I am Jesus (in the Passion reading)

Yesterday the youth choir started off the Palm Sunday service in the church hall by singing Siyahamba. This South African song is sung mostly in Zulu. For those like me who do not know African languages, most of the lyrics in the song translate to, "We are marching in the light of God," where the title is the, "We are marching," part. Our version of the song consists of three verses - first in Zulu, then English, then back to Zulu. However, even if we had not sung the middle verse, most people would be able to perceive that it is an uplifting song based on the melody. When it was over, we processed out with the adult choir, and the entire congregation, holding palms, into the church.

Once in the church, I had a few minutes before making my way up to the altar for the Passion reading. I was selected to read the part of Jesus because I apparently bear a strong resemblance to the European representation - at least that was what people had jokingly said. Surprisingly I was more nervous about falling than about the large part I needed to read in front of the full church. The podium I was standing on was meant for one person, but I shared it with the narrator. Each time one of us spoke, the other needed to step to the back of the small platform, because there wasn't enough room by the microphone. So, I was more focused on avoiding falling backward down the steps than on the audience looking up at me. From this experience, I learned that fear of falling off small platforms is an effective cure for stage-fright. Luckily the passion reading went well and neither of us fell off. However, even if I did fall off, my body splain out on the wooden floor, it would have been a good preview for next Friday.

Bonus Tech Stuff: Transfer.sh: Simple Command-Line File Sharing

Transfer.sh is a website that allows for temporary online storage of files for transfer. These files can be uploaded with wget or cURL, and downloaded through https. It also provides a way to view these files online. Transfer.sh can store up to 10 GB files for 14 days. Best of all: it is free and open source.

Here is a demo upload: https://transfer.sh/dLpFr/hello.txt
That link will eventually break.
Here is a command to test it by uploading text and re-downloading it to stdout:
curl $(echo hello | curl --upload-file - https://transfer.sh/hellotest.txt)

This is relatively simple, and could be used with GPG to securely transfer files. You could also use tar and LRZIP if you wanted to bulk transfer a large number of files. They also have a virus scanner, if you have to deal with Windows things. Transfer.sh has a bunch of examples using tar and GPG. They also have examples for backing up an SQL server and sending email, although I am not quite sure how secure this is. However, this will be fun to play around with!

#slice2016