Deacon’s Blog

Notice today’s posting spree? I can start by saying that I would have loved to spread this out as background information arrived, but this past weekend was just a bit too physically challenging for me. I felt absolutely lousy all weekend. I actually missed Holy Mass on Sunday - the first time in years. Needless to say, posting to the blog wasn’t high on the priority list. I feel much better now and have a burst of energy. I guess I just needed rest, light eating, and as always, God’s blessing. A measure of my renewed energy comes from the inspiration for many of these posts.

The source of many of today’s posts comes from a benefactor whom I truly admire - a storehouse of knowledge on the PNCC and a person I see as a true lover of the PNCC. I came home today to discover several items that he mailed, a publication from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center and a brochure from the University of Michigan’s Copernicus Endowment. I am looking through both while writing these words. More to come after I reflect on what’s there.

I am truly grateful for these gifts - not because they are things, but because of the time one man, with more knowledge and grace then I will ever have, spends in being the giver of gifts.

Bardzo dziękuje i Bóg zapłać Pan Władysław!

From the how much is too much category, the “conservative” Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (see their Wikipedia entry) under the guise of the “Empire Center For New York State Policy¹” has published SeeThroughNY.

You can go there and faithfully study every public employee’s pay. You can search by name or by agency. This is a trend among people posing as open government/good government types. Ohio went so far as to publish every public employee’s pay and home address until they were stopped.

You probably should avoid the site for awhile since their servers are getting bombarded. When I checked their site earlier today I found that their web programmers left a few of the pages, including the one for searching public payrolls, completely unsecured. Anyone could have deleted large chunks of the site through a simple to use interface at the top of the page. It is one of those really stupid things people do when they are in a hurry.

Of course most of the State’s citizenry could care less. They’re worried about larger more personal matters. This stuff generally appeals to government workers (especially those with a grudge against the boss), political hacks, folks with a ax to grind, and those wanting to track down people who have seized their assets because of tax evasion, who have arrested them, who have audited them, or who have evaded them only by obtaining a restraining order (the ex-spouses and stalkers).

Now, all this information is public and a state’s citizens have a right to that information. Prior to publishing this site any citizen could get the very same data by making a FOIL request. For those with bad intent that at least left a paper trail and was self policing. Now those folks can do it from the comfort of their home computer.

By the way, the Manhattan Institute (see the People for the American Way report on these folks) publishes the salaries of their highest paid employees and directors via their IRS filings. Here’s a copy of their 2006 Form 990. You will note that their Chairman, Lawrence J. Mone pulled down a little over $400,000 in salary and deferred compensation in 2006. Since 1998 he’s received approximately $200,000 per year! Of course they don’t publish their entire payroll. I wonder what their lowest paid secretary, receptionist, or bathroom cleaner makes?

Over the past two weeks I’ve been making my final moves to the Mac. I’ve been running Boot Camp with a copy of Windows XP because I needed to run a few programs. The things I delayed moving to the Mac platform were:

• Quicken
• Legacy Family Tree
• Paperport
• Publisher (I was using this to do my parish’s bulletin which our new pastoral administrator will do now. No need for this app because I have iWork)
• Homescan

I had delayed in moving these because they had tons of data and take a bunch of work to get moved.

Quicken to Moneydance

The toughest was Quicken. The Mac version of Quicken is notoriously difficult and not everything transfers smoothly. In fact there are no programs out there that convert Quicken data easily or cleanly (i.e., don’t be fooled by anyone’s claims).

The other issue with Quicken is that the Mac version is way past its prime. They keep discussing a new version “coming soon” but I still think that they have not invested enough in their Mac line to make Intuit the software of choice.

In switching you just have to look at the scale of difficulty involved in all the available options and read a lot of reviews, hopefully locating the one that entails the least amount of pain. I chose Moneydance 2008. It took about two days to clean up all the transactions (note that they went back to 1993!!!) In the conversion there was limited duplication of entries. The biggest, most significant problem was with accounts where balances were brought forward from an archiving process in one account (like a checking account) and where the same transactions were not archived in the second account. To clean everything up I created a “Prior Transactions” account and moved the unmatched and duplicate transactions there. At the end I simply zeroed the Prior Transactions account balance. Not very elegant, but it worked. I just have to accept it as a one-off problem. Note too that I did not delete transactions because doing so makes the situation worse. If you have any accounting background think “T” accounts and having unmatched entries.

