Justin McCandless

I finally succeeded in getting another 90 days here in Ecuador. I went to the immigration office here in Loja, and they told me to go to Cuenca, Guayaquil, or Quito to try and get a visa to stay longer. But everyone continued to tell me that I could do it by going to Peru, despite already having tried that and failing. Later that day Ángel from Arcoiris told me that he was going to Huaquillas again that day and that I should come along to try the Peru thing again with him, then I could go to Guayaquil from there if it didn't work.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } As my last main post from Ecuador, I thought I'd take a look back by just thanking all of the people who have made this trip as amazing as it was.  Enjoy.   Thank you to my host family, Irene for the awesome chow, Rrrrrenato have fun being a foreigner in Bélgica. Conchita, come visit in the US! Your comped room in Vegas awaits   Everyone from the Zamora trip, great hike.

Yes, I actually did get the website updates to the server as promised. I'm pretty sure there are a few bugs, and I'm definitely sure that there are a few things that I need to do better. But we'll worry about that later. For now just take a look around and enjoy the incredible improvement over the old site. Quick tour. If you'll take a look at the Categories section in the bar to the right, you'll notice that I've divided up all of my posts into different sections.

The long, long overdue updates to this website are finally almost here. I should seriously have them up by the end of this week. There is still tons more I want to add, but what I have now is just about fully functional and is still an immense improvement so I'm pushing it out the door. Don't get too excited though, it's actually very similar to the old site in terms of appearance.

I did get to Peru this past weekend, and I actually succeeded in getting all 4 stamps that I needed, but after I thought I had succeeded the Ecuadorian dude at the border showed me my account and I still had only 16 days left. Not good. I took a bus out to Huaquillas Friday night, trying to finally get this Peru thing over with. My plan was to go to Tumbes, Peru, spend the night, and then come back the next day and hope that there was some way to take care of my passport thing along the way.

Peru ended up not working out last weekend due to the other interns finding out at the last minute that their visas didn't let them leave the country during the time they're supposed to be here. So I stayed here in Loja and got some work done, which was good, but I still have the problem of my winding down time to legally be in Ecuador. I think I'm going to end up heading to Peru solo, hopefully next weekend.

I’ve been writing a bunch of somewhat useful little programs during my web design jobs and here’s one that might possibly prove useful to someone else. It’s in Perl, and free of course. Feel free edit the code, and really do whatever you want with it. As long as you don’t claim it’s yours or anything like that, we’re cool. The link’s at the bottom. A lot of times I use a javascript file full of document.write statements to write a bunch of html into an html page.

First of all let me start by making a correction. Remember how I was praising the cyber cafe with SD card readers, and I was all happy that I would be able to post pictures now? Well that cyber cafe sucks. The next time I went in there, the card reader was acting funny and ended up just not reading my card, which didn't really bother me at the time since I could just try another one the next day or something.

Yes, contrary to popular belief, this blog is capable of handling pictures. I ended up missing the Cuenca trip for a work trip to Huaquillas, and combined with finding a cyber cafe with SD card readers we now have Huaquillas in Pictures. So I actually didn't get any pictures of Huaquillas itself (whoops), but I got plenty of my two trips from Huaquillas to some islands in the vicinity. So before I get in to that part of the trip, let me describe Huaquillas and what I did before heading out on the two other boat trips.

I ran into a problem awhile ago involving Steam. I always had it installed on my external hard drive, which is usually connected to my laptop, to save space on my boot drive. I then took my trip to Ecuador, leaving my external drive at home. Because Steam was installed on a currently non existent drive, it wouldn't run (obviously), but more importantly it also refused to uninstall. And last but not least, after downloading a new install client, it also wouldn't let me install it anew on my internal drive.