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They should have just tried being me for five minutes 🙁

Ok, so that’s a huge exaggeration. But I’ve not had a good time of it recently with the car, i.e. getting it repaired. The story so far: in late February, someone reversed into the side of my car while it was parked. This buckled and dented the door. I rang up and made an insurance claim.

On Monday, the car (finally, after more than five weeks) went to Colchester Accident Repairs. They initially said that it would take three days to repair the car, I rang them up today and they said they were working on it and it would likely be Monday or Tuesday. Ok, well, that’s inconvenient but I guess I can live with the hire car for another few days.

The hire car, by the way, was delivered to me at the garage on Monday morning. They rang me up this morning and said that they were going to be needing it back. WHAT?!!! Apparently someone made an administrative error and he had down that I was due to finish with the car on 30th March, not that I was due to pick it up then! Why they ring me up three days afterwards with this I don’t know, but still. I (politely) told them to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and they’re not going to pick the car up today – but I might be driving round a car which is uninsured.

Grrrrrrr.

The hire car itself is nice though – it’s a 2007 VW Passat. It’s got a pretty good engine on it so is more nippy than my Saab. And because it’s diesel, you get a fairly decent MPG (although I must say the petrol guage has been a bit more mobile than I thought it would be). It also feels lighter – I think the Saab is built a bit like a tank!

So in general I like it. Still would like to get my car back though, the VW is nice but it’s just nice to be in your own car. Hopefully not too long now (I’ve been saying this for ages, but I really don’t think it will be now…)

So this has been a “meme” that’s been going round on Facebook like a virus. The idea is that you write 25 random things about yourself, post it as a note, and ‘tag’ a bunch of other people who then go and write a 25 random things note. They then tag people, and so it continues. The point of it is to get to know your friends better, apparently.

Anyway, I thought I’d post mine on my blog (which will then get imported as a note into Facebook) just because I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit recently and this will make it look like I’m doing something 😉

So here, in no particular order, are my 25 random things. I hope it gives you an insight into how boring I really am.

1. I once dressed up as Robin Hood for a fancy dress party (this was when I was about 7 or 8).
2. I’ve only ever been to two football games, both at Portman Road, to see Ipswich play Chelsea. I went with my Dad (who supports Chelsea – I ostensibly supported Ipswich although to be honest I’m not really into football).
3. As a university assignment I once programmed a robot to manoeuvre a football around a couple of obstacles and into a goal. Shut up, it was a proud moment for me!
4. My middle name is “Daniel”.
5. The first film I ever went to see at the cinema (that I remember seeing) was the animated version of “101 Dalmations”.
6. I performed “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” while I was at primary school.
7. I wasn’t a major character though. Actually I wasn’t a character at all – just a sort of backing singer. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
8. I’ve come to believe that every single person in the country performed “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” while they were at primary school.
9. I have only ever owned three cars. My first car was my Dad’s old car – a 1988 Rover 216s.
10. I’ve been DJing for eight years now. I started off playing trance in 2001, then moved to progressive house, then breakbeat (nu-skool breaks FTW), and finally drum & bass. It’s gone full circle now though because I recently bought some CD decks and starting playing my old trance CDs.
11. I started learning piano when I was about 12. But I’ve improved more in the last few years than I ever did during about 5-6 years of having lessons. Part of the reason for that is we didn’t have a piano at home, so I had to use the one in the (freezing cold) church next door. Guess why I didn’t practice much.
12. I’ve been learning to play the guitar since early 2008. I’m not great at that either – I can play a few chords but can’t really do much else.
13. Given the above two points, I have come to the conclusion that I’m not a natural musician. In fact I always feel like an imposter when I play at church, for example.
14. I have never broken any bones.
15. I am quite geeky when it comes to computers. I got my first PC, a 486 SX/25, when I was about 11. I’ve been messing around with them ever since.
16. I don’t use Microsoft Windows at home, I use Ubuntu Linux – although in the past I have used Fedora, Gentoo and even FreeBSD.
17. My favourite webcomic is XKCD, but my favourite cartoon is probably Calvin & Hobbes, with Dilbert coming second.
18. My absolute favourite TV sitcom of all time is “Spaced”. At uni we used to watch it all the time. Seriously, I don’t think a week went by without us watching at least one episode. And I love the newer Simon Pegg / Edgar Wright stuff (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz)
19. At Soul Survivor one year, a friend convinced me and another friend to do something slightly crazy. Soul Survivor is (or was) split up into different camping sites (“villages”) such as ‘orange 1’, ‘orange 2’, ‘red 1’ etc. Each one had its own sign. On the night before we left, we swapped a few of the signs around. Apparently as people were arriving the next day there was chaos as people were trying to find their villages. Good times.
20. My favourite band of all time is the Beatles (my last.fm page confirms this). I love pretty much everything they’ve done, but I particularly like their later stuff (from Rubber Soul onwards)
21. I prefer buying CDs to downloading, unless it’s an individual track I want. I like having a physical product, plus hard disks have crashed on me in the past. (Speaking of which, I must get an external HDD for backups…)
22. I enjoy learning theology and am currently finishing my third unit of the Moore Course (theology correspondence course from Moore College in Sydney, Australia).
23. I’m not really a sporty person but I do enjoy playing cricket and tennis. Haven’t played either in literally years though.
24. I used to be into gaming – particularly First-Person Shooters such as Half Life and Quake – and designed / ran a website called “Clan Factor” with a friend of mine.
25. It took me ages to come up with this list. I hope you’re happy. Thanks for tagging me, Ian :p

