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So, as some of you may know, we went out to visit some friends in Leipzig, Germany this week. We flew out last Thursday, and came back yesterday (Tuesday). I have to say, Ryanair isn’t the most comfortable airline to travel on – but the price was right, so can’t really complain!

On Friday, we went for a walk at the Wörlitz gardens (I think I got that right) near Leipzig, which were very nice. I have some photos which will be uploaded soon! The gardens were very big, but there was plenty to look at. There were lots of buildings spread throughout the gardens, some of which were very unusual indeed! There was a really cool one in the middle of a lake (well, you had to cross a bridge to get to it at least), which looked like it was built out of rock and had a cool mini rooftop lake kind of thing.

On Saturday morning, one of the people from Leipzig English Church (where our friends, Peter & Martina, go) was being baptised, so we went along to that. It was actually in a lake, and for me that was the first time I’ve witnessed a baptism outside of a church! Although the weather wasn’t great that went well. Afterwards we played frisbee for a while, and then went back home and drank tea and chatted. In the evening, we went to a free concert at the nearby Conservatory. It was actually a piano recital by some students there, and they played some lovely music – some pieces by Mozart, Chopin, Brahms and Liszt. They finished off by playing a version of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, arranged for two pianos.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then had a walk around Leipzig in the afternoon. It’s a very lovely city for the most part, certainly well worth going if you get the chance! In the evening, we went to church again, and then went to someone’s house for dinner (as they had invited quite a few people from the church round). That was great fun, after dinner we watched a couple of episodes of “Fawlty Towers” – although not ‘The Germans’ episode!

On Monday we went out for a long walk around some local “Schloßes” (castles)… well, two of them to be precise. I think the village which we were near was Benewitz. The weather was good – although it was a bit grey to start off with, the sun shone in the afternoon! We got to see lots of the local scenery, and again – we have photos!

On Tuesday morning we went to a memorial which I can’t quite remember the name of… it was to commemorate the Battle of Nations. It was very, very big – apparently, it’s taller than Big Ben and the Empire State Building! You can go right up to the top – the view was absolutely fantastic from up that high! You could see all the way over Liepzig.

In the afternoon we said our goodbyes and headed back home. So… that’s just about everything for what we actually did! There were a couple of things I wanted to say about Germany in general though, just a few observations.

Germany is a strange place in terms of the languages used: although in East Germany English is less popular, there are still plenty of signs in English. It’s quite strange to see an English phrase used on various posters etc.

The public transport system is absolutely amazing, speaking as someone who is used to plenty of disappointment when it comes to public transport! Leipzig has a tram system, which is great. But the whole system seems to have been well thought-out, it’s quite cheap, and you can really see the results: there are a lot less cars on the roads than there are in England! There are still quite a few cars on the roads, but less than you would otherwise expect to find in an equivalent British city.

This leads onto another subject as well – recycling: in Germany, recycling seems to be a real priority. They really seem to be geared up for it. Apparently, hot water is provided by the city – which comes from the hot water used in power stations to cool down the turbines! So it all seems like a neat system to make the best use of everything. Obviously it’s not a perfect system, but it certainly gave pause for thought to me at least.

Well, I think that’s all for now… to summarise: we had a great time in Germany, we feel better for having a holiday, and if you get the chance then Leipzig is well worth a visit!

This is just a quick post to let you know that we are off on holiday this week and next week, so don’t expect any updates! Normal service will resume soon enough…

You know, I completely forgot to mention this the other week, but I think it’s probably worth mentioning. When we moved, we used One Man and a Van as we didn’t want all the hassle of moving stuff ourselves (it’s a very tough job!).

Anyway, in a nutshell they were absolutely excellent – very cheerful, friendly and polite throughout; very careful with our stuff; and (amazingly) — very cheap!

If you’re in the Colchester area and need to move, we can recommend these guys 🙂

And I apologise for mentioning the move stuff about two and a half weeks after we actually moved, we didn’t have the internet at home until last week, and then it just completely slipped my mind!

Apologies for the lateness of this post, and the techy ones before it… I thought I should probably post a quick summary of the weekend! On Friday night we went to see “The Simpsons Movie”. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, as short TV shows don’t always translate well to the big screen. But it was absolutely hilarious – if you like the Simpsons, you should go and see it! It’s really funny, definitely one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year.

On Saturday we didn’t do a huge amount really – it was fairly busy with shopping and sorting out a few bits and pieces, in the evening we just crashed out and watched a DVD.

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then in the evening we went round to Karen & Steve’s to see them and Alex. We ended up watching “The Princess Bride” because Phil hadn’t seen it before… I have to say, although it’s not my favourite film ever it is quite watchable! It’s got some great lines and is good fun.

Anyway. Over the weekend I managed to finish off “The Twilight of Atheism”. It’s a really good book, although not quite what I expected: there is no defending of religion as such, but Alister McGrath goes into the details of how atheism became a fairly mainstream worldview, and then how its failings led to its demise in the second half of the 20th century. All in all I’d say this was good reading for anyone interested in the history of atheism and how it relates to culture (at least from a Christian perspective!).

