I traveled with two colleagues, both of which are also Saint Vincent alumni, to meet and talk with a group of students, in one of my old classrooms none the less. A collection of about twenty students came to our presentation, representing a variety of majors. We presented about current and future opportunities the company can offer along with discussing company history, current progress and corporate culture. As I was explaining my position and day to day work to the students, I found great joy and pride; not in talking about all the things I have done and do, but in the moment of realization of what I was doing just then in the classroom. It was an awesome experience to be in front of the classroom instead of sitting in it. To be able to talk to young people, who are in the exact position I was only a few years ago, about the success I’ve gained from my time at my college was just really cool.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve been back to campus to talk to students, but it was a most special one. I think in part because I was able to share it with my fellow graduate co-workers. Without really talking explicitly about it, we all shared a connection to the school and the students that day.

After our presentation, we were all surrounded by students who had further questions for us individually. This moment actually echoed something that I told the students myself only a few minutes earlier. I spoke about how when I first started working, I found myself sitting at my desk in the corporate office of American Eagle and thinking, “Whoa. I’m really here. I hope I know what I’m doing!” A few weeks later it hit me that, yes, I do know what I’m doing, and here I am a working professional. I remember attending many lectures and speaker events while in college and questioning to myself whether I could ever be that person in front of the hall. Well, its only a few years later this time, and I found I could answer my own question again.

I hope that my my short presentation and story inspired the students who came and gave them confidence that they can also have success in whatever road they take. And that they’ll be able to answer their own questions to themselves soon.

Many thoughts began rushing through my mind. Since the new year, I’ve been challenging myself to be more giving to others. Trying to practice the extreme kindness and hospitality I’ve been taught to practice and give to a society in great need of such things. Here was likely a man representing the need I’ve told myself I need to fill.

Yet, I paused. Hesitated. Stepped back. Reminded myself that at the same time, we live in a very real world with dangers and looking out for yourself is nothing to scoff at.

But, I thought, I need to have faith that I was being nudged to help this man anyway.

I asked if he would come into church with me, as I was there for the service, so I couldn’t help him at the moment. But I said I could possibly help afterwards somehow.

He chose to pass on coming in. I decided to give him some cash that I had in my pocket and told him I would pray for him. He thanked me, and went on his way.

As soon as I sat down in the pew for church a few minutes later, I felt like I failed. I should’ve done more, right? How can I expect others to help in extreme ways if I don’t put forth an effort myself?

I prayed for the man. His family. And for myself.

After church, I stayed after to talk to the pastor. I explained what happened before the service and wanted to at least make him aware that the man came through so if he came again, he could possibly provide more help. He explained to me that he actually met the man earlier that day and also helped him in a similar way as I did. He assured me that I did the right thing. Sometimes going out of our way to be kind doesn’t have to mean taking huge steps without watching where we’re stepping.

I think at least one thing I’ve taken from my experience is the reminder that the needs of those around us are very real. I don’t know for sure this man’s whole story, but I do know that certainly there was a true need of some kind. I know that I take for granted so much in the life that I have. Getting a hard reminder of the struggles of another is truly humbling.

Since we’ve been living in the cloud, it’s easy to forget that not too long ago we were rewinding, fast-forwarding, and dubbing with VHS tapes. Yep, home movies, memories, recorded tv shows and specials all saved on those long forgotten tapes. Revolutionary technology at the time, but obsolete overnight.

Using some gift money that was burning a hole in my pocket after the holidays, I decided to invest in a video capture device to take some of my old VHS memories and bring them into 2013. After some research online, I chose to go with the aptly named, Elgato Video Capture. Heads up, you can get it cheaper on B&H Photo, a site I’ve begun to use more and more for electronics purchases. Most of the time they’re cheaper than Amazon.

I was hesitant at the price tag at first, but after using the device, the extra cash was worth it. The Elgato works as advertised and is more or less idiot-proof. Easy to set up and get rolling, the product provides a great user interface for pulling your old videos onto your computer.

Elgato Video Capture comes with everything you’ll need to hookup your VCR to your computer. An RCA (red, yellow, white) to USB cable,  composite video/RCA cable, and the video capture software which you can install via included CD or download from their website.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Plug in your VCR. : )
2. Plug one side of the double ended RCA cable into the LINE OUT on the back of your VCR.
3. Connect the other end to the video capture USB cable.
4. Insert the USB end of the video capture cable into an open USB slot on your computer.
5. Insert your VHS tape into your VCR. Another :) here.
6. Launch the Elgato software.

