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I was browsing through the list of Facebook applications written in Java the other day, and happened to stumble across Bloom: “The best Facebook photo uploader!”

I was a tad surprised, because it appeared to be (a) open-source (it had a link to the source code in one column) and (b) there already is a Java application to upload photos to Facebook. I know this, because it was written by me!

I was going to write up a rant about open-source projects never getting anything done if people don’t bother joining other projects, but – on further investigation, it seems like “Bloom” isn’t open-source. Can you see a link to the source code, or any reference to it, anywhere on the site? I certainly can’t. So I’ve edited the Facebook wiki and removed the link (well, if it’s not open-source, the link is invalid).

I’m not quite sure whether the guy who wrote Bloom was aware of my uploader before writing his. Bloom does now have more features (including some not related to uploading, such as browsing through photos), although it does seem a bit complicated to use – I don’t think it will win any GUI design awards (neither will mine, to be fair).

Anyway, inspired by Bloom and jUploadr (and upload tool for Flickr also written in Java) I have released a new version of the Facebook Photo Uploader which lets you drag and drop photos onto the upload panel, rather than selecting them using a file browser. I don’t know whether I’ll implement any of the other features though – I do like the file browser, and being able to rotate / resize things in-memory is good, but whether they would be useful or not I don’t know.

I’ll stop rambling now anyway 🙂

A few various reviews and news bits…

On Monday, Coldplay’s new EP “Prospekt’s March” was released. I didn’t buy the CD – I just downloaded it from 7Digital.com (£3.99 – bargain!). As I understand it, the EP is basically just songs which didn’t make it onto the album (Viva la Vida) but which are still part of the album musically. Anyway, it’s really good – there’s a small piano solo called “Postcards from Far Away”, which is like a Chopin Prelude. I think it’s virtually worth downloading it just for that! But the rest of the songs are also good – even the Jay-Z version of ‘Lost’.

Last Friday, the new series of “The IT Crowd” started. I was a huge fan of the first series, the second series wasn’t quite as good but still had some great moments. The first episode of this series looks promising – it was very funny and had some brilliant lines. One of my favourites: “(Moss) I’d be upset if you called me a big ugly builder. And not just because I’m an IT contractor”.

Lastly, my new ESV Study Bible arrived yesterday. It looks really good – loads of articles, commentary, information about each book… I’ve been wanting to get a study Bible for ages, and this looks like it won’t disappoint. I’m sure it will come in very handy when preparing talks, home groups etc.

Well, last weekend was pretty busy once again! (It must be that time of year again, you know, the time of year that we’re really busy. That’s about three quarters of the year!)

Anyway. On Friday evening we went to 21. I did the talk on “The Church” which seemed to go pretty well. On Saturday, my parents came round for a brief lunch and then I headed down to London with them to see my sister. She had had an operation the day before, for breast cancer, so we went to the hospital to visit her. She seemed to be in pretty good shape considering (and is apparently now vastly improved). We came back late afternoon, and Mum and Dad stayed round for dinner before heading back home.

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, and then came back for lunch. In the afternoon we both headed off to Fordham. I spent the time preparing for the youth service, while Phil went off to hear a beautiful Bach Cantata (I was really annoyed I had to miss it, but there you go). But I think the youth service went really well though – the music was good (despite a few minor confused moments!).

Anyway, that’s about all for now. Someday I hope to write something on this blog which ISN’T about what I did for the weekend, that’d be a revelation, huh? 😉

Oh, this is funny. The BNP have lost their membership list. When I say ‘lost’, I mean – it’s been leaked onto the internet. All 12,800 members now have their names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses exposed.

Oh dear.

I hope this is the end of the BNP – if you read through the Wikipedia entry you’ll see just how bad they are.

I’ve had a quick look through the list (can’t link to it here, but you will probably have luck on a certain website which deals with leaks which is similar in name to wikipedia.) There are a few names from Colchester down, including a couple of people who actually live in the same street we used to live in. Scary stuff. (Appropriate quote from Spaced: they’re not in the Jungle – they are the Jungle!)

It’d be interesting to do some data mining on the list to get some statistics, but I suspect that will probably be done by people other than myself so I’ll just look at their efforts once they’re done 😉 Quite what the BNP is doing storing their membership list in a freaking Excel spreadsheet I don’t know – I don’t think it was converted, it looks genuine: disorganised, not sorted properly…

Excel actually does (*gasp*) a pretty good job of handling the 13,000 rows as well. I’ve just tried it in OpenOffice and… actually, OpenOffice is pretty good as well (does take a while to load, but that’s probably because it has to convert from Excel to its own format).

