Category: Work

There is a young, college-age gentleman who has been a friend of Catholic Answers for a number of years and who used to work there.

He’s been sick since January and been having excruciating pain in his neck and abdomen. This morning, starting at 8 a.m. Pacific time (11 a.m. Eastern), he is going to be having a thyroid biopsy.

I don’t normally make prayer requests here on the blog, but I’d ask folks to keep him in prayer. The biopsy happens today and then he’ll get the results on the 20th.

Thanks, folks. I appreciate it.

Okay, I’m really not that sleepy. (Or wasn’t *AT THAT TIME.*) I picked a frame where I’m blinking.

But you can see other frames with my eyes wide open (if you have an interest in that).

GET THE VIDEO. (55 meg; high-speed required.)

(Cowboy hat tip: Small But Disorganized for capturing & hosting it!)

NOTE: The video may only be available for a limited time only due to download restraints.

Mommy Guilt — guilt for being a mother with a career — is not something I currently experience because I’m not married or a mother (although I do hold out hope).  But since I do one day hope to be a wife, mother, and writer, this post by a romance novelist on a romance novel blog was of some interest to me.

"Sometimes, I even have to shut the door and say, ‘Mommy’s working’ in the . . . EVENINGS. Or, worse, WEEKENDS. Can we say slimy, guilt-ridden mother???

"So here’s the deal. I’m going to try to feel less guilty. Because I still believe it’s really cool to teach my kids that Moms can have wonderfully fulfilling jobs, too. I’ll even let the emotion inform my writing. And I’ll stock up on supplies for the next galaxy I have to help build at midnight."

Is it just me or does it sound to anyone else that this is simply saying, "I know something’s wrong here; I’ve even got my finger to the pulse of what’s not working.  But rather than fix it, I prefer to revel in the guilt"?

Like I said, I’m not a working mom, so I don’t have suggestions for this working mom.  But I don’t think the solution is to use Mommy Guilt to "inform writing."  Kids are kids but a short time.  On your deathbed, are you going to be glad you used your Mommy Guilt to pen a bestseller, or are you going to wish you set aside the copyedits to help build a miniature galaxy with your child? 

I read this post and I started hearing Harry Chapin singing "Cat’s In the Cradle."

A reader writes:

What’s up with the Catholic Answers forums? I haven’t been able to get in since Friday, and I can’t find any information anywhere.

The server they were on died, and our ISP is subbing in new hardware. Sorry for the inconvenience. We hope to have them back up soon.

CHECK TO SEE IF THE FORUMS ARE BACK UP AGAIN.

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Ever consider doing a list of questions asked in a particular
Q&A show for the whole set of shows on Catholic.com Sometimes I
want something fun to listen to so I’ll pick one at random. Othertimes
I’d like to hear an answer to a question I have, and having a list of
the questions asked as a pop-up or heads-up display would be really
keen.

I don’t have the time to do this, I’m afraid. I can make up question lists for all of my shows from here on out, but I’m not able to go back and do the whole run–for my own shows, much less everybody else’s. (Among other things, I have a blog to write.)

That being said, I recognize the value of doing this and I’m not opposed to the idea–if I can get some help doing it.

Tell ‘ya what:

• Y’all can see the level of detail and way I’m describing the questions.
• If anybody wants to volunteer to do a block of shows, e-mail me and I’ll let you know which ones to do (this way we won’t have people duplicating efforts by picking the same shows).
• Each block would be a month on the calendar (typically three to six shows of mine).
• You tell me how many blocks you’d like to volunteer for (mininum commitment = 1 block; assinging individual shows rather than blocks would be a bookkeeping nightmare).
• Then you do the question lists (which only takes a few minutes per show since you can jump forward once you get the sense of a question–unless you want to listen to the whole show ’cause you’re interested), e-mail them back to me, and I’ll post them.

If we can work through the backlog of my shows, that would show that there are enough people out there interested in doing this that it would make sense to do it for the rest of the shows as well, at which point I would propose it to the folks in the Web and Radio Departments at Catholic Answers that we get this all done via volunteers and then post it all on Catholic.Com so everyone can benefit from it.

If they say yes, we do it. (If they say no, we don’t do it, but I’m pretty sure they’d say yes if the data is offered to them and I’ve already proven that there are enough volunteers by doing my own shows, which are about a fifth of the total.)

Whadda y’all think?

There’s going to be a Big Announcement at the top of today’s Catholic Answers Live.

A debate strategy that I learned a long time ago was that when your opponent is doing something unreasonable (e.g., trying to hog all the time, refusing to address your arguments) that the thing to do is point out what he is doing. This alerts the audience to the behavior he is exhibiting and leads them to think about why he is doing it. It also may motivate him to change his behavior.

I recently had two occasions to use this tactic on a couple of radio shows.

