I had the privilege of meeting the Lakeland mayoral and city commission candidates on September 29 at an event hosted by the Lakeland Chamber of Commerce. I want to thank the Chamber of Commerce for organizing this event and the candidates for being willing to speak directly to individual voters like me. Ordinary citizens like me seemed to be a minority of those in attendance. For those who were not able to attend, here is a run-down of my impressions. With one exception, I think all the candidates would serve Lakeland well.

Google Calendar can share subscriptions with other devices, but it does not provide a way to find the option. To find it, go to https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect.

Last week, I wrote about how free software has to break out of the customer-vendor mindset. The customer-vendor mindset doesn’t work with free software because users don’t pay and developers don’t provide customer service. The free software community works on a build-what-you-use model. I ended by saying that the build-what-you-use model is not enough to sustain hero developers—people who contribute at a level that cannot be sustained by their own use of free software.

I was able to spend some time in the DrupalCon Community Summit yesterday. One of our topics was how a paid ecosystem could align with Drupal core values. We have developers who are not getting paid for the work they do to support their projects, and users who complain about the support they are given as if they had paid for it. Developers feel like users are bad customers because they don't pay, and users feel like developers are bad vendors because they don’t provide support.

I enjoy listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Skeptical investigation is necessary to find truth. But because we can’t personally investigate everything, we may be misled when we have to rely on what appear to be skeptical investigations by others. This seems to have happened to Steve Novella in episode #806 of the Skeptics Guide.

Last year, I researched the origins of Christmas and Christmas trees. I had heard claims about the pre-Christian origins of Christmas so much that I expected to have no trouble finding actual evidence for them. In fact, the claims were rumors that began centuries after the traditions had become established in Christianity. There was no evidence of pre-Christian origins for Christmas or Christmas trees.

As soon as Justice Ginsburg died, the same Republican senators who promised in 2016 that they would never vote on a Supreme Court justice in an election year said they would vote on a new justice in 2020. It would be tempting to say I never believed Republicans anyway, but I do remember a time when I believed Republicans.

Today I attended a class on mentoring and empowerment in youth ministry. It left me with some thoughts that apply to all of us. I hope that you will think about how they apply to you.

The twelve disciples who followed Jesus had no question what their mission was. His wisdom and His love exceeded anything they had ever imagined. They loved and trusted Him completely. They chose to follow Jesus to establish a kingdom of love that would abolish all other kingdoms.

The Views XML Backend module allows data from XML documents to be rendered in Drupal views. It uses XPath queries to select rows and fields from XML data. Given
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the XPath query to get all the items within a channel would be /rss/channel/item.