In the end I am finding Moneydance easier to use than Quicken. There is less in-the way and you get a clearer picture of your financial status. Quicken had simply evolved into bloatware. A lot of fancy bells and whistles that get in the way. Moneydance is simply clean, inexpensive, core Quicken - the Quicken I fell in love with years ago.

Legacy Family Tree to Reunion

Genealogy programs tend to transfer data easily. Gedcom files are the standard and most of the programs on the market, whether proprietary or freeware, export and import smoothly. No problem here. 2,535 individuals, 1,896 families all cleanly transferred.

The Reunion interface is much like the Legacy interface so it lends to a sense of familiarity. I like Reunion’s Mac look and feel. It also makes taking stuff to your local LDS Family History Center or National Archives Centers easier because it ports to your iPod.

Paperport to Yep!

This wasn’t a bad transition. I used Paperport for years, probably going back to version 9 or something earlier. Can’t quite recall. Anyway, I used it to store those all-too-important documents like explanations of medical benefits, bank statements, appliance manuals, etc. It helps to keep the paper down and I really dislike digging through old file folders.

In the newer version of Paperport those items are all stored in pdf format, but the older Paperport files are .max files. Paperport 11 has a batch converter so I changed all the .max files to pdfs. Yep! stores pdfs and is a the sort of application any blogger would love. It used tags to ID documents!!! It is great because you can get to documents through a tag cloud. You can also use as many tags as you like to describe a document. It allows new documents to be scanned in and is really easy to use.

On importing all my existing pdfs it automatically tagged them using the directory structure of the imported files (I simple copied over the “My Paperport Documents” folder and deleted all the extraneous files, i.e., those that were not pdfs).

Others

Publisher is gone - as I noted above I no longer need it. I’ll use iWork (even though I have Mac Office) for all my document publishing needs.

Homescan is the last holdout. They’ve been promising a Mac version of their apps. I hope that they hop on it. Mac users - let them know. Actually I would think that they would want to capture the Mac demographic.

From Mobile Entertainment: Nickelodeon inks Orange Poland deal

Mobile content key element of cross-platform launch into Poland by kids brand.

MTV Networks International today unveiled the latest addition to its growing portfolio, Nickelodeon Poland.

A content shopfront on the Orange World portal has been launched in support of a new TV channel serving up the likes of Dora the Explorer, Spongebob Squarepants and Jimmy Neutron.

Nickelodeon will also be launching online with a Polish language website which will provide users with an online community, games, downloads and an online broadband video platform.

Bhavneet Singh, managing director of MTVNI’s emerging markets division said: “Our Polish team has done a tremendous job in creating what will no doubt become the standout go-to destination for Polish kids of all ages both on and off-air”.

A household favorite - and now we can watch SpongeBob Kanciastoporty (Sponge Bob Squarepants), Patryk Rozgwiazda (Patrick), Skalmar (Squidward), Pan Krab (Eugeniusz H. Krab - i.e., Mr. Krabs), Gacuś (Gary) and Plankton (Sheldon J. Plankton) the next time we’re in Poland.

From Lionsgate Home Entertainment: “Anthony Warrior of God“, a film based on the life of the most famous saint St. Anthony of Padua, is now available.

Co-written and directed by Antonello Belluco, “Anthony Warrior of God” is an inspiring tale of historical and doctrinal resonance that doesn’t preach, but instead invites the audience to go on a journey of reflection and contemplation regardless of their theological convictions. The film stars Jordi Mollá (Blow, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), Matt Patresi, Damir Todorovic (The Nativity Story), Giovanni Capalbo (The Passion of the Christ), Arnoldo Foà (II Caimano) and Paolo De Vita (Excellent Cadavers) and depicts the story of the remarkable man whose deeply rooted faith enabled him to challenge society in support of his people.

