Currently reading: Jane Eyre (Enriched Classics) by Charlotte Bronte 📚 This one’s long overdue for me and has been sitting on the one-of-the-kids-had-this-for-school shelf. Starting it right before bed was a mistake; I got pulled in immediately.

When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you want God to know that you are hungry, know that another is hungry. If you hope for mercy, show mercy. If you look for kindness, show kindness. If you want to receive, give. If you ask for yourself what you deny to others, your asking is a mockery.
 — St Peter Chrysologus, Office of Readings, Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism—one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement—died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness, it was reported by Michael Mehaffy, a long-time collaborator and protege. Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.

Christopher Alexander, 1936 - 2018

(h/t MetaFilter)

In him the Old Testament finds its fitting close. He brought the noble line of patriarchs and prophets to its promised fulfillment. What the divine goodness had offered as a promise to them, he held in his arms...Remember us, Saint Joseph, and plead for us to your foster-child. Ask your most holy bride to look kindly upon us, since she is the mother of him who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns eternally. Amen.

— St. Bernadine of Siena, Office of Readings, Solemnity of Joseph, Husband of Mary.

Latest paper for Foundations is nearly in the can: revisions, a run-through with grammarly, more revisions. I think it’s about done. This three-classes-at-a-time bit is crazy-making.

Currently reading: In the First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 📚 It always pays to ask co-workers what they are reading! Just got this and can’t wait to start.

“Teach us to be loving not only in great and exceptional moments, but above all in the ordinary moments of life.

Lord, give us your Holy Spirit. “

— Intercession of Lauds, Ash Wednesday

Currently reading: Fundamental Theology (Sacra Doctrina) by Guy Mansini 📚

This came up in class this weekend and I’ll be using it in parallel with the required texts, though mostly for my own edification. The author’s at St. Meinrad to boot!

RSS, classes, Synodality, and Spenser

I have an unabashed love of RSS feeds and track about 40 right now. I used newsboat, which is a terminal client that works pretty well. If you like mutt, you'll like newsboat. It runs on my main workstation, though, so I found myself gravitating back to Feedly so that I could catch up on things when I wasn't sitting in my office. Somewhere along the way, I saw a reference to a self-hosted aggregator, and since my phone is tethered to the home network all the time anyway via wireguard, I figured I'd give it a shot. I looked at a few and finally landed on FreshRSS - mainly because I found a docker image for it and can run it on the NAS alongside HomeAssistant. Ten minutes later, I'm up and running. So far, so good. I like it! 

I'm more or less caught up with schoolwork. Grades are starting to come back to us, which is nice too. One final set of readings and an essay (Theodicy: Aquinas v. Anselm) is due before the next class but I'm ahead of schedule. Next week, I'm on deck to teach OCIA and will be doing Marriage and Morality (read: contraception, IVF, &c).

I also managed to step (along with my wife) into coordinating our parish's Synod-on-the-Synod activities, which should be interesting. The runway seems short - we need to have our summaries back to the diocese by the end of April - so the keys will be delegating as much as we can to individual ministries and school, hosting as many listening sessions as we can before the diocesean deadline, and ensuring bilingual access every step of the way.

Meanwhile, the temperatures are slowly climbing. The sun is out more and the days are getting longer, but we're still in that 60s-one-day-20s-the-next part of the year.  Spenser nailed it:

Therein the changes infinite beholde,
Which to her creatures euery minute chaunce;
Now, boyling hot: streight, friezing deadly cold:
Now, faire sun-shine, that makes all skip and daunce:
Streight, bitter storms and balefull countenance,
That makes them all to shiuer and to shake:
Rayne, hayle, and snowe do pay them sad penance,
And dreadfull thunder-claps (that make them quake)
With flames & flashing lights that thousand changes make.

Not sure what I was expecting out of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but given its famous opening line, I guess the plot went the only way it could. This book (and the last) happens from me looking at our bookshelf and saying, huh - I didn't know we had this. I'm still not entirely sure where we got some of these. I think after this, I'll look for something on the lighter side. 

“Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty man is happy when he is drinking, and he is not depressed because he cannot exhaust the spring. So let this spring satisfy your thirst, and not your thirst the spring…Be thankful then for what you have received and do not be saddened at all that such an abundance still remains.”

— St. Ephrem the Syrian, deacon

This was in the Office of Readings for Sunday - the whole piece, excerpted from a commentary on the Diatessaron, is worth reading and comes at a particularly good time for me (simultaneously thirsty and a little overwhelmed).

“When I notice something wrong in my brother that cannot be corrected - either because it is inevitable or because it comes from some weakness of his in body or character - why do I not bear it patiently and offer my willing sympathy? As scripture says, their children will be carried on their shoulders and comforted on their laps. Could it be because there is a lack in me, a lack of that which bears all things and is patient enough to take up the burden, a lack of the will to love?”

— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Abbot

Still working through the Tolstoy collection. So far The Cossacks is my favorite, followed closely by Family Happiness and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I finished The Devil last night and am still chewing on it. Two endings are included, both terrible, and I’m not sure which is the less terrible.

Draft of one paper (Liturgy!) is done. Will sleep on it, review/edit it tomorrow, and submit Monday-ish. Most of this week's reading for the online class (Creed!) is also done; one more article to get through plus a couple of YT lectures. On deck: readings and essays for the upcoming class (Fundamentals!) at the end of the month. #wharrgarbl

Current state: I have to write a paper for a class that just ended, start the reading assignments for a course beginning in a few weeks, and keep up with the ongoing readings/reflections for an online class that commenced this week.  My head so full. 

“And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone.”

— Tolstoy, The Cossacks

Facebook, said the director of diocesan media, is where the people still are.

So after this latest formation weekend, I installed FB Purity, gritted my teeth, and logged back in after a nine year hiatus. Not much seems to have changed and the plug-in seems to clear away nearly all of the most annoying UI stuff.

I intend to use it like Twitter - follow a few things I’m interested in (church stuff, duh) and mostly lurk/listen.

A little more nerd stuff - I've fallen down the Home Assistant rabbit-hole. Not really interested in the automation aspects as much as having One Place to See Everything. I've been eyeballing it for a while but figured it would have to wait until Raspberry Pis were available again at reasonable prices. Then I saw that there was a Docker image available! Our NAS will run Docker, so fifteen minutes later I had it up and running. A couple of days later I've got what few IoT things we have all discovered and dashboarded. In the process, I wanted to re-install OpenVPN but decided to give Wireguard a try. After a bit of flailing - I had ignored the 'you should reboot' installation message and wasn't actually using the updated kernel - it's up and running beautifully. It's fast, easy to add new clients, and I can set it for on-demand activation whenever I'm off the local wifi network.

Spent most of Sunday and Monday installing a new ceiling fan. Difficulty level: 16' ceiling. This required two (2) runs to Home Depot to rent a 14' step-ladder and truck to haul it and an extended facetime call with a master electrician friend of mine for some Q&A. Managed it all without serious injury or breaking anything, so I'll call it a win.

In all of the bouncing of the room circuit, the Raspberry Pi bit the dust, or at least its sdcard did. Found a larger card and reflashed it so we’re back in the adblocking business. Oh and amidst all this, one of the garage doors went all haywire and a guy had to come out and basically re-set a bunch of things. So we start the (short) week with everything more or less working again. The sun’s out and the weekend’s snow and ice are, again, melting quickly.

We finished up season 4 of Fargo and season 6 of The Expanse, so we decided to give Peaky Blinders a try. One episode in and we're sufficiently intrigued. I do have to say that we got a good laugh by Netflix's content warning when it started: "Language, Nudity, Gore, Smoking."

We breathlessly intoned "...and smoking!" to each other as things got underway.

And now for something completely different.

I wrote a dumb little shell script to watch the USCCB’s website for any updates to their ongoing overhaul of the Liturgy of the Hours. If anything changes, the script DMs me on our family’s Slack channel. Why Slack? The price is right and the younger ones without phones can participate. It’s been great fun for general silliness, sharing pictures, and general announcements like we’re starting Boba Fett in 10 minutes.

I’ve also come to appreciate Slack’s webhook feature, which makes it a cinch to post data to a channel. Among other things, I’ve got a script that uses rtl_433 to monitor my wireless grill thermometer and send temperature updates so I can keep an eye on things when I have to be elsewhere.

In any event, this is what I came up with after liberally borrowing from similar things I found online:

#!/bin/bash

URL="https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgy-of-the-hours/liturgy-of-the-hours-second-edition"

mv new.html old.html 2> /dev/null
lynx --dump -nolist $URL > new.html
DIFF_OUTPUT="$(diff --changed-group-format='-%<+%>' --unchanged-group-format='' new.html old.html)"
if [ "0" -ne "${#DIFF_OUTPUT}" ]; then

    message="LOTH Website has been updated: https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgy-of-the-hours/liturgy-of-the-hours-second-edition^M"$DIFF_OUTPUT

    curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
            --data "$(jq -n --arg var "$message" '.text = $var')" \
            https://hooks.slack.com/services/getyourownwebhookapi/urlinfoandputithere
fi

Why lynx? For a page that doesn’t change very often, the USCCB’s CMS uses enough javascript that changes and I was getting false alarms. Lynx will dump out the content and leave all the cruft behind. The ‘nolist’ option suppresses the URL list which is normally appended to the output.

I wanted to see the actual changes in the message, so I found a concise bit of formatting for diff’s output

Another tip of the hat to ‘jq’ which, once again, makes dealing with JSON a snap. This runs as a daily cron job. Now I’ll be all in the loop whenever something happens. In the spirit of sharing, take this and go nuts if it’s useful to you.