Posted: June 28

Catching up by email and face to face

Yesterday was a watershed day for me, as far as my new career as web programmer. I have been learning how to create interactive web pages and finally worked the major bugs out of an application to send email from a database. And I used it for the Jescom mailing list which has 266 names so far. The best part came when I opened up my email this morning and saw how many people have already responded. The situation is a little Pavlovian, but if you give me a response, I react helplessly. I know you can use Outlook Express or something like that to send mail, but I am working on a much bigger project of developing an effective intranet for use within the Jesuit Curia here in Rome, and then taking that learning experience for a broader communication via the web with Jesuits and friends all over the world. So getting one part of the bigger application to work is very satisfying. Especially for me, since I am a designer by training-- keeping track of all the little codes, and every precise comma or lack of one, which can throw everything off—is not easy for me.

On the other side of life, I had a very nice personal visit from Fr. Albert Chirwa, a diocesan priest from Malawi, who is just finished with a three-month course at the Gregorian University and will be returning to Africa to undertake the creation of a diocesan radio station at the behest of his bishop. I was able to give him some notes about Radio Chikuni, the Jesuit station from a rural mission in the south of Zambia. They do a religious-communitarian type radio station very well and can offer him a good model. I visited Radio Chikuni in February and met the two Polish Jesuits who staff the parish and run the radio. In a way, my travels and getting to know what is happening around the world, and then being able to share that a bit, is the best part of my job. Much better than writing code, even though that is pretty amazing when it works.