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New church website launched!
Our congregation in Dubuque, Lord of Life Lutheran Church, has launched a new website! I, along with those in the Lord of Life Website Task Force, are proud of the result and happy to announce it to the world. With the switching on of the new website, our email and calendaring infrastructure now is running on Google Apps. So, between the free Google Apps hosting and DreamHost’s free hosting for registered non-profit organizations, we have a sophisticated website and quality collaboration tools for free! Look for good things to come in the next few months as we prepare for Phase 2 of this project.
Morning Light
A Setting of Morning Prayer for the season of Easter
Ted Carnahan
ted@tedcarnahan.com
In the Spring semester of 2009, I was invited by Thomas Schattauer, Dean of Loehe Chapel at Wartburg Theological Seminary, to work on a setting of matins (i.e. morning prayer) for the season of Easter. The result is Morning Light.
End of an Era – WartVid
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.
Internship Assignment
I’m now free to tell the world that Jennifer and I will be spending the next year, probably starting sometime in July, at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Sterling, IL. We’re excited – this seems to be a good supervisory match, an interesting congregation, and an opportunity to explore some questions in technology and ministry. We’re also really excited because our good friends Chuck and Claire Meyer will be just a few minutes away in Rock Falls, IL.
Internship Assignment… soon.
Well, Wednesday was a really big day. Jealaine Marple and I, as co-presidents of the Middler class, spent most of the evening on the festivities that accompanied Internship Assignment Day. We had a small gathering amongst the Middlers with BYObeverages in Fritschel, which was fantastic – it was wonderful to see everyone pulling together and supporting each other. This was followed by a service of Holden Evening Prayer for the Wartburg community. Jealaine and I co-led the service, and we did it in what we jokingly called “punk rock style,” which was really just using fairly clean electric guitar and bass (and a Djembe). We also had a special sequence of intercessory prayers written for the occasion. After that, we retired into the Refectory for a dessert potluck, which was a smashing success. Actually, I think the whole thing was amazingly successful, and we had twice as many people at each event than I had expected.
As for my own internship assignment, I’m rather pleased with where we’re going, but I’m not allowed to publicly disclose the assignment until Friday afternoon. A friend of mine – and Wartburg alumnus – was saying it was weird how cryptic everyone’s Facebook status messages have become. Cryptic, yes, but honoring the confidentiality with which we’ve been entrusted. So it’s been a good, but very long day, and even as I write this after six or seven hours of sleep, I’m still feeling bone-weary over the whole thing. Thank goodness that my weekend starts at 12:30p this afternoon.
Done with the semester
I finally got my last paper done and printed today. That means I’m officially done with my third semester at Wartburg, and that means that I am officially halfway through the (academic) work for my M.Div.! Just three more semesters of school and a year-long internship to go…
Wartburg Oktoberfest 2008 Pictures
Pictures from this year’s Oktoberfest celebration are now up in my Picasa space. Check them out:
Edit: Moved pictures to my own domain.
Also, here are some pictures from Oktoberfest 2007:
Student Technology Task Force
Here’s something genuinely unexpected: The WAS Council today voted to form a Student Technology Task Force and appointed me the head of it. We’ll be looking for ideas on how to advance technology on campus and working with the administration to implement solutions. I’m pretty excited – hopefully we can get something done.
Wartburg Updates
I haven’t written much lately, and hardly anything about Wartburg. So a quick update:
- I was elected co-president of the “middler” class (second year students) along with my classmate Jealaine Marple. Last year was a pretty good experience, and if I keep moving up like this (last year I was co-vice-president), I expect to be elected Benevolent World Dictator for Life by the year 2047.
- Remember that proposal I wrote on about church demographics and websites about six weeks ago? It looks like it’s going to turn into a real research project. I’ll be doing that for my independent study project this J-Term. Jennifer’s due January 18, and she told me that if I wanted to go abroad for J-Term this year, I might as well buy a one-way ticket! So I’m Dubuque bound this year, but I’m excited about the project and even more excited about the reason for staying close to home.
- My Endorsement interview is coming up here at Wartburg on October 15. Pray for me! Two members of the Central States Synod Candidacy Committee are flying up here to interview me and one other student. This is the second step in the four-step process leading to ordination, and it serves as the authorization to go on next year’s year-long internship. You can read more on the process in the ELCA, though the people in that slideshow look waaay holier than I do.
Remove Horizon (Dynix) automatic refresh
I find the automatic refresh on my seminary library’s catalog really annoying. I like to open up lots of tabs of results and then evaluate them later. Horizon (Dynix) doesn’t let me do that – those tabs auto-refresh to the main search page after 6 or 7 minutes. I can always press the back button on each of those tabs, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.
Thus, I decided to learn Greasemonkey scripting. There’s a great online book to help you learn, and Greasemonkey is very intuitive.
The onLoad attribute of the body tag calls “setTimer(); setfocus();”. setTimer() is the culprit. So here’s the one-liner to get rid of that (and keep setfocus()):
document.body.setAttribute('onload', 'setfocus();');
Quick and easy. You can install my very first Greasemonkey script here: dynix_norefresh.user.js. You will, of course, need the Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox.
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.