Category: Uncategorized

This weekend turned out to be rather busy! On Friday evening, we had our ‘Clerks’ night. That was good fun, the Clerks films are great (if not for the faint hearted!).

On Saturday, we did a bit of shopping in the morning, and in the evening went round to Wivenhoe to see the Eurovision with a few other people. I did enjoy the evening, although it did inspire me to write a rant about the Eurovision (see my previous post).

On Sunday, we went to Fordham in the morning, and then in the afternoon I did some preparation for the home group study I’m leading on Thursday on 1 John. I’ve never noticed it before, but there are an awful lot of similarities between John’s Gospel and 1 John – it would be interesting to do a proper analysis one day! Anyway.

In the evening, I went to the 6:00 service at Fordham which incorporated Bach’s Cantata for the fifth Sunday after Easter. It was played and sung by the Curlew Ensemble, a local group of musicians. They were really good – it was lovely! They did a similar thing on New Year’s Eve this year, but we weren’t able to attend. I’m glad I went yesterday, and I hope there will be more like it!

Afterwards, we had a few people round for the unveiling of the first episode of Phil P and Alex’s series, “Tales from the Devil’s Armpit”. It was a good evening once again, Phil P and Alex had done a good job with the script, and Alex had done a good job with the editing. So, well done!

Right, I think that’s just about everything for the time being. Until next time…

We watched Eurovision on Saturday night. It was quite good fun… I’m not sure I’d like to do it more than once a year, though! However, just to be controversial I thought I’d post up a rant about it…

What is the point of Eurovision? As far as I can tell, it exists for the following reasons: 1. A musical contest; 2. To ‘unite’ Europe; 3. Entertainment.

I think it pretty much falls flat on its face for all those three categories:

1. A musical contest. Nope, sorry. If this was a musical contest, then the countries involved would submit songs that were actually good. Take, for example, our entry this year. What on earth were they thinking? It was rubbish! I felt ashamed to be British… in no way is that representative of what British pop music is like. I can’t I know what pop music is like in other countries, but I’m pretty sure that many of them have decent pop music as well. Also, the voting does not reflect the music, which brings me onto my next point…

2. To ‘unite’ Europe. Again, nope. The political voting which goes on is an absolute joke. I know that it’s not a serious contest, but if that actually is the case – why bother doing political voting then? If it’s just a joke, then vote for whichever song you like. Don’t bring politics into it. I actually think this is the key reason why Eurovision should be re-thought: look at the placement of the Western European nations in the results. None of them did very well… admittedly this might be because their songs were rubbish, but I think a large part of it was that there are so many Eastern European countries and all of them voted for each other. Something could be done about this, but as this is a rant I won’t bother going into it now :p

I don’t think Eurovision unites Europe at all – it just highlights which countries are popular and which ones aren’t.

3. Entertainment. Admittedly, Eurovision does have an entertainment value. Watching people sing ridiculous songs on TV is fun, you can laugh at them… having said that, I think it would be far more entertaining to have proper music in the Eurovision. I’d much rather watch a decent band as opposed to the utter tripe we’ve produced over the past few years.

Anyway, I think I’d probably better stop there… I know that things aren’t likely to change (certainly not in the near future), but I just wanted to rant anyway…

Not much to say really, I just thought I haven’t updated that much recently so I’ll just post up a quick one to let you know what’s going on (or not!). I’ve updated the links section with a few additional links. If you don’t know it already, check out XKCD (under the ‘others’ section), it’s a very funny webcomic — although if you’re not a technical person you might not get some of the jokes (some of them you don’t have to be technical to get, though, such as this one).

Anyway. Yesterday I went to home group in the evening, although Phil wasn’t feeling well so she didn’t go. She’s had a virus, although is feeling much better today!

This evening we are having ‘Clerks night’ at our place, i.e. we are going to have a few people round and watch both of Kevin Smith’s ‘Clerks’ films. Should be a good evening 🙂

And… that’s pretty much it for now.

I thought I’d probably better post up to say what I’ve been up to this bank holiday weekend, before I forget! It’s always a bit of a struggle towards the end of a long weekend because it’s three days I have to remember, as opposed to just two… still.

On Friday night, we didn’t do much! (No surprises there). On Saturday we did a bit of shopping during the day. In the afternoon we headed over to my parents’ house in Ipswich. We had dinner there before driving out to Snape Maltings to see the University of Essex Choir perform Mendelssohn’s “Elijah”. We all thoroughly enjoyed it! It was a great performance by all concerned (choir, soloists, and the Essex Sinfonia).

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, for two services! – Phil was playing at the All Age service at 10, and I was playing at the 11:15 service. In the afternoon we relaxed, and in the evening we went to the Rover’s Tye to meet up Sarah, Jon and Simon to have a few celebratory drinks for Simon’s birthday. For some reason towards the end of the evening we managed to spend about half an hour discussing the University of Essex room numbering system?! One day we will have to have that ‘explore the university’ day to see if we can find any of those rooms which are rumoured not to exist…

Yesterday, we went to Lavenham with Sarah, Jon and Simon. We had lunch at a local pub (The Cock), and afterwards had a look around the Lavenham Guild Hall. It was very interesting, a lot of the buildings in Lavenham are quite old so it’s fascinating to explore.

In the evening, Phil and I went round to Alex’s for a bit.

And that was our weekend! Not much more to say now…

Hello there!

This is just a quick update to say that the new job is going well… I’ve survived so far! And am also enjoying it (which is always a good thing). It’s been a fairly slow start, but I’m gradually getting into the swing of things.

