Review: Basis Bibel Auslese
Back in October I launched a German-language worship service in Nashville, Tennessee. In the lead-up to launching St. Mang, I knew I’d need to focus on my German to get back to the point where I could write a sermon in German each month. I immediately switched to German for my morning prayers using the 1984 Luther translation. Though there is a lot I like about Luther’s translation in German, it is not a great entry point into theological/ecclesial German. Read more...
Advent: Always be Ready
In my home it is no secret that I am no fan of secular Christmas. I was raised outside the Church. When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. The music. The beautiful colors. Nostalgia for a “better time.” The idea of joy, family, and peace. And, naturally, presents. But, then, I answered the call of Jesus. Christmas, I came to understand, was not just a remembrance of a nice man that gave out pretty sayings and showed an examplary way of life. Read more...
Advent Family Prayer
For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find a short and simple Advent liturgy to do each night around the advent-wreath. The family form of Evening Prayer from the 2019 Prayer Book is good, but it is still a little long for my very young children and still requires me to find short readings for each night. I wanted a resource that was short and simple for my young family, but still retained the character of the daily offices. Read more...
Use Localtime in Debian Slim
Sometimes you need to run cron or other applications in your Debian container that rely on the system running in localtime. In Debian 9, switching to localtime wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. With Debian 10, however, you can switch your container to another timezone with just a few commands. First you need to install tzdata. RUN apt-get install tzdata -y Then you need to make a link between the timezone you want to move to in /usr/share/zoneinfo and /etc/localtime. Read more...
Migrate from Bash to Z Shell (On macOS)
In macOS Catalina, Apple is switching the default shell to Z Shell from Bash. Even if you haven’t upgraded to Catalina yet, getting used to Zsh is a good idea and pretty simple to do. 1. Install Latest Z Shell First, install the latest verison of Z Shell from Hombrew. Since you’re going down the path of learning an alternate shell, you might as well keep on the newest version instead of just taking whatever Apple gives you. Read more...
God Calls Me
I am called to preach the Gospel and faithfully administer the sacraments under the apostolic authority of a bishop of Christ’s Holy Church because God saved a Mormon boy from the pits of despair and freed him from the chains of the law. This God, in securely calling me his own, redirected my heart to serve his one, holy, Catholic Church and to share the truly Good News of unmerited free grace to others lost in darkness. Read more...
Instantpot Hardboiled Eggs
- Place eggs on steam rack.
- Add 1 cup of water to the pot.
- Set Instantpot to cook on high pressure for five minutes.
- Allow Instantpot to naturally decompress for five minutes.
- Immediately place eggs in cool water to stop cooking.
- Peel eggs and enjoy.
Logs in the River of Discourse
A feminist tried to fail me out of divinity school. The last two weeks of divinity school turned out much differently than I expected. For my last semester I was required to take a course to fulfill a credit in the topic of gender and sexuality. There was only one course that fulfilled that requirement that would fit into my schedule with another required course, ethics. I spent my last semester as one of two men in a course exploring the intersections of theology and psychology for women. Read more...
The Magic Variable 'count'
So, I happened to be looking back through some old files and I found an early programming assignment from my first computer science course back in college. In the middle of the code I found this wonderful line: while (cownt<years) { cout<<cownt+1; //"cownt" = "count", but when I entered it spelt correctly it gave me errors.// As it turns out early on in the code I declared int cownt=0;. I either couldn’t find this typo in debugging my mere 61 lines of code or — what I think was actually going on — I thought count was a reserved magical variable that made loops work — not something I had to declare. Read more...
XML::Compile with an Extension Namespace
Starting this May, mortgage folk are going to be required to send Freddie and Fannie data including additional data points in ULDD phase 3 extension. At face value, adding these additional data points shouldn’t be a big deal at all. However, the legacy code I’m maintaining used XML::Compile to generate code. For various and sondry reasons — which I will not go into here — XML::Compile in the code I’m maintaining was in a place where it was extremely difficult to add XML elements that weren’t included in the original base Mismo 3. Read more...
Cron in Docker with Debian Slim
Recently, I needed to get cron working inside a Docker container running Debian Slim. It’s not difficult once you figure it out, but it did take a bit of research and learning to get everything to work. First off, Debian Slim is real slim. There’s no cron nor is there a syslog when you want to debug things. Add apt-get install cron and rsyslog in your Dockerfile before you start anything else. Read more...
Automated Weekly Sermon Podcast
Each Sunday at Church of the Epiphany we record our sermon using someone’s mobile phone. We started doing this back in September and, for the last three months, editing and uploading these sermons to our website has been a fairly manual process. Starting this month, however, with a combination of JustCast, Dropbox, Hazel, Squarespace, and Auphonic I’ve been able to mosty automate the process. 1. Download & Rename Each week shortly after worship, Fr. Read more...
Word to Markdown Conversion with Footnotes
Many of the essays on this site start their life in Microsoft Word or Scrivener. Early on, I would have to convert essays to Markdown for posting manually. This generally worked okay, but I lost my footnotes. I tried Word to Markdown for a brief while, but it didn’t work entirely as I’d like it to. Enter Pandoc. I’ve been using Pandoc to convert all of my Word documents — including footnotes — for the last two years. Read more...
East Nashville Antenna Television Update
Almost a year ago I blogged about my new antenna set-up here in East Nashville. All in all, I’m still happy with my decision to drop cable and switch to antenna and streaming services. The Tivo Rovio OTA has proven to be money well spent. The Tivo is extremely easy to use and seamlessly binds OTA recordings with Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. Because the Tivo supports Plex, I’ve also converted an old Mac Mini into a Plex server. Read more...
Sea Walls: haud responsalis sed peccator
Recently I saw a call for more people in enterprise IT to start blogging. Following that call, I’ll offer some reflections. The foundation of a healthy IT culture in the enterprise starts with IT leadership and, especially, front-line IT management focusing on building a great working environment for developers. If developers are overextended, overworked, are not able to innovate, and are not given the dedicated time needed to solve problems, there is no hope for the transformation of corporate IT. Read more...
