Phill Sacre

Category: Random other stuff

Random stuff that doesn’t fit into any of the categories

  • Nearly There…

    You wait ages for a blog post to come along, and then two come along at once! Sorry about that – things have been a bit busy recently, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Term is very nearly over, we have just over a week left (eek!) and then a week of exams (eeeeeeeek!!!). *ahem* So, anyway, I haven’t had much time to write blog posts, and I won’t have much time over the next couple of weeks. Just in case you think I’ve been neglecting the blog, or anything.

    So apart from being busy, what’s been going on? Well, the usual stuff really – finishing assignments, work and the like. Last weekend we went back to Colchester overnight, we saw AJ and Jen on Saturday afternoon and then spent the evening with A-M and Sarah. All in all, a pretty good day! Then we went to Fordham on Sunday morning, and headed back home after lunch. We did have an ulterior motive for going back to Colchester, but more on that in a couple of weeks. (It’s not very exciting really, but still… I hear that tension and excitement keeps people interested. Probably too late for that now though)

    Anyway, as they say about blogs: “I have nothing to say… I say it often”. This is me saying nothing. Back to the studio.

  • Is Twitter making us dumb and angry?

    Every few years, it seems to be an unwritten rule that the newspapers have to have a scare about dumbing down, e.g. GCSE results now don’t mean as much as they used to back in the good old days. Now, whether they have a point or not I can’t say, but it does seem to me that a lot of it is alarmism: things aren’t really as bad as all that, the “good old days” were never that good, etc.

    That said, I have been thinking a bit about Twitter recently, and how it affects communication. Twitter, if you’ve never got into the craze (and have had your head buried under a rock for the past few years – in which case, how are you even reading this?!) is a social media service where you can send messages to your ‘followers’, people who subscribe to your updates, as long as the messages are 140 characters or less.

    In many respects this has been an absolute revolution – but, frankly, lots of people have written about it far more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could. What I’d like to look at is one aspect of Twitter usage which I’ve become more and more disturbed by over the past few months (and years – it’s been building for a long time).

    (more…)

  • Some adverts are controversial. Get over it.

    Once again, it falls to me to leap into the quagmire of misinformation and correct it with my iron sword of reason and moderation. (Everyone should have a sword of reason and moderation. They’re all rage these days.)

    In case you hadn’t heard, a bus advert has been banned: a group called Core Issues Trust, together with Anglican Mainstream, tried to put an advert on some London buses. Before I say what the advert was, you might want to make sure you’re sitting comfortably and have plenty of air around, maybe a nice cup of tea, because it will shock and dismay you to the very core of your being. Well, maybe not that extreme.

    The advert was (are you sure you’re sitting down?): “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it.”

    Wow. Are you shocked and dismayed? Well, apparently good old Boris was – dismayed enough to ban the ads in the name of intolerance (one source quoted him as saying he was ‘intolerant of intolerance’, not sure how that works logically but there we go.)

    Anyway, now it’s looking like Core Issues Trust want to sue for the ads being pulled. And, unsurprisingly, many people have been making remarks (on Twitter, where else? I honestly don’t know what we did as a civilisation before outrage could be widely spread in 140 characters or less) about how it would be nice if Christians cared about issues that actually mattered, such as poverty, healing the sick – the usual stuff.

    There are just so many things wrong with all this, it’s staggering.

    (more…)

  • Need… Caffeine…

    We’re a few weeks into lent, and I’m … just over a week into my caffeine fast. Well, tea and coffee drinking fast. Well, tea and coffee with caffeine in drinking fast. But it doesn’t really sound as good if you say that.

    I did this once before, a few years ago (although strangely enough, I can’t find a blog post about it…) so I was prepared for the headaches for the first day or two. After that it’s fine, it just leaves you feeling a bit tired after a while.

    I don’t really have much else to say, to be honest, so this is just a blog post in the traditional sense of blog posts on my blog. I just wanted to post up something which wasn’t about secularism or gay marriage (what larks!), but yet still communicated the message that I was actually, you know, alive and everything.

    So, I’m alive. *waves*

    Here’s a video of a baby monkey riding a pig.

