I went to Alex’s commissioning for his position as chaplaincy assistant this evening. It was a good evening, although my voice is now a little hoarse as we sang about eight songs!
A good time was had by all. I took some pictures afterwards, and have provided them here for your viewing pleasure (or not, as the case may be…)
[Photos removed – now on Flickr]
I didn’t really do much over the weekend, and I think what I did do I’ve already written about! Anyway. Yesterday I went to Fordham in the morning. Then I went back home for lunch, and then Philippa came round for the afternoon. She had to write some intercessions for this evening (more on that later), so I spent the time implementing the photo gallery (as you have already seen!)
In the evening, we went round to Alex’s for chillout night. We were joined by Chris J (one of the new freshers) and went for Fish and Chips in Wivenhoe – as it was chucking it down with rain we drove there and back, and had them inside! I don’t think we’ll be eating fish and chips by the quayside again for a while…
Anyway. Then, another fresher (Sarah) joined us to watch “Galaxy Quest”. I’ve seen it several times before but I still enjoy it – it’s very well written!
This evening, Alex has his commissioning service. He’s been Chaplaincy Assistant now since late August – it’s only taken them nearly three months to commission him! I’m sure it will be a good evening, though 🙂
And that’s it! All for now…
Well, I’ve finally got around to putting a photo album on this site! Let’s see if it works…
These photos are from my holiday in August 2005.
[Photos now on Flickr]
Firstly, just a quick one about Media Players: Zeth’s written a blog entry about mplayer. The blog is about command-line tools, and mplayer can be run without a graphical front-end. To be honest I think graphical front-ends are a lot quicker when you’re dealing with media, but there you go! Just something else to read if you’re interested.
Last night I went to a bonfire night at Fordham. It was good – the fireworks went off with a bang (boom boom… oh dear), the food was good, and everybody seemed to have a good time! One of my colleagues from work came with his sister, I think they enjoyed it!
I don’t have much else to say right now, so I’ll leave it there…
Well, I’ve got the new design up and running. I think I’ve still got some work to do (‘some work’ will probably translate into ‘re-designing the whole thing from the ground up again – twice!’) but still. All I have to do now is add a photo gallery. I might put my ‘Open-Source’ page back as well.
I have to say I’m quite impressed with WordPress – it’s pretty flexible! I’ll have to have a good old browse of the plugin list at some point, see if there’s anything there I could use here…
I forgot to mention this at the time, so I thought I’d mention it now. If you’re looking for a good all-round Media Player for Linux, check out Xine. I used to use Mplayer, but I found that it didn’t seem to like some DVDs and files: the DVD player didn’t support DVD menus, which caused a problem on some DVDs.
Anyway, I downloaded Xine a few weeks ago, and it seems to work fine! It supports DVD menus (which I was pleasantly surprised at, as Mplayer didn’t and Ogle was the only one I’d found before that did), and I haven’t had a problem with it playing DVDs. It also comes with a GUI, which Ogle and Mplayer don’t by default (you have to install it separately). So, yeah, check it out – it’s pretty decent!
You know, this is what I really like about Linux / Open-Source Software. It’s actually quite liberating… I don’t know, it just feels like with Windows you have to do things the Microsoft way. With Linux and OSS you can do it any way you want to. I particularly like WordPress and the way it has a large community of plugin developers, and if you want to you can just leap into the code and break it… (of course, with PHP it’s kind of difficult to have closed-source software, but at least if I modify WordPress I’m not breaking the law!).
In other news, my trip to Epping went well yesterday. I got the 8:15 train from Colchester, and was pleasantly surprised to be in Epping at around 9:30. It was good fun travelling out on a tube train that far (Epping is the last stop on the central line) – I enjoyed going through the countryside on a tube train! It’s just an unusual experience…
Don’t think I’ve got much else to say now. I’m going to try and get the new design for this site nearly done this evening, it’s getting there! – there are just quite a few templates to modify to the new design.
Just a quick update to say I’ve added a “Random Quotes” feature to this blog. All the quotes are taken from the Campus Crew MSN Group. I realise that they’re probably quite cliquey and not many people will understand them, but hey – you don’t have to read them! It won’t have any negative impact on people who don’t know the people involved, but will be quite amusing for people who do…
I don’t have much to update with right now. I’m off to Epping tomorrow on a ‘business trip’ (I have to do an installation for a piece of software we developed for a client). I don’t know why I have to go down there given that it will probably take about ten minutes to do (maybe a bit longer) but apparently they paid for a day, so down there I must go… I’m going to get the train as I don’t like navigating on my own in the car, Epping is actually on the tube – last stop on the central line! I’m quite looking forward to seeing what it’s like – I’ve never been to the end of a tube line before, it will be an interesting experience.
Anyway, I’m off now, farewell…
It’s really weird. I’ve started to, like, you know, use the word “like” in my sentences. I don’t know why. It’s, like, really strange. I think it could be, you know, like, me wanting to avoid growing up. Like. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll, like, go soon…
Time for the customary ‘The Weekend’ post! Quite an unusual one actually. Friday night, I went home and stayed with my parents overnight. Then I had lunch with them on Saturday, and headed back to Colchester. In the afternoon and evening I didn’t really do much! Just worked on the new look for this site a bit, and watched the odd episode of Family Guy!
Yesterday was the unusual day, in that it seemed a lot longer than it actually was because I did more than I would normally do on a Sunday! In the morning I went to church as usual. Then in the afternoon, I worked on my website for a bit before meeting Alex and Anne-Marie at the cinema to watch ‘Sky High’ (see below). Afterwards, I went to church again where I was playing the piano, and after that I went over to Alex’s and watched most of ‘The Princess Bride’ (I missed the first bit). So, quite a full day, good fun though!
Right, ‘Sky High’. It looked like it was going to be to superhero films what ‘Galaxy Quest’ was to Star Trek. I have to say I did enjoy it! I think it was more obvious than Galaxy Quest in places, and maybe didn’t have quite as strong a storyline (as in, they seemed to do a movie based on cliches and the ending was obvious from about half way through, in fact from the beginning if you’re cynical) but it was funny and worth a watch! You never know, I might even buy it when it comes down to buy one get one free on DVDs 😉
*phew*… that was quite a mammoth SQL session! To give you a bit of background info: Blogger didn’t used to let you put titles into your post, unless you paid for the privelige. After I’d been using Blogger for a few months they gave the feature away free, but I never used it because I already had a system (i.e., all titles were in bold on the first line of my post) – I used that system in every single post.
Unfortunately, that meant when it came to import stuff into WordPress, it didn’t recognise the first line being the title of the post (which is fair enough…). Thinking about it, I should have just hacked it there and then. But I didn’t. Stupid of me really, but nevermind!
Fortunately, I know a bit more of SQL than your average “SELECT FROM” statements. I was able to extract the title of the posts from the post content, set that to be the post title, and then remove it from the original post content. After doing that, I was able to set the post “name” (the ‘name’ is what you’d get if you were looking at the permalink, i.e. for this post it will be something like /2005/10/29/sql-is-a-very-handy-thing-to-know) and I think it’s pretty much working. I can’t believe why I didn’t do that before… I was going through it manually to do it, and it was taking AGES! Ah well.
If anyone else wants any help doing it, I can try – it does heavily depend on you using exactly the same format for the titles, though…