St. Anthony began life as a young nobleman who enjoyed all the sumptuous pleasures and privileges of that medieval Europe could offer. Yet he was compelled by a mysterious inner voice to gaze upon the unspeakable misery, disease and cruelty around him. Overcome with boundless compassion, he entered a monastery, dedicating his fine mind and fragile body to defending the poor and oppressed against injustice. This revolutionary saint dared to challenge the highest spheres of society, the government and even the Church, if they were guilty of exploiting the common people.

His story continues to this day with the many accounts of those who have been transformed by “the most famous saint in the world”, St. Anthony of Padua.

I plan to purchase the film.

Tim Russet, the host of NBCs Meet the Press died today at the age of 58. From CNN:

Friends and colleagues remembered Russert on Friday not only as one of the country’s most respected and influential political journalists, but also as a friend, a devout Catholic and an avid sports fan, especially when it came to his home team, the Buffalo Bills…

Russert was born May 7, 1950, in Buffalo, New York. His parents were Timothy John Russert Sr., or “Big Russ,” a newspaper truck driver and sanitation worker, and Elizabeth Russert…

“Tim was a true child of Buffalo and the blue-collar roots from which he was raised,” Brokaw said Friday. “For all his success, he was always in touch with the ethos of that community.”

Russert credited his upbringing with helping him keep his ego in check as he became the man who interviewed presidents and important politicians of the day.

“If you come from Buffalo, everything else is easy. Walking backwards to school, for a mile in the snow, grounds you for life,” Russert told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz in 2004. “Plus, if you have a family the way I do, it’s a daily reality check…”

Eternal rest grant onto him O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon him.

A friend sent me a link to a site called Birth Verse. You put in your birth date and are given a biblical verse where the chapter and verse are the month and day of your birth.

I ended up with the following from Proverbs (NIV):

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life,
and he who wins souls is wise.

Unfortunately the RSV isn’t quite as happy as the NIV:

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life,
but lawlessness takes away lives.

Thankfully the Douay-Rheims backs up the NIV:

The fruit of the just man is a tree of life:
and he that gaineth souls, is wise.

We pause today to honor…

Growing up, that is what Memorial Day was all about. Those lessons, learned as a child, are engraved, engraved and part of me. They are lessons time and tide cannot touch. They are truths that surpass the nowness of today. They tell us that history builds upon a continuity of national spirit. That continuity is more valuable than the whims of politicians and the exaggerated ideas of those who wish to hijack the national treasure. At core we are to be about honor.

My father, grandfather, and most of my uncles were veterans. Those few who did not serve in the armed forces served at home. They made the steel that built the ships, planes, and tanks. They protected the home front as police officers. After their time of service they remained loyal to the ideals they fought to protect and maintain. Lessons engraved. Honor.

I saw it after my father died. The flag draped coffin, honor guard, rife salute, taps. I was only four. I saw it each year as my grandfather attended to the veterans graves, including his son’s, at St. Stanislaus cemetery in Buffalo, New York. Those men from the Adam Plewacki Post, #799 of the American Legion, walked the rows of headstones, placing flags for the fallen. I saw it as I served at Funeral Masses and assisted the priest at the cemetery. God, family, country. Lessons engraved. Honor.

Near my father’s grave was the grave of an uncle of one of my classmates. He was killed in action over Europe. Army Air Corps. On the front of his monument there was a small picture. I always stopped to pray there after visiting my father, to honor him. Honor.

Memorial Day will always be about honor. More than honor it is a fitting reminder of what we are as a country. We must pause and remember, not just the service or sacrifice of our father, uncles, brothers, grandparents, and friends, but their eyes, ears, and voices. We must take their vision, the words that they fought for, and the pledges that they took, and we must recapture them. We need their vision, the words they honored, and faithfulness to the pledges they took.

As they did, let us place the Lord God in front of all we do, first and foremost, and render Him due homage. Let us honor God and God’s way above all. Loyalty to His way protects us from the temptation to strike first, to retaliate, to exchange wrong for wrong, to sell truth for sloganeering.

