Hello World.

This is the place where I will be typing my journal entries here. I want to say that I will update this 2-3 times per week, but I am unsure if that will happen till I am there. It might be more, it might be less.

Here is an e-mail message I recently sent to everyone following me in my life:

Hello Everyone, Here is my first Newsletter for this year: "The Life of Matt Sawyers." Numerous things have happened my life in the past 5 months. And one major thing about to happen in my life - studying abroad in Argentina. At this point I have yet to create an actual newsletter, but my website contains a lot of what I have been doing. Namely I wanted to write about my trip to Argentina. I am leaving this Saturday (May 17th) out of Houston, then I have a 9hr layover in Miami (yuck!) then I fly to Santiago, Chile, then on to Mendoza, Argentina. I will be spending the next 3 months in Mendoza with a host family; I will have a mother, sister & a brother. My "brother" is 28 years old, and my "sister" is 25. I will be taking a total of 14 credit hours (4 Spanish courses). Hopefully I will have some sort of working knowledge of Spanish by then... The first 6 weeks I will take a Spanish 1 & 2, then the last 6 weeks, I will take Spanish 3 & 4 (which are mainly literature classes). Being a video/photo person I was a bit disgruntled when I knew I couldn't take my video camera. But I am going to take the risk and take my photo camera. I will post my pictures online here: http://arphotos.msbaylor.com , the password for the site is ****** . If you have an RSS reader such as RSSOwl or Firefox Sage plugin (recommended. If you don't have Firefox, shame on you...) you can click on the little icon to the left of the Copyright notice at the bottom of the page within the album to receive updates on when I update my photos (then click on your choice of feeds. I recommend the "featured" one). I am also keeping a blog which I will update as often as possible (at least 2-3 times/wk). The blog is located at: http://argentina.msbaylor.com also below the blog you will find that you can also subscribe to the blog using one of the feed readers I mentioned before. And finally, I have decided to take a very compact video recorder with me. I will be able to upload the videos straight to the web with ease. You can visit the folder here: http://arvideos.msbaylor.com . Currently there are not any videos up, but once I start posting them, you will also have the ability to download them if you wish. Happy Reading! ~Matt Sawyers A Little About RSS & Atom Feeds From Wikipedia: "Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs (Like RSSOwl) or filtered displays (Firefox plug in)." By clicking on an icon similar to this one: . Atom feeds are just an alternative to RSS feeds. They are usually more compatible. To read more about RSOwl click here or the Firefox plug-in here. Side Note: My New Year's Resolution My new year's resolution is to run 4 half-marathons this year (In no less than 10K sections). So far I have 2 down & 2 to go. I did the Disney Half in January & the Austin ATT Half in February. I have also did a 10K with my Dad on April 1st. I am planning on doing the San Antonio Rock & Roll Half in November. Click on the picture to be taken to see all my pictures from my running event. Again the password is: ***** .