Month: April 2007

Running in Tampico

I have run in the city of Tampico before. This week I remembered something that I thought was humorous before, and it still is.

Each taxi that comes by they have to honk their horn to see if I want a ride. I guess I could understand that if I were standing on the street or walking. But, running?

One of the intersections I ran through this morning on my 3 mile run was interesting. The sewers were full from the heavy rains the night before. There were geysers coming out of the man-hole covers. During the night last night there was one man-hole cover right outside of my window that kept getting pushed up by the water and then falling back down and making that neat clanging and rolling around sound. At least, it is a neat sound in the middle of the day when you are not trying to sleep.

One other interesting thing about here is that the streets are concrete and not asphalt. That is not really fun to run on.

My luggage came home

Vacationing in Guadalajara. That is where the luggage was hiding out. I did not ask it to see if it went to check out the folkloric dancing or to see the cathedral. Guadalajara toysWherever it went, and why I will probably never know, but it decided to come join me in Tampico today. And, best of all, it was sober. That is always a plus when you are trying to keep your clothes on. You don’t want them to be drunk.

I am having some good meetings and accomplishing a lot here in Tampico. The majority of the group will leave Thursday morning, but my plane does not go back to Merida until Friday. I actually get a long layover in Mexico City. I know that is not what most people would want, but I am looking forward to going out and looking for shoes. I am hoping to find a shoe store near the airport. I should have about 3 hours to run around looking for shoes.

EMI to offer DRM-free music!

This is great news. I checked the dates of all the announcements I could find. They are all dated today, not April First like Google’s big announcement.

The deal with EMI is that they have offered to sell their entire catalog of digital music without DRM for 30 cents more than the normal price of $0.99. Besides losing the DRM (which keeps you from using your music on all of your digital music devices) you gain a higher quality song. They are doubling the bit rate of the song to 256 instead of 128.

Anyone who has purchased EMI music through the iTunes music store will be able to upgrade their music to this unbroken format for the $0.30 price difference. I realize that this is a 30% price increase and that I would never be excited about anything jumping in price that much, but this is a great step in the right direction.

I have previously posted about DRM and EMI’s talk of dropping it.

This is supposed to be available in May. I may start doing some purchasing then.

Vacationing in Mexico City

No, I am not vacationing there, but apparently my luggage is. I flew AeroCalifornia from Merida to Mexico last night. Then from Mexico to Tampico. I did not buy one ticket to get me from there to here. It was a couple hundred dollars cheaper to buy a round trip from Merida to Mexico and back. Then another round trip from Mexico to Tampico.

I was assured at the check in counter that my luggage would be transfered and that I would not need to claim it in Mexico. I had a feeling that it would not go well, but did not follow that up by checking in the baggage claim area in Mexico since that would have meant that I needed to leave the secure area and have to re-enter. I should have taken the time to do it though.

Fortunately I have arrived for the meeting a day early. There is nothing I have to be presentable for today. But it was also a great running day–cool and no responsibilities. But my shoes are in my suitcase.

The neat thing is that I am borrowing clothes from the missionary’s skinny teenage son and they fit. It is just that the look that fits a 17 year old kid does not look quite right on an almost 40 year old.

Happy April Fool’s Day

This morning when I was preaching for the church service I mentioned that today is called Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday). Our son leaned over to my wife and asked her what that meant. She explained that it was called Palm Sunday because when Jesus entered into Jerusalem the people believed he was the Christ as fortold in the Old Testament. He had come to be their king. They laid out palm leaves for him to enter the city as a king.

Our son thought for a minute and then leaned back to my wife and asked, “Then how did it come to be known as April Fool’s day?”