers from the USA, but I’m sure those of us from elsewhere can find useful information beyond that….

(Note: I’m not sure the music always fits what’s being said… but the audio isn’t necessary, so feel free to turn it down.)

So, here I am with dozens of emails – people wanting me to do this, check that, fix these things, tell them the other stuff.  I got a phone message telling me they were going to cut off this if I didn’t do that (turns out it actually wasn’t my responsibility at all), someone wanting to sign Shari up for that, a call about a free trip I had qualified for.  The phone kept ringing even after I went to bed.

So anyway, I need to go through these dozens of emails and figure out what to do and say in them all – so thanks for your patience!

We’re still working out the bugs – the internet isn’t actually working in the office (of course, I can’t go up there anyway because the stairs are being tiled!), and sometimes it doesn’t want to work at all.  But we’re getting there as you can see!

I’ll write more about the progress of the house later.  The big news of the day really is that Shari gets back into town today!  We’ll be picking her up at the airport this evening. 

Here’s the view from our (former) roof in Cuernavaca.  I liked our roof, and I also like this MagToo.com website that allows you to put together 360° panorama shots.  So, here’s my first attempt from photos I took just before we moved.

You’ll be able to see some of the houses around (and the brick and white wall of the house behind us), the flowers on the fence, and the surrounding scenery.  Just press and hold your mouse button to move around, or use the controls at the bottom.

If you view this panorama on the MagToo website you can see where it was taken on Google Maps, rate it, share it, etc.