Mobile Phone SMS Spam Can be Expensive

I recently started receiving spam (unsolicited) text messages on my iPhone. I first received one on New Year's Eve, at 8:31 p.m., and then again at 5:00 a.m. a few days later (nice wakeup call... thanks).

These messages were all from some company named 'GagaCell', which didn't turn up many good search results (most were about Lady Gaga, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't

GagaCell IQ Spam Text Message

Running a Windows XP VM in Parallels (Mac) from a USB Flash Drive

I thought I'd post my experience here, for the benefit of others, because I couldn't find a whole lot of information about this specific use of an external USB flash drive.

I have a MacBook Air with a dainty 128GB SSD drive, so I try to keep large files that I rarely use on external drives. I have plenty of external USB and FireWire storage (over 6 TB), and running VMs in either Parallels or VMWare Fusion works great (very highly performant) off


What happened to Life is a Prayer.com?

[ Update: I've finished building a new theme for Life is a Prayer.com; it's a bit of the old, mixed in with a bit of the new. What do you think?]

I'm in the middle of upgrading Life is a Prayer.com to Drupal 7 (to the non-geeks out there: I'm changing up the structure of the site a little bit, and giving it a new coat of varnish).

So... for a while


Interview on Make Web Not War

A recent interview focusing on my involvement in open source development (mostly centering around my work with Make Web Not War website:

Make Web Not War - Interview with Jeff Geerling
Interview - Jeff Geerling - Open Source Catholic

In the interview, I speak about my involvement in Drupal, and my appreciation for a variety of different open source projects. I'm glad Microsoft is putting some resources behind sites like 'Make Web

Crestwood Mall - Ghost Town

[January 2013 update: there is only one store still open in the mall—a LensCrafters. It's weird. I went to the post office the day before it closed, and the mall seems to not even be heated anymore (glad I brought my coat!). Entire portions of the parking lot (including all underground parking) are barricaded off, and the place looks even more like a post-apocalyptic site!]

A week ago, I needed to drop off a

Crestwood Mall - Door out of order

Inspiration and Garbage

My relationship with writing is a funny thing; I've never been a 'writer', per-se, but I do love writing things from time to time. I probably write about as much prose as the average active blogger, but a lot of my writing never sees the light of day, nor is it focused in one particular area.

I blog about Drupal development and technology over on my Midwestern Mac blog , about the Church and technology on my Open Source Catholic blog , about life in general here


Buzz or Hum in Computer Speakers

I recently spoke with an audio engineer (my Dad, who has worked in radio for many years) about something that's been bugging me for many years: Why do almost all computer speakers have some sort of annoying buzz or hum?

I know it has to do with voltage differences, power, RF emissions, etc... but I wanted to know more about what I could try to do to reduce the level of the noise. I've tried things like plugging everything into one outlet/power


Routines and Marriage - Keeping it Together

My wife and I have crossed the one-year threshold; after achieving this milestone, she told me, "Once we get past a year, we're set for life, right?"

Jeff and Natalie - Christmas 2011
Christmas 2011: I'm trying to look normal, I think. Didn't work.

While it's not true that strengthening the marriage bond gets easier over time (it's always a challenge—but in the best possible way!), it is true that seemingly

Moving Comments into a Block - Drupal 7

[ Note : It looks like there's a new module, as of January 2013, Node Comment Block , which uses the technique outlined below to move comments into a block.]

Most of the time, Drupal's convention of printing comments and the comment form inside the node template (node.tpl.php) is desirable, and doesn't cause any headaches.

However, I've had a few cases where I wanted to either put comments and the comment form in another place


Sending emails to multiple receipients with Amazon SES

After reading through a ton of documentation posts and forum topics for Amazon SES about this issue, I finally found this post about the string list format that helped me be able to send an email with Amazon SES's sendmail API to multiple recipients.

Every way I tried getting this working, I was receiving errors like InvalidParameter for the sender, Unexpected list element termination for the error code, etc.

Normally, when sending email, you can either pass a single address or multiple addresses as a string, and you'