Jeff Geerling's blog

In the Hospital

Jeff Geerling — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:45:36 +0000

I'm at the hospital this week, so I'll be unable to answer many emails, reply to comments, or post any new content. The spam hammer is still running, though, so you spammers out still won't get any mercy!

Please spare a prayer for me, as I still don't know what's wrong, but did get to experience some amazing new things, like using a toilet that slides out from under a sink, and curling up in a ball while someone withdrew brain juice from my spine!

2013 Deacon Ordination Mass Pictures Online

Jeff Geerling — Tue, 07 May 2013 01:39:57 +0000

This year's Transitional Deacon Ordination Mass took place last Saturday, May 4 (May the 4th be with you! And with your spirit.).

I was privileged to be able to take photos for this year's transitional deacons, even more so since I will be unable to attend the Priesthood Ordination Mass this year (due to my attendance at DrupalCon Portland), and was happy to see many of my seminarian friends become deacons—one step closer to their journey towards the priesthood.

You can view the entire set of photos on Flickr: 2013 Transitional Deacon Ordination.

A New Job (2013 edition)

Jeff Geerling — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:40:14 +0000

In 2011, I left my job as the web developer for the Archdiocese of St. Louis to join Flocknote, and help build Flocknote into a great communications tool for churches, ministries, teams and organizations.

I've worked with some great people at Flocknote (hi Matt, Barrett, Kait, Derek, LCM staff et all!), and have enjoyed the challenge of building a major web application on top of Drupal 7. Flocknote was built back when Drupal 7 was in the 7.1 and 7.2 stages (when many, many modules had not yet been ported from Drupal 6!), and I was able to learn much about the craft of programming, server administration, project management, and Drupal in the past two years working on Flocknote, an iPhone App, and an API, among hundreds of other little things.

Beginning next month (almost exactly two years since my start date at Flocknote), I'll be working with Mercy, the sixth largest Catholic health care system in the US (more about Mercy). I'm excited to begin working in this new environment with a new team, and will continue developing with Drupal both in the new job and in my free time (with projects like my hosted Apache Solr search and Server Check.in, as well as my other sites and organizations I help with).

If you or someone you know might be interested in the main web developer position at Flocknote, please see the Web Developer job posting on Flocknote and apply today!

Time Refines Code

Jeff Geerling — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:41:42 +0000

Legacy code—warts and all—isn't such a bad thing.

If it's built well, and maintained well, it probably takes care of the hundreds/thousands of edge cases with which your beautifully-rewritten new codebase doesn't yet cope.

Unless it's not well-documented (or self-documented), or incompatible with modern systems, it's often a better idea to refactor and clean up old code than to scrap a system entirely and rewrite from scratch.

Image from Thinking Through.

Tolerating the Hatred

Jeff Geerling — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:17:07 +0000

If you accuse someone of hating you (or someone else) for simply disagreeing with you (or someone else) on an issue (whether it be the best baseball team, iPhone or Android, the best candy bar, or—gasp—same-sex marriage), please look up the definition of hate, and its synonyms in a thesaurus.

Disagreement ≠ hate.

The Story of the PING Program

Jeff Geerling — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 03:44:56 +0000

I love finding little gems like this: The Story of the PING Program.

The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure.

This Bud's for You, Grandpa

Jeff Geerling — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:30:40 +0000

My Grandpa Geerling was a very ordinary man. He lived in a simple split-level with a loving wife, and raised nine children while working at a union job.

He loved golf, he loved tools, he loved his children, grandchildren, and more recently, great grandchildren. He had a strong faith that he proclaimed in word and deed throughout his life to all his friends and family—~~even~~ especially when they needed it most.

He drank Bud Light, and always had golf, racing, football, baseball, or hockey on the TV—unless his team was losing.

His name won't be in any songs, nor will he have a page remembering him on Wikipedia. The world won't remember him—but he didn't have his eyes set on worldly recognition.

He devoted his life to his wife and children. He was always happy when someone would visit and talk sports, religion, politics, or kitchen remodeling. He was glad to loan out his tools to anyone who asked (and boy, did we ask!), and was always generous in sharing the modest possessions he had.

Last October, I noticed that his entire family—my aunts, uncles and cousins from out of town, his brothers and sisters, his wife, his many grandchildren and great grandchildren—came to support him in his final hours on this earth. He couldn't make his holy hour of adoration, so one of his sons made sure to go and be with Jesus in the Eucharist during that time. He couldn't speak the words of the Rosary audibly, but that didn't mean his family didn't.

He couldn't tell his wife, his brothers and sisters, his sons and daughters, his grandchildren and great grandchildren, to come together and visit him, but also connect with each other one last time before his death. But we did.

At the funeral, as I looked around, I saw doctors, musicians, programmers, writers, members of the armed forces, beautiful families, and many precious children (one of them my own, inside my wife's belly). And I know that my grandfather wasn't a 'great man' of worldly acclaim. But his legacy will make this world a greater place.

He and his wife have spent their lives devoted to their faith and family, and their family was there at the end to support him, as he went to visit God. I pray that he will join the choirs of angels in Heaven, and be united with God eternally. He was a humble man, and he would want me to tell you to pray for him, too. Nobody can pass judgement but God, and nobody can know a man's soul as God did. Everyone needs prayers after they die, even a man of great faith like my grandfather.

