Blog

I would like to thank you for all your prayers for my mother over the past months. She has had a long struggle with her health, and she just received news from her doctor that her bone marrow cancer is in remission. She has told me many times how thankful she is for everyone's prayers. She still has some struggles, and appreciates prayers for her to overcome these, but the greatest struggle, cancer, is in remission now!

I also thank all of the people who amassed 112 votes for my blog! I was surprised and thrilled my blog was even nominated for the 'Best Blog by a Seminarian' award of the Catholic Blog Awards this year... and I never expected to get more than a few votes! I'd also like to formally congratulate Kevin Muniz, who's blog The Heart of a Seminarian placed 2nd in the same category.

UPDATE: I have posted pictures from the retreat. Also, check out Jesuit Mark Mossa's blog, You Duped Me Lord, the latest addition to my Seminarian blogroll.

Yesterday I was quite sick from a flu virus that has been going around. This morning, I felt well enough to take a few pictures of the Archbishop's retreat, as well as a few pictures of the group of retreatants (and a few other people) after Mass and Sunday Brunch.

The Archbishop's Retreat at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary is being held this weekend, and there is a record number of participants this year (close to 40!). Unfortunately, due to bad weather the Archbishop hasn't been able to fly into town yet, so we're hoping (and I'm sure he is, also!) that he can make it early tomorrow.

In other news, the hot water is not working throughout the Seminary, and that makes for quick, but uncomfortable, showers—especially when it's 18° outside! Maybe God is welcoming the visitors to the Seminary with a special kind of penance! We also had our first real practice for the variety show (which will be performed next weekend), and it's looking pretty good so far.

I've posted some preview clips of songs the Priestie Boyz are working on right now. The songs sound great, and I've been working on making ready for mastering (then duplicating on CDs!) during my spare time. We won't be recording any more of the vocals or a few lead guitar parts until after Couch Potatoes (our annual variety show at the Seminary), because we need some practice for the show, but we hope to finish the album very soon!

After a few months of scratching my head as to why my RSS Feed was not working properly (dates would range from January to December in one day!), I finally found the offending line of source code in my RSS template file in Thingamablog. It turns out I wasn't specifying the 'format' for the date and time in the .xml template file.

I replaced this:

$EntryDateTime$>

with this:

$EntryDateTime format="RFC822"$>

Now that that's solved, some people may ask, "What is RSS? Why would I want to use it?" Well, read this (xml.com) for more info.

I don't normally write about happenings in the computer world, but I found it quite humorous that Apple put a message to would-be hackers of it's OSX operating system in verse inside a file deep in the system. You can read the poem on the OSx86 Project's website (I'm still waiting to see if anyone can get Windows running on their new Macs; I know a few people that would be more than happy to dump their PCs if this were possible!).