So all 12 of us landed in Bangkok and when we got to the hotel all of our 16 checked bags, 20 carry-ons, and the 8 suitcases that we left in storage were in the lobby.  I was riding the elevator and a woman in a dry British accent said, “That’s a well-luggaged group that just arrived.”  I smiled and said, “Well, there’s 12 of us and we’re traveling to 3 countries…”  She smiled and said, “Well I guess you deserve a lot of luggage, but not that much.” ( I didn’t tell her that we had a lot more when we started the trip.)  The comment was bad enough, but then we were hit with a huge overweight charge on our flight from Bangkok to Kolkata.

So we are making a concerted effort to pare down our luggage for our next trip.  Providentially, Lifehacker just posted, how-to-cram-all-your-travel-gear-in-one-bag.  There’s quite a bit of info there if you follow all the links and then dive down the worm hole of all the sub links - which is what I spent a bunch of time doing this weekend.  I’ll try to cover the highlights: Read the rest of this entry »

Listing how many times a word occurs in a story is something that my wife does on a regular basis. Finding the number of unique words and how many times those words occur is useful for determining how complex a story is, finding the most common characters, and can even be used as a manual spell check.

There are two tools that I’ve found that make this very easy - The first is a Microsoft Word plug-in called Unique Words List by Ed Weber from the Office file list on the WUGNET forums. It adds a button to your toolbar in Word and brings up a dialog with options for how you want your word list. It can only do alphabetical lists, but you can easily convert the list to a table by select the text and then going to Table->Convert->Text to Table…

The second tool is for the word list junkie like me. TextSTAT can take multiple Word documents, text files, and even web pages and compile a complete word list for all the words. You can choose to sort by frequency, alphabetical, or retrograde (alphabetical from the end of the word). Then you can double click any word in the list and get a concordance of all the uses of that word, and finally you can double click a concordance entry and it will show the word in a larger context. Great stuff!!

A while back I posted about drinking a gallon of water a day. Well, I have a confession to make - I drank a gallon of water for the very first time in my life, today! I never actually took the advice I posted originally. I’d seen my wife, Connie, do it with the gallon jug in the fridge, but never got that far myself.

BUT, Thursday, I went in to the Urologist to get the results from the tests that they ran. The doctor said, “I have one simple piece of advice. DRINK MORE!” Just after my surgery for kidney stones, I was doing pretty good about drinking, but I quickly went back to my typical 3-4 glasses a day.

So after my appointment, we went out and bought two 1 liter bottles with spouts. Yesterday, I started late and drank 3 bottles, which is way more than 3-4 glasses, but still not what the doctor recommended - 1 GALLON. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year when our boys were 3, they ran out of pages in their passports, and we had to have more stitched in. We have been taking them overseas with us every year since they were 6 months. They had their 3rd birthday in Myanmar, Christmas in China, and their 4th birthday in Venezuela. We do have quite a bit of experience traveling with small children, but even so, every trip is an adventure.

My first point of advice is a negative one: Lower Your Expectations: Read the rest of this entry »

A copule years ago I didn’t do so well keeping track of my stuff. I lost my wallet in Bangkok airport and then a couple weeks later I left my billfold in a taxi in Myanmar with about $300 in it. Thankfully the taxi driver returned it in about 15 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been using the Leatherman Wave for a number of years now. It’s an incredible tool. First of all it’s very well made from very strong 100% stainless steel. (Leatherman actually uses different grades of steel depending on the particular tool - so knives are made to be sharpened and screwdrivers aren’t.) Second, you can access 4 of the tools 2 knives, a saw, and a file without opening the entire tool. Those tools have a convenient locking mechanism as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I compiled a number of resources for developing PowerPoint presentations using the Beyond Bullet Points methodology.

Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire Author: Cliff Atkinson ISBN: 0735620520 Publisher: Microsoft Press Date published: 2005-03-02 List price (USD): $24.99

Multimedia Learning Author: Richard E. Mayer ISBN: 0521787491 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Date published: 2001-04-23 List price (USD): $29.99

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Here are some links that I have compiled on the topic of Bible storying:

Communicating God’s Message in an Oral Culture

Bible Storying To Evangelize , Plant Churches And Train Leaders

Chronological Bible Storying:& ISC Storying Manual

Towards Contextualized Bible Storying: Cultural factors which impact a Sindhi context (125 pages)

Making Disciples Of Oral Learners

Technorati Tags: Bible storying, links, orality, cross cultural communication, contextualization

When you’re traveling to a church, most of the time you absolutely, positively have to get there. The pastor is depending on you to fill his spot for a few hours and your schedule is booked so this is the only Sunday you can have this meeting . Well, Rain-X WindshieldTreatment won’t get you out of the ditch or the snowbank, but it will let you see to drive in conditions that otherwise would make you consider pulling off at the nearest rest stop.

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Many times missionaries are in places where it’s hot or dry or both. I was in northeast India this past January and it was extremely dry. The problem was it was rather cold. So I didn’t drink much water. Then I got a stomach bug just before we left India for the States and lost a lot of fluids. To top it all off, we spent 3 days traveling home (airline travel tends to dehydrate you). So less than a week after we got back, I was in the emergency room with kidney stones. I had a 2mm one en route that was giving me a lot of pain, and I had a 7-8mm one hanging around in my kidney. Typically 5mm is the largest you can pass, so they had to do a lithotripsy (aka shooting high-voltage electroshock waves through your kidney to break up the stone). Read the rest of this entry »