Anyway, I’ll stop rambling! 🙂

We’ve been incredibly busy the past few days, and it’s not set to slacken off for a while. On Friday night we helped out at 21. I was leading and AJ did the talk. It seemed to go pretty well, although I wasn’t sure whether any of the kids were listening in our discussion group. C’est la vie, I think the best you can do with youth work is hope and pray that something goes in despite everything!

On Saturday Phil was out most of the day visiting her sister in Reading, so I did the weekly shop in the morning and then spent most of the afternoon preparing for the Moore Course next week. In the evening, we went out to a home group meal to celebrate our home group leader getting married, so that was rather nice.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then Phil’s parents came round for lunch so that was rather nice. In the evening I went out to a music practice for the youth service at Fordham next week! So that’s our weekend in a nutshell.

I may not be posting up so much over the next couple of weeks though, here are some edited highlights of what’s coming up for me:

• Pub quiz tonight with work colleagues
• Music practice tomorrow night for youth service
• Doing a talk at 21 this Friday on “The Church”
• Going down to London on Saturday to visit my sister (she has an operation on Friday to remove a cancerous growth)
• Youth service on Sunday!
• Confirmation preparation class a week today (I will be getting confirmed on 14th December – more on that some other time!)
• Church re-ordering committee meeting next Tuesday
• Moore Course meeting next Wednesday
• Home group on Thursday evenings

Some of those things are optional and, in fact, I think I may duck out of a few. But I still don’t quite understand how I managed to end up so darned busy? As I’ve said before (in this very post) – “C’est la vie!”

I was checking the Google Analytics account for the Fordham Church website earlier today, and I found this:

As you can see, about 75% of people use Internet Explorer, 20% use Firefox, 6% use Safari… and poor old Opera is right at the bottom – below Google Chrome! Yes, that’s right, more people use Google Chrome to access the Fordham website than use Opera. Given that Google Chrome is still in beta and hasn’t even really established itself just yet, I find that quite funny.

I do like Opera as a browser, but with those kind of statistics they’ve got a long, loooooong way to go!

So, I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently. At Uni, a friend of mine (Phil P) used to contend that secular music was better than Christian music. To prove this, we listened to a few Christian songs which sounded vaguely like their secular counterparts. Guess which ones were better (in our opinion)?

I came across another example of this a few weeks ago. ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ by Matt Redman uses pretty much the same chord sequence all the way through the song. I discovered that ‘With or Without You’ also uses the same chord sequence all the way through the song – it’s in a different key, but the same chord sequence.

Out of those two songs, ‘With or Without You’ is a clear winner – at least in terms of the arrangement. Why can’t more Christian music be like that?

I admit that I’ve probably picked a bad example, because ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ is really a worship style song, designed to be sung by a congregation of worshippers. ‘With or Without You’ is designed to be performed by U2, and as such they don’t have to worry about the average Joe’s limited vocal range (or the average skill of a worship band guitarist, which – to be fair – is probably less than The Edge’s guitar playing skills).

The other thing is, I often find that Christian bands are… well, too Christian. U2 are actually a good example in some ways – I believe that three out of four of the band members are Christian, and a lot of their songs reflect that. Why define yourself as a ‘Christian’ band?

What we need is some good music by Christian people, some of which is about Christian things. But not in a “three point sermon” kind of way.

Do any such bands exist? If I was any good I would form a band like that, but unfortunately I am both a pretty rubbish musician and a rubbish song writer. So I wouldn’t exactly be a great advert for “Christian” music 😉

We went to see the new Bond film “Quantum of Solace” last night with Matthew and Anne-Marie. I didn’t really know what to expect, I’d seen a trailer for it but apart from that hadn’t heard much about it.

As Bond films go I thought it was pretty good: it had plenty of action, and the plot was pretty clever. There were a few ‘serious’ moments and a classic one-liner from Daniel Craig (if you haven’t seen the film I won’t spoil it by quoting though!)

There were a few downsides to the film, though. I was quite confused for most of the film…. this isn’t unusual for me (I watched LA Confidential and had very little idea what was going on for most of the time – I’m not good at names!). But apparently I wasn’t the only one who was confused, if our discussion after the fiml is anything to go by! I also felt like it didn’t quite live up to the standards of “Casino Royale” – that had some genuine tension, particularly during the poker game.

“Quantun of Solace”, on the other hand, just didn’t engage me in the same way – it felt a bit like it was desparately trying to, but not quite getting there. Perhaps it was trying too hard? Anyway.

