WiFi is awesome for homes and small businesses. Stick a router in a closet somewhere near where you have a cable modem or DSL router, and—boom!—easy Internet and Network access for all 5-10 people/devices within the building.

But, try bringing this setup to a small conference or a meeting of 25+ (or 200+) computer-using people, and you're in for a world of hurt. Some people will get slower-

Does anybody else remember the whine of a dot-matrix printer head passing over a paper, making thousands of little dots which transposed digital text and images into analog?

Chalk up the sound of the print head on a dot matrix printer with the sound of a modem dialing, a cassette tape rewinding, and a real bell inside a telephone—these are sounds my kids will likely never hear.

Drupal 7 uses InnoDB tables . InnoDB provides many benefits, but can cause some unexpected headaches. One headache for me is that, by default, MySQL tells InnoDB to create one file on your system, called ibdata1 , to hold ALL the data from EVERY InnoDB table you have on your MySQL server. This file never shrinks in size ; it only expands to contain new data. If you delete something from MySQL or drop a table, the space that table was using is reallocated for other new data. This isn

I was migrating all the data from a friend's old MacBook (which was running Mac OS X Tiger) to her new MacBook Air (running Mac OS X Mountain Lion), and besides a WiFi hiccup, everything went smoothly (I had to clone the old MacBook's drive to a USB disk, then use Setup Assistant to migrate the data from that disk to the new MacBook Air).

During the Setup Assistant, I could easily connect to my WiFi network, but after the migration was complete,

For the past few months, the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious) has been gearing up for an annual convention in St. Louis  (my home diocese), where they'll have a keynote by Barbara Marx Hubbard.

Google finds some interesting tidbits about Hubbard:

"Agents of conscious evolution training." — her newest course, offered via her site .

"Birth 2012; Cocreating a planetary shift. It is time to activate a new era of human possibility and potential

See previous posts:

• Photography Weekend Part 2 - Taking Photos
• Photography Weekend Part 1 - Packing My Gear

An Ounce of Prevention...

When you work on a project where every piece of work (in this case, every photograph) needs to be cataloged, backed up, and sent to production as it's created, you have to plan things out pretty well in advance, but also be ready to fix problems and adapt to difficulties as they arise.

During my weekend of photography at Steubenville St. Louis,

Someone shared a link to slides from a recent lecture put on by Credo St. Louis by Rev. Michael Witt concerning religious liberty and the current furor over the HHS contraception mandate.

During the presentation, Fr. Witt spoke of the episcopal motto of Archbishop Kenrick , Noli irritare leonem (seen in the picture of his crest above, which I took during a visit to the Old Cathedral a few years ago). It is translated, "Don't disturb the lion," and conveys a special message today:

tl;dr : Almost perfect for people who use Apple's bluetooth keyboard on-the-go with their iPads. Pretty good for most other bluetooth keyboard users.

I've seen a few interesting Kickstarter projects in the past year or so, but none piqued my interest enough to consider committing some of my hard-earned cash until the TouchType iPad Case by Salman Sajid.

See previous post: Photography Weekend Part 1 - Packing My Gear .

I apologize for not getting this post out sooner; the first weekend of Steubenville St. Louis went by so quickly that I simply didn't have time to write more about my process over the weekend.

In this entry, I'm going to speak a little bit about the gear I use while I'm out getting pictures. Note that this setup is what I'd typically use when doing photojournalism-style event photography—

This weekend I'm heading to Steubenville St. Louis to photograph the weekend's events. There will be a wide variety of photo opportunities, from band shots/stage lighting, to outdoor portraits, to group shots and environmental shots. Thus, I will be needing almost all my gear to make sure I can have the versatility I need to get the pictures people want to see.

I'm going to try to document the whole process—packing up/readying my gear (in this post