Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

So I am in San Antonio. I want to go riding with Gordon. Reggie freakin Regan gave Gordon an old mountain bike but he had only ever ridden it on the road. I had a quick look. Its a decent bike. i pumped up the tyres and checked the brakes. Gordon jumped on for a test ride but the front gears were not working. My wife Judith had given me a list of bike shops here in SA before I left. She is good like that. So I opened them up in a browser and Gordon recognised one shop cyclelogic as being 2 miles away. We go there and the shop was crammed with bikes. Interestingly for me they were Marin dealers. My first bike was a Marin Pine Mountain. Here is a dodgy mobile phone pic of the new 29’er. Anyway we had a great chat, they fixed the gears on the spot and told us where to ride. Local knowledge is always best. We organised to come back to get a small Issue with my brakes fixed after the ride.
Gordon got lost while we were riding but that is just par for the course with him. It took 30 minutes for me and 4 other riders to find him. I’m getting used to it. If I was Jeanene I would have had him fitted with a GPS tracker under his skin by now.

After a great ride  we headed back to the shop. I had noticed that they had a fish sign on the business card and a crown of thorns hanging above the counter. I said “hey we are Christians too” and asked about the crown of thorns.

Allen told us a story in the most humble way about how he had helped a blind girl who wanted to ride by getting her and her mother fixed up with a tandem bike and how they had hand made this crown and given it to him. They were so touched by the way he had helped when no other shop would.
While he was telling the story we were both fascinated and my gut feeling was that this guy was living out his High Calling in his shop. In fact he said what he does is help people and that his work place just looked like a bike shop. After telling him a bit about why we were here and www.thehighcalling.org website he recognised the radio broadcasts and said he listened to them each morning.
Allen is a real neat bloke. His shop is great. i can heartily recommend him.

We just had 8 days in Tasmania – a fantastic family holiday with friends and extended family. It was an amazing experience for lots of reasons, just being away from work was one! Seeing a different place and taking my kids to see and experience different things was also great. I spent some time also playing with photography (not working).

I wanted to share my favourite photos from the trip. Some of these are just mobile phone captures, but the emotion was what makes them special.

Potts Point is not as flash a place as it sounds. It is next to Kings Cross.

Don’t go to any Thai restaurants in the cross and expect to pay with EFTPOS or credit card – they all only take cash.

It is sad seeing how young the hookers are in the cross.

A 2 star hotel is rated that way for very good reasons – cheap and very basic – however it was clean.

Business class on a plane is much nicer than economy – but they still give you a dodgy plastic knife.

I have had so much new stuff come over my desk the last few days I haven’t got time to try it or even review it properly. There is a lot of new innovative things going on at the moment on the web.

Here is a randomly ordered selection of stuff that I thought was cool or useful.

Large File Sharing Services

(also added to my original large file sharing post)

Pando is free P2P software that makes downloading, streaming and sharing large media files fast, easy and fun. Need to email large attachments, IM a folder, or publish your downloadable videos to the Web? Maybe you'd just like to watch full-screen HD Internet TV. Meet Pando.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta

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Access files from anywhere

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• Password-protected sharing; you control who views and edits your work

Work with programs you know

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• Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook

Free Photo Shop tutorials at Luxa

SkyScanner is a Flight Search site that works for other countries than US.