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?):
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!
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)
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:
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.
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:
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.
One day I took Hannah to Sunday School in Calgary, and there was no teacher. So I taught a Sunday School lesson, crafts and all. How did it go? Ask the kids. You remember the time I lost the song I was going to sing, and I did one I hadn’t practised.
Many years ago I was in Apatzingan, Mexico. I had only an hour to prepare a sermon. I sat down to get started, when someone came to tell me that we had misunderstood when the service was – it was now! Somehow the Lord got me through that one! At least that time it was in English (I was being translated).
Last week we were talking about some Christian history topics in conversation class. I brought in a timeline so that we could see some things in context. I was being asked about some numbers on my timeline, and I said they were just for a seminar I taught (2000 Years of Missions). "Oh, you should teach us!" Ha ha, sure. I don’t have nearly enough Spanish for such a thing. Maybe in a few years.
"No, really – you should teach us. What do you think?" "Sure, yeah, he should".
Yeah, hah hah… whatever you want.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? After all my joking affirmation, my teacher was making plans and asking what I needed and planning where we could do it. So this week, apparently, I have 8 hours of teaching time (2 hours each day- today, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday). After I’d said sure, whatever you want so many times, I wasn’t sure how to refuse.
Now, of course, I won’t really be teaching. I’ll be standing there introducing topics and asking how to say this and that. I’m the one who knows the least Spanish in the class, and of course I’ll need words that aren’t in the dictionary – names, places, terminology.
It’s ok, not only have I improvised before, I’ve also embarrassed myself before. Often. Daily. I’m used to it. And now I can do it for 8 solid hours. They teach conversation in this school – why don’t they have a course on keeping your mouth shut?
This post was inspired by a post by Andrew Comings in which he shared this video of Danish musician and comedian Victor Borge. Talk about improvisation. Borge was a brilliant musician, and could think fast even at 80 years old. Of course, he already knew the language – of music…
I actually made this little video for Grandma and Grandpa Winger, but I might as well share it with you too! Besides, you can see a bit of our living room. (Actually, that open space is supposed to be a dining room, but we don’t have any dining room furniture yet.)
Grandma and Grandpa gave Hannah and Nathanael these little straw-shooters for Valentine's Day, so they had fun shooting them around the house.
