Greetings from Guatemala City

After getting up at 3:30 to catch a 6:30 flight, and trasferring in Miami, I am finally in Guatemala. It´s colder than I thought it would be and louder with planes flying overhead and very noisy birds - quetzals??

I´m off to get some Guatemalan money to spend in one of Central America´s largest Mayan markets. Then we will continue on our 8 hour journey to our build site.

Not sure how accessible internet will be up in highlands. Stay tuned.

6th assignment: google docs

At first glance, google docs appears very similar to a wiki. But it offers more formatting options, not unlike a word document, without the annoying bugs.

To begin with, I didn't think you could

- create a file name, but you can!
- spell check, but you can!
- revert to a previous version and view your document's changes over time, but you can!
- link to other parts of the page or to other google docs - but you can!

I can also limit who has the right to edit and who can view it, as with a wiki.

I liked having everything -- emails, docs and blogs-- all linked together from google docs. Too bad you can't do it from Blogger.

But, I tried uploading files, and kept getting an error message -- because of TPL's firewall? I also tried sending one of my documents to my very complicated email address Moyra+Mackinnon-df6mj2-etc..@prod.writely.com, and again got an error message.

I think anything that is being continually updated or rewritten, such as a procedure or a training package, should be done using collaborative software. In the past, I might have used a wiki. Now I will consider google docs. A very powerful new tool.

update: I have just spent that last hour trying to add my web suggestions to the surfer's advisory site. But I couldn't. I kept getting a message saying there was a network problem. At first I thought it was because someone else seemed to be editing at the same time, so I logged out and tried again fifteen minutes later. No such luck. I am no longer as enamoured of this product.

another update: aarrggh.
I just tried again after the library was closed, when no one in his or her right mind would be working on this, and it still wouldn't save.

final update: finally able to add my sites after 16 million tries

5th Assignment: Getting Social

Once again I am trying to do more than the assignment asks for. I was trying to figure out how to add a del.icio.us tag cloud to my blog, but have settled with a link to my del.icio.us page.

I have, however, added tags to my posts and am trying to figure out how to create a tag cloud on my blog. For now I just have a list of my tags or "labels" on the right hand side of the page.

4th Assignment - What YOU can do with images

Although the tone of my blog is supposed to be serious, I did have fun creating these images:


Rigoberta Menchu






Beware of the Jaguar God of the Underworld, the Night Sun, one of the major characters of the Maya pantheon.










Warholized images of a Jaguar mask.

3rd assignment - Blogs

I'm familiar with Blogs and RSS feeds, but I still learned some interesting things

1. people publish blogs on anything regardless if there is an audience for it or not. A couple of the blogs that I selected only had two or three subscribers.

2. Bloglines allows you to put all of your feeds in a folder and then view all the posts in one continuous stream -- a little overwhelming if subscribe to a lot of blogs and don't view them regularly.

3. I'd forgotten how attractive some blogs are. I'm used to reading them through the bloglines interface so I miss the individual formatting, photos, etc.

2nd Assignment - Photos

Here are some images of Guatelemala:

Rigoberta Menchu, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and defender of the Mayan victims of the brutal civil war that tore through Guatemala between 1960 and 1996.

A woman sweeps in front of her shack.

Some Habitat for Humanity workers.

Welcome - 23 things, 1st assignment

This is my first blog that will be read widely by others (hopefully). I've tried creating other ones, but haven't been able to pique people's interest.