  • Gay Marriage and other lighthearted topics

    Honestly. It feels like the news has gone a bit crazy recently, what with the ASA ruling that God cannot heal people, then the whole fracas about ‘militant secularism’, and now this: people going a bit crazy over whether the definition of marriage should be changed to include same-sex marriages.

    It seemed to kick off a few days ago when Keith O’Brien wrote an article entitled, “We cannot afford to defend this madness“. After that, the atheist brigade on Twitter seemed to go mad; I saw a number of comments along the lines of “he believes in <x> (e.g. sky fairies) and yet he doesn’t believe in gay marriage”, etc. Most of what I saw written went way beyond what he actually said and ended up in ad hominem attacks or more general attacks on Christianity.

    I don’t want to defend O’Brien’s piece because I don’t agree with all of it; although I do agree that redefining marriage would be a bad thing: the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman is an orthodox Christian belief.

    That said, I do want to make a couple of points about people’s responses, one of which will seem oddly familiar if you’ve been reading my blog of late.

    Firstly, the people who seem to be most vocal in their criticism of O’Brien (and the like) seem to be taking a ‘moral high ground’ position by claiming that it’s obviously right for marriage to be extended to homosexual couples. I would like to pose the challenge (similarly to my previous post on secularism): to what are you appealing when saying that one thing is more moral than another?

    Secondly, I got thinking about marriage (as one does), and why it’s defined like it is. What is the point of marriage? Is it strictly a civil thing, or is there some deeper meaning to it? Why, indeed, does the government have to get involved in pronouncing people man and wife?

    In fact, why should the government really be legislating on any kind of sexual activity (beyond, perhaps, sexual activity with minors and incest)? Come to think about it, why should polygamous marriages be disallowed?

    It seems to me that the legal definition of marriage makes a few (generally Christian) assumptions about what is right and wrong in terms of sexual behaviour. If we start changing one of those assumptions, we may as well reconsider the others. Once again, it seems that secularism may well lead us down a path here where I don’t think we want to go.

    Finally, Peter Ould has blogged some very good questions on “Gender Neutral Marriage” which I would recommend reading to get an idea of the scope of the issues.

    This whole move by the government smacks of “Yes Prime Minister” – doing something to prove that the government is trendy and not the ‘old Tories’, rather than actually doing something because they’ve thought it through and believe in the principles.

  • Someone please show the Daily Mail a map

    This is brilliant. I missed the original Twitter storm, but apparently some pictures starting circulating last week apparently showing members of the Ku Klux Klan walking through East Barnet. (East Barnet is where we live, about a 20 minute walk away from college).

    Anyway, it turns out that they weren’t Ku Klux Klan members, they were merely choristers from the local Methodist Church – wearing robes – on their way up to the local Anglican Church. Someone had taken a photo and they’d got mistaken … you can read all about it here.

    Now the Daily Fail, sorry, Mail picked it up and ran a story about it. Then, when they realised they were wrong, the published this article correcting it. (I apologise for linking to the Mail, by the way, please try and avoid looking at any of the links in case the red mist sets in). That article is unintentionally hilarious: they have got the location completely wrong.

    The pictures were taken in Essex and created a frenzy on Twitter, with one member of the public even calling the police, urging them to investigate.

    East Barnet is not in Essex. It’s in Hertfordshire, or Greater London … whichever way you look at a map, not Essex.

    After it was uploaded to Twitter Essex police carried out a search of the area on the night of January 31 and told MailOnline that they hadn’t found anything suspicious.

    I would love it if they had actually called up Essex Police.

    But, to my mind, the most hilarious thing is the picture of the church they’ve put up. That’s definitely not East Barnet Methodist Church… I’ve got no idea where it is. This is the real church, which is the first result if you put “East Barnet Methodist Church” into Google.

    Clearly this is exactly the kind of investigative journalism the British newspaper industry has been missing.”East Barnet? That’s in Essex, isn’t it? And let’s include a picture of a random Methodist Church”. The crazy thing is, it would have been the work of about ten seconds to verify that a) East Barnet is not in Essex; b) ‘East Barnet Methodist Church’ is actually, well, East Barnet Methodist Church. Genius.

  • The Two Hundred Dollar Cheesecake

    This week at college it’s “Namugongo Week”. Oak Hill has a partner college in Uganda called Uganda Martyr’s Seminary, and this week is designed to raise funds to support students there. The plan is to raise £10,000 – that’s enough money to support 25 students for a year.

