Category: Projects

I’m New Here

It’s been a long time since I’ve made an effort to give out my blog address. So since I might have a new audience for the first time in a long time, I’m going to start my 2019 Quito Quest blogging journey by answering all the questions I usually get from people who are trying to figure out what exactly I do in Ecuador.

What exactly do you do in Ecuador?

I will be hosting a short-term team. In general, teams come for between 1-2 weeks to work with ministry sites in (and sometimes out of) Quito. The team hosts are around basically to take care of the team. Food, housing, transportation, translation, cultural acquisition… all the things they need to be running smoothly so they can do their projects, interact with people in a healthy way, and stay safe… that’s my job.

How long have you been doing this?

I started going to Ecuador in 2007. I’ve been hosting teams since 2008. I’ve lived there for several springs and summers and a big stint between 2009-2010. These days I just go back for two weeks or so every March to host a team. Since the first time I went, the longest I’ve ever gone without being in Ecuador was 15 months (between March 2012 when I hosted a Canadian team in the jungle and July 2013 when I took my own high school students from Elizabeth City on a team).

Where do you stay?

My wonderful friends the Vivanco family let me crash with them. Cameron, Roberto, Graham (7), Liam (5), and Francis (3) will be part of the cast of characters in my daily recaps. So, probably, will Luciano (the cat), and Caroline (my partner, who is also flying in from the U.S. just to be a host).

Do you get paid to do this?

That’s cute.

Travel Prep 2018

March is here again, and with it come plane tickets and a host of technological projects.

First, my ancient iPhone 4s finally gave out. It has a hardware error stemming from an issue with the WiFi antenna. I cannot connect to WiFi at all, which means I cannot disconnect the phone from Find My iPhone, which means I cannot even reset it to factory defaults. Maybe I will get around to finding a SIM card with a data connection so I can fix at least some of these issues, but for the moment, it is simply out of commission. Enter, “new” iPhone.

My iPhone 4s was the first iPhone I ever purchased, and I purchased it Factory Unlocked (which was not a common, nor inexpensive thing back then) and it was with me through three US cell carriers until I finally switched back to Verizon and CDMA service, and a new iPhone 5s. The 4s then permanently became my Ecuadorian phone, replacing a refurbished 3GS I had purchased in the meantime, and I would just keep my Ecuadorian SIM card in it and add a few dollars to my prepaid account every time I was in the country. And the 4s outlasted not just that old 3GS, but the 5s as well. That phone’s battery exploded when I was in California in 2016 and I upgraded to a then-band new iPhone 7. So it has been the Ecuadorian 4s and the North American 7 until today, when my refurbished iPhone 6 arrived.

One of the things I have learned with all these generations of phones is that SIM cards keep getting smaller. At one time, I had what we referred to as the Nokia “Brick” phone (those indestructible candybar phones that we still give to our Youth World interns in 2018 because the cockroaches will be calling each other on them after the nuclear war). That phone had what most people would call a full-size SIM card in it (although that’s technically a “Mini” SIM). I purchased a SIM card cutter way back in the day to slice it down to fit in my 4s, which required a Micro SIM. And that card just got sliced down again with a new cutter into a Nano SIM  for the iPhone 6.

Restored from the 4s Ecuaphone backup, it will be all ready to use when I step off the plane. Or at least it would be if I ever managed to have any saldo left when I finish hosting a team. Hopefully I’ll remember to turn off my cellular data instead of blowing through all my saldo before the team even arrives, which I may have done… two years in a row. My Quito Quest pareja, Caroline, gets a little frustrated with this phenomenon when all outgoing phone calls and texts have to be on her phone until we remember to send someone to the Farmacia to recharge my saldo. I could solve all of this by just using one of the Nokia phones. But what can I say? I am spoiled.

The other tech project has been updating my website. I generally renew my hosting and domain registration in February, so that has been done for a couple of weeks, but parts of the site have been broken for a long time. The DNS records were a little wonky, probably since I switched hosting providers years ago, or possibly since I added Google Apps. At any rate, if you got here by putting a “www” in front of my domain name, then my update worked.

The site was also running a WordPress theme that was at bare minimum 5 years old, and had survived heavy coding updates I did to it throughout that time. The bulk of those coding edits were to incorporate a head image randomizer, the thing that makes the top image change every time you visit the site, click “Refresh,” or go to another page within the site. This option is now something that’s built into the WordPress software. I was just doing it before it was cool, thanks to some PHP script found and then reworked by Mike Turner. The result of all this was that as the underlying software has changed and modernized, my theme would not even display my blog posts on the front page anymore. Obviously, you’re reading this, so I’ve corrected that error. For the moment, I have done this mainly by changing to a less archaic WordPress theme. It will probably change again as I get annoyed at searching for post dates off to the side. But at the moment, I am simply happy that there is no quest required to access my content, or even my site anymore.

Springtime Web Maintenance

I so rarely check look at my own website when I’m not in Ecuador, that the most common occurrence for the last several years is for me to find it totally broken when I do bother to check on it. So if you notice the face-lift, that’s why things are different. I logged on last night, and lo and behold, the front page simply wouldn’t load.

I chalk it up to laziness on my part in updating. Somebody found a flaw in WordPress and exploited it so that the theme I was running got messed up. I switched themes, and most of the content is back. But it doesn’t look like “me” around here at the moment.

I tell you that to tell you this. Once the school year starts and I return to a normal schedule, my plan is to begin a youth ministry blog, and split my website into two sections. One for my Ecuador writings, and one for my musings on the oddities of working with students and getting a paycheck from Jesus. So that face-lift will continue, but hopefully that’s a reason for me to actually create content here more often. And keep my website updated. And not get hacked. Again.

Keep checking back.

New Writing Project

Yesterday I began the process of writing an article about Guardians, a program within the Inglés Student Ministries (ISM) branch of Youth World. Throughout my afternoon hanging out with the chaplains at Alliance Academy and the high school juniors and seniors who really run the program, there were tons of entertaining moments I just had to write about, but knew should never make it into something published with our organization’s name officially attached.

My first and favorite was when my friend Ashley had all of the kids circle around Dani, the girl who was speaking during the whole-group program. Her directions were “Everyone circle around and touch Dani… appropriately.” I’ve actually been in several adult groups where that particular disclaimer might have been helpful and effective. It’s going to be fun hanging out with this group as I work on the article.

Virus Fixed

As far as I know, I’ve wiped out the virus. Please let me know if you are still having problems.

As far as the new theme, it’s an indirect result of this whole process. I was reminded of the fact that my website has looked exactly the same for over two years now, and I couldn’t find the original source code for my theme anyway. Rather than going through every single file in the theme to manually wipe out the virus (I actually think I manually destroyed the only occurrence, but would have wanted to be sure), I just installed a new theme. It was probably just as much work to re-crop, re-size, and re-upload all the images for my randomized header, but be that as it may, I’m still pretty pleased with the time and effort that went into it, and the final product.

For those of you who are just reading this on facebook or anywhere else this gets imported via RSS, I’d encourage you to cruise on over to dannypeck.net and take a look around. If you haven’t actually been to the original source of my blog before, you may find something interesting. If you have, hopefully you’ll like the new look.

First Article Published

Finally, with a lot of help, input, and editing from around Youth World, I’ve actually published the first article I’ve been working on. For those of you who aren’t on Youth World’s mailing list, you can check it out here in PDF format. If you’d like to be added to Youth World’s mailing list, which I’m administering at the moment, you can send an e-mail to mail@youthworld.org.ec to subscribe.