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Firstly, let me just wish all my readers a happy new year (if I have not already done so in person)! Our new year began well – more on that later.

We had a really nice Christmas break. On Christmas Eve, we went to the carol service at Fordham, which was absolutely packed! It’s been getting more and more busy over the past few years, and this year was no exception. We had people sitting down in the choir stalls, even a few chairs down by the altar! It was great to see so many people there. Straight afterwards we headed down to Kent to stay with Philippa’s parents for a few days.

It was a fairly standard Christmas (i.e. presents, seeing friends, having Christmas dinner etc) so I’ll just post up a few notable bits. On Boxing Day we went into London to see a production of Rapunzel at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (see a review of it here). It was really good – an innovative take on the traditional story. Well worth watching if you can go – it’s not just for kids!

On Friday, we came back home overnight, and then on Saturday went to Ipswich to see my parents. We stayed there until Monday, and then came back on New Year’s Eve. Matthew and Ellie had a party at their house to see in the new year, which quite a few people came to. That was a really good evening, much fun was had. We played a game of ‘Chinese Whisper Charades’ (or whatever you call it), which is a cross between chinese whispers and charades (amazingly enough!) which was incredibly funny. I recorded a short video of it which I may post up at some point.

On New Year’s Day, we went to the Sun Inn at Dedham with Alex for lunch. For some reason they were serving Italian food (I don’t know why a pub in the Suffolk countryside was serving Italian food?!) but it was certainly very delicious.

Anyway, I should probably mention a few Christmas presents… I got a new guitar from Philippa, which I will try and learn to play gradually. I got Philippa a Logitech Harmony 525 Universal Remote Control (she doesn’t like the fact we have a rapidly growing number of remote controls). I will definitely be blogging about that at some point in the near future – I’m still awaiting a reply from Logitech support…

I think that’s a quick summary of what we’ve been up to over the past week or so!

Well, it’s been a fairly busy weekend – once again! I think December is just a fairly busy month, what with Christmas and everything…

We basically spent the weekend doing a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping (for wrapping paper!), wrapping up presents, and generally preparing for Christmas.

There’s a carol service at Fordham tonight, and then afterwards we are heading down to Philippa’s parents for a few days. So I probably won’t be posting much here over the next week or so (no change there then!)

All that remains is for me to say, Happy Christmas! And try to find some time to reflect on the marvellous truths behind Christmas:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

Well, I’ve finally managed to get desktop effects (Compiz) working on Ubuntu Gutsy! I’ve been having problems for a while – I’m not sure why, could be a number of things… each time I tried to enable the desktop effects, it just came up with a message about not being able to enable them! Enabling the proprietary ATI drivers made no difference (I have an ATI Radeon x300). Anyway, I managed to get it working by following the manual installation instructions on this page.

Yay! Now my desktop has cool effects, a bit like Mac OS X or Windows Vista. I know it’s just eye candy, but… eye candy is good 🙂 As Apple say, “the interface is the application”.

I came across this quote recently:

We in the Orthodox church regard all religions as being an indication of God’s graciousness to mankind. (Father Gregory Hallam, being interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Sunday Programme last Sunday, found via Dave Walker’s Blog)

And it got me thinking. I’ve been re-reading “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” by Philip Yancey over the past few days – I’m only 1/3 of the way through it, but there’s a little story in it which the quote above reminded me of. I can’t find the exact quotation in the book, but here’s a similar one:

It is told that during a meeting on comparative religions in Britain that many scholars gathered together to discuss what, if anything, was unique to Christianity. Many different elements were discussed and debated. Was Christianity unique because of its concept of truth? No, other religions have this. Was it unique because of the doctrine of reconciliation? No, other religions have this. Was it unique in terms of inspiration of a particular book? No, again, other religions have this. It is told that C.S. Lewis entered the room during the debate and asked what the discussion was all about. “We are discussing what makes Christianity unique, if anything.” “That’s easy” Lewis responded, “its grace.” [Source]

In other words, Christianity has the concept of grace, which other religions lack. Can, therefore, other religions be said to be an indication of God’s grace, or graciousness? Would God graciously give us a religion where we had to earn our salvation, as so many other religions seem to require?

I’m not saying that all other religions are 100% wrong, and as such will contain elements of God’s grace – and in that sense the above quote does hold true. But it just seems you’re on a dangerous road when you proclaim that all religions are an indication of God’s grace, especially some of the stranger ones out there.

To summarise, this post was fairly pointless, just random musings!

Well, I heard today that Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 Test. In case you’re not aware, the Acid2 test is a website which is designed to test capabilities of the browser to determine whether it is fully compliant with certain web standards.

This is a highly significant milestone for any web developer — particularly website designers: in the past, and even still today, Internet Explorer standards support has been the bane of our lives. I’m sure many a web designer has cried out in frustration, “When? When?! WHEN will you finally support &*(^&*%* CSS properly!