The first was on the KPBS stem cell debate. In this debate my opponent kept doing the "oh, one more thing . . . " tactic for hogging the airtime and preventing me from responding, and the host let him get away with it. This was unfair. At one point he said, "I don’t want to ramble on, but . . . " and I jumped in with "But you are. And at such length that I haven’t been given remotely equal time to respond," which I said while looking the host in the eyes, signalling that he wasn’t doing his job.

I started getting more time.

After the show the host tried to justified his mishandling of the situation by saying (off the air) that "from an editorial perspective" it was "justifiable" that my opponent got "a little more time" because he had to sell people on the stem cell proposition.

I responded: (1) It wasn’t a little more time, it was a lot. (2) That I disagree: Both viewpoints should be explored equally.

If I’m confronted with a similar situation in the future, I will add: (3) I didn’t know our purpose here was to sell the listener on his viewpoint. And I may even add: (4) And people in the media wonder why the public thinks that they’re biased!

The second time I had the occasion to use the tactic was on Seattle talk station KIRO. Guest host Allan Prell–an excitable leftist attack dog of an interviewer–had me on to talk about the voters guide. First, though he had me explain what an apologetics is, because he learned a new term when his producer told him my title. Most of the interview was pretty low-key because I kept sidestepping the inflammatory things he wanted me to say. Here’s a paraphrase of some exchanges:

PRELL: You’ve got these five non-negotiables in your voters guide–abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and gay quote marriage enquote. Who knew George W. Bush was such a good Catholic!

ME: (Reeling from the fact that the host has put to me an absurd statement rather than a question) I couldn’t comment on that one way or the other except to note the point of fact that he is a Methodist.

He then went on to accuse us of putting out a disguised endorsement of George Bush over John Kerry and I had to be rather firm with him pointing out that this was not the case and why it was not the case (e.g., the guide says not to vote based on party, the guide is a set of general principles to be used in all elections rather than just the presidential one, the guide was written long before the candidates for this election were known, and that we will be teaching the same principles long into the future).

He thanked me, and that was the end of my segment.

But then I got a voicemail from his producer saying that a question had arisen from their listeners ("Why wasn’t the death penalty non-negotiable #6?") and could I come back on the air to talk about it.

I did.

He put the question to me on the air and I said:

ME: The death penalty isn’t listed because it isn’t a non-negotiable in the sense that the guide uses the term. The Catechism of the Catholic Church points out that the state has the right to use the death penalty . . .

I was going to go onto to say " . . . but it counsels that it be used infrequently" but couldn’t because at this point the host FREAKED OUT and interrupted me and kept interrupting me each time I tried to finish the sentence. After repeated tries, I decided it was time to point out the host’s behavior.

ME: I’m sorry, but are you going to let me finish my sentence or not? Is that the kind of host that you are–that won’t let a guest finish a sentence? Do you want a serious answer on this or do you want me to hang up right now? [This was the first time I had ever threatened to walk out on an interview.]

PRELL: Well, I dunno . . .

ME: Well, while you’re thinking about that, why don’t I finish my sentence?

I did, and it got the interview back on track. Yet the excitable attack dog host wouldn’t take the fact that the Catechism acknowledges that the state has the right to use capital punishment (despite the fact that he declared "I’m not a Catholic–in fact, far from it"). He also would not take the fact that most people in world history have seen a difference between killing a guilty person and killing an innocent person.

At this point he turned personal again.

PRELL: What is your view of the death penalty?

ME: I’ll be happy to tell you the Church’s position . . .

PRELL: (interrupting) I don’t want the Church’s position! I want to know what you think!

ME: I’ll be happy to tell you the Church’s position, but it is a matter of my professional ethic that I stick to stating the Church’s position rather than advancing my own opinions.

PRELL: (hyperactive) Profession! What’s you’re profession???

ME: I am an apologist. [I had explained this in the first segment, one will recall.]

PRELL: (incredulous) You get paid for that???

ME: I do. And I try to be very scrupulous as a matter of professional ethics to state the Church’s position without putting my own spin on it.

PRELL: (mocking) Sounds to me like hy-po-cri-sy!

In fact, abandoning all pretense of observing normal ettiquite, he mockingly repeated this accusation of hypocrisy (at one point repeating it in a way that led me to think he was also accusing the Church of hypocrisy). This led to a second instance of my pointing out the host’s behavior.

PRELL: (mocking) Sounds to me like hy-po-cri-sy!

ME: (calmly) Sounds to me like you need a lesson in manners that your momma didn’t give you.

At this point Prell said thanks and hung up abruptly, ending my second appearance on his show.

Afterwards I got a voicemail and a couple of e-mails from KIRO listeners thanking me for my appearance on the show and telling me about how leftist the station is and how much ugliness followed both of my appearances.

I doubt I’ll be invited back anytime soon.

A debate strategy that I learned a long time ago was that when your opponent is doing something unreasonable (e.g., trying to hog all the time, refusing to address your arguments) that the thing to do is point out what he is doing. This alerts the audience to the behavior he is exhibiting and leads them to think about why he is doing it. It also may motivate him to change his behavior.