Just a note that I have added the excellent Yet Another Related Posts Plugin to this blog.

This means that on each page, if there are any related posts you should get a nice list of links underneath. (In addition to the “On This Day” info).

If you find this really annoying, please let me know and I will turn it off. (Or I could just turn the “On This Day” plugin off, instead of having them both on). But I just thought it would be an interesting addition to the blog!

So. This weekend hasn’t been too busy – we spent most of the time revising for our Moore Course exam (which is coming up THIS SATURDAY! Scary stuff!)

On Friday evening we went to 21, which will be the last time we do it this term. This week we are going to see Mark Watson at Colchester Arts Centre, which we are quite looking forward to! We really enjoyed “Mark Watson makes the world substantially better” when it was on Radio 4 a while ago, so I just hope he’s as good live doing stand-up.

On Saturday we did some shopping and revision, and then in the evening headed round to Anne-Marie’s. We watched a film called “Tuesday“, starring Phil Glenister and John Simm (amongst others). It was a very clever film – the plot deals with a bank robbery, seen from the perspective of various different people (who all just happen to be robbing the same bank, which isn’t giving too much away). It’s definitely worth watching, especially if you’re a fan of rather understated comedies.

We also watched an episode of “Life of Mars” (Phil and I hadn’t really seen much of it the first time round), which looks like it deserves all the critical acclaim it got.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning as per usual, and then went home to do (you guessed it!) more revision.

In the evening we went to the Sunday @ 6 prayer meeting, followed by the last of the “Visual Bible Journeys” presentations. We found the whole series very helpful – if you do get the chance to see Geoff Tucker doing one, take it. There’s just so much more to the Bible accounts when you understand a bit of the history and context. One small example, Jonah: everyone knows God asks him to go to Nineveh. What I didn’t realise was that Nineveh – standing as it was in the Assyrian empire – was to Jonah as (say) Berlin would be to an Englishman in the middle of WWII. In short, somewhere you really wouldn’t want to go.

Anyway, afterwards we came back home and watched another episode of “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”. Good stuff, as usual!

I mentioned a month or so ago that I’d bought some new CD Decks. This is my first mix using those decks. I’ve had fun digging through my old CD collection, and this is a result of that. Almost all of the tunes are back from when I was buying CDs (2001 and before), a few of them are newer but not many.

