In addition to our monthly prayer requests that we put up each month (see upper right corner), I thought I’d mention the things we are praying to see become a reality in 2009. We ask you to pray regularly with us for at least one of these requests. There are some that only the Lord can answer directly. But who knows? Maybe you or someone you know will be the Lord’s answer to our prayers.

Health and family

1. We pray that in 2009, Blanca will get relief from her insomnia, an ongoing problem for years » Continue reading “Our 2009 ‘wish list’”
   

Thought you would all like to see Daniel’s new hairdo. Mom and Dad are sighing…

Linux.com did a write up of TiddlyWiki recently, and one of the two TiddlyWiki applications featured was my to-do list organizer TiddlyDu2! Check out the write up here: http://www.linux.com/feature/152948 and check out TiddlyDu2 for yourself here: http://www.giffmex.org/tiddlydu2.html.

Update: The Lifehacker website also recently had an article on TiddlyDu2. See here: http://lifehacker.com/5100041/tiddlydu2-manages-your-tasks-on-the-go

Hi friends, below you will find links to our prayer letter, one in pdf format and the other in Word format.

http://www.giffmex.org/pdfs/dec08pl.pdf - the pdf version

http://www.giffmex.org/docs/dec08pl.doc - the Word version

If you are here because you received our e-mail notice, please note that our new mailing address and phone number are included in the e-mail we sent you, but not on the above online versions of our prayer letter. Please go back, if you haven’t, and jot down our new address and phone number from that e-mail. We want you to know where to find us when you call us, mail us, or visit us!

Blessings in Christ,

Dave and Blanca

I was recently interviewed by the Calvin Theological Seminary Forum about my experiences with baptism and how that impacts my ministry here in Mexico. If you’d like to check out the issue, it is available as a pdf here: http://www.calvinseminary.edu/pubs/forum/08fall.pdf

It’s not like I go looking for more work to do. But sometimes an idea pops in my head unexpectedly and I have to do something about it right away before the inspiration is gone. That’s what the creation of No-Brainer Notes was like a couple weeks ago - a ‘brain-burst’ followed by a brief burst of activity.

No-Brainer Notes is the easiest way to take and organize notes that I know of. There are a lot of note-taking tools out there - the market is full of wikis and Evernotes and whatnot. NBN doesn’t have some of the power features of other tools, but it has a few advantages that the others don’t:

• It allows you to quickly create a multi-level index of topics and subtopics that your notes fit into.
• It has simple instructions for creating notes from the top down (from master topics to subtopics to notes) or from the bottom up (from notes to subtopics to master topics).
• Its clean interface makes it easy to use and easy on the eye. Many of the TiddlyWiki features that confuse newcomers have been hidden from view.
• It’s also available in Spanish
• It’s absolutely free. You can download as many NBN files as you wish without cost.

In addition, NBN benefits from all the great features of TiddlyWiki:

• Note creation and searching TiddlyWiki is lightning fast compared, for example, to MediaWiki (the wiki that Wikipedia is created from).
• TiddlyWiki formatting allows you to format tables, use custom CSS styling, and other formatting that is not available in tools like Evernote.
• TiddlyWiki is a web application that runs on nothing more than a web browser. There are no programs involved, and you can carry it on a USB stick and use it from any computer, Mac, Windows or whatever.
• The many plugins available for TiddlyWiki means you can tailor it to your wishes.

If you follow the download instructions for NBN and play with it for no more than ten minutes, I’m sure you will find it a ‘no-brainer’ to use. Go to NBN by clicking on the screenshot above. Enjoy!

On October 1 we will be moving to a new house since the owner of our current place wants to sell our place. Here is the view we will have from our living room:

And here is the whole set of pictures of our new place:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/giffmex/sets/72157607500278869/

Yesterday at church we celebrated Mexican Independence Day by wearing traditional Mexican outfits and eating lots of food, of course. Blanca made her chalupas, which were a big hit. We also ate sausage from Toluca, the tastiest sausage I’ve ever had, and a fruit that looked like rotted watermelons and had the texture of oriental noodles, but tasted good. Here’s a photo of Alexandra with her friend Daniela:

And a group shot of everyone who wore traditional clothing:

Click here to see the whole set.

I finally figured out where the RSS feed generator was, and added it. You can find it on the bottom right in the ‘admin stuff’ section. Click on ‘RSS Entries’ link to put a feed right in your browser menu. That way you can easily keep up with our goings-on.

I was at a motivational impasse for a Spanish project I am working on for 1 Peter for my students. Then the thought struck me to study the book in a different way, and in English first, then finish the original project in Spanish.

But thanks to a couple new tweaks, this ‘quick fix’ in English has become a very helpful resource in its own right, and I am pretty excited about it. In a nutshell it is a file that lets you see at a glance the themes, literary elements, names for God, cast of characters, etc of 1 Peter. Colorful tag clouds let you see which themes and elements are most prominent, and the full lists let you see which verses include which themes.

I had already been looking in depth at the themes of 1 Peter, but even so, doing this exercise helped me see a number of connections that I hadn’t seen and probably would never have seen otherwise. Check it out by clicking on the image above, and follow the instructions to save a free copy to your computer.

Update: the 1 Peter overview is now complete! Make sure to check it out and comment on it here. Blessings to you all.