Justin McCandless

I have officially finalized my plans for Spring Break, and I will be going to Guatemala. The point of the trip is to work on setting up a solar power system for a school in a remote region of Guatemala. I kind of randomly stumbled upon the trip, which is sponsored by a student organization here and a local nonprofit, and now I wound up deciding to go. It should be a lot of fun, though. It will only be a 9 day trip, but I should have a bit of time to check out the towns we'll pass through and stuff while I'm not recording measurements of the school for my CAD drawings when I get back. And I will be able to practice my Spanish a bit, which I unfortunately don't have the opportunity to do very often in Michigan.

Another important yet neglected topic. I've posted a bit about Loja before, but now I have some pictures to go along with it. This is a cool park near the house. Note the llamas. You can sort of see one of the rivers that runs through town in the picture. There's a dam that makes a small lake in it for this park. Lots of typical houses and stuff in the background, as well as that castle that I went to earlier up on the mountain on the left.

I only have a little over a week left in Ecuador, so I'll try to get in as many posts as I can before my trip is over. I realized that I haven't really posted that much on what I do on a typical day to day basis here in Loja, so that's what this post is about. Sans travelling, giant pigs, or anything out of the ordinary whatsoever, here's what I do on an average workday.

I finally got my web-based updater software up and running for this blog. This was kind of the whole point of the transition to php and MySQL, despite being delayed a bit. Basically, it makes it really, really easy to update the site. Evidence: I am currently writing an entry about a writing entries. I can now add new entries to this blog using a simple form from any web browser.

Today is the Ecuadorian independence day, which I didn't actually know about until yesterday, but apparently it means that I get the day off work. At least I think so, no body really ever told me anything about it, though I do remember on Friday somebody asking me to help with something Tuesday (strangely not Monday). So, I'm staying home. And since I'm home (and my family is in Macará visiting relatives), I might as well write about what I did yesterday since it was fairly interesting.

I think I have the majority of the bugs ironed out of my new blog software, pending a few pictures I'm still uploading on the terribly sketchy internet. I swear, I get 10 times as much stuff done in the same time in Michigan as I do here only because of the difference in the internet. But anyways, here's what I did with the site. The old site (being nothing but hand-written html and css), was a pain to update and maintain, so I came up with a solution.

Finally, finally, after waay too much time and delays, version 1.0 of the Arcoiris website is up and running. It took me awhile to get all the information that I needed out of the Arcoiris staff, but I eventually got an amazingly well done set of noticias which I promptly translated and used my own update system to post. And the rest of the stuff I needed I just improvised. I'm still in sort of crunch time after launch, fixing and tweaking things, but I'm really happy with the way the site is looking at the moment.

I use several different computers, and several different operating systems, and I wanted to be able to have all my browser settings, contacts, and calendar info available on all of them. Without restricting my self to solely using web apps. And for free. Here's how I did it. I was able to sync my favorite software for all of the above tasks using a few featurs and add ons. The software I synced was: Firefox on any computer using the add on Mozilla Weave Thunderbird contacts on any computer and my Gmail contacts using the add on Zindus Lightning or Sunbird on any computer and Google Calendar using a feature called CalDAV Starting with Firefox, the Mozilla-made add on Weave will sync all of your browser settings when you use any computer with the add on installed.

Last Saturday (25/07/09) I went hiking at Podocarpus, this time at the entrance located on the way to Vilcabamba. I had already been to the San Francisco entrance and the Bombuscaro entrance in Zamora, so this was entrance 3/3 for me. I went with Ángel and Paola from Arcoiris, as well as the other intern at Arcoiris Audrey and her boyfriend. On the way up to the refuge there in one of the Arcoiris trucks, a landslide had blocked the road completely about three-fourths of the way up, so we had to get out and walk the rest.

I just got my pictures off of my camera (without destroying my memory card this time) so I thought I'd post some of them. These pictures span from my trip to Baños de Ambato to a quick visit to San Francisco cloud forest to my host brother Renato's graduation. And note that this time around you can click on the image for the giant version. This is the mountain town of Baños in Pichincha in northern Ecuador.