Greetings from Synge Street, Dublin, Ireland! The chef on the right is your blog writer on his day off! In case you are wondering, yes, the turkey was a success after a long culinary battle. It took three people to pacify the bird and proclaim it truly cooked!

Maybe it's the gloom of these days, maybe it's just the sheer overwhelming powerlessness one feels in the face of so much misery and suffering. Anyway this morning sitting here at the computer I feel disheartened. There is always the straw that breaks the camel's back. For me it was the comment by someone who genuinely thinks the hours in front of the computer are taking a toll. With which I agree. However, the straw was the thoughtless rider to the comment to the effect, "no one reads that stuff anyway and who cares about what is happening out there!" Actually, I've sanitised the comments; they were somewhat more vernacular in tone.

Most of the time no one really cares about "that stuff". The important thing, though, is that some people do care. Some one has to care. It is a moral imperative. Reading again the excellent Statement from the New Zealand Bishops on climate change and also the Living Simply pages from the CAFOD website, I believe strongly that more and more people do care.

I think of the young people up there in Belfast, on the other side of the world in Oamaru and Auckland, in Sydney, in Brisbane, in Cardinal Newman College in Buenos Aires, in Vancouver. Young people do care. And, increasingly, the Edmund Rice community around the world gathered in different contexts care deeply about what is happening to people, especially to young people in different parts of our world.

So, if anyone out there is listening, remember it matters that you care!

Happy Christmas to you all and, as Tiny Tim would say, God bless us everyone!

I have encountered problems with the latest version of Internet Explorer. Those of you who have installed version 7 will have discovered that the navigation bar a the top of the screen pretty much falls apart. It is an issue over which I have currently no control. I am using a theme template from SeyDesign in the USA. The IE7 problem is known and has caused havoc with other websites that have been exclusively constructed using W3C standards.

It was hoped that IE7 would show greater compliance to W3C standards. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. Unless you are committed to Internet Explorer, it would be highly recommended to switch to Firefox, Safari, Opera, or some other browser that is more standards compatible than Internet Explorer.

In the meantime, I will do my best to update the SeyDesign theme for IE7 once workarounds or updates become available. For the moment, all I can suggest is switching to Firefox.

If you have not yet downloaded IE7, resist the temptation for a while!

At long last, I completed the website update, the creation of the first ERI Newsletter, and the creation of the Advent prayer resource. I am very grateful to the many people around the world who are collaborating on the Advent initiative. My own coding skills have developed dramatically in the last few weeks. When I came back from my travels in Oceania and earlier in Geneva and the Philippines, I discovered that much of what I had learned in 2005 had evaporated through some window in my brain. I had to relearn much of the HTML and CSS coding. I am now resolved to write a little code each week in revising the website.

For those who are technically minded, I use Rapidweaver to construct the pages. I use TextWrangler (the poor person's BBEdit) to write the HTML. I have to admit that I am still on the search for a really good HTML editor for Mac OS, one that emulates the user-friendly features of Taco (which I also use, but I suspect that it is not XHTML compliant).

My real discovery is actually a journey back to the future: using a stripped down word processor called WriteRoom. It presents black writing on a green screen. It's intuition is that it is easier to write if there are no distracting menus or other stimuli on the screen. One can edit on the full screen, which on the Apple 20-inch, is a real joy, no more eye-strain.

So the workflow is: text in Write Room, converted to HTML in Text Wrangler, and inserted into an HTML box in the editing screen of Rapidweaver. Lots of work! But it is worth it. Now I am taking a day off (well sort of)!