Just for fun
Wayne’s mandolin
You meet a lot of interesting people, going to school at here in Cuernavaca. One of Shari’s classmates went to the popular town of Tepoztlán, where he climbed up the mountain Tepozteco with his mandolin. Somebody videotaped his performance on the mountain, and I thought it was pretty funny – so here’s your chance to meet another student at our school…
Can’t get enough? Here’s an encore.
CAM Mexico blogs
I admit, I’ve been going a little crazy with rss feeds over the last couple of weeks. I actually put up a page with a list of all my feed experiments. For example, I’ve tried out Google Reader a little more. With Google Reader you can put up a page of posts that you’ve found interesting for others to see – you can see my page here.
But with more and more CAM Mexico missionaries blogging, I decided to put together a proper feed of every known CAMex blog. For the moment I’ve put the top 3 posts (excluding this blog) on the main page of Finding direction (look down to the right on the sidebar).
You can subscribe to this feed if you’re interested. It includes this blog (of course), every other CAM Mexico missionary blog I know of (there are six that I know of at this writing), missionaries on their way to Mexico to serve with CAM (one more), and even short term missionaries (two of those at the moment).
Below you can see the live feed for the CAMex blogs, along with a link to the feed if you would like to subscribe (if you’re a CAMex missionary yourself, you do want to subscribe, right?):
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Paper towel holder. Finally.
As you recall, when we moved here to Cuernavaca we didn’t end up renting the house with the paper towel holder. Instead, we moved into this house – a great house for us in every way except… no paper towel holder at all.
No problem (you say). Just go to the store and pick one up!
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Well, we searched and we hunted, and couldn’t find such a thing. No way, no how. Amazon.com may have hundreds, but they won’t deliver to Mexico.
So today I’m back to announce that – yes – after almost 6 months of paper towel rolls that toppled over onto the wet, dirty counter, we finally found, and purchased, a fine paper towel holder. There’s the proof.
Now you’ll notice it isn’t a nice wall mounted model like the other one, but we actually have plenty of counter space, so that’s not a problem. Besides, as I mentioned before, have you ever tried to install one of those things? I have. Not a pretty picture.
So praise the Lord for a great house … one now with a fine paper towel holder.
(we’ve been out of bananas for some time, so I’m pretty happy about those too)
Photo updates (and RSS feed)
I’ll bet you didn’t know that our photo gallery had its own RSS feeds. Actually, you can be excused, because for a while the feeds disappeared. I went looking for them today, and discovered they were missing, and reactivated them.
I’ve updated the Recent shots… album with pictures from Taxco, a nearby trout farm, and more. Here are the most recent photos that are in the album (brought to you by the wonders of the RSS news feed):
Each album has its own RSS feed. To find it, go to the album you want, then look to the left of the page. What most people will want is the newest photos, so to find those use this news feed
You should already know that Finding direction has its own news feed, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/findingdirection. And if you’re a real CottrillCompass.com fanatic, I created a MASTER feed that will show the latest entries in both the photo gallery AND Finding direction:
Don’t even know what an RSS feed is? An RSS feed is a specially formatted feed that updates whenever something at the source it’s updated. It’s read by news reading programs. It’s a way to always keep up to date with the latest. Some programs that read news feeds include:
- GreatNews (I use this a lot)
- Thunderbird
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Google Reader
- My Yahoo!
- BlogLines
And of course online services like:
One more thing, and this is really nifty. You can use Google Photos Screensaver to automatically add our most recent photos to your screensaver! I had a little trouble getting this to work with the normal album screensavers, so just to make things more complicated, I made a new feed just for use in the Google Photos Screensaver. Use this one:
The screensaver will show the latest 50 photos (I think!), along with the titles. You can click a link to go directly to the photo online to read the description.
Now you have more information than you ever wanted. But if you want to learn more about news or web feeds, check out this article on Wikipedia.
Google’s “Dark porcelain” project
You know what today is, right? No, not that. No, that‘s not what I’m talking about either. No, it’s the time of year new and amazing Google revelations come down the pipes.
You can read my post from last year about Google Romance. The year before that was Google Gulp, the amazing and the most technologically advanced drink of all time.
Strangely related to Google Gulp is the offer from this year – free high speed internet access. But not just any access. It’s called TiSP, which stands for Toilet Internet Service Provider. Yes, you actually flush the cable down your toilet (using the patented GFlushâ„¢ system) and it will connect to an access node. This from the official press release:
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 1, 2007 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA)â„¢, a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users’ plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.
Really? Well, no, not really. But I’ll let you read more about TiSP yourself here. The FAQ page is my favourite.