Post for September 8, 2009
For those who don’t know, Dawn Eden is coming to Montreal to give some talks on chastity, based on her book Thrill of the Chaste. I asked the organizers if I could interview her for this blog, and she graciously agreed. I’m looking forward to it.
Today I met with a former parishioner of mine who was a communications student and who knows her way around a video camera. The Cardinal is letting us use his library/meeting room as an interview location, so I wanted her to see the layout, the lighting, and so on. There are still some more technical details to work out (i.e. we need a third video camera, we need portable mikes, and so on) but everything seems to be coming together. The end product will go on the Adventus website (as well as this one), and the Archdiocese will be promoting it as well. Be sure to look for it!
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Post for July 21, 2008
More programming for the tool I am working on for Adventus. I’ve bumped up against a coding roadblock that will require a redesign of some earlier material I thought was done. *sigh* At least there is progress.
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Post for July 1, 2008
More programming today. I love solving these sorts of puzzles. And I’m happy to report that the first major functional element is now in place and working well. I’m able to copy articles from publicly available news feeds and store the information in a database, while custom altering it to preserve original authorship and copyright information.
Now that I have some articles to work with — real articles from the field, not just fakes I dummied up for testing purposes — I’ll get to work on on the container documents for those articles.
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Post for June 30, 2008
Day off today. I spent it programming the project I once mentioned previously. Lots of work, and actually lots of progress.
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Post for June 29, 2008
I didn’t have any particular ministry assignment this weekend, so I decided to head over to Chinatown nearby and visit with Fr. John, the young pastor of the Chinese Catholic mission. He and I have become good friends, and we go for coffee often enough. This Sunday was a special commissioning service for the youth of his parish who were headed off to Sydney for the World Youth Day, and I was glad to be there.
Fr. John did pull a bit of a fast one on me, though: 5 minutes before the mass, he asked me to offer a few words at the homily! He smiled and explained that he always offers a few words in English at this mass in particular — why not have it be from someone new? (Naturally I agreed: I can’t resist a chance to open my mouth, after all.)
As an added bonus, Fr. John has offered to help with the Adventus site — by translating some of the articles into Chinese! He believes that new Chinese immigrants might benefit from our approach to presenting the faith. It is a very exciting prospect.
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Post for June 21, 2008
Today was spent working on a (not-so) small programming project: a multilingual content-management system based on the Atom specification. This was supposed to be one of the first steps in the triumphant arrival of Adventus to the wonderful world of Internet evangelization, but unfortunately it turned out to be more complicated to organize than expected.
*sigh* Welcome to the wonderful world of programming.
It’ll come, folks. It’ll come.
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Post for June 20, 2008
I had a discussion today with a brother priest regarding the origins of humanity. A lot of Catholic theology depends on our theological anthropology, i.e. what we have to say about what it means to be human. My brother priest, in a gentle and respectful way, took issue with some of my own stated views on the subject, particularly those that I have articulated in my Four Basic Questions parish mission. I certainly do not mind having my own ideas tested, so I really enjoyed our discussion. And, as is often the case, this discussion has sparked additional reflection on my part. Tune in to Adventus.org to see an article series I will soon begin on the question of human origins, starting with the notion of evolution.
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Post for March 4, 2008
I’ve been spending the last 3 nights preaching another parish mission at Holy Name of Jesus parish, my old stomping ground in Laval. HNJ was the first parish I was assigned to as a newly-ordained priest, and I still have very fond memories of the people there. It was nice to preach to the “home crowd”, so to speak.
We had intended to record this mission on video, but I could not get a videographer in time and the lighting was too poor for my video camera to do a proper job (we ran tests, and they did not turn out well). The audio also left something to be desired, and to cap it off the bulb on the projector started to go. I’m sure there will be a next time, mind you, and in the meantime people can always follow a previous edition of the same parish mission over at Adventus.org. The major difference is in the last evening, which I have since adjusted to focus more on the sacraments, a previous version of which was preached at Holy Family parish late last year.
Finally, if you really want to get the PDF files of this parish mission, they are now available at Adventus.org.
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Post for February 24, 2008
I spent the last few nights preaching a parish mission at St-David church in Pierrefonds. What made this mission different from the previous ones was that it was all in French. It was quite a challenge, I must say, translating all the material into the language of Molière, but I’m sure it will pay off for the Lord’s kingdom.