I recently had two occasions to use this tactic on a couple of radio shows.

The first was on the KPBS stem cell debate. In this debate my opponent kept doing the "oh, one more thing . . . " tactic for hogging the airtime and preventing me from responding, and the host let him get away with it. This was unfair. At one point he said, "I don’t want to ramble on, but . . . " and I jumped in with "But you are. And at such length that I haven’t been given remotely equal time to respond," which I said while looking the host in the eyes, signalling that he wasn’t doing his job.

I started getting more time.

After the show the host tried to justified his mishandling of the situation by saying (off the air) that "from an editorial perspective" it was "justifiable" that my opponent got "a little more time" because he had to sell people on the stem cell proposition.

I responded: (1) It wasn’t a little more time, it was a lot. (2) That I disagree: Both viewpoints should be explored equally.

If I’m confronted with a similar situation in the future, I will add: (3) I didn’t know our purpose here was to sell the listener on his viewpoint. And I may even add: (4) And people in the media wonder why the public thinks that they’re biased!

The second time I had the occasion to use the tactic was on Seattle talk station KIRO. Guest host Allan Prell–an excitable leftist attack dog of an interviewer–had me on to talk about the voters guide. First, though he had me explain what an apologetics is, because he learned a new term when his producer told him my title. Most of the interview was pretty low-key because I kept sidestepping the inflammatory things he wanted me to say. Here’s a paraphrase of some exchanges:

PRELL: You’ve got these five non-negotiables in your voters guide–abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and gay quote marriage enquote. Who knew George W. Bush was such a good Catholic!

ME: (Reeling from the fact that the host has put to me an absurd statement rather than a question) I couldn’t comment on that one way or the other except to note the point of fact that he is a Methodist.

He then went on to accuse us of putting out a disguised endorsement of George Bush over John Kerry and I had to be rather firm with him pointing out that this was not the case and why it was not the case (e.g., the guide says not to vote based on party, the guide is a set of general principles to be used in all elections rather than just the presidential one, the guide was written long before the candidates for this election were known, and that we will be teaching the same principles long into the future).

He thanked me, and that was the end of my segment.

But then I got a voicemail from his producer saying that a question had arisen from their listeners ("Why wasn’t the death penalty non-negotiable #6?") and could I come back on the air to talk about it.

I did.

He put the question to me on the air and I said:

ME: The death penalty isn’t listed because it isn’t a non-negotiable in the sense that the guide uses the term. The Catechism of the Catholic Church points out that the state has the right to use the death penalty . . .

I was going to go onto to say " . . . but it counsels that it be used infrequently" but couldn’t because at this point the host FREAKED OUT and interrupted me and kept interrupting me each time I tried to finish the sentence. After repeated tries, I decided it was time to point out the host’s behavior.

ME: I’m sorry, but are you going to let me finish my sentence or not? Is that the kind of host that you are–that won’t let a guest finish a sentence? Do you want a serious answer on this or do you want me to hang up right now? [This was the first time I had ever threatened to walk out on an interview.]

PRELL: Well, I dunno . . .

ME: Well, while you’re thinking about that, why don’t I finish my sentence?

I did, and it got the interview back on track. Yet the excitable attack dog host wouldn’t take the fact that the Catechism acknowledges that the state has the right to use capital punishment (despite the fact that he declared "I’m not a Catholic–in fact, far from it"). He also would not take the fact that most people in world history have seen a difference between killing a guilty person and killing an innocent person.

At this point he turned personal again.

PRELL: What is your view of the death penalty?

ME: I’ll be happy to tell you the Church’s position . . .

PRELL: (interrupting) I don’t want the Church’s position! I want to know what you think!

ME: I’ll be happy to tell you the Church’s position, but it is a matter of my professional ethic that I stick to stating the Church’s position rather than advancing my own opinions.

PRELL: (hyperactive) Profession! What’s you’re profession???

ME: I am an apologist. [I had explained this in the first segment, one will recall.]

PRELL: (incredulous) You get paid for that???

ME: I do. And I try to be very scrupulous as a matter of professional ethics to state the Church’s position without putting my own spin on it.

PRELL: (mocking) Sounds to me like hy-po-cri-sy!

In fact, abandoning all pretense of observing normal ettiquite, he mockingly repeated this accusation of hypocrisy (at one point repeating it in a way that led me to think he was also accusing the Church of hypocrisy). This led to a second instance of my pointing out the host’s behavior.

PRELL: (mocking) Sounds to me like hy-po-cri-sy!

ME: (calmly) Sounds to me like you need a lesson in manners that your momma didn’t give you.

At this point Prell said thanks and hung up abruptly, ending my second appearance on his show.

Afterwards I got a voicemail and a couple of e-mails from KIRO listeners thanking me for my appearance on the show and telling me about how leftist the station is and how much ugliness followed both of my appearances.

I doubt I’ll be invited back anytime soon.