Continuing his Lenten messages pertaining to the value of silence in our lives, Pope Benedict XVI delivered another pointed message at this past Wednesday's general audience :

The interplay of word and silence that marks the prayer of Jesus during his entire earthly life—especially on the cross—also touches our own lives of prayer, in two ways. The first concerns our welcoming of God’s Word. Interior and exterior silence are necessary in order that this word may be heard. And this is

Preparing for your first DrupalCon ? Even if this isn't your first, here are a few tips and tidbits I've learned from my first DrupalCon last year, and would like to pass on to you. (I'm posting this now so you have time to order the things you need to make your conference experience better and get it shipped!).

Keep things you need handy

I expected to have some downtime every now and then to run back to my hotel room and grab something I needed for

I had a rather interesting feature to implement on flocknote lately (after doing a pretty vast redesign of the UX/UI on the site over the past month... it was refreshing to dig into PHP again!):

We want to allow insertion of YouTube and Vimeo (and potentially other) videos into 'Notes' on the site, and there are a few moving parts in this equation:

• I had to create a text format filter similar to the 'Embedded media inline' module in Drupal 6 so people

I've been thinking about this lately—especially after the uproar having to do with the Georgetown student and Rush Limbaugh —but why haven't more people questioned the fact that the HHS mandate only provides free birth control, and not a hundred and one other drugs that are, in fact, much more helpful to the saving of lives? The Crescat, in fact, is also thinking about this ( why free birth control... ).

Birth control, let's face it

This month, my old Mac story about a IIci was featured on on the excellent Apple-related blog 512 Pixels , by Stephen Hackett: Old Mac of the Month: Macintosh IIci .

Special thanks to my brother

This week I've been visiting doctors, getting checkups, getting tests, and generally being a lab rat. My health has been better, so any prayers you could spare could be appreciated... but enough about me!

Since I've been feeling not-so-good lately, and since the whole HHS mandate fiasco 's been so annoying to me, I've felt relatively pessimistic in the past week.

Well, during one of the many waiting room visits (I hesitate to call them

I usually avoid writing about politics on this website, but the recent Health and Human Services coverage mandate debacle has annoyed me to no end, as I feel that it's one of the first incisive and direct attacks on the freedom of my religion I've witnessed.

Basically, the mandate is telling me (if it is ever enforced), "The U.S. Government has the right to make its citizens pay for whatever the U.S. Government deems necessary for whatever reason, even if a

I've created a few iOS and Android apps for mobile devices and tablets, but just a few days ago, my first 'desktop' app (for Mac OS X 10.7+) was released on the Mac App Store.

Behold, Quick Resizer ( $0.99 on the Mac App Store ):

I created the app mostly because I realized I would often drag an image to Photoshop to simply resize it from something like 1024x768 to 500

As a Catholic who's worked in many different media fields (newspapers, photography, video production, and web development), I've seen a very wide array of copyright violations, improper media usage, and misuse of licensed assets. This seems to happen more in the non-profit world, where there is little or no budget for acquiring stock images, etc.

I'm extremely generous with my licensing for photos and other media I produce; typically, if someone asks to use a photo of mine

Just some tips from an occasional Craigslister:

For everyone:

• Cash only. Don't do checks, PayPal, etc. Even if it's > $1,000.
• Meet in a well-lit, public place. Starbucks is great. Target parking lot is fine. Nice gas stations are okay. Small restaurant parking lots are out, as are shady gas stations.
  • Aside : Additionally, if the other party doesn't show, you at least have something to do if you're