Thoughts and opinions from a Priest in the PNCC
We thank Thee, Lord, for America, our home. We bless Thee for the liberty, the opportunity, and the abundance we share. But above all we praise Thee for the traditions which have made our country great, and for patriots who have laid the foundations through faith, courage, and self-sacrifice. Teach us in our own day the meaning of citizenship, and help us to be faithful stewards of the responsibility which Thou entrusted to us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
I see that Bill Gates has is panties in a bunch over Apple’s new ads. Poor, poor rich man – can’t take it can he (I’m hearing Bugs Bunny now).
The Apple ads are funny, sarcastic, and true.
I installed Vista as I previously blogged. The Vista tester told me – no problem, go for it. My computer ran like an old Russian tractor. After the purchase of two additional gigs of RAM I’m pretty much ok.
The UAC prompts that pop up are the biggest pain. Imagine working along, several windows open, several different task going on, blogging your random thoughts, and boom, your screen goes black (at least they didn’t choose blue as in the BSoD). It then re-appears grayed-out with a prompt as to whether you want to allow the action to occur. Ummm, yeah, I just clicked on a program because I wanted to install, uninstall, or change it. Well there goes that thought out the window(s).
Vista is Windows on steroids trying to be a MAC. If I didn’t need my PC, I’d toss it.
In regard to Mr. Gates complaints against Apple and Mr. Jobs – at least Mr. Jobs is throwing some innovative stuff out there. See: Jobs Calls for End to Music Copy Protection. All Mr. Gates can do is gripe.
Fr. Jim Tucker points to a YouTube of Laetabundus in Sequence for Candlemas. Laetabundus is a Presentation Sequence normally attributed to St. Bernard. I found the English translation from The Dominican Missal in Latin and English, Revised Edition, Blackfriars Publications, Oxford, 1948.
Faithful people,
Sweeten all your song with gladness.
Alleluia.
Matchless maiden
Bringeth forth the Prince of princes:
O! the marvel.
Virgin compasseth a man,
Yea, the angel of the plan:
Star the Dayspring.
Day that sunset shall not close,
Star that light on all bestows,
Ever cloudless.
As the star, light crystalline,
Mary hath a Son divine
In her likeness.
Star that shining grows not dim,
Nor his Mother, bearing him,
Less a maiden.
The great tree of Lebanon
Hyssop’s lowliness puts on
In our valley;
And the Word of God Most High
Self-imprisoned doth lie
In our body.
So Isaias sang of old,
So the Synagogue doth hold,
But the sunrise finds her cold
Hard and blinded.
Of her own she will not mark,
Let her to the gentiles hark;
For the Sybil’s verses dark
Tell of these things.
Make haste, O luckless one,
Give ear to the saints bygone:
Why perish utterly,
O race undone?
He whom thy seers foretell
Born is in Israel:
Mary’s little Son, O mark him well.
Alleluia.
I’ve been upgrading to Windows Vista and Office 2007 over the past 24 hours. The upgrade itself went fairly well.
I checked compatibility beforehand, removed programs that were in conflict, plus some others likely to cause problems, and ran the Windows upgrade first. The following problems were encountered:
The upgrade took quite a while to accomplish. The Vista interface is pleasant albeit a little slow.
I pretty much agree with Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s article Vista’s pretty, but it’s a shameless Mac OS X imitator from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I look forward to updating our Macs to Leopard.
In short order the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 was a tad more complicated than expected.
I followed the instructions for upgrading exactly. My upgrades tend to fail on the last step – running the upgrade.php. The called for database updates fail completely.
The blog was back and operational, but there were errors. I printed out the errors generated from upgrade.php and did the updates to the database manually using phpMyAdmin. It was a little slow going, but I have enough of a background so that the SQL statements were not insurmountable. Of course I had to dabble while I was in there, and I took the opportunity to delete tables leftover from old plugins.
Everything else appeared to work fine, but my blogroll (links) were a mess. Most did not get labeled (categorized) so I had to do that manually. Once that was done the blogroll was duplicated, with all the links in their respective categories AND in the whichever category was listed first, effectively doubling the links. I tried all sorts of strategies, read the codex, and a bunch of posted help topics. All I could find was info on the php coding changes necessary to display links. Since I use widgets I looked through the links code in the widgets plugin. The code looked fine (hey, what do I know anyway…). I tried toggling various other plugins to no avail.
I got the idea that it was the way the theme (I’ve been using WP-Andreas01 1.3) was handling the links. I really didn’t want to change themes, mostly because of the work I have to do to reset widget order and the back-end coding I’ll have to do to fix my database pages, but I figured I’d invested about 4 hours already so I went ahead.
I had a nice Web 2.0 style theme, Subtle by Glued Ideas. I selected it and everything looked peachy.
In retrospect it was a great experience. I think the blog looks far better under the new theme, less choppy.
I’ll be doing the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 over the next hour or so. Please stand by…
Check out The Day I Lost My Religion from The Soapy Knitter (by the way – a nice WordPress theme adapted for knitting).
Fair waring – the language used is not for the faint of heart, but I won’t tsk tsk … this family has been hurt a lot.
I commented on the post here.
Several of the blogs I read had pointers to Fish eaters quiz on the Four Temperaments (Medieval self analysis).
I took the quiz and it turns out that I am Melancholic. My personality is said to consist of being:
It appears that I am in the best of company:
Famous Melancholics include St. John of the Cross, St. John the Divine, St. Francis, and St. Catherine of Siena.
…and that my ‘if I had my druthers’ way of life might include a career as a contemplative religious, theologian, artist, or writer.
I would say that they pegged me pretty well.
Check out the temperament test if you care to see where you fall.
On our trip to Florida we learned of Tervis Tumblers. My sister has several sets.
Tervis, we learned, is the original and the oldest insulated tumbler company in the U.S. These tumblers and their other drinkware are perfect for keeping hot things hot and cold things cold. They do it without sweating and they’re practically indestructible. In addition they are light weight.
We finally decided to get rid of our old glassware and we replaced it with Tervis. We received our first set a week ago (one more set of eight on order). They are great – and another shout-out to my sister for introducing us to these.