The link is here (MP3, about 1h 10m, 100MB or so)

Here’s the tracklist:

1. Hybrid – The Formula of Fear (Original)
2. Mike Monday – Can U Play Bass
3. LeAnn Rimes – Suddenly (Riva Remix)
4. Delerium – Underwater (Rank 1 Remix)
5. Lange – Drifting Away (Lange Sunset Dub)
6. Push – The Legacy
7. The Thrillseekers – Synaesthesia (En-Motion Remix)
8. Jan Johnston – Flesh (DJ Tiesto Remix)
9. Delerium – Heaven’s Earth (Matt Darey Remix)
10. Three Drives (On a Vinyl) – Sunset on Ibiza (Above & Beyond Remix)
11. Rob Dougan – Clubbed to Death (Hybrid Remix)

It’s probably not the smoothest mix I’ve ever done, but it’ll have to do for now 😉

Hope you enjoy, leave a comment here if you like it 🙂

The random title is an oblique reference to what we were doing yesterday: priming the bathroom! When we had the bathroom knocked through we also had it re-plastered (the paintwork was cracking and coming off in places so it was worth doing). Up until yesterday, the bathroom looked very brown. Now it looks nice and white 🙂 Phil’s parents came up and helped us (well, to tell the truth, Phil’s Dad did most of the priming).

We also did some work in the garden, i.e. put in a split log border along one of our flower beds. The back garden is looking pretty good now – although I don’t think one can ever call a garden “finished” it’s definitely much better than it was when we moved in. And I can’t wait to see it all in full bloom!

Anyway. Phil’s parents stayed for dinner, and then afterwards they went home and we watched “Firewall” which was on TV last night. It was a decent enough film but I couldn’t help watching it with a sense of Deja-Vu: an evil dude wants to rob a bank, so kidnaps a man’s wife and two children and basically holds him to ransom until he obliges (the man in question happens to be the VP of Security for a major bank).

I mean, the film itself was OK… Harrison Ford played the lead role and, despite being a little wooden at times, pulled in a good performance. Paul Bettany, the villain of the piece, was good despite me being a bit confused by his having an American accent to start with. Robert Forster (Arthur Petrelli from “Heroes”) was good but underused.

There were some plot holes, but nothing I cared too much about (it was just an entertaining film, not meant to be the best film ever!)

One thing me and Phil quite liked was the portrayal of one of the guys in the film: he was apparently a Christian, but this wasn’t portrayed in a positive or negative light – it was just sort of a part of him. At one point we hear his ringtone as “What a friend we have in Jesus”, and then later on we see him playing guitar in a church service, where they are singing “There’s a voice that must be heard (Jesus friend of sinners)” – one of my favourite rockier Christian songs. So it was nice to see a portrayal of a Christian character in a film which was actually quite realistic and not just a stereotype.

Oh, and finally, one little nice touch: at one point in the film, the Mum and kids are watching a scene from what looked like “The Empire Strikes Back”. If I’m right, nice little reference to a rather famous role of Harrison Ford’s 🙂 (EDIT: according to the IMDB it was “The Forbidden Planet”. Ah well, it was only a split second, not going to watch it again just to check!)

Well, this weekend was a fairly eventful one! On Friday evening we were helping out at 21. Fortunately I wasn’t doing the talk this week – I say fortunately because it was a difficult passage! Judges 14. But AJ did a good job despite that and I think everyone had a good time.

On Saturday afternoon we met up with Tom and Chris J at the Bricklayers pub for the first part of “The Magnificent Seven” – a pub crawl encompassing the seven Colchester pubs which are in the good beer guide. Unfortunately we were only able to stay for two (The Fox and Fiddler was the next one) but it was a good time and hopefully we’ll get a chance to do the full one sometime later this year. I tried a couple of beers I hadn’t had before including one called “Binary Bitter”, a pale ale which was very nice!

In the evening we went to Matthew’s birthday party. It was superhero-themed, so I dressed up as Christopher Ecclestone’s Doctor Who (well, he’s sort of a superhero) and Phil dressed up as Rose. It was a fun evening, although I think I ate my own body weight in chocolate covered things (the chocolate fountain was good).