On his deathbed, one of my aunts asked him if he wanted anything—something to drink or eat. One of his last words to his children, "I'll take a Bud Light."

Dear Grandpa Geerling, this Bud's for you:

#ThanksPontifex for your infectious joy

Jeff Geerling — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:43:51 +0000

Remember to help get #ThanksPontifex trending today at 1:45 p.m. CST!

Taking Twitter by Storm: Let's get #ThanksPontifex trending on Feb. 28

Jeff Geerling — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:34:58 +0000

Matthew Schneider is spearheading an effort to get the hashtag #ThanksPontifex (and it's multilingual equivalents) trending globally on Twitter at 07:45 Rome time, in February 28. On his blog, he offers further details, and gives local times around the world for when you should tweet using this hashtag.

For those of you in St. Louis or otherwise in CST, tweet around 1:00 p.m. on the 28th.

Also in the post are a bunch of sample tweets you may post, in addition to links to services that will allow you to schedule tweets in case you can't tweet during the appropriate time (due to work or some other circumstance).

Obviously, this isn't limited to Twitter; if you're on Google+, go ahead and use the same hashtag and see if you can get it trending there too!

Aquinas and More Closing

Jeff Geerling — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:03:08 +0000

Aquinas and More, a great Catholic store that had probably the best selection of Catholic goods available online, seems to be going out of business soon. This is unfortunate, because that means I'll have to go to Catholic ~~Ripoff~~ Supply more often (and their website needs major improvement). Ah well.

For now until they run out of inventory, they're having a 20% off sale on almost everything.

The Mass, Explained by an App

Jeff Geerling — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:40:52 +0000

The Mass Explained App for iPad looks like a pretty awesome app ("coming soon") from Agnus, LLC. I haven't seen the app in action (just screenshots), but even if it's just a bunch of static pages like an interactive book, it looks like the content is high-quality:

I really hope the app function as good as it looks. If so, I think this would be a good template for other similar apps explaining sacraments, sacramentals, the Rosary, prayer, saints, the Vatican, etc.

Basically take encyclopedic knowledge of a Catholic subject, and marry that with some great illustrations, images, and 3D models, and make a very nice interactive app or iBook. I would buy the whole series!

What's a good video camera to use for short YouTube videos?

Jeff Geerling — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:37:01 +0000

I've gotten this question enough times via email that I thought I'd create a quick blog post mentioning what I think is a good deal for a video camera setup for recording short videos, ideally with one person speaking.

In such a situation, since you probably won't see a major difference in picture quality in anything under $500, I'd skimp a little on the camera itself and just make sure the video camera you buy has an external microphone input, then buy a microphone like the Audio-Technica ATR-3350 to clip onto the person being recorded.

A microphone goes a long way towards making quality video—many people think the camera's the most important part of a video recording setup, but it really isn't (unless you're doing a top-notch production!). That's how I can use the tiny iPhone camera as my primary video camera and record good videos, since the iPhone accepts external microphones so easily.

The camera

I'd buy a Canon VIXIA camera, as long as it has an external microphone input. The Canon VIXIA HF R100 is only $179 on Amazon, and it records great video and has a microphone and headphone jack.

The microphone

As stated earlier, using an external microphone (instead of the cheap, junky built-in microphone) will dramatically improve the overall quality of your recordings. I recommend two different microphones:

For one-person recordings: Buy a lavaliere microphone. If you'll be less than 10' from the camera, buy an Audio-Technica ATR-3350 for $20. If you'll be further away, a good wireless lavaliere is the Audio Technica Pro88W-R35 for $130 (see my review).
For multiple people or environmental recordings: Buy a shotgun microphone. My favorite is the Rode VideoMic for $150, but you could get by with a cheaper option.

Beautiful tour of the Sistine Chapel (VR)

Jeff Geerling — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:11:44 +0000

In some ways, viewing this VR image (zoom in to see incredible detail) is better than visiting in person, because you don't have to listen to constant shushing and be packed in a small space with more than a hundred other people!

The picture above was adjusted in Photoshop after a screen grab, and shows Michaelangelo's famous The Last Judgement.

The best part? It also works on the iPad. Check it out here: Virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel.

It's going to be a good Saturday

Jeff Geerling — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 18:34:27 +0000

Dear old scrap wood furniture that came with the house: say hello to my little friends.

3 million pageviews

Jeff Geerling — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 17:26:45 +0000

Wow. Just glanced at stats for 2008-now on lifeisaprayer.com, and it looks like I've passed 3,000,000 page views, with more than 1.6 million unique visitors (I didn't keep stats from 2004-2008, so I don't have data for that time).

Thanks for all your visits, and for helping me improve this site through your feedback! I've received over 1,500 comments and 1,000 emails over the course of 800 blog posts, 60 articles, 31 reviews, and 1,100 photos posted to this site. I've written over 40,000 words in the posts on this site (not yet enough for a novel), and I've written similar amounts for sites like Open Source Catholic and Midwestern Mac.

One of my greatest dilemmas is whether to consolidate sites like those into this site, or to try to keep Life is a Prayer more about personal things, marriage, family life, etc. Here's to another 40,000 words figuring it out!