With the software launched, you’ll begin by naming your movie. The software also provides a dropdown to estimate how long your movie will be to give you an idea of how much space you’ll need.

Click continue where you’ll come to the Connect Video screen (first image below). Here, select the RCA connection and most likely the 4:3 ratio for old VHS tapes. Hit play on your VCR. You should be able to confirm everything is working by seeing your video play on the screen. Once the picture looks good, hit continue and confirm that the sound is also coming through on the Connect Audio screen (second image below).

The next screen is the recording area (third image below). Now you’ll want to pause or stop your VCR and rewind or fast-forward your tape to just before where you’d like to begin recording. Don’t worry if it’s not exact, in fact, better to leave some time before where your movie begins to ensure you get it all. When you’re ready to go hit the big red record button. Then hit play on your VCR. Now, just sit back, relax and let your movie play and record.

A few tips here: In my case, I had one old tape in particular that was very worn. There were a lot of tracking lines and static in parts of the video from the tape being used in recording after recording so many times. In my first recording session, I found that the tape seemed to be too worn and I lost signal during recording. My pause, stop, rewind, play, stop, rewind, play strategy in attempt to try again, just made things worse. I then found that doing a soft rewind, or literally holding the rewind button manually to reach my desired point on the tape, rather than an automatic rewind using the VCR’s function, seemed to help things. This action wasn’t as hard on the tape, which was already in fragile shape. Once I manually found my place again, and let the tape play for a bit before trying to record, the section that gave me trouble the first time played through much more smoothly.

When your ready to stop recording, just hit the record button again, and stop your VCR. The software will automatically take you to the editing screen. Here you can trim your movie on either end to remove the excess by moving the markers. Once your happy with the edit, hit Continue and the software will finalize your video recording.

After finalizing, Elgato will automatically save your digitized video in your Movies directory, if you’re on a Mac. The video is saved in mp4 format. The software also gives you options to play your movie in QuickTime, add your movie to iTunes, edit it further with iMovie, or upload to YouTube. And that’s it. Now you’ve digitized your old home movie.

Once last note, keep in mind that using the Elgato Video Capture device, or any analog to digital converter of this type, will NOT automagically give you HD versions of your old home movies. Several customers reviewing the device noted that they like the Elgato, but were disappointed in the video quality. The software records what’s on the tape, so seeing as how VHS recorded in less than what’s considered standard definition today, you won’t get much more than a video that’s 640 x 480. No 1080p  HD here ; ), but old memories preserved well for sure.

I began with gathering an understanding of the Python for Facebook SDK. While the SDK (Software Development Kit) isn’t “officially” endorsed by Facebook, it is listed on their Third-Party SDK page within the Facebook Developer area.

The SDK is very well written and provides a  lot of comments and hints within the code to explain how things work along with providing several simple examples of implementation. After a couple hours of sifting through things I came to realize that for my particular scenario, the SDK gave me a lot more than I needed to accomplish my task.

In my situation, I wanted to create a simple Python application to run on a web server. Within my application, I wanted to use the Facebook App I already had in place to authenticate fully with Facebook from the server-side, without any user interaction. Once authenticated, this application would reach out to Facebook to gather the data for the last five Wall posts of my Facebook Page. Upon data retrieval, I would save the data to file on the web server. Then on my web page, I would use AJAX to pull the newly created file from the server, construct HTML using the data and dump it on the page. Viola.

The Python SDK is written to lend itself to more common scenarios than mine. The SDK can help create a complete front-end to back-end application for users by harmonizing with the Facebook Javascript SDK. In my case, this was more than I needed. Using my Facebook App Id and App Secret and gaining authentication with Facebook from within my Python app on the server was enough for me to retrieve an access token. This access token is required to pull data such as the Wall feed from the Facebook Graph.

Check out Facebook’s documentation for more information on the common scenarios, API, and access tokens. Heads up. You’ll need to be a Facebook Developer to get to those links ; )

Ok, I know you’ve been on the edge of your seat. Here’s the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from facebook import *
import json

FACEBOOK_APP_ID = "MY_APP_ID"
FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET = "MY_APP_SECRET"

access_token = get_app_access_token(FACEBOOK_APP_ID, FACEBOOK_APP_SECRET)

graph = GraphAPI(access_token)

#Data
pic_query = "SELECT url FROM profile_pic WHERE id=123455678 AND width=30 AND height=30"
feed_query = "SELECT message, permalink FROM stream WHERE source_id=123455678 LIMIT 5"
data = graph.fql({"picture": pic_query, "posts": feed_query})
jsonfeed = open('data.json', "w")
jsonfeed.write(json.dumps(data))
jsonfeed.close()

I begin by importing the Facebook SDK along with Python’s json library; a handy Python library for working with JSON data. Next, I set my Facebook app id and app secret. Using these two values, I call the SDK’s get_app_access_token to authenticate with Facebook. Once authenticated, I gain my access token which I can use to access the Facebook GraphAPI. Now, I’m in.