All the mission materials that I’m making public can be found on the Adventus website.
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Post for January 2, 2008
I got some new toys in the mail today: a camera, and another camera.
The first is a Canon EOS 30D digital SLR camera. It came as part of a kit, with flash memory card, carrying case, two tripods, a telescopic lens, and so in. I’ve had the occasion to chat with lots of wedding photographers over the years (imagine that), and the consensus is that this is just a beautiful camera, no doubt about it. It does everything but walk the dog.
Why get such a fancy camera? Because I want to take pictures of churches in churches, and that isn’t easy. Indoor church photography is known for long distances and lousy lighting. A good camera is a must.
The other camera is a Panasonic 3CCD video camera. It is a “prosumer” model, just on the edge of being a professional camera. It also came with a kit, including wide-angle and telescopic lenses, hard carrying case, 6-hour battery (good for going on the road) plus a bunch of other bells and whistles. It does not do HD video (only standard definition), but it does do audio extremely well thanks to two direct mike inputs. I’m mainly interested in using it to make more YouTube catechesis videos, so sound is more important than HD in that case. I’m looking forward to getting to know this piece of equipment better.
I’m filing this under the Adventus category because, ultimately, these things are meant to help enhance the web-enabled part of my ministry. Stay tuned for the results – once I figure out what all the buttons are for!
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Post for December 23, 2007
I have two Adventus.org RSS feeds in the sidebar. Unfortunately, they just decided to stop updating one day. A search through the source code revealed that WordPress uses an old version of Magpie, an RSS feed parser. So I hacked around a bit, and got it to work now, including with UTF-8 encoded output. Yay!
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Post for November 24, 2007
I bought a new toy today: a 4-channel stereo mixer. I couldn’t help it, the price was 2/3 off (knocked down to $50 with decent product reviews).
Why get this kind of equipment, especially something so basic? After all, it doesn’t even come with an amplifier. Still, this board does what I want it to do: it will take multiple inputs and mix them to a single output, which then can be fed elsewhere…like, the Internet, where we don’t need an amp.
That’s right, folks. Live internet radio, here we (eventually) come. Some more equipment will need to be purchased, and a programming structure set in place, but I’ve already scoped out a few streaming audio service providers that offer reasonable prices. So stay tuned! (yes, pun intended!)
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Post for November 3, 2007
I gave a talk to the West Island Alpha group (French-speaking) this morning on the topic “Does Jesus heal today?” The short answer is: Yes, he does. But I think the approach of the Lord to healing is likely not our own. See this post on Adventus.org for a story of what I mean.
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Post for November 2, 2007
I gave a presentation at the Faith Enrichment Conference today, and you can find it on-line at Adventus.org.
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Post for October 30, 2007
One of the things I am working on as part of the Adventus.org project is a new piece of software tentatively called “Fusion”. You can think of it as a kind of blogging database on steroids: Fusion will allow an individual to write articles OR create other forms of media (like video) and then assemble those Entries together into packages called “Feeds”. An author can then add style information to these Feeds to transform them into web pages, or indeed any other kind of electronically transmissible information. This is all based on a specification called the Atom Syndication Format, which is (in my opinion) the wave of the future for stuff like blogs.
A student from Vanier College is presently in charge to the development of the database structure and user interface for Fusion. Version 1 will be very simple: it will simply generate Atom feeds based on data drawn from a database, and will allow users to add data to a database. Where it will really kick is that it will be built from the ground up with a multi-lingual approach: every single element in the Atom Syndication Format can have a language tag associated with it, allow for the entire system to be language sensitive. Eventually we would be able to transfer over the entire Adventus.org content, for example, and easily add additional languages to the system as it grew — we could have languages from Arabic to Zulu.
And that would be cool.
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Post for October 28, 2007
I was invited to the rectory of Mary Queen of Peace parish this evening to offer a talk to a group of young adults about the topic “why be Christian?” I’m going to post a summary on Adventus.org, and when I’m done I’ll put up an update.
UPDATE: Done!
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Post for October 22, 2007
I’ll get to posting a review on Adventus.org when I have a chance.
UPDATE: Done!
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