Right, that’s all for now.

Apologies for making two techy posts in one day, but I’ve just come across a problem which I think it might be good to post up in case it helps anyone else.

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve been using MySQL-Python to connect to MySQL using … you guessed it, Python! Anyway. Long story short, I was trying to do an INSERT statement on a table which contains a DATE type. MySQLdb can parameterise database queries, so I thought this wouldn’t be a problem. What I was doing was something like the following:

cursor.execute("INSERT INTO table (date_column) VALUES (%s)", (date_val,));

Where date_val was a variable which contained a struct_time. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to work: I kept getting the error message “Data truncated for column date_column' at row 1“.

Eventually I found out that in order to use certain data types in queries, you have to convert them to the relevant MySQLdb type. In this case, as follows:

mysqldb_date = MySQLdb.DateFromTicks(time.mktime(date_val))

[thanks to this page — at the bottom]

Once you’ve done that, you can use it in the query like before. Just a little ‘gotcha’ which I fell foul of, although it can be solved by reading the documentation it’s not crystal clear and I thought posting it here might help someone else 🙂

One other ‘gotcha’ with MySQLdb is that it disables auto-commit. In fact, I think the Python Database API Specification says that you should disable auto-commit, so it’s not the fault of MySQLdb — anyway, it just means that whenever you update data in the database, you have to call commit()! Not a problem, just something to watch out for if you find that your updates don’t seem to be hitting the database.

It seems that the past couple of days I’ve had to spend a fair bit of time working with programming languages beginning with the letter ‘p’:

At work last week, I wrote my first ever perl script. Our client had asked for a script which parsed a CSV file and inserted the data into a database table. I chose perl because python was unavailable (and I’m not sure how good bash scripts are at parsing CSV, I did google it but it didn’t come up with much useful info). Anyway, it seemed to go alright – perl seems to have a rather “quirky” syntax (i.e., it’s quite strange) but once you get used to it it’s not too bad. Plus, a lot of PHP seems to be based on perl so some bits already seemed quite familiar.

Perl does have a bad reputation in some circles, mainly because it is a very good language to do “quick and dirty” fixes in which fix the problem but are badly written and are a maintenance nightmare! I suspect that perl is more open to abuse in that respect. But it is perfectly possible to create decent code using it, and because it’s such a well-established language there is a large amount of documentation on the web for it.

I mentioned python as well at the start of this post: I said a few days ago that I had written a shell script to rip CDs and upload them to the Fordham website. Well, last week I converted the website to use a database – previously you had to browse the filesystem to find sermons, whereas now you can search for them! (It’s not complete just yet, but hopefully will be soon…)

Anyway, the only problem with the shell script was that there is no easy way to connect to a MySQL database using bash scripting (short of starting up the mysql client executables locally, but I didn’t want to do that!). Python has a nice library called MySQLdb which enables it to talk to MySQL databases.

I really don’t know why I didn’t write the upload script in Python in the first place… what I like about Python is that it’s a powerful programming language, and yet it’s just about as easy to use as a standard shell script. You can do object-oriented programming if you want to, but you can also just use it to write a quick script to rip a CD and upload it to a website… in other words, it’s very versatile and fast.

In fact, the only thing I don’t like about python is the fact that when you’re creating a class, all the methods have to take the parameter “self”. In Java, the identifier “this” refers to the instance of the class in which the code is currently executing. I’m not srue why python doesn’t do this… I noticed that perl uses the same technique (i.e. the instance of the object is passed as parameter), so perhaps it’s a feature of interpreted languages?

Anyway, just a minor gripe. Once you get used to it, it’s no problem at all!

*phew* – that turned out to be a longer post than I’d expected it to be! Sorry about that! All for now…

I’m just reading through “The Twilight of Atheism” by Alister McGrath. It’s a very good book – I’m only 3/4 of the way through it, but I would definitely recommend it! One thing which he said that I found very interesting is that protestantism indirectly created circumstances in which atheism was able to thrive. I thought this was strange at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense:

One of the things which early protestantism did was to remove the focus on images and so on (not without reason – images can lead to idolatry, i.e. the focus being on the created rather than the creator). What became the focus instead was the pulpit – people would learn about God through the word. Churches became places where you would go to hear the word, and there would be nothing there to distract you from that (no statues, paintings, etc – the walls would be whitewashed). In doing so, protestantism inadvertantly turned Christianity into a dry set of doctrines which people would accept cerebrally – but take the “experience” of God out of the equation. McGrath calls this the “imaginative failure of protestantism”. Before, in the medieval ages, God was just an ordinary part of everyone’s lives – people would see the divine in everything. Not without reason the protestant movement sought to reduce that to what we could know about God through the Bible, what was taught at Church…. it just seemed that in doing so this contributed to taking the experience of God out of people’s every day lives.