Then our families. The family as core to our communal way of life. Families in communities who maintain self sufficiency, community responsibility, neighborliness, hard work, and charity. Families who sustain community for the common good, because we must live side-by-side without prejudice or scorn. People living in freedom and sharing the gifts of freedom with each other. People who will acclaim: ‘I am free - my neighbor deserves the same respect.’ People who believe that they really must be their brother’s keeper when he is in need.

Finally our nation. Not nation over all, but nation for the sake of good order and the protection of just laws. Not laws over people, and intrusive government, but a shared ideal of what a nation can do by garnering the collective will and strength of its people, only when necessary, and always vigilant against exploitation. Not a nation of invaders, but a nation wary to fight, wary to venture abroad, wary of might over right, the stick over the words.

We pause today to honor the fallen, and to honor their honor. We pause to reflect and then to turn again, to take up their honor and to be steadfast in our allegiance to God, to our families, and to our country. We pause, and with our engraved memory renewed, we take up the fight for our Country. Their ideals, our ideals, bound by honor.

O Judge of the nations, we remember before You with grateful hearts the men and women of our country who in the day of decision ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy. Grant that we may not rest until all the people in this land share the benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines. This we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. — BCP (1979), Thanksgiving for Heroic Service

…and why is he dancing with that little girl?

In New York’s Capital Region we have several public access TV stations. One of the stations carries a Polka show (I think its called Polka Joe - but I’m not sure). Anyway, this gentleman travels from Polka event to Polka event and films the events. The events are later broadcast via public access. It’s a niche demographic.

A week or two ago one of my staff members caught up with me to tell me that her mother-in-law was watching this Polka show and saw this guy in a dress dancing with a little girl. She called her over to see a scene filmed at my parish’s annual PolishFest. My staff member looked closely and saw that it was my daughter and me.

Q. Who’s that man in a dress?
A. He is a deacon at that church.
Q. Why is he dancing with a little girl?
A. It’s his daughter.
Q. Why is he wearing a dress?
A. Clerical attire.

All sorts of hilarity ensued.

When I attend a public event - especially at the parish, I wear a cassock and cincture. I also have a biretta, but that only comes out for liturgical events. What I found most interesting is that the person asking is probably old enough (and Roman Catholic enough) to remember cassocks, birettas, etc.

I was born just prior to Vatican II and remember my pastor walking his dogs wearing a cassock and biretta. I remember the way he came to the altar wearing the biretta, and then removed it as he ascended the steps. The priests of that day may have worn a “dress” and a funny hat but they were men.

I personally hope that their use becomes more prevalent. Beyond the basic message the cassock conveys (remember at tonsure you are reminded that you are no longer adorned in the fashion of the world - ab omni servitute saecularis habitus hunc famulum tuum emunda, ut dum ignominiam saecularis habitus deponit, tua semper in aevum gratia perfruatur), wearing a cassock make the balance of the liturgical garments a clergy member wears look far better. The lines are cleaner and you don’t look messy with pant cuffs hanging below your opaque alb (bleh…).

Just a little story outlining the things lost in the twilight zone called V-II.

Honoring Russell Pawlak and the work he has lead - to restore and reclaim a part of Buffalo’s history. His story shows that determination, hard work, and a step-by-step approach can win more than just the day. From today’s Buffalo News: Restoration conductor hangs up his cap at Central Terminal - Russell Pawlak steps aside after 10 years as volunteer

Ten years ago, Central Terminal was an uninhabited and dilapidated relic in danger of the wrecking ball.

Today, the 17-story art deco former train station on the East Side is still a long way from full restoration, but it has become a popular site for community and offbeat artistic events.

The surprising transformation wouldn’t have happened without Russell Pawlak, the pitchman, marketer and, some people contend, visionary who grew up on Milburn Street, in the shadow of Central Terminal.

Now, after a decade of volunteer involvement, including the last eight as president of the Central Terminal Restoration Corp., Pawlak is hanging up his conductor’s cap…