Radical Transparency is all the rage right now. With President Obama opening access to government data in order to encourage transparency, more attention is being paid to the way that restricting information restricts collaboration, decision making, and progress. This is, however, a value derived strongly from the Internet – more specifically, from the Freedom Software movement.
You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em… – Kenny Rogers
I’m shutting down WartVid. WartVid was a project to get the Wartburg Seminary community to save money on DVD rentals and Netflix subscriptions by listing each person’s collection online and making it easy to share. It had a lot of great accomplishments:
- Over 1600 DVDs available, across a wide number of genres
- More than 60 enrolled participants, representing nearly a third of Wartburg’s on-campus students and faculty
- Written in fewer than 10 hours, total, by using the excellent Perl MVC framework Catalyst
Yet after the initial burst of enthusiasm, interest waned. I found that I didn’t even use it much myself, which is a bad sign for a hobby project. When the site starting turning up Internal Server Errors a few months ago, nobody even noticed, let alone complained.
So long, WartVid. It was fun, while it lasted.
I ran across an unusual problem tonight. I got a bunch of pictures of our recent visit to Kansas City from my sister-in-law, and I wanted to download those images. Alas, Gmail let me down – while I could right-click and save each of the 54 images, there was no “Download All Attachments” link at the bottom of the message. Frustrated, I fired up Evolution and looked to see if it could tackle the task – nope. What’s a hacker to do?
Well, a little Googling brought me to UUDeview, a program which hasn’t received any updates since 2004, but nonetheless is highly useful and available in your friendly neighborhood Ubuntu repository. Getting the images out was simple.
sudo aptitude install uudeview- Download the “original source” of the email to a file, let’s say
/home/ted/Desktop/email.eml uudeview /home/ted/Desktop/email.eml- Press
pto set the folder where you want the images to go. - Press
ato extract all the images.
And for those of you Windows or Mac users, it looks like there are versions available for those operating systems too. I’d say that this is the best little utility I’d never heard of.
Imagine this – three pastors on one bicycle (made of bamboo, of all things) riding 13,000 miles in 100 days to visit all 65 cities that have an ELCA synod office in order to raise awareness of world hunger. This is the “Tour de Revs.” They have a website you can follow them on: www.TourDeRevs.org. There’s tons of great information there, and it supports a good cause, ELCA World Hunger. Check it out!
Wow – my blog finally reached 200 posts after several years of writing. I guess it has taken me this long because I try to keep this site the place where I put substantive content, not the pithy, sarcastic stuff I’m more likely to throw on Facebook. Altogether, it’s a pretty big milestone for me. Maybe I’ll hit 500 in fewer years than it took to reach this milestone – with internship starting soon, I’ll have no shortage of topics to write about.
I’ve decided to stop making my photo uploads Anneliese-centric, because once in a (long, long) while I actually take pictures of not-Anneliese. These photos are highlights from May 2009.
Occasion: Pentecost 2, Year B
Text: Ezekiel 17.22-24, Mark 4.26-34
This sermon was preached at Saint Andrew’s Lutheran Church, Columbia, MO on 13-14 June 2009.
For the last couple of years, Jennifer and I have been dreaming about having a house of our own. We dream about what it would be like to build our own house – sometimes we think big, more often we dream about a really tiny house that has everything built-in and packed in tightly. But no matter where we dream of being, no matter what kind of house or family we envision, one thing always stays the same – we’re going to have a garden. We’ll grow food and flowers, perhaps keeping a patch of the lawn for wild grasses – heck, with any luck, there won’t be much of a lawn to mow at all. I say that because, in all seriousness, as much as I want Jennifer to have the garden that she dreams of, I harbor a terrible secret in my heart: I hate yard work.
Occasion: Pentecost 1, Holy Trinity Sunday, Year B
Text: John 3.1-17
This sermon was preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Manchester, MO on 7 June 2009.
About a year and a half ago, I had the opportunity of a lifetime – I got to travel with a group of students from Wartburg Seminary on a trip to the Holy Land. We spent about a week in Bethlehem and stayed at Christmas Lutheran Church just up the street from where Jesus was born. Then we went up to the Galilee for a few days to see some important ruins, and finally we went back down to Jerusalem for a week. Jerusalem was fantastic. Not only did we get to visit old churches and holy sites in the Old City, but we also got to learn more about issues of justice and peace in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians. We also got to roam around the city a bit and shop for souvenirs.