It’s a decent film and worth seeing at the cinema, if you generally enjoy Bond films you won’t be disappointed. But don’t go if you’re expecting another ‘Casino Royale’ – i.e. lots of tension with not much action.

(Oh, I should also mention the theme tune by Jack White and Alicia Keys. In a word: disappointing. Muse would have done a much better Bond theme. They’ve already written songs which have titles like Bond films – ‘Ruled by Secrecy’ sounds like a Bond film to me!)

So, this weekend Philippa and I went all the way to Milton Keynes (well, actually to Newport Pagnell – just outside MK) for the 9:38 Annual Conference. This is a conference which is geared towards people who are considering full-time Christian work, and had a variety of useful seminars and talks designed to help people think through the issues.

We drove down on Friday night (through rush-hour traffic) – and somehow managed to get there in good time! We had dinner (the food was excellent, as it was all the way through the weekend. We were staying at the De Vere Harben venue. Although it is quite possibly one of the ugliest buildings in the area (viewed from outside), it was comfortable and well-equipped inside.) After dinner we had the first talk from Vaughan Roberts, and I played piano for a few hymns. It was rather nerve-wracking as I was on my own, but there were only three hymns which I knew so it went OK. Afterwards we all split up into prayer groups for a while, and then went to bed!

On Saturday we had a rather packed day. In the morning we had a prayer group session, as well as two talks / meetings: Andy Gemmill talked about “What is Gospel Ministry?” and Tim Silk did “How do I know I’m called?”. Both were very helpful and gave plenty to be thinking about! The music went well too – I was joined by Philippa on the clarinet, and three other people playing violin / piano / guitar / hand-drum (or combinations thereof). So we had a little music group going, and I think by the end of the time we were actually sounding quite good.

Aaaanyway. After lunch, we had some free time followed by a couple of seminars – we had chosen one on Anglican ministry, and then one about apprenticeships and training. Again, both of them I found very helpful and with lots of food for thought! After dinner, Vaughan Roberts interviewed four people who had been involved in gospel ministry career-wise, and it was really interesting to hear all their stories. No two people who I spoke to at the conference had the same story – some were similar, but it just goes to show: when God calls people, he definitely cares about the individual, it’s not just a matter of a “one size fits all” kind of plan. We then had another prayer group and went to bed.

On Sunday, we had one more seminar on theological education, and then it was time for the final prayer group session. After that we all came together as a group one last time for Vaughan Roberts’ second and final talk, which was very good, and then lunch and home.

*phew* Sorry to take so long writing that up… I thought it might be useful to have in case anyone else was thinking about going on a 9:38 Annual Conference! We both found the experience tremendously helpful and would happily recommend it to anyone thinking about going into full-time ministry. It’s definitely challenging but there are plenty of people who are very willing to help you talk through the issues. I also very much enjoyed meeting and talking to people who were in a similar position to us, it was really encouraging.

Right… I think I’ve rambled on enough about that now. Sorry, etc. etc….

After the busyness of the past month or so, we thought it would be a good idea to have a quieter weekend this time round! On Friday evening we had AJ and Jen (some friends from Fordham Church) round for dinner. It was a really nice evening, we did a curry and I think it went down quite well 🙂

Then on Saturday, we basically spent the day not doing very much at all. In the evening we watched “Bender’s Game” (which arrived that morning) – but more on that later.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then again to Eight Ash Green, before meeting up with Alex and going to the Black Buoy in Wivenhoe for lunch. Although I think the menu has changed a little (maybe it just changes for Sunday lunch though), we had a delicious lunch. Alex and I had roast beef and Phil had a risotto. After that, I think just about all we could manage was head home and watch “Bender’s Game” again (Alex hadn’t seen it).

After dropping Alex off at the station, we then watched “Top Gear” and “Stephen Fry’s America”. It was great to have Top Gear back again, and I’ve really been enjoying Stephen Fry’s series. It’s nice to see America in a different light to the one usually seen on TV!

Aaaaanyway. Bender’s Game. This is the third instalment of four new Futurama DVDs. It was mostly based on the Dungeons & Dragons game, which I don’t know much about so I probably missed some jokes. Nonetheless, it was still great fun if incredibly surreal at times! Although it didn’t seem quite so surreal on watching it a second time. I really enjoyed it – the jokes were good and the plot was clever – although some of it was probably lost of me given that I didn’t know much about D&D.

The only thing was, I did feel like the plot was a bit forced at times – I think where Matt Groening and Futurama excells is at short stories, i.e. the usual 20 minute format. Ah well, let’s see what they pull out for the next one 😉