    So, as part of the week Oak Hill hosts a variety of fundraising events, the highlight of which is possibly the auction. This year the auction was on Monday afternoon, and a whole variety of lots were up for grabs – lots of babysitting, some cakes, drumming lessons, a painting created specially, etc etc. Basically anyone could put pretty much whatever up for grabs, a skill or time or something like that. We – as in the first years – had been warned that this was something to budget for, i.e. you should plan it in with your giving for this term. They were not wrong.

    The lots went for some quite high prices in the end – some chutney went for about £60, the drumming lessons went for over £200, etc. One of the latter items to come up was a “White Chocolate Cheesecake”, which apparently had gone for quite high prices in previous years. I decided to bid for it, as cheesecake – especially white chocolate cheesecake – is one of my favourite things.

    Well, the bidding started at £50, and skyrocketed. I … well, basically, I got a bit carried away, and kept sticking up my finger. Until the bidding stopped, and I ended up the winner.

    So that’s the story of how I ended up spending £200 on a cheesecake. More details to follow…

  • Coding and Lyric Display

    Well, it’s that time of year again. I’ve started a little coding project, this time to do with Lyric Display. In Java. *sigh* Why do I do this to myself?!

    To be fair, I started it last year – I’ve just picked it up again and refactored it a fair bit. I checked my Google Code repository, and according to the Subversion logs I first started on the project in October 2010. The interesting thing is, I’ve started a new project every single October for about the past four years (since I’ve had my Google Code repository):

    • 2008: A short-lived project using ExtJS to basically create a Javascript / PHP version of an Outlook-style email client;
    • 2009: jMonopoly – a short-lived Java version of a Monopoly game.
    • 2010: This short-lived lyric display project…

    Spot a bit of a pattern going on there? I tend to work on them for a few weeks and then give up. (Probably getting into the Christmas rush at that time, also losing interest…)

    Interspersed with all these things is a Java desktop app I wrote to upload sermons to the Fordham website (a script I blogged about when it was merely a Python script) – although to be fair I only imported that to Subversion in the summer so I don’t know exactly when that was started.

    I don’t know what it is about this time of year which drives me to the keyboard… I wonder whether (in the past) it’s been to do with the post-summer slump at work, or something like that. I think this year it was more because the chapel computer at Oak Hill broke down and we currently have no lyric projection software, which made me think of what I’d done last year. If it gets anywhere I might release it as Open Source, because there aren’t enough open source lyric projection packages knocking around already… (to be fair, I don’t think there are any in Java).

    Anyway, I thought this might give you an insight into my mind. Or not. Either way, I’m not sure I like it, and I’m not sure I really want to post it on my blog… *clicks ‘Publish’*

  • Protesting Supermarkets

    I’ve read a couple of articles recently which have got me thinking. The first one was about people who protest supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco etc – unfortunately I can’t remember where I found it so I can’t link to it! (May have even been… hushed tones… on paper!) The other article was called Good News and Bad News, which I linked to on Twitter.

    Anyway, it got me thinking about supermarkets and why people protest them. In many ways I actually support people who protest supermarkets: I do think that town centres can be ruined by large out-of-town stores moving in and taking everyone’s business away. But I have an issue with that, which is: whose fault is it that these stores are so big and so ubiquitous? It seems that blaming the stores for opening is ignoring the issue that there are people who shop there. The stores wouldn’t open if people didn’t shop there.

    If the stores thrive because of unethical dealings with third world countries and slave labour etc – then that should be stopped. Of course it should. But that’s not really an issue people can solve by protesting against Tesco opening a new store in… whichever town they want to open a store in. It just seems to me that the rising flood of supermarkets is something which can only be ‘solved’ by proactively using local shops and businesses over the bigger chains and getting other people to do the same.

    Aside from this is the issue that high-street shopping is gradually evolving – if it’s not actually dying out. Who buys CDs or DVDs or books from an actual shop these days? It’s just cheaper and more convenient to buy online. But you don’t find people protesting Amazon in the same way, do you? And I think in the past few years, online shopping has done far more damage to the high street than big supermarkets have.