FROGLEGS

Auto-respond emails are a bit of a two edged sword. On the one hand, they dispel expectation of immediate reply. But on the other hand, they endlessly clutter up your email inbox. And wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a program that would respond once to each individual email? Then you could be informed with the first email (helpful) and not get a reply to each subsequent email while that person is on holiday (annoying).

I’m responsible for sending a weekly newsletter for 24-7 Prayer. Every time I send it out, I get an average of 45-60 auto-response emails. Are people really on holiday that often?!? Auto-responders should be responsibly turned off after holidays are over. My friend Carla is extremely responsible in that respect. I know I could set up a rule in Mail.app to take those responses to my junk mail folder, but still…

Samuel and I are hoping to go out to this groundbreaking power plant near Sanlucar La Mayor on Thursday to see what the hullabaloo is about. We hope to get close enough to the power plant to be able to take some pictures as well. No particular reason, just think it might be interesting. And it is close to the pool!

The challenge will be finding the actual power plant. I’ve looked around a bit online, and the company that owns the plant seem to be a bit “hush hush” about its location. I suppose we could try stopping in Sanlucar and asking around.

Sophia videos up on Friday!

Calling all Grandparents!

I’m opening up a new category called “Video”. I can bet you know who the videos will be of.

I’m going to try and get up one video a week of Sophia. It isn’t going to be very flashy, it’ll just be about 3 minutes of her goofing around.

… wrote some really good songs (The Guests, Hallelujah), and some really bad ones (I’m Your Man). Sometimes I really like Leonard and other times his music makes me cringe.

I’m working on an essay about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade this week. There are a few things that jump out at me:

• The Holocaust of the Jews during WWII, horrific as it was, involved about one fifth of the fatalities of what must surely be considered in today’s parlance “Africa’s Holocaust”. Conservative estimates put the total traffic of the Atlantic slave trade at around 40 million total slaves bought on the African coast. Around 27 million survived the “middle passage“.
• As much as we’d like to think that an altruistic appeal to Judeo-Christian humanistic values led to the abolition of the slave trade, it is more likely that it ended because a)it was becoming less profitable and b) it was in the best interest of the British Empire and its unbelievably large naval fleet to do so.
• William Wilberforce was probably not at all like he was portrayed to be in the recent movie “Amazing Grace” and countless sermons and Christian books. (This might lead me to go on a rant about why we, as followers of Jesus Christ, seem to have a penchant for being dishonest about our history?)
• Thomas Clarkson was a dude worth making movies about.

Rant continues after the break…

(more…)

Apparently, Sevilla is on a fast track to become one of the greener cities in Europe. Both Engadget and AutoblogGreen picked up a story featured on the Agencia Andaluza de Energia (Andalucian Energy Agency website which says that there is a plan afoot to convert all of the city’s stoplights to energy-saving LED models. That is a fantastic plan and a great way to spend tax-payer’s money. I think investing in sure fire energy-saving methods is extremely appropriate at this time in history.

We’ve also got a solar power plant under construction that could, if expanded, power the entire city. I think that would probably make Sevilla one of the greenest cities in the world, wouldn’t it?

As this is Sevilla, the land of patronage and corruption, anything could go wrong between now and the completion of these two projects. But the fact that they have been approved and received funding is promising. Maybe Andalucia isn’t as backwater as some have thought in the past?