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then straight afterwards went round to Laura’s. We had a very nice Thai style curry, and then spent the whole afternoon watching Gavin & Stacey Series 1 – which none of us had seen before. It was brilliant, I’ve really got into Gavin & Stacey (we’ve been watching series 2 on BBC3) – it’s very clever, although it’s really funny at times it also has some great ‘drama’ style moments and is actually quite touching. It’s also quite realistic – the families are both so well written and played, I feel like I recognise them! Bryn (played by Rob Brydon) is probably my favourite character.

Aaaanyway. After that we had our meeting about the music for Sunday @ 6. The meeting actually made me realise (again) how far I have to go with the guitar – although I can play chords pretty well, there are still lots of other things I want to be able to do. I’m getting there slowly, I just hope I do actually ‘get there’ in the end though!

Afterwards we came back home and did a bit of revision for the Moore Course exam (not long to go now – 4th April!) and then we watched the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was good fun.

I should probably clarify the title: surprisingly enough, it’s nothing to do with pirates (me hearties). Apparently IE8 is going to be released this week (well, soon).

They claim that it has much better (standards-compliant) rendering – that you won’t have to basically break your page in order to make your page work with IE. (Although… well, I’ll get to that). It passes the Acid2 test. In short, it’s supposed to fix a lot of the problems that were caused by IE6 and only partially fixed in IE7.

This can only be a good thing, right? Well, not necessarily. I think Microsoft are caught a bit between a rock and a hard place: if they make IE8 standards compliant, they’re going to break older pages. Particularly internal web applications which can’t be updated. But, if they don’t make IE8 standards compliant, they’re not making any progress and the web is going to continue with its current bizarre system of designing for standards compliance and Internet Explorer.

What Microsoft have opted to do in this situation is implement two or three rendering engines – the IE8 engine, and the IE6/7 engine which will be used to render old and non standards compliant web pages. Whether this was a good idea, I don’t know. I personally think it’s going to add to the confusion – but then, I don’t know what else Microsoft could have done in the circumstance. If they could invent a time machine, go back in time and remove the abomination that is IE6 that would probably be the best option! But unfortunately it isn’t.

But if IE8 does render pages ‘properly’ if they are standards compliant, as a web development community we are moving to a place where the web should have been a decade ago: where your markup / CSS is what’s important and you don’t have to try and hack things for different browsers. IE has held back the web dev community long enough, let’s hope IE8 starts bringing in the changes.

Well, it was a nice change to have a quieter weekend this time round. Friday night we were out at 21, and I was doing the talk. It went pretty well – I think I’m gradually getting better at doing those talks. Even if I did nick most of the contents out of a commentary 😉

Afterwards we came back home and watched “Idiocracy“, which was quite funny. Despite it being a comedy it’s actually an interesting premise, definitely worth a watch.

On Saturday we spent most of the day shopping and revising! I bought some new jeans and then did some revision for our Moore Course exam on 4th April.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then did some more revision in the afternoon. I also spent some time playing FreeCiv – I don’t know why, every time I play I always get frustrated because I’m so bad at it.

Anyway, in the evening we went to another “Visual Bible Journeys” presentation by Geoff Tucker, which was very interesting and informative again. Afterwards we came back home and watched the last episode in this series of “Lark Rise to Candleford”. Although I have enjoyed this series I must say I think the writers have been pushing the bounds a little… it’s not that it’s badly written, it’s just that the characters have all been taken to extremes. Mark Heap’s character particularly I’ve wanted to shoot at several times in the series!

Just a quick update of what’s been going on!

Friday night: helped out at 21.
Saturday: did some shopping, prepared for the evening, and had our next-door-neighbours round for dinner (which went very well actually… we seem to have been lucky so far when having them round to dinner, everything has gone nicely!)
Sunday: church in the morning. Had Alex round for lunch, which was cool as we hadn’t seen him in ages. Then afterwards I did a trance mix on my new CD decks (although probably won’t upload it!) and prepared for the talk I’m doing at 21 this Friday.

So that, in a nutshell, has been our weekend!