Mark W. Shead

Eric at AdventureLogue posted a link to my article about why you can’t drink the water in Mexico. This is based on our experience living in Durango Mexico as well as some trips to Mexico City. Quite a few people really seemed to enjoy the article. I’ve been a little surprised at how popular it has been. I guess everyone has heard that you can’t drink the water South of the border, but most people don’t really understand why.

From other people I’ve talked to it is fairly rare for you to be able to drink tap water in most countries. I’m assuming that England and Germany and the larger countries in Europe have water that you can drink, but the largest percentage of countries have water that isn’t safe for drinking. It will be interesting to see if Mexico continues to develop and if the water becomes drinkable in the next 50 years.

I finally sat down and made a list of the pros and cons of living in Durango Mexico. For example on the pro side is that there are very nice people and housing is reasonable. On the con side is the fact that food is more expensive than other places and they have scorpions.

All in all though Durango a nice place for us to live right now.

I posted some photos and a description of my work setup here in Mexico.  It isn’t anything fancy, but it lets me get my work done.  Other than my folding chair (which collapses several times a day), it is comfortable to work at and I feel like I can be quite productive–at least on days where I haven’t eaten any bad tacos.

The reason you can’t drink the water in Mexico has less to do with the way it is treated and more to do with the distribution system. Water only runs for a few hours per day and it goes into a cistern under your house. A pump carries the water up to a container on the roof to give you pressure. So the water has to sit in the cistern and again on the roof. By the time it actually comes out of the tap, it may have been sitting there for quite a while. (At this this is how it is in Durango Mexcio, and I think most other places in Mexico.)
The cisterns and holding tanks don’t seem to be something that gets cleaned very often and you run the risk of a mouse or something crawling into the holding tank and drowning.

There is an interesting discussion going on at Digital Point about WebmasterWorld’s cloaking setup. Basically if you click on a result in Google for WebmasterWorld, you get sent to a login page, where they suggest you pay for a membership and very small type where you can login for free.  So basically the average user gets a login screen and the googlebot gets the actual page content.

There has been a bunch of talk about this, but I have yet to see anyone from Google say it is ok.  Of course WMW is fairly well known so you’d think if there was a problem it would have been noticed by now.  If this is ok, it is a great way for people to get more subscribers to their website–show the results in Google, but don’t let them see it until they sign up.

We met with our private Spanish tutor yesterday.  It was a good meeting and she was helpful.  Even more helpful than the Spanish instruction was her explanation about some things that had been puzzling us about Durango.

We mentioned that the food prices seemed much higher than what we had been expecting.  She said this was because Durango doesn’t grow any of their own food.  Almost everything in the stores has to be imported from other Mexican cities.  She said they do raise cattle in the area, so beef is generally lower cost and high quality.  We don’t eat a lot of meat, so we haven’t noticed.

We talked about what the average salary was in Durango and she wasn’t sure, but she did say that the minimum wage was 42 pesos per day.  That is generally what unskilled labor is paid, so if you need someone to dig a ditch or something like that, you are looking to pay around $3.83 per day per person.  42 pesos seems pretty low when 1 kg of tomatoes cost 18 pesos.

In Durango Wal-Mart pays 500 pesos per week. I bet Wal-Mart in the US would love it if they could get employees for $45 per week.  Wal-Mart is considered a good employer here because they high younger people and work around their schedule so they can go to school.

I’m amazed at how much time we spend waiting in Mexico.  I’m beginning to suspect that when an appointment is for 12:00, you really aren’t expected to get there until 12:30 or so.

The other day we were going to look at a house for rent.  After waiting for 30 minutes, we called the owner and were told that they were “on their way”.  After an hour we tried calling them again, but their phone was off the hook.  After an hour and fifteen minutes we finally left.

When we go to the vet or doctor, it seems like the receptionist sees us come in, and then calls the doctor to tell him there are patients there.  I guess if they are use to not having people show up, it make sense to wait to leave your house until you know for sure they are there.

Our best bet is to probably call before we leave the house and confirm our appointment.  Unfortunately until we get better at Spanish, we are just as likely to end up canceling our appointment or doing some other harm.

The fear of messing something up is probably holding us back from learning Spanish as quickly as possible.  I don’t mind saying something wrong and appearing silly.  However once, we get a taxi driver headed in the right direction, I don’t want to try to startup a conversation and end up changing where we are going.

I struggle a lot with the idea of people being “born leaders”. Leadership is obviously something that can be learned and developed, but it seems kind of extreme to say that everyone has the potential to be a great leader. I suppose that most everyone has some capacity to lead or allowing people to raise their own children would be disastrous to society.

I do see a problem when we are so focused on trying to make everyone a leader, that we don’t really give a special focus to people who have natural leadership skills. Is it possible that while we maybe increasing the skill of those with little leadership capabilities, we are also lowering the abilities of people with great in-born skills?

I’ve talked about this before in an article about trying to teach eagles to run. It is possible, but still a waste of time.

I’ve finished all my requirement toward the ALM in IT except for my thesis. I had a thesis proposal approved and about a year later I was assigned a director. Unfortunately my topic was irrelevant after waiting a year as I had already completed the project on my own to solve a business problem I had. I wrote a new thesis proposal and submitted it in June 2006, when I wrote back to check on the status in August, I was told the proposal was fine, but they were still looking for a director.
Fortunately this time my topic isn’t something I’m going to complete unless it is for the thesis, so I don’t mind waiting. In one way I’m enjoying the delay because it means I still have access to the Harvard Library online resources. It is very nice to have easy access to all the journal articles.

On the other hand, I am interested in finishing the thesis up sometime in the near future.