I’ve identified at least one or two defects (here and here) in IE7 – not sure if they’ve been fixed yet. Either way it was a pretty poor show, so let’s hope that IE8 at least has proper standards support…

… “I don’t know who she is, but she really packs ’em in!”

So goes the old (cartoon) joke, where the above line is spoken looking at a poster outside a church for ‘Carol Singers’. I expect you can now guess what we were doing this weekend! On Friday evening we had a practice for the carol service on Sunday. Philippa was playing her clarinet in the music group, and we were both singing for one of the songs (properly, with like parts and everything!) I had one or two misgivings about singing the bass part (my voice doesn’t really go down that low) but with a bit of practice I just about managed to get there.

On Saturday we went into town to do a bit of shopping, and in the evening we drove over to Wivenhoe to meet up with Alex & Elisa and Dan & Alison. We went to Papas Fish & Chip shop for dinner (felt like we hadn’t been there for ages!) and then went to the Greyhound for a few drinks, a chat – and some darts! It was a really nice evening, now that Alex in particular is down in Kent it was good to be able to meet up and have a catch up.

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning for the Christingle service — I always worry a little that something or someone will catch fire from one of the candles, but mercifully there were no accidents! In the afternoon we went round to Jo’s flat for tea and mulled wine (Jo works at the university with Phil). Afterwards the three of us headed to Eight Ash Green for the carol service there. It seemed to go really well – everyone was quite cheerful at the end, and the music sounded good from where I was sitting at least (behind the musicians, unfortunately, in the choir stalls).

Afterwards we came back home and watched ‘Jersey Girl’ – the only Kevin Smith film at the moment which doesn’t have Jay and Silent Bob in it. I was actually very impressed with it – it wasn’t half as bad as all the reviews made out! I would recommend watching it even if you’re not a fan of Kevin Smith films. It was quite sentimental in places, but generally very good. Probably not ‘buy on DVD’ good (we recorded it on the Freeview box!) but well worth a watch.

I started piano lessons when I was about 12 or 13 years of age. I did grades, up to Grade 4 – which I scraped through in December, 2000. Suffice it to say, I didn’t really practice that much!

I should take a moment to explain that if you don’t know much about the ABRSM grading system, if you are learning an instrument you can do various grades, which range from grade 1 (the easiest) through until grade 8 (the hardest).

Anyway. Three years ago, once I’d graduated, I took up the piano again (not literally, pianos are heavy things). I’ve been playing a fair bit since then, and I think I’ve made progress. I’m pretty sure I’m better than I was when I did Grade 4, but of course it’s actually quite difficult to quantify that.

One of the pieces I’ve learnt to play over the past year or two is Arabesque no. 1 by Debussy. It’s a lovely piece, and according to this page – it’s Grade 8 standard! Ok, so it’s probably not “hard” Grade 8 standard, but still… it came as something as a revelation to me, because I’d always seen Grade 8 as a sort of mystical place where people who have actual musical talent roam.

I’m not saying that I’m one of those people who have actual musical talent, but it was an interesting perspective for me nonetheless! I don’t think I’ll actually do another exam for grades — doing scales etc was one of the things which put me off playing the piano in the first place – but it’s good to know that you can make progress even if you don’t have anything to prove it formally!

In case you hadn’t realised, Jesus is actually on Facebook!

This article explains…

[Warning: Article may contain humour]

This weekend was a long one for us – we took Friday off work to do some Christmas shopping! It was actually quite a successful day – we managed to get most of our Christmas shopping done, although we do still have a few bits and pieces being delivered (hopefully before Christmas!).

On Friday evening Philippa travelled down to see her sister, so I watched “The Big Lebowski” which was an OK film. It wasn’t the best film ever, but it was quite entertaining for an evening. On Saturday, I did some food shopping in the morning and didn’t go out again all afternoon as the rain was pouring down! In the evening I went to La Tasca in Colchester with Dan, Alison, Caroline and Tom. That was a good evening – we had a variety of Tapas dishes, plus a paella for two shared between the five of us (they are absolutely huge!). Afterwards we went to the Twister for a quick drink before heading home. It was a very enjoyable evening, La Tasca is always nice and it was good to see a few people again who I haven’t seen in a while!

On Sunday we went to church as per usual. In the evening we had a take-away curry, and then Matthew came round and we watched Top Gear. It was good again this week, I can’t believe they managed to get that BMW all the way to the finish line! So that was also a nice evening… not a bad weekend really!

Just a shame that all weekends can’t be three days long – I could get used to four days work, three days off… ah well!

In a bored moment, I decided to start writing a Battleships game. The bored moment turned into a slightly longer bored moment… and so here it is.

It’s fairly easy to play – click on a ship, select whether it should be horizontal / vertical, and then click on your board to add it in. You can also generate a random board if you prefer. Once that’s done, click on the start button. The computer will make its move first, and then it’s your turn. When all ships have been destroyed by either you or the computer, you’ll get a message.

Well, it alleviated some boredom for a while, even if it was completely pointless!