At this point, I thought I was home free. I first thought to use another SDK method, the get_objects method:

def get_objects(self, ids, **args):
  """Fetchs all of the given object from the graph.

  We return a map from ID to object. If any of the IDs are
  invalid, we raise an exception.
  """
  args["ids"] = ",".join(ids)
  return self.request("", args)

This one seemed appropriate, right? I wanted to retrieve the profile pic object from the Graph along with the wall posts object. Well, after several hours of trial, error, research, and some frustration, I realized that I just wasn’t using this part of the SDK correctly. As I noted, the SDK is set up to lend to full front to back apps. This function seems to be better suited if your authenticating with a user and grabbing several objects for that user, rather than just an app like myself. I’ll admit, my rookie Python skills led to my misunderstanding here.

So, I finally decided to turn to another tool in the SDK the fql method. The fql method allows you to use FQL or Facebook Query Language to access Facebook data. The SDK is also written smartly to allow you to write FQL statements easily as strings. The method parses the strings for you and makes the call to Facebook, resulting in a nice JSON object with your named objects, picture and posts in my case, neatly in place.

pic_query = "SELECT url FROM profile_pic WHERE id=123455678 AND width=30 AND height=30"
feed_query = "SELECT message, permalink FROM stream WHERE source_id=123455678 LIMIT 5"
data = graph.fql({"picture": pic_query, "posts": feed_query})

Once I’ve got the data object, I save it to the filesystem using Python’s open method. And that’s about it. At this point, my JSON data file is on the web server, where I can call it on my web page using AJAX, create some HTML around it for the profile pic and wall post message and add it to the page. Bada bing, bada boom.

I should note that another tool that proved very helpful was Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, found within Tools on the Facebook Developer website. It lets you play with and construct both Graph API calls and FQL statements to see how data is returned.

It was fun to dip into a new language and integrate with a well known API in a new way. I enjoyed working with Python, especially with all that neat whitespace : )

And so, the python and the social network lived happily ever after. The end.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil any of the plot here. I don’t discuss anything that you can’t get from the movie description. The movie is about the abolition of slavery and the president who sought to have it so.

The movie Lincoln may be the best movie I have seen all year. That may seem silly, seeing that we are not ten days into 2013, but I need to say that it may be the best film I will see all year. It’s that good.

It’s not surprising to see the name Spielberg at the beginning of the ending credits. The movie was greatly crafted and powerfully performed. Much of the credit, I feel, should go to the screenplay, written by Tony Kushner. I lost count during the movie of the number of time that I told myself, “Wow. I need to remember that line.” If the movie doesn’t win at least multiple Oscars, we’ll know for sure that Hollywood is very much filled with shallow minded fools.

Lincoln does a tremendous job of taking you back to the 1860′s and placing you in the mindset of the people of the time. I felt that the way in which the actions of the leaders of the time were presented, it reminded you that they really were people. Humans. I loved this aspect. I think so many times in our world today, especially in the media, we haphazardly throw around words such as founding fathers and fathers of our nation. While these two phrases without a doubt describe succinctly the role the men in Abraham Lincoln’s day and the days before him played, I think we take for granted what they really mean. President Lincoln and the men of the United States government of the 1860s were just men. Humans like you and I. The movie really captured this fact. It captured the struggles and inner turmoil that the men fought with and I personally found power in that.

What is even more powerful is the simple fact that Lincoln and his cabinet with their disagreement and struggles had the guts to act. After recently coming out of a presidential election, many of us are familiar with the issues of our day. Taking a step back to the time of the Civil War in America, it’s no different. The men and women of early America faced just as many of their own problems. Problems that we don’t give even a second of thought today. When you take this perspective into view, it demands even more respect for the Lincolns, the Washingtons, and the Franklins of those times. These men had the conviction, the determination, and the faith that so many of our so-called leaders and representatives, who have “served” us for years, seem to lack and leave them unable to lead and represent.

I think everyone in Washington should see this movie. The President, the cabinet, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, assistants and secretaries. And you. Lincoln showed that the future cannot be bettered without making changes in the present. Everyone should see what it takes to make real progress. Everyone should see the power of true democracy.