Whew! Another semester ends, and I am now halfway through my seminary education at Wartburg. No breather for me, though, as I’ve got a number of big projects and travel plans that are going to happen in the next several weeks.
- Websites – I’m currently working with a task force of members of our congregation here in Dubuque to relaunch LordOfLifeDBQ.org, the congregational website. The prototype is built on Wordpress and is up and available here, but doesn’t have all the content loaded in it yet. The theme is just temporary too – a talented designer at our congregation is working up a custom template for us to use. We’re also working to get content written for MovingToDubuque.org, a site designed to help IBM employees and others moving to the Dubuque area get settled in. (I’ve also got a super-secret project in the works, but if I told you what it is, I’d have to kill you.)
- Websites, ugly and less-ugly – Work continues on my study of congregational websites in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and their connection to demographic trends in those congregations. Hopefully results will be available in a few weeks.
- Hardware hackery – I just bought a Asus WL-500G Premium wireless router and a nice 640G Hitachi USB hard drive enclosure to build a cheap combination-embedded-BackupPC-FileServer-Wireless-router for church.
- Musicality – This semester I wrote a setting for Morning Prayer for Loehe Chapel at Wartburg Seminary called “Morning Light.” Now I’m working on scoring it and will soon be releasing it under a Creative Commons license. I’ve been especially thankful for the positive reception the Benediction and Sending piece from that liturgy has received – several classmates want to use it in ordination services this summer, and it may also be used at a wedding! Of course I’m geeking out as I do this, so I’m doing the typesetting in LilyPond and constructing a full-fledged musical build system in Apache Ant.
- Computers for Africa – Via one of our international students, I’ve been put in contact with a university in Africa that could use some second-hand computers loaded up with Linux and shipped out there. I am not sure whether this will come through or not, but it’s on the radar.
- Family Roots – My great-grandfather (via my paternal grandmother) Otto E. Matuschka was a Lutheran pastor in Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas from about the year 1900 on. I’ve embarked on a project to find out more about him, and via his alma mater, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and its Concordia Historical Institute, I’ve located some records. I’m looking forward to going down to St. Louis in June and doing some more research in their archives. According to one of their archivist, other family members were pastors too – who knew? Fun fact: my classmate’s husband served the same congregation in Nebraska that Great-Grandfather Matuschka served almost 85 years prior. It’s a small Lutheran world…
- The Great Missouri Trip – Our occasion for visiting St. Louis is a trip to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia that will have me preaching at Good Shepherd, Manchester, MO on June 7th, visiting in St. Louis through the 10th, then traveling to Kansas City to visit family until the 13th, when we return to Columbia so I can preach at St. Andrew’s, Columbia, MO on June 13th and 14th. I guess I better get started on writing some sermons…
- Paint Chips – My classmates just discovered that their little girl has elevated levels of lead. We live in the same kind of housing they do, so we’re obviously also concerned. I’ll be looking into what kind of lead exposure testing might be necessary for Anneliese, Jennifer and I in the next few days.
- Leavin’ on a… Budget Truck? – Soon we’ll be
wingingdriving our way to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Sterling, IL, where I’ll be doing my year-long pastoral internship / vicarage under the supervision of Pr. Mark Oehlert. It’s going to be a busy summer, but an exciting one as we accomplish a lot of interesting tasks and get ready for a year of Something Completely Different. Pray for us! - And much much more! – Somewhere in here I might also send out some (painfully late) birth announcements, help edit the second edition of a book, and work half-time on some cool performance-related projects for IdeaWorks. Busy? Who, me?
Occasion: Easter 5, Year B
Text: John 15.1-8
This sermon was preached at East Iron Hill Community Church, Maquoketa, IA, on 10 May 2009.
Mother’s Day isn’t easy for some people – it wasn’t easy for Jennifer and I for a long time. We were married at the end of 2004, and after about a year of wedded bliss, we decided to get started on our family. We thought that it couldn’t be too hard, after all people turn up pregnant all the time who weren’t even trying to get that way. We went out and bought little odds and ends we were sure we’d need when the baby came. We dreamed, we planned, we saved – and we were so sure it was going to work out. Time passed. Months turned into years. Things did not work out for a very, very long time. And as Mother’s Day rolled by in 2006 and 2007 and 2008, those were dark days for us. When you so desperately want to be a mother or a father, and you see people being celebrated for that, and you can’t – through no fault of your own – it’s a terrible experience.