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The second series of Torchwood finished with a bang (literally) on Friday night. It was pretty standard Torchwood fair – i.e. nothing was explained particularly well – but they did at least do the exit of Tosh and Owen pretty well. I thought Naoko Mori’s performance was fantastic, and Burn Gorman did pretty well too.

It concludes what was, in my eyes, a much better series of Torchwood. I think they’d listened to the criticism from the past series, and tried to adjust the tone accordingly. Although there is still quite a way to go, I have enjoyed watching this series – which is more than I can say for series one, which I found quite a trial at times!

Like someone on the Behind the Sofa blog suggested, if they’d just cut down a bit on the number of episodes it could have been really good.

Anyway, Saturday night saw the return of Doctor Who – and it got off to a great start! I watched a repeat of the Christmas Special with Catherine Tate last Christmas, and I thought then that she would do a good job. If “Partners in Crime” is anything to go by, that’s definitely true! The scene between her and her grandpa was really quite touching, and she has a real chemistry with David Tennant.

And Rose has returned! That was a very mysterious five seconds at the end of the episode – I wonder where it will lead.

The story itself was a fairly typical “first episode of the new season” one, but it was a good laugh and I enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to the next twelve episodes – I’m sure it will be “fantastic”!

I don’t know why, but the past couple of days we’ve had a couple of people leave messages on the phone for people we’ve never heard of. I don’t know whether our number is similar to another one, or whether it’s just a coincidence. We don’t get many of them.

I’m never quite sure whether to call back and say “You got the wrong number!” or just to let them find out themselves. Sometimes I feel like ringing back and asking for Roger McAlistair-Smythe, but that’s just me.

I was also wondering whether it was like the Doctor Who “Big Finish” radio episode where there was a virus going round that caused people to dial the wrong numbers, but I somehow doubt that! … However, if we disappear for a while, contact Torchwood (Torchwood can be contacted in Cardiff. Just dress up as a blowfish and nick some old lady’s purse, I’m sure they’ll turn up in their overblown, ridiculous SUV in no time).

In other news, I’ve just found an incredibly random (and rather disturbing) website: Adult MooseFinder. I don’t think the Moose of Ming would advertise on such a site…

… our exam, that is. On Saturday morning we had our Moore Course exam on “Old Testament 1”. And it’s all over! High fives all round, I think. It seemed to go quite well – I was expecting the exam to be awful, but in the end it turned out to be moderately OK. I managed to answer all the questions to a reasonable degree at least, which is usually a good sign! Of course, how many marks I will get is a completely different kettle of fish but I’m fairly confident I at least got a pass mark – and I don’t really care if that means just scraping through!

The exam was on Saturday morning, and afterwards we went for lunch at the Sun Inn in Dedham with a few other people who were also sitting the exam. It was a very nice morning / early afternoon! In the evening I made a start on the Wasgij we’re borrowing from my parents – didn’t get very far, it’s quite a difficult one: the picture on the box is only a clue as to the picture you actually make. The picture you actually make is of the same scene, but 70 years later! Quite a clever idea though, and they’re good fun.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, came back for lunch, and then spent the afternoon doing some cleaning and getting ready for the evening — we had a whole bunch of people come round for pizza and to watch a film! When I say ‘whole bunch of’, I mean Alex, Elisa, Anne-Marie, Tom, Dan, Alison, Steve, Karen, Phil, Jenny, Matthew, Ellie, and me and Phil. It was probably the most packed out front room has been since we moved in! But it was a very good evening. We watched ‘Stardust’, which I haven’t seen before, and I rather enjoyed it.

Oh, there’s one more thing I have to say: I want my hour back! I’m still catching up on sleep after missing an hour on Saturday night. Still, at least losing an hour now means gaining an hour in October, so it’s not all bad!

I haven’t really blogged much about this, but Microsoft’s OOXML format is currently on its way to becoming an international standard (i.e., it’s been submitted to the ISO and they have been voting on it recently).

For those of you who’ve never heard of OOXML, it’s basically a file format for documents — i.e., when you save a Microsoft Word document it will get saved to OOXML. There are a number of problems with the specification, though, which have been pointed out at length elsewhere. There is another format called Open Document Format (ODF) that has far fewer problems, and it was voted in as a standard last year.

Unfortunately, it looks like OOXML is set to become adopted as a standard in the face of all these technical difficulties as well as a perfectly acceptable standard already existing. There have been a number of controversies in the voting, for example:

March 28th: Meeting in the Norwegian Standards Institute (Standard Norge).

Purpose: To decide the final vote for Norway on whether the document format OOXML should become an international standard.

The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge.

The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved.

The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard.

I think the ISO are well on their way to becoming totally irrelevant. If ‘standards’ can be set by methods such as these, they’re not really standards.

… strangely enough, not the Operating System.

I’m talking about Ubuntu Coke! I’m not sure why they decided on the name ‘Ubuntu’, given that there’s already a pretty well-known operating system out there with the same name and a moment’s Googling would have easily found it, but still.

It seems like Ubuntu Coke is fairly traded, so I’m not quibbling!

Thanks to Alex for the coke!

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post, what with the long weekend I almost forgot to make an update! We’ve been fairly busy as usual this weekend, but it’s been very enjoyable.

On Friday we spent most of the day revising: we have an exam on Saturday for our theology course on the pentateuch. (The exam is optional, but it does help cement what you’ve learned in the course). We took a break from revision to go to the Good Friday service at Eight Ash Green.