In other words, it turned people into pragmatic atheists – living as though God did not exist. From this, it was a short step to actually becoming ‘proper’ atheists – people not believing in God at all.

At this point McGrath mentioned the global pentecostal movement: this movement focuses a lot on the experience of God, rather than dry preaching. It’s gained enormous popularity over the world, partially because of its ability to mould itself to fit in with cultural circumstances.

Now, I don’t know whether protestantism in general has made our experience too ‘dry’, or whether we’ve taken the experience of God out of the equation. I suspect my answer to those questions would be “maybe” and “I don’t think so”, but it’s difficult to tell. What may be one person’s experience of God may not be the same as another’s.

However I think it’s definitely worth thinking about… I can’t pretend to know what the right answer to this is at the moment, but I do believe that this is a serious issue and one which is worth thinking about at length. If we’re doing something wrong, surely we should do something about it!

Note: I don’t think that the protestant church of the present necessarily is repeating the same mistakes as the protestant church of the past. But a lot of what McGrath said seemed to ring true for me, to a certain degree. I think it’s still an issue, even if it’s not as big an issue as it was…

I’d just like to apologise in advance to anyone who has already heard this story… I’m afraid I did rant in person to a few people! But I thought it was probably worth posting up here as well. You know, just in case anyone hadn’t heard it. Because it’s worth hearing. Yeah.

So. I mentioned a while back that we bought a washing machine from a well-known outlet whose name is almost the same as a well-known form of Indian food. We paid a bit extra to have it installed, in order to save us a bit of hassle on moving in day. We arranged to have it delivered on the day before we were moving in (the Friday).

On the Friday, the delivery men arrived and delivered the washing machine OK, but they refused to install it for two reasons: (1) There were no taps on the washing machine pipe outlets; (2) the electrical socket was too close to the pipe outlet. They’ve been sued in the past because they installed a washing machine like that, and the water pipes burst throwing water all over the electrical socket causing all manner of problems.

Either way, I’m none too happy about it: on Saturday, we (well, technically, my Dad…) had a look at it: there were no taps on the water pipes, this much is true. However, there were grub screws… apparently grub screws are too complicated to operate 😉 And in terms of the electrical socket being too close to the water pipe outlet – Phil’s Dad brought the IEEE guidelines on the subject, and apparently the only regulation is that the electrical socket should be above the water outlet (so that water doesn’t drip down onto it). Our socket was well above the water outlet, by the way. To some extent I can understand their concern, but if they had installed the washing machine they would have done it in line with industry regulations – what more can you ask for? And how have people managed to sue them and get away with it?

Apologies for this long and rambling story, but the moral is: don’t pay extra for installation from shops (unless maybe it’s a small independent place who know what they’re doing). If you need someone it’s probably better to get someone independent (i.e. someone who knows what they’re doing!)

So… what did we get up to this weekend, then? “Not a whole lot” is the astonishing answer to that question! On Friday night we went out to the Rose & Crown on East Street for a drink, which was nice 🙂

On Saturday, we went to the recycling place to get rid of all the boxes we used when we were moving (so much cardboard! – at least it can be recycled…). In the evening, one of Phil’s colleagues had a house warming party so we went along to that. It was good fun actually, and they have a very nice house – it gave us a few ideas…

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning. Afterwards, Chris invited us back for lunch, so we were in Wivenhoe for most of the afternoon. We went back home for a bit, before going out to the Bengal Spice for dinner with Alex. We thought that as Alex might not be round here much longer, it would be fitting to have dinner there! It was, as always, lovely food as well.

Afterwards we drove back to Alex’s before wandering down to the Beehive – it was the first time we’d been there, and it was quite a nice pub. If I lived a bit closer I’d probably go in there more often!

Right. I think that’s just about everything for now. We should be getting the internet at home on Wednesday, so hopefully it won’t be too long now before I can write posts at home (not that it will mean I’ll make them any more frequently, but still…)

I’ve just heard that we won’t have the internet until next Wednesday (25th). That’s a bit longer than I’d hoped for really… can anyone explain to me exactly what it is that takes so long about provisioning ADSL? I mean, seriously, it takes absolutely bloomin’ ages to get a DSL line enabled… what are they doing for all that time? I reckon ADSL start dates work in the same way that software deadlines work – pick an arbitrary date sometime in the future provided that it’s about ten times the amount of time you actually need…

*ahem* sorry, did I just say that out loud?

I think it’s probably just BT who are the slow link in the chain – they always seem to be. We asked for our phone line to be activated on Saturday – they only managed to get it done yesterday!

Anyway. Alex mentioned on his blog last week about a film currently being made which is only known as “Cloverfield” – it’s a JJ Abrams production. I watched the trailer once and thought, “hmmm, that looked pretty good. I’d like to see that when it comes out.” I’ve watched the trailer again (several times) since then, and I have to say… I’m hooked! I think I’m going to be glued to the net for developments on this one, and I’m going to have to go and see it when it comes out…