Not work related, but on Saturday we’re going to see the University of Essex choir performing Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” at Snape Maltings, I’m really looking forward to it 🙂

That’s about it for the time being… not much else to say at the moment!

This is strange. I finished my old job on Friday: it feels odd to think that I will never have to go back there again, that from now on every morning I’ll be going somewhere different! I think it’s partially the fact that my previous job was the first proper job that I had out of university. I’d been there for two and a half years – that’s a fair old time!

Anyway. On Friday evening we went out for drinks after work. Everyone said really kind things about me, which was a little embarrassing (being English, it’s difficult to take a compliment), but very flattering. Afterwards I came back home and we didn’t really do very much!

On Saturday it was just a matter of doing some shopping during the day (a nice change from the busyness of last weekend!) and in the evening we down to the chaplaincy for a games night. We spent a long time playing “Balderdash”, it was great fun! Some of the answers people came up with were absolutely hilarious.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and in the evening we went round to Alex’s. We had a curry at the Bengal Spice (once again, a delicious curry! – never had a bad one there yet…) and then went back to Alex’s to chat for a while and watch random videos from YouTube.

When we came back I spent a while surfing Facebook. I found a group for my old school and joined it – I added a few of my old classmates as friends… Facebook is very useful in helping to see what other people are up to these days! Friends Reunited was good, but because it was a “pay-for” service I don’t think it was all that great. Facebook is much better.

Anyway, that’s probably enough from me. All for now…

Ok, this is another techy post, for which I apologise. I thought I should probably mention it, though, because if I mention it now I’ve got no excuse for not remembering it…

At work, we migrated our source control to Subversion last October. When the repository was created, it was a Berkeley-DB based repository. The past couple of days, I’ve read that the new default repository is a filesystem-based one (FSFS) – not just that, but there are advantages to using the filesystem based repository over using the Berkeley DB based repository. We’ve had a few issues where the database has needed recovery (see my previous post on Subversion…), which wouldn’t happen on a filesystem based repository. There are a few other things as well.

“So”, I thought, “I’ll create a new repository and migrate the data across” [as described here]. And the migration worked perfectly, I might say.

However, there was one thing which could have gone better, not the fault of Subversion but our fault: last year we didn’t have a build server, meaning that we would store binaries of the deployment files in Subversion so that if you wanted a build to install you could just get it out of the repository. That might seem like a good idea, but it’s really not: in the first 300 revisions in the repository, there are a large number of binaries, around 20 megs in size. We have approximately 1600 revisions in Subversion. Guess how long it took to migrate? The first 300 revisions took about an hour to migrate – the next 1300 took about ten minutes.

Anyway, my point is, deployment files (web application files, installers, that kind of thing) are not for source control. Use a build system like Maven, regularly build your installation files using a continuous integration system like Cruise Control, but don’t store them in the svn repository! That’s not its purpose… and it will make things very, very slow if you ever need to do a migration.

I’ve just found a rather nifty plugin for WordPress. It basically inserts an “on this day…” item at the bottom of my posts (on each post page, not on the main page – if you’re looking at the main page, you’ll need to click on the title of the post before you can see it). Incidentally, I found it through Simon’s Blog – I saw it there, thought “that looks cool!” and downloaded it 🙂

Oh, the fun… anyway, that’s all from me for today. Three posts in one day, it must be some kind of record in recent times!

I’ve just read a great article by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N T Wright. It’s a response to Jeffry John’s Easter message, and also “Pierced for Our Transgressions” (a book which I mentioned recently – still haven’t started to read though). I think the response to Jeffry John is excellent. His is quite critical of “Pierced for Our Transgressions”, without having read the book I think he raises some good points. You’ll have to read the article to find out what they are though!

One thing I did want to mention was a quote he gives at the end of his response to Jeffry John:

God is love, say [some], and therefore he does not require a propitiation. God is love, say the Apostles, and therefore he provides a propitiation. Which of these doctrines appeals best to the conscience? Which of them gives reality, and contents, and substance, to the love of God? Is it not the apostolic doctrine? Does not the other cut out and cast away that very thing which made the soul of God’s love to Paul and John? . . . Nobody has any right to borrow the words ‘God is love’ from an apostle, and then to put them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic import. . . . But this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the Gospel . . . Its whole virtue, its consistency with God’s character, its aptness to man’s need, its real dimensions as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes to us in it through judgment.

James Denney, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Expositor’s Bible, Hodder, 1894, p. 221f.

I really like that quotation, and in fact I think it sums up the idea of ‘penal substitution’ (as it were).

I’ll post up my own thoughts on ‘Pierced for Our Transgressions’ when I’ve read it – it’s quite a weighty tome though, so it might be a while…

Just a quick update about the past few days! At the weekend, we went up to Leeds for a wedding. One of Philippa’s friends from Cambridge was getting married, so we went up to the ceremony (which was in Leeds Cathedral – it’s very nice!), and afterwards to the reception at East Riddlesden Hall. Despite not really knowing anybody there, we had a good time – despite being rather tired from having to start quite early!

We travelled back again on Sunday, and got back home in good time. We did a few things related to the house-buying process in the afternoon (filling out the form the surveyors wanted, etc). In the evening we watched this week’s “Doctor Who” while having dinner — we really enjoyed this week’s one! I think it was probably the best one of the series so far…

Afterwards we watched ‘Lost in Translation’. It was a rather strange film. It was quite enjoyable, quite surreal, and I think made some interesting points… but the conclusion wasn’t very satisfying! Quite thought-provoking, in a strange kind of way!

And, I think that’s just about it for the time being. All for now…