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(Title, translated: "Good night, from Rome!")

Many new experiences every day. Greetings from the eternal city! After having been in the city that never sleeps a few weeks ago, it's quite nice to be in a more or less quiet but beautiful place!

Some of the first Roman air in which I breathed. Tasted good!

I hopped off the Alitalia flight into the Fiumicino (FCO) airport, straight onto the tarmac. Hadn't done that from an airliner the size of this 777 in my whole life! We got on a bus, went to get the bags at the baggage claim, then I met with two Redemptorist priests to head over to the Salesianum, a retreat house/hotel run by the Saletians, located just outside Rome.

On October 19, 2009, the Redemptorist priests will hold their 2009 General Chapter in Rome, Italy (Zenit news story), and, since they thousands of priests and missionaries spread throughout the world, they decided to stream the events of the General Chapter online (Ustream channel). Through a series of wonderful events and conversations, I was eventually invited to help the priests with technical aspects of said streaming, and thus, I am headed over to Rome this morning.

I will be in Rome until October 31st, but will still be working remotely for the Archdiocese of Saint Louis. I'll also keep updating my Twitter feed, this blog, and my Flickr photostream, most likely (as time allows, of course). I won't get a ton of time to sightsee, but even a few hours would be more than enough to fall in love with Roma, I should think.

See you on the flipside!

[UPDATE: For a full review of the camera, please visit the Canon PowerShot G11 Review on MidwesternMac.com]

After a few weeks of phone calls, store visits, etc., I've finally found a Canon PowerShot G11. And none too soon, as I'm leaving for Rome in less than three days, and really wanted to get this camera as a 'pocket' camera for walking the streets of Rome!

Heralding Obama as a transformative figure in U.S. and international diplomacy, the committee said: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population." [Source: Washington Post]

...without regard to the moral good of the people, nor the eternal truths discoverable through human reason. [Note: I'm not speaking solely of our current president, or of any single individual... more so every person I have seen heralded as 'peaceful' and 'loving' lately... whatever happened to working for justice to bring about peace?]

When I was rebuilding www.jeffgeerling.com in Drupal, I decided to use the testing domain new.jeffgeerling.com. This presented me with a challenge, once I started working a bit more on the site, as I set up imagecache, the file system, the favicon, the logo, internal images in posts, images inserted into blocks, etc., into my /sites/new.jeffgeerling.com/files directory.

If I simply renamed the directory to 'jeffgeerling.com' and went live, I'd end up with tons of 404 errors. Currently, there's no easy way to switch the location of your files directory in Drupal. Lacking an easy method, it's time to get your hands dirty with a little SQL (I entered the following commands via phpMyAdmin, since my host doesn't yet allow SSH access):

As of today (October 5, 2009), I have moved all the content off the old Lifeisaprayer.com into a new Drupal-based site, in order that I might not have to do so much manual labor in maintaining and updating the site.

This has been a long time coming, as I had the idea to move to a CMS (it was a heat between Drupal (for extensibility) vs. WordPress (for it's ease of use for blogging). But as I didn't know exactly what I wanted this site to become (is it about articles? the blog? photo galleries? what???), I figured Drupal would be the best choice, as I can have a lot more freedom in building out new functionality now. Wordpress is a little limiting if you want to really stretch your site into different directions.

I'm working on the site's theme right now, and probably will be tweaking it over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you have any problems or have suggestions for improvement!