4th Jan 2010
Mexico City
Sorry
I feel that I must start this entry off with an apology: I stink at blogging and honestly I don’t foresee myself improving in the future. I am about to blog about stuff that happened over a month ago but I have cool pictures so it all balances out right? Thanks for forgiving me, now to the real meat of this entry.
Mexico City
The Schroeder family, a missionary family here in Mexico invited us to take a vacation with them to their missions house in Mexico City. We left December 27th and planned to stay around a week, give or take a day.
What we did
Being missionaries in a foreign country is very cool in the respect that you get to understand and live in a culture other than your own. The challenge is that too often your so busy being missionaries, you can easily miss out on the “cool stuff” of that culture. This was a cool opportunity to just take a break from “working” and explore Mexico’s Museum, Palaces, Plazas, and Aztec Ruins. It was relaxing to be able to not worry about being late or ill-prepared for Prayer Meetings, Bible Studies, Awana Clubs, Church, etc.
It was also an awesome opportunity to get to know the Schroeder Family better. Being that Natalie, Morgan, Vanessa and I are all so close in age we became instant friends. The Schroeder family also has a little girl Ceci(8) whom they adopted from Mexico City. She is such a testament of how much adopting can change a child’s future, she speaks english and spanish fluently and is a light into any room which she steps. As the Schroeders showed us the ins and outs of the subway system we were able to explore the city from what I think is more a Mexicans point view than a traditional “gringo” tourist.
Favorite Memories
- Visiting the Aztec Ruins
- Seeing one of Frida Kahlo’s original paintings
- Touring the previous Presidential Palace.
- Riding the Subway all over the city
- Eating 30 Al Pastor Tacos in one Sitting
Credits
Lad DeGraffenried (AKA: Dad)
If you would like to see more of Lad’s photos you can visit: http://mosaicministry.net/photos.php
Subscribe to Lad DeGraffenried’s Twitter feed
22nd Dec 2009
Christmas Wallpaper
Design
I was designing a Christmas card for my family and this is the top part of it. I designed it fairly large and thought, hey why not make that into a wallpaper? So, I hope you can use this wallpaper for the few days before Christmas comes upon us. Have a great Christmas and if I don’t see you before the new year, Happy New Year!
So, you don’t like my design huh? Take a look at my friends wallpaper he released it today, maybe you will like his better.
Credits
- Star Background: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1005288
- Shack Photo: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1148784
Download
- 1900px by 1200px (For those of you fortunate to have some nice screen real estate)
- 1600px by 1000px (Nice, you have a bigger screen than i do!)
- 1280px by 800px (Do you own a macbook? Then this one is for you)
PS: Quick Note
I know I have been slacking off on this blog, I am gonna try to be less lame next year.
15th Oct 2009
reCAPTCHA
Slapped With Spam [Geek Warning!]
I recently signed on to my blog to see that I had been spammed over 300 times on my most recent blog post. I looked back in the archive of the comments and found that all the comment appeared to be coming from the same source about every three minutes for the last two days straight. I shut the website down temporarily stopping the comment spamming party and began sifting through various spam stopping options. reCAPTCHA instantly caught my eye.
A Little reCAPTCHA History [Geek Warning!]
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
Source: What is reCAPTCHA
En Fin [Geek Warning!]
I had seen reCAPTCHA’s before but I never knew the idea behind their movement until I had a need to be free of spam. I thought that it was pretty cool that were able to take something monotonous and make it into something that could be used for the digitization of books. Now on this website not only can you comment without yucky spammers you can also help digitize books one word at a time. Luckily Alistair Kearney had made a beautiful symphony extension that was easy to install and get working. So scroll down to start digitizing books and making comments all at once.
After reading this article it sounded a little like a commercial. I am in no way affiliated with reCAPTCHA. I just simply thought what they were doing for the internet was cool.
18th Sep 2009
Light Up The World [Video]
Desperation Conference
When I was in the US of A I had the opportunity to attend a Desperation Conference with my youth group in Colorado. The theme of the conference was Light Up The World, meaning that we as the youth of the next generation are to fill the earth with God’s light. It was a life changing experience for me and even months after the conference I still can feel the impacts of it on my life. On the right is the music video for Light Up The World, off the brand new album Light Up The World [iTunes Link]. I hope you enjoy this video/song song as much as I have.
Link-Love
31st Aug 2009
Prayer Walking / Busing?
I had an idea over the summer for an outreach here in México. Most likely you have heard of prayer walking, if not my buddy Wikipedia would like to fill you in.
“A prayer walk is an activity that consists in walking and praying at the same time. It’s done not for the physical benefit but for the spiritual exercise, either publicly functioning also as a demonstration or rally (to let other people know the group is praying), or quietly in sight of the subject. For instance, a person or group may be praying for a town or city, and walk the streets of the city while praying, either out loud, or in silence.”
Basically, my idea would be to go prayer walking busing, instead of walking around a certain neighborhood or area I would hop on a bus route and pray as the bus went through different areas of the city. This way it allows me to see other parts of the city that I wouldn’t otherwise see and it gives me the opportunity for a little old fashion adventure.
If I can get a couple people from my church and school to come with me I would like to try and ride one entire bus route per month. I will continue to update ya’ll (ooo, I can say ya’ll like I am from Texas on my blog and no one can make fun of me haha!) as I take the next steps to hopefully making this a small ministry.
If you would pray for me as I take this challenge on that would be awesome, thanks everyone.