On Saturday afternoon we headed over to Ipswich to see my parents, and spent the rest of the day with them. We spent a bit of time looking around Christchurch Mansion, which is actually a very interesting old house to look round – and all the better because it’s free!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then afterwards drove down to Kent to see Phil’s parents. We didn’t do very much on the Sunday except for watching “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” in the evening – which was very good, I really must read some of the books!

On Monday we spent some of the time revising and some of the time learning to play bridge (!) – I’d never played bridge before but I had played a similar variant online called Spades. It seems quite complicated to begin with but after a while you start to get the hang of it!

In the evening we went to see Joseph at the Adelphi Theatre in London — it was a birthday present for Phil’s sister, Roz. It was great fun – Lee Mead was in it, and he put in a very good performance! I hadn’t seen Joseph on stage before (although I did perform some of it when I was in primary school, but that doesn’t really count) and I really enjoyed it. It was very good fun, and the music is so catchy and engaging you can’t really fail to love it!

Afterwards we drove back home, and that pretty much brings you up to date.

I mentioned in my last post that I quite liked The Passion, despite them putting words in Jesus’ mouth on one or two occasions. Well, having watched the third episode this evening, I still think it’s quite good – but I do wish they would stop messing around with Jesus’ words!

It seems quite clear to me that whoever wrote the screenplay for The Passion doesn’t actually have an appreciation for why Jesus used the words he actually did. I can understand then making up some dialogue to fill in the bits of the account which aren’t covered by the gospel writers, but why did they actually change what the gospel writers recorded Jesus having said? I don’t understand it.

Case in point: at the last supper, in The Passion, when Jesus gives his disciples the wine he says: “This is my blood, given for the healing of many” (or something similar).

According to Mark’s gospel, what Jesus actually says is: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” (Mark 14:24, ESV). Matthew makes it even more explicit: “…this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matthew 26:28, ESV).

Theologically, what was in The Passion and what is in the gospels are quite different. Now, I realise that the makers of The Passion are trying to make a film about the life of Jesus which is accessible to everyone, not just students of theology – but surely if they’d have just used what Jesus actually said – from the gospels – that would have checked both those boxes? I actually think “dumbing down” Jesus’ words like that actually empty what he said of a lot of its power.

Another example was on the cross – in The Passion Jesus didn’t say to the thief, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43, ESV).

I like The Passion, I just wish they would have stayed a little truer to the gospel accounts of what was actually said – changing the words just seems so pointless. It spoils what is otherwise an excellent production – they’ve obviously gone to a lot of effort, and it shows. The characterisation is just about right, the acting is good, I like how they have really brought out the difference in what the disciples expected Jesus to do against what Jesus actually came to do.

Ah well, you can’t have it all, I just hope and pray that people watching will want to find out for themselves a bit more about Jesus, and come to know who he really was!

The BBC are screening a new mini-series called “The Passion“. It’s a four parter, covering the last few days of Jesus’ life. The first part aired on Sunday, but we only got round to watching it yesterday.

I didn’t know what to expect – secular films about the life and death of Jesus aren’t always very sympathetic – but I thought this was done very well. The only thing I was a bit concerned about was them putting words in Jesus’ mouth: I don’t recall Jesus ever saying “The Kingdom of God is within you”!

But overall I think they did a good job, and I quite look forward to seeing the rest of them, it will be interesting to see how they handle it!

One of the annoying things about Facebook is the way it displays photos: at a very low resolution! You can upload photos at full resolution, but with Facebook you can only get a fairly low-res 600×450 (approx) resolution.

What I want to know is — why? Why this ridiculous restriction? Every other online photo service which I’ve used (Yahoo! Photos and Flickr) let you download the full resolution.

The only thing I can think of is that if people can’t download the full resolution photo from Facebook, they’ll be forced to use Facebook’s “Photo Prints” service (at least, I think Facebook has one!). But they could at least give you the option of getting photos in a slightly higher res (i.e., 1024 x 768) without too much fear of people doing that. And other photo sites offer you the option of getting prints and downloading the full-resolution version.

Hmmm, I’m a bit exhausted after this weekend! It was pretty busy for most of it – although very enjoyable! On Saturday we spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen as one of Phil’s work colleagues and boyfriend were coming round for dinner, and we were preparing all the food. It was worthwhile though, we had a good evening and all the food went down well.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, where Mike preached a very helpful sermon on communion (this will be available to listen to on the Fordham Website later — we were out most of yesterday so I didn’t get a chance to upload it then).

Afterwards we went to a sort of student lunch at Simon and Lara’s house in Wivenhoe. We had slow roasted pork (apparently one of Nigella’s recipes – it needs to roast for 24 hours) which was delicious, and it was good to chat to a few of the Essex Uni people who come to Fordham.

We spent most of the afternoon chatting there, and didn’t get back home until about 5:00! We just had time to do a bit of washing up (left over from the previous evening) before going to the last of the lent services at St Albright’s. It was on “I Am the True Vine”, and I found it quite helpful – although unfortunately I missed some of it because I was a little bit tired!

Afterwards we headed into Wivenhoe for Matthew’s birthday party. We had a very nice ploughman’s for tea, followed by a quiz (food for the mind?!) about Devon and then some birthday cake. All in all, the day was rather packed but good fun – I’m